Interview: Maurice Chammah

Maurice’s father Albert Chammah (born Ibrahim Chammah) was born in 1928 in Aleppo into a well-off, religious family. He leaves Aleppo in 1947, shortly before the first Arab-Israeli war. Initially, his path takes him to New York, where there is already a Syrian-Jewish community in Brooklyn. This is too narrow for Albert, who chooses a secular life. He first joins the military, presumably also to obtain U.S. citizenship, and then pursues an academic career that takes him to Austin, Texas. Only once, in the late 1970s, does he return to Syria to see his mother and siblings again after 30 years.

Maurice Chammah is 19 when his father, already suffering from Parkinson`s disease for many years, dies. He first formulated his thoughts on his father`s life story and his connection with it in his article My Father’s Aleppo. In this interview with Hila Amit, he now talks in detail about his father`s story, his own childhood, the search for his Jewish-Arab roots and his own identity.

Languages:

Deutsch

Maurice Chammah

Maurice Chammah is an American journalist. He lives in Austin, Texas where he works for The Marshall Project, a nonprofit publication critical of the U.S. criminal justice system. He has also researched and published on the life of his Syrian-Jewish father, Albert Chammah. His most recent essay on this topic was published in Guernica Magazine in 2016, My Father’s Aleppo.

Hila Amit

Dr. Hila Amit is an award-winning author of short stories and nonfiction. She was born into a Jewish family of Iranian-Syrian background in Israel. She lives in Berlin and is the co-founder of ANU: Jews and Arabs Writing in Berlin, curating literary events that bring together Jewish and non-Jewish people from Middle Eastern heritage.

The online exhibition „Side by Side“ is part of the project The Course of (Hi)stories.

The Course of (Hi)stories is a project by Minor Kontor and is funded by the Federal Agency for Civic Education and the Federal Foreign Office. It is under the patronage of Foreign Minister Heiko Maas.