The Book Collectors: A Band of Syrian Rebels and the Stories that Carried Them Through a War by Delphine Minou (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Every day another headline cascades through social media. Another photo fills a screen and with one click, a new one takes its place. With so many disasters flaring across the world, Attention Deficit Disorder outranks Covid-19 as the leading malady of our time. “The world is too much with us;” turning away seems to be the only possible response.

When Delphine Minoui, an Istanbul-based journalist for Le Figaro, finds an image of Syria “without a trace of blood or bullets” while she’s browsing a Facebook page called Humans of Syria, she can’t turn away. The photo of two young men in a room full of books, one of them reading, the other examining a bookshelf, is captioned “The secret library of Daraya.” 

Minoui knows about Daraya. It’s a city that once had a population of 250,000 and now holds less than half that number, 12,000 rebels against the government of Bashar Al-Assad. Since 2012, Darya has been under siege, a place less than 1000 miles away from Istanbul but completely out of reach. A seasoned journalist, Minoui wants the story and she has the skills to uncover it. Through social media, she makes contact with the man who took the photograph, a co-founder of the library.

An active protestor since 2011, Ahmad Muaddamani and his compatriots see themselves as a third force: not jihadists, nor soldiers in the Free Syrian Army. Daraya is an unyielding center of active and peaceful dissent and by chance these dissenters find their primary means of defense.

One of them had walked into a destroyed house and found its floor was covered with books. At first his comrades thought he was mad for wanting to save these volumes, but they came to realize the books were a means of escape from the horror they live with. They understood Daraya needed these books; it needed a library.

They clean and paint a basement in a deserted building. They construct bookshelves. They scour the city for abandoned books in empty houses. Before these are put on the shelves, each one is numbered and inscribed with its owner’s name. “We’re not thieves,” Ahmad says, “Our revolution was meant to build, not destroy.”

The library they build is open six days a week from 9-5, It serves a daily average of 25 readers, who come in spite of a continuing deluge of barrel bombs filled with explosives and scrap metal, as many as 600 in a single month. They borrow The Alchemist, The Little Prince, Les Miserables, printed in languages that are not their own. When the library begins to offer classes in English, the readers come to learn. When it brings the outside world within its walls through videoconferences on Skype, discussion groups are born. The librarians publish a bi-monthly magazine, printed on a rescued photocopier; it holds tips on how to manage daily living during the siege, poems, news garnered from the internet, crossword puzzles with clues that hold grim humor. Ahmad finds a pdf of Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. He shrinks the text to fit four pages on a single sheet of paper and prints two copies. It becomes so popular readers fight to read it. It’s a mental survival guide in a city that’s been assaulted with chemical warfare while the world looked away, where a small UN convoy finally brings flour to people who have had no bread in years. The supply lasts less than a month and future convoys are barred from bringing more. Assad’s forces firebomb the fields that fed the city and Darya eats only vegetables grown in people’s yards and bulgur wheat that’s the last of the municipal reserves.

Then after 1350 days of siege, Assad drops four barrels of napalm on Daraya’s hospital. The city begins to die. Negotiations with the government ensure that its inhabitants will be safely transported to another city. 

Once it’s empty, Assad walks through Daraya’s ruins, “the deserted streets of a ghost city,” claiming to have restored “true freedom.” His soldiers strip the library and sell its books in the flea markets of Damascus. “Four years of saving Daraya’s heritage, swapped for a few coins.”

“So it’s over?” When Minoui asks Ahmad this question, he replies, “Of course not! You can destroy a city. Not ideas!” He and the other residents of Daraya hold tight to the words of the poet Mahmoud Darwish, “We nurse hope.” The rest of us need to stop turning away from hope as we click through to the next post on Facebook.~Janet Brown