Exile is always the passage of the immigrant, and when migration is not optional or voluntary but takes place in a forced manner, the language of nostalgia fades in directions, to heal there in the distant places of the soul.

Thus comes the novel: "A Sun Shone on Our Strange Lands" recently issued by the Maysaloon Foundation for Culture and Publishing, by the Syrian novelist Yara Wehbi, residing in Germany, to summarize the stories of the harsh asylum across the sea for Syrians in the hope of reaching the West and the integration process that awaits them.

The novel describes a scene of the tragedy of the Syrians who crossed the land and the sea in search of a safe shelter that preserves their freedom and human dignity in addition to the asylum issues for the novel's characters such as integration and cultural cross-pollination in a mix of conflicting feelings.

The events of the novel take place in a small town called "Saalfeld" and it was until the recent past considered part of East Germany and most likely that no one in Syria had heard of it before the wave of Syrian asylum in 2016, although it is one of the German cities whose name was carved on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris following the defeat of its prince at the hands of the French armies during the era of Napoleon.

This city will be the center of events and its starting point. The narrator begins with the most important event, which is the arrival of the Syrians stuck at the borders to the train station in "Saalfeld", where the Germans gather to receive them and among the receivers a young Syrian Armenian woman named Shams attended, married to a German man, and she had left Syria with the beginning of the revolution in Syria.

Shams will reveal during the first chapter the stories of the Syrians she meets, and she will find herself involved in playing the role of Scheherazade and telling all the stories to her husband who decided to achieve his old dream in writing and turning all the stories of the Syrians into a novel named "A Sun Shone on Our Strange Lands". The novel is composed of three chapters and each chapter is composed of a group of tales: the tale of Abu Jaber - the tale of Rami and his sister Hanin - the Shami.. and the person organizing the parts is the narrator.. Shams who reveals the threads of her own story and on the background of the stories of others from Syrians and Germans where the novel does not stop at monitoring the psychological struggles of Syrians only but es deep into the thoughts, feelings and experiences of the German character.

The novel draws its inspiration from real events and stories, but it is not considered in any case a documentary work. The work deals with different segments of Syrian society with diverse social, cultural and religious ideas and origins, so the novel forms what resembles a panorama that puts a large number of people under the microscope of life that the writer records.

The novel is an attempt to build a bridge between different and diverse human experiences. during the narrator there is no single event that pulls the reader to follow it, but the stories of the Syrians themselves and the Germans form the human axes and the deep experiences that attract the reader to see and know them. Every Syrian may find a part of his story or a detail that touches him personally and many Germans may find between its papers what concerns them.

It is noteworthy that Yara Wehbi is a Syrian journalist residing in Germany. She worked as a correspondent for many Arab newspapers. Recently, a children's story was published for her entitled "Where did you come from to here?".

Signals

https://www.syria.tv

https://nabd.com/s/101448036-