My Syrian roots and why I want to talk about them

The talk of more war in the Middle East prompted me to finally wrestle my thoughts about my Syrian identity into words.

Very important: new pic of Big Dog at the end of this post.

This has been difficult to write — not because it’s painful or traumatic, but because it’s hard to articulate. My family background is important to me, but it didn’t have a large impact on my life until much later.

My dad’s side of the family is from Syria. I have always struggled to figure out how this plays into my overall identity, so I talk about that here.

Some family background

My great-grandparents — Ellis and Eva Ferris Corra were Syrian and were born in the 1880s in Saidnaya, Syria. Before coming to the United States, their names were Elias and Diva Kuri.¹

Copy of my great-grandfather’s naturalization certificate

They left in the early 1900s, when the Ottoman Turks still controlled the country. My great-grandfather came to the United States to build houses and was naturalized on February 5th, 1912 in Washington County, Ohio.

It was rumored, and I wish I still had the diary entries that my dad showed me, that great-grandpa Elias ran a general store in Cairo, West Virginia and would hide whiskey in the floorboards during prohibition. Just rumors though!

From cobbling together research that I have done, and that other family members have put together, Elias worked many manual labor jobs in addition to running a general store and building houses throughout the first couple decades of his time in the United States.

FDR’s New Deal

As with many Americans in the early 30s, the Great Depression caused him and his family to fall into existential crisis. However, in 1935, FDR established the Works Progress Administration (WPA) as part of the New Deal, which gave unemployed people jobs to carry out public works projects.² Elias was able to get a job through FDR’s WPA, and it gives me enormous pride to know that my immigrant great-grandpa was a beneficiary of this program, and helped in a small way to build our public infrastructure.

Anyway, that’s a bit of the history and foundation. Saidnaya is, interestingly enough, a predominantly Christian village in Syria, and there was a Christian emigration from Syria during the late 1800s and early 1900s, which would have been the time that my family left.

Copy of my great-grandparent’s Ellis Island certificate

My Syrian identity

I say all this because my family came from an Arab nation, but I retained virtually no Arab cultural influence. My papaw was 100% Syrian, my dad 50% Syrian, myself 25% Syrian! Did I ever hear a lick of Arabic ever spoken in mine or my grandparents’ house? Never.

Why we never spoke Arabic

According to my dad, my papaw spoke some Arabic when he was younger, but lost most of it over the years. If you were to walk into my grandparent’s house, you would have never had any indication that my papaw was of 100% Syrian blood. There was nothing in Arabic whatsoever in the house, no cultural remnants of his parents’ life in their home country, nothing written in Arabic anywhere to be seen, and barely any Levantine cuisine aside from the occasional grape leaves.

Why? I asked my dad about this too, and his explanation was very limited and cryptic. He said that, “from what he could remember from grandpa (his grandpa), it was a tough time, and they tried to move on”.

He didn’t really elaborate — perhaps because he couldn’t, or he wasn’t willing to. There was a reason why they left. It sounded like an incredibly difficult life in Syria, and my great-grandparents tried desperately to assimilate to American society, and part of that meant no longer speaking Arabic. It makes me sad that there were little cultural aspects of Syria they chose to retain.

I lost my papaw when I was pretty young — 9th grade — and I had zero interest in our cultural heritage at that time.³ I never had the opportunity to ask him about his parents, what their lives were like, why he never spoke Arabic, or why they never retained any cultural aspects of their Syrian homeland.

As a sidebar: In my cursory research, Saidnaya had a higher Christian population than most other parts of Syria. I found it interesting that neither of my great-grandparents were Muslim, which would seem to track with them being from a higher Christian population city (although my grandparents were very Catholic, so I’m not entirely sure how to square all the circles here ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

Why I’ve avoided talking about this

Because my family shed nearly all of its cultural identity to Syria, I’ve always struggled to figure out where I fit in with my Syrian identity. How Syrian am I? Am I Syrian enough that when it comes to issues of Syria and the Middle East, I should have an opinion on them?

My papaw Joe after bagging a buck

As someone who is only 1/4 Syrian, I’ve certainly never felt “enough” of anything to really feel qualified to consider myself Syrian or Middle Eastern: I’ve never felt Syrian enough, Middle Eastern enough, Arab, enough, etc.⁴ I have always wanted that connection because it’s where my family’s origin story comes from. It’s well documented. It’s our homeland and our story. My direct lineage can be traced back to Syria not that long ago.

Lately, though, the relevance of my Syrian roots/heritage/identity has become much clearer.

How I came to terms with what my identity is

A friend reached out to me a while back, when Israel first bombed Syria — because Israel apparently just bombs whoever the fuck they feel like with reckless abandon as long as the U.S. doesn’t care, I guess — and asked what I thought about it and when I was going to say something on behalf of the podcast.

My papaw (left) Joe and my great-grandpa Elias “Ellis”(right)

I thought this was a strange thing to ask. Why in the world would I opine on geopolitical issues that I had no clue about from a podcast account about Appalachian politics and culture? Plus, it’s not like I knew dick about Syria! But this got me thinking a lot, about a lot of things.

The first, which was necessitated already by the ongoing genocide in Palestine, was that certain events in the world necessitate me using my platform to speak out beyond the confines of just issues pertaining to Appalachia. The second was that maybe I should care about what the hell was happening in Syria and the Middle East.

When it came down to it, I felt like I didn’t have a right to feel strongly about Syria and the Middle East because my ties to Syria/the region felt so thin.

But what I realized is that, despite these feelings — not speaking Arabic, not having a lot of cultural ties to the area — those things cannot replace the fact that this is where my family is from. My dad is half Syrian. My papaw was 100% Syrian. His parents came to the U.S. from Syria in search of a better life. This is who my family is, and I am proud of that.

I’m not sure why I’m choosing to write this substack post now. Perhaps it is because Iran is the latest victim of Israel, a nation that unlawfully targets other countries in the Middle East whenever it feels like it (similar to how it did with and continues to do with Syria).

Perhaps it’s because there are a lot of ignorant people who look at Iran the way they look at Syria — like a country full of terrorists that need to be bombed out of existence. This line of thinking is unironically similar to how people view Appalachia — with broad, sweeping generalizations that cast the region in simplistic terms seeking to dismiss it as expendable.

Thanks for reading. If you’d like, you can support me on here by becoming a paid subscriber. You can also support on Patreon and get exclusive bonus videos and exclusive merch.

1. As many of you probably know, on Ellis Island immigrants names were often “Americanized” or “Anglicized”

2. I can’t find it, but there are census documents somewhere showing his employment status documenting this. I’ll update this post if I come across them.

3. As a teenage boy, my hormones were raging, and I was obsessed with girls at the time. Shocking, I know.

4. I want to be clear, I’ve never been the victim of discrimination that many Arab/Muslim people have faced nor do I want to imply to the contrary — aside from one time in college when some drunk person hurled a racial slur used on Middle Eastern people at me