Damascus Nights

It is 1959, Damascus. The most famous storyteller in Damascus, Salim, the coachman, has mysteriously lost his voice. For seven nights, his seven old friends gather to break the spell with their seven different, unique stories -- some personal, some modern, some borrowed from the past. Against the backdrop of shifting Middle Eastern politics, Schami's eight characters, lost to the Arabian nights, weave in and out of tales of wizards and princesses, of New York skyscrapers and America. With spellbinding power, Schami imparts a luscious vision of storytelling as food for thought and salve for the soul, as the glue which holds our lives together.

Rafik Schami

Rafik Schami was born in Damascus, Syria, in 1946 where his family has lived for generations. He was supposed to be a baker, but decided instead to become a chemist. In 1971, at the age of seventeen, he emigrated to Germany where he worked in factories and department stores, restaurants and construction until he received his doctorate in chemistry in 1979. "I thought I would rather be a chemist," he says, "and discover a formula for immortality, but instead I discovered that only literature makes one live forever." After seventeen years, Schami gave up his work as a chemist and began a writing career. He claims to be "working on the immortality question. You see," he says. "I can't stand death."

Storytelling is a deep-rooted tradition in Syrian culture, and Schami feels particularly drawn to it. He loves to tell stories aloud and thrives on watching the transformation in his listeners as they leave the world of their thoughts and begin to travel with him. "This moment of magic fills me with a peculiar sort of happiness," he says. To him, there is no better payment.

Schami feels that he has a special kinship to children. He believes that it is the child inside of us who loves to hear stories; he claims it is only the child in us who can enter the fictional world. "An adult who has stifled the child within," Schami says, "cannot hear stories."

He says he once dreamed that his writing would have a great effect upon society. Since then, his goals have grown more modest. He says now, "I simply want to outwit death for a few more years. But I have a trick. I try to write so well that my books and my voice will live for a long time. This will make Death absolutely furious."

Schami is now a successful children's book author and a professional storyteller in the Syrian tradition. A Hand Full of Stars, a child's book published in 1991, was a winner of the Mildred D. Batchelder Award. He lives in Germany where he works as a freelance writer.

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