Never Can I Write of Damascus: When Syria Became Our Home

In 2005, teacher Theresa Kubasak and retired publisher Gabe Huck moved to Syria to aid some of the many Iraqis who found refuge there from the violence of US-occupied Iraq. They set up and ran a project to prepare young Iraqi refugees for admission to US colleges. (Sixty of their “graduates” won admission to colleges all around the United States.) Never Can I Write of Damascus is Theresa and Gabe’s memoir of the lives they led in four Damascus neighborhoods, 2005–2012, describing the many rich relationships they built with Syrian, Iraqi, and Palestinian-refugee neighbors. The book’s title is from a line by Syria’s leading poet, Nizar Qabbani.

Never Can I Write of Damascus paints a uniquely intimate picture of daily life in the heritage-rich country of Syria in the period before and just after the 2011 eruption of unrest there. It gives readers sobering information about the heavy human toll, for Iraqis, of the US invasion of Iraq. The book contains stunning photos, charming hand-drawn maps, and other rich supplemental content.

Gabe Huck attended Benedictine schools where he learned from the monks what literature is—and why we should challenge power. He was briefly a monk himself but in 1965 he traveled to Washington DC via Selma. A conscientious objector to war, he counseled other COs and in 1967 cheered Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s antiwar speech on Vietnam. In 1968, he walked as a mourner behind Dr. King’s coffin. For 24 years, Gabe worked in a publishing house. In 2005, he went to Damascus with Theresa and found a home among Syrians whom he found to be “well practiced in kindness to refugees.”

Theresa Kubasak always braided social justice activism into her 40 years as a teacher, including work she did with the Woody Guthrie Archives. In 1999, she traveled to Iraq in defiance of the US/UN sanctions. At age 54, Theresa resigned from the New York Public Schools to study Arabic in Damascus. There, she founded the Iraqi Student Project with her husband, Gabe Huck, teaching world literature and writing to Iraqi refugee students. In 2015, she provided similar tutoring to Syrian refugees in Istanbul.