The Roots of the Guava Tree: Growing Up Jewish and Arab in Colombia. This item is unavailable.The Roots of the Guava Tree: Growing Up Jewish and Arab in Colombia

A debut contemporary memoir about a young woman struggling to understand her identity as the daughter of a Jewish mother and Christian Palestinian father, coming of age in Colombia as increasing violence and the instability of the 1980s engulf her country. 

Sonia Daccarett grew up with a Jewish mother and a Christian Palestinian father in Colombia during the drug-war 1980s. When she asks her parents questions about their family’s ethnicity and religion they answer evasively, defining their family religion and ethnicity as “nothing.” Grandparents and family members who speak Yiddish, Hebrew, and Arabic and fled from places called the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Russia, Bethlehem, and the Ottoman Empire, does not sound like “nothing” to Sonia.

At the same time, Sonia grapples with her American education at school. She is both enchanted and challenged by the tropical landscape of her childhood in a remote suburb of Cali, which is rapidly changing as cocaine trafficking and drug cartels begin to dominate the city’s life.

As she tries to discover what her family is, Colombia begins unraveling around her through violence, kidnappings, and the death of acquaintances and friends. At the same time, her parents’ marriage and their personal identities are rocked by the faraway Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Soon, she will have to decide whether to stay in Colombia with her family or leave them behind to find the answers she seeks.

Sonia Daccarett is a writer and communications professional. Born in Colombia to a Christian Palestinian father and a Jewish mother, she moved to the United States and received an undergraduate degree in journalism from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a master’s degree in international and public affairs from Columbia University. For more than two decades, she worked on strategic communications initiatives with corporate and non-profit clients and currently writes and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.