Now in a full-length book, the New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic story of a refugee family who fled the civil war in Syria to make a new life in America After escaping a Syrian prison, Ibrahim Aldabaan and his family fled the country to seek protection in America. Among the few refugees to receive visas, they finally landed in JFK airport on November 8, 2016, Election Day. The family … Election Day. The family had reached a safe harbor, but woke up to the world of Donald Trump and a Muslim ban that would sever them from the grandmother, brothers, sisters, and cousins stranded in exile in Jordan.
Welcome to the New World tells the Aldabaans’ story. Resettled in Connecticut with little English, few friends, and even less money, the family of seven strive to create something like home. As a blur of language classes, job-training programs, and the fearsome first days of high school (with hijab) give way to normalcy, the Aldabaans are lulled into a sense of security. A white van cruising slowly past the house prompts some unease, which erupts into full terror when the family receives a death threat and is forced to flee and start all over yet again. The America in which the Aldabaans must make their way is by turns kind and ignorant, generous and cruel, uplifting and heartbreaking.
Delivered with warmth and intimacy, Jake Halpern and Michael Sloan’s Welcome to the New World is a wholly original view of the immigrant experience, revealing not only the trials and successes of one family but showing the spirit of a town and a country, for good and bad.
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“Welcome to the New World” is a marvelous story about a family emigrating to the US during it’s anti Muslim hysteria. What Jake Halpern brings us is a look at the hopes and dreams that bring refuges to our shores the hardships, difficulties they must face during arduous times.
There is something so real, so heartfelt about this graphic novel, because it is based on an actual families journey to what they hope is a better life.
The art work is excellent, uncluttered and simple and in many ways for me the art work is very representative of the life the Aldabaan family find themselves in. I found moments in the story that are utterly heartbreaking, images that touched something very deep in me. In a single scene Naji (the eldest son) is speaking to an elderly neighbor as she explains what her “medic alert” band is and how she presses the button when she needs help. Naji pictures his friends and neighbors back home all of them running for their lives from bombs exploding as they are all pressing the medic alert buttons on their wrist bands.
It is difficult to imagine what someone else is going through unless you can see it through their eyes and that is what Halpern has managed to do. He never gives us any reason to pity the Aldabaan family, but we do feel compassion for them.
Jake also reminds us that in the fear mongering, hysteria of the “Trump” presidency the Aldabaan family is not alone as we are introduced to a slew of people of all nationalities and cultures who in essence are “paying it forward” and that willingness to do so embodies the best of what it is to be an American.
Would I recommend “Welcome to the New World”, not only do I recommend it, but it should be required reading in any “hall of education”.
Finally, thanks to Jake Halpern (and all the support he had) for putting together a very important literary work. There must be thousands of these important stories (of all issues) that need to be told, hopefully they find there way to him. The ones that find the way to other story tellers, may they be treated with the respect and compassion that this one was.
These are the type of stories that I hate having to rate because this is a true story based off of surviving Trump’s US as refugees from Syria.
It infuriates me to no end that the United States has been sold as this all inclusive resort package that accepts people from all creeds. That is an absolute lie and is exactly what plays out in this poignant graphic novel. There’s a scene where the son Naji has these grandiose dreams of what it must be like to be a child raised in the US where you’re surrounded by lavishness and not leaving in an actual war zone. However, when Naji arrives in the US, how he is treated and what he experiences makes his miss Syria even more despite the constant turmoil he was subjected to. This resonated with me as a reader because it is ludicrous that the bigotry and xenophobia in this country makes refugees miss literal war zones.
There are a lot of heartbreaking scenes in this book. The sacrifices that each of the family members must make in order to pursue a better life will tear at your insides. But even though there’s so many roadblocks in front of the Aldabaans, they refuse to give up on each other and doing whatever it takes to build a better future. Their hope and dreams were infectious.
Thank you Henry Holt & Co. for providing a review copy. This did not influence my review. All opinions are my own.
Compelling – following a Syrian family coming to America as refugees on election day 2016 – but ultimately it feels unfinished. We see bits and pieces of their life, but it stops seemingly in the middle of things. We see very little of their interaction with people outside of their own family and sponsors; I wanted to know more.