About nine years ago, as thousands of Syrians fled the violence in their country for neighboring Lebanon, the novelist Rabih Alameddine visited some of the refugee camps to speak with them.
He didn’t know what would come of it, but he had experience listening to people in extremis — including dying friends during the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco — and he knew the power of the act.
At the very least, he thought, he could to talk to the kids about soccer. What he heard was excruciating: stories of families killed, homes destroyed, history eradicated.