A red leather photo album sat on a bookshelf in our living room throughout my childhood. Inside it, under textured vellum sheets, a collection of square photos was held loosely in place by adhesive corners. These photos told the story of a family in Cologne: a bearded man with half-moon eyes, a pale-faced woman wearing long skirts, a girl in ponytails and ruffled dresses, and a round, smiling baby, me. Sometimes the man held a pipe, sometimes the woman wore a hijab. All of the photos were taken before 1976, the year my mother, my sister, and I fled.
I can only imagine what our flight across the Atlantic was like that December night, my mother with a bandaged ear, me on her lap, my sister beside us. We were leaving a life that would soon exist only in those photos and a country that would disappear entirely from every map, yet remain on my birth certificate forever.
My mother kept our New York address and phone number hidden from my father all of our childhood. His letters reached us through a post office box she kept in Midtown, which we visited once or twice a year to see whether a thin light-blue envelope stamped “Mit Luftpost” was waiting for us. My father’s handwriting always looked awkward, both on the envelope and on the stationery inside, with its unexpected curls and uniform spacing, like that of a child just learning how to write. The only script that seemed to have flowed naturally from his hand was the one I couldn’t read, the Basmala blessing he would use to begin each letter.
Through his broken English, he shared stories about his life: trips to Spain with his new family, visits from aunts and uncles I had never met. Often he enclosed a photograph of a child with smooth, light hair, introducing them as my new brother or sister. On the back of each photo was a name, seven in all by the end of two decades: Omar, Hussain, Tarfah, Faisal, Rakaan, Aminah, and Sainab. I wondered whether in Germany people mispronounced my siblings’ names the way they did mine in the States, whether the children at school turned them into ugly words like Sour or Sewer.
Salwa, I was told, meant consolation, yet for years I gladly mistook it for constellation. I felt proud to be linked with whole clusters of stars ordained to sit together in the sky. It was just as well that I’d gotten the meaning wrong, since I was too young to understand the particular kind of comfort that consolation offered, the kind reserved for loss. No one around me spoke Arabic, so there was no one there to correct me. And so I carried my name this way, mispronounced and misunderstood.
The trip to the post office was a pilgrimage my sister and I were happy to make, since it carried the possibility that a package might also be waiting for us, a large brown box filled with treasures: ladybug chocolates wrapped in thin red foil with black paper feet, salty licorice, fruit-shaped marzipan, picture books, long silk nightgowns, and woolen coats. We delighted in these gifts that, for a little while, made our world suddenly feel enchanted. It was as if some invisible hand from far away had cast a spell, removing us from the roles my mother had assigned us: I, the favored daughter who slept on the sofa bed with her, and my sister, the spurned one behind a bedroom door, being told she was just like our father.
One year, I received a special gift from my father: a maroon velvet case with a delicate golden clasp. “It’s a Quran,” my mother explained as I pulled the gilt-edged book from inside. I knew nothing of his religion, only that my mother had saved me from it. From time to time I would lift the latch and finger through the thin pages with their liturgy of indecipherable lines, curves, and dots.
The prayer my sister and I recited each night was far simpler, yet no less mystifying:
Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
The verses were meant to comfort; instead, they frightened me, pointing toward a vast unknown that threatened to swallow me there in the dark. Would I die before I awoke? Where would my soul go if the Lord decided he didn’t want it? These questions loomed like half-formed demons in the corners of my mind as I drifted off to sleep.
***
I saw my father only three times while I was growing up, on the brief trips he made to New York. Before each visit, my mother would instruct us with a conspiratorial smile: “If you order a ham sandwich, tell your father it’s rabbit meat.” We found this secret game exciting, though we sensed the stakes if we didn’t play it right. Still, that perceived danger was hard for me to reconcile with the teary-eyed man with the raspy laugh who had his arm around my shoulder. He smoked a pipe, as he had in the photos. The tobacco smelled surprisingly sweet, and I longed to take a draw, but was too shy to ask.
I don’t know how much I actually remember about those visits and how much the photos from them imposed themselves onto my memory. One was taken in Central Park when I was eight, on my father’s second visit, my sister and I on either side of him, she in her purple Izod dress, and I, in my favorite white-and-blue sailor outfit and knee-highs. Another shows me between both parents, sitting on the edge of the fountain in front of the Met. My father and I look happy and at ease compared to my mother, who is staring vacantly at the camera.
***
I didn’t hear from my father throughout my teenage years. Then, when I was twenty, I received a letter: “My dear Salwa, I hope you are going to understand me as a father very well when you read my letter to the end. You don’t know, my dear Salwa, how I suffer till today from my destiny, losing you and your sister, and you are still alive. You were one and a half years old as your mother abducted you and your sister to New York, leaving an ocean between you and me. It was a kidnapping, not more, not less… I am very sad and it is sorrowful that we don’t know each other as father and daughter. I think we must have enough time for that…”
Kidnap. My mother had wielded that word so often as the reason for her secrecy that I had believed it belonged only to her. In the same letter, my father asked if I had been reading the Quran, since my mother had promised him that she would raise us to be Muslim. A lie, I thought, like the rabbit meat. Only this lie was different, because it had turned my entire life into an illusion on which my father had hung his fragile hope. For the first time, I pitied him.
He said he had written me a poem but had accidentally placed it inside the wrong envelope and sent it to a friend in Spain instead. “Your father’s getting old,” he joked. I learned later that he had written many poems in Arabic about us, scribbled on scraps of paper and then tucked inside of books that were now scattered among relatives’ homes in Jordan.
***
In 2006, I decided to visit my father in his house in Bornheim. There on the sofa among his wife and seven children, he sat hunched, with plastic tubes running from his nose to a nearby oxygen tank. He looked much older than I’d imagined, and also more joyful. That afternoon, my teenage brothers served us tea in small glass cups, and my sisters smiled and asked us questions in nearly perfect English. I watched my father walk over to his prayer mat in the corner. My children followed, then clambered onto his back as he knelt, and the room erupted in laughter.
I turned toward the wall of family photographs above the sofa, and my gaze fell on the center frame. I swallowed. There I was, on a bench in Central Park, in my sailor shirt and pigtails, my head tipped back in mid-laughter, my eyes smiling intimately back at me. I didn’t understand and couldn’t fathom how I could occupy that space among so many strangers’ memories.
Tarfah, the oldest of my three sisters, came and stood beside me.
“You’ve been there the whole time, right there in the middle. Every day Baba would tell us, ‘That’s Salwa. That’s your older sister.’”
The sound of my name jarred me almost as much as the photo. The subtle eh was nothing like the guttural American vowel I was used to, and the lingering l connected the two syllables in a way that sounded almost musical. I had taken a semester of Arabic in college, but nothing had prepared me to hear an entire room of people say it better than I could.
***
I flew to Germany alone the following year to sit by my father’s bedside as he faded in and out of sleep. The linen handkerchiefs and fine soaps I’d picked out for him so carefully now seemed silly. One afternoon I pulled a worn book from the shelf, a collection of stories of Stefan Zweig, who had been one of my parents’ favorite writers. I pictured them in the early days of their marriage, reading aloud from that same volume I read from now. My German was primitive, left over from what my mother had taught me when I was a child, and I was careful to pronounce each word correctly, but after two pages my father grew restless and told me he needed to sleep.
During my third and last visit, he began experiencing déjà vu, declaring with fascination and alarm that he had already had whole conversations that were only now just taking place. Was that what death felt like, I wondered, the stealthy dismantling of time and language? Did we all return to a formless infancy where symbols and words lost their grip?
***
A year later, I received a phone call from Tarfah telling me it was time to say goodbye to my father. I was the only one of his nine children unable to be there in the room with him when he died. “Ich liebe dich,” was all I could manage to say. My mother happened to be visiting me in my new home in Western Massachusetts, and I persuaded her to talk to him for the first time in decades. I don’t recall much from what I heard, except for three words: “Ich verzeihe dir.” I forgive you. That day I finally understood the true meaning of my name.
One of my siblings had taken a picture of my father and me on my visit, smiling tenderly at each other, and sent it to me later. Were it not for that photo, I would never have known what I looked like loving a father.
About the Author:
Salwa Emerson is a writer and speaker based in New York City. Her collaborative work in nonfiction has earned the 2025 Andy Award. Her own writing can be found in several publications including The Dispatch, Pinch, and her Substack, Salwa Emerson, Unghosted. She is currently at work on a memoir.
Photo by Andrii Leonov on Unsplash