Rachel: A Life in a Turbulent Century

by Stella Darvey Joory

This remarkable book is the story of the author's mother, Rachel, a girl born in the Jewish Quarter of Damascus, who in 1927 wins a scholarship to study in Versailles to become a teacher with the Alliance Israelite Universelle. Posted to Baghdad, she meets Victor, a young man from a wealthy Iraqi Jewish family, fresh from study in Germany.

The book follows their relationship, through the enormous and appalling upheavals of the twentieth century. The Holocaust is at first only a terrifying rumour to Syrian and Iraqi Jews, whose immediate problems result from the rise, following the collapse of the Ottoman rule, of a predominantly Muslim Arab nationalism whose sources in European fascism and Nazism make it a threat not only to Jews but to all the religious and ethnic minorities of the region, including the ancient Christian sects. The book covers the entire sequence of events, including the rise of Israel and the defeat of the Arab armies sent to suppress it, which led to the dispossession and expulsion, by the new nationalism, of virtually the entire Jewish community, in a vast act of what would now be called ethnic cleansing.

In all of this Victor, extraordinarily, retains his nostalgia for an earlier, pre-Nazi Germany, and in the 1950s re-establishes himself in Hamburg.

639 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 15, 2026

Reviews

[Debbie Young · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. What a huge labour of love to commemorate the author's mother, and at the same time to shed light on the ongoing struggles of a significant minority in the Middle East: Jewish Syrians. Rachel spent her life migrating from one country to another in search of a permanent home and peace, against all the odds. Although it's a very long book, and a detailed imagining of Rachel's life, the format of biographical novel divided into many short chapters and sections makes it very readable. It's also a bold assertion of women's rights in a region and an era in which the patriarchy was very much in charge. I learned so much about twentieth century history in general, in the kind of personal detail that isn't taught in schools or covered in history books. Very glad I took the plunge and invested the time required to read this book, which I'll be widely recommending.

[alan davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing family history covering the most epic political events the world has experienced in the last 100 years.,
Rachel’s family lived through trials and tribulations rarely covered in modern literature and this book brings to life the personal history of extreme persecution in this era.,
The history is as pertinent today as it was then.
An exciting story with a perfectly true account of the historical background, I really recommend Rachel to everyone..