extraordinary months, she sits in the basement, churning out the paintings that her busy life never gave her time for, while Ann sits upstairs with her facts. At the end of each day, they meet to cook or take long walks and whatever else either can think up to keep death at bay just a little bit longer. Sookie is still alive on the book’s last page, if only just. It is what she leaves behind that gives this collection of true-life stories the aura of a novel, in which all good people have their chance before the end.
The last Christians YSENDA MAXTONE GRAHAM The Vanishing: The Twilight of Christianity in the Middle East By Janine di Giovanni Bloomsbury £20 The persecution of Christians in the Middle East is on the edge of the consciousness of any of us who go to church and don’t doze off during the intercessions. ‘We pray for persecuted Christians in the Middle East…’ says the person whose turn it is to do the prayers, reading from his or her sheet of A4. We squeeze our eyes tight and try to imagine a dusty village and people fleeing. Janine di Giovanni has been to those dusty villages and to glaring, blaring Middle Eastern cities under new regimes worse than the previous ones, and has talked to those people, who do not in fact always flee, but sometimes stay put, preferring to live in fear and repression rather than abandon their homes. As a war correspondent, di Giovanni has always had a gift for bringing out the small, telling, human details and fitting them into the larger political picture. This she does here, in a book to make us uncomfortable at Christmas. An unashamedly emotive writer, she draws us in by telling us first about herself. I didn’t mind this, as I rather needed to be taken gently by the hand and led unwillingly to the world’s trouble spots. We find her in a melancholic state, holed up in silent, empty Paris during lockdown, from where she escapes to a village in the mountains to join her ex-husband and her 16-year-old son, Luca. She muses on her own Catholic upbringing, her education by strict Dominican nuns, her grief for her brother Joseph who died five years ago and her craving for the liturgy of the Mass. Wherever she has covered wars, she
has always sought out the local church, for its reassuring ritual and the sense of belonging that it brings. She has seen how Christian communities somehow find a way of gathering together to pray, even in secret in a bombed-out church. From here, she describes her visits to four places where Christianity is under attack: Iraq, then Gaza, Syria and Egypt. It’s heartbreaking stuff. The gentle living side by side of all the various sects and religions that has somehow managed to carry on for millennia is being eradicated by thugs and collapsing economies. How I loved all the names of the branches – Greek Orthodox of Antioch, Greek Melkite Catholic, Syriac Orthodox of Antioch, Armenian Orthodox, Maronite, Chaldean Catholic – in this cradle of Christianity. She chats with people over cups of tea in traumatised towns. She talks to a Christian woman who fled from Mosul under attack from ISIS – the woman went to a nearby city, Qaraqosh, which was burned to the ground, and managed to flee to a monastery on a mountain, along with 65 terrified Christian families hiding out, ten to a cell. The last to escape from Mosul was Monsignor Nicodemus Sharaf, the Archbishop of the Syriac Orthodox Church. He said to di Giovanni, ‘They cannot take God from us. They have taken everything else. But not God.’ In both Iraq and Syria, the Christian population felt safer under the brutal dictator than they did or do under the chaos following the attack on or toppling of the dictator. Because Saddam Hussein’s government was a minority Sunni one, other minorities, including Christians, enjoyed a degree of protection in return for loyalty to his regime. Likewise, in Damascus, priests and
parishioners had an underlying confidence that President Assad would protect them. When the Russian and Syrian barrel bombs started falling, Syrian Christians became targets of violence as punishment for supporting the Assad regime. Before the war, di Giovanni visited the tranquil city of Maaloula, where nuns lived alongside Muslims. The locals were certain that their city, famous for its tolerance, could resist the ‘centrifugal pressures’ of a vicious sectarian civil war. But two years later the Battle of Maaloula began, nuns from the peaceful monastery were kidnapped, the medieval Church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus was destroyed and all the families, shopkeepers, restaurant-owners and taxi drivers she’d chatted to two years before were gone. In overcrowded Gaza, piled high with trash, she visits a Christian family on the seventh floor of a high-rise block during the daily power cut. They have to apply for permits to visit Bethlehem on the West Bank at Christmas, but do not often get one. In post-Tahrir Square Egypt, the current regime under President El-Sisi is brutally repressive, but Coptic Christians feel more secure under it than they did under Mubarak, who banished the Christian era from the history books. ISIS attacks on Copts and the burning of churches continue, and Copts are emigrating in their hundreds of thousands. ‘I wrote this so that the people documented would never disappear,’ writes di Giovanni. The recent wars and terrorism in each country have been (and are) horrible and chaotic. I admire her for going in, knocking on doors and recording the stories of Christians caught up in it all.
‘Your snoring kept me awake all through January!’ The Oldie January 2022 55
