GAZIANTEP, Turkey—Visiting Czechoslovakia in the 1970s, the American novelist Philip Roth reflected on what distinguished him from his peers behind the Iron Curtain: “It occurred to me that I work in a society where as a writer everything goes and nothing matters, while for the Czech writers I met in Prague, nothing goes and everything matters.” Roth could just as well have been speaking about the diaspora of Syrian poets now scattered throughout the Middle East. With the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine and renewed hostilities in Gaza, the nearly four-year-old Syrian Civil War has once again …read more
Source: The Atlantic
