WELCOME TO THE NEW WORLD: WAKING UP IN TRUMP’S AMERICA | BOOK REVIEW
Jake Halpern & Michael Sloan (Bloomsbury)
Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Welcome To The New World is the true story of a family of Syrian immigrants starting a new life in what became President Trump’s America overnight. Novelist Jake Halpern hooked up with the Aldabaan family just after they arrived in America on Election Day in November 2016. Bruce Headlam, an editor at the New York Times, came up with the idea of having a weekly non-fiction cartoon strip depicting the life of Syrian refugees, and Michael Sloan was brought in to illustrate the story.
With the help of Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services (IRIS), Halpern and Sloan set out to tell the Aldabaans’ story as journalism, rather than as a memoir. Welcome To The New World vividly reveals the double-edged sword like complexities of life in America as an immigrant, with the contradictory kindness and cruelty. It flits between the Aldabaans’ past life in Syria, with the nail-biting tension of their survival of the siege of Homs and flight to Jordan prior to seeking refuge in a “strange land in even stranger times”.
Halpern and Sloan spent three years with the Aldabaan family; what becomes apparent, as regards emigration to America, is that “the first generation makes the sacrifice to come here and the next one realises the dream,” as Halpern puts it. With this volume including new, non-NYT content, Welcome To The New World is crying out to be made into a film, perhaps in the manner of Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis.
Price: £16.99. Info: here
words DAVID NOBAKHT