 A Web Chapbook from The Literary Review
 
Patricia Sarrafian Ward That day when the Syrians came for the men, they blocked off the surrounding streets and parked a row of trucks in front of the building. Under the eyes of the mukhabarat, the plainclothes secret police, soldiers herded all the men into the trucks while the women leaned over balconies and ululated like they would at funerals. Several hours later, the Syrians pulled out, but only after a house-to-house search in the neighborhood that left people complaining for days for the dirt tramped everywhere, the rude questions, and even, in some cases, violence. Everyone had known these Palestinian men would be taken off to Syrian prisons, where they would be interrogated and killed, but there had been nothing to do about it except wait for it to be over.
Patricia Sarrafian Ward was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and is of Armenian-Danish-American heritage. Her family stayed in Lebanon throughout the civil war, but in 1987 the political situation finally forced them to move to the U.S. Ward attended four undergraduate institutions, including the American University of Beirut, and received her BA in 1991 from Sarah Lawrence College. In 1995, she received her MFA from the University of Michigan.
She has won several awards for her writing, including a Transatlantic Review Award (1990), Avery Hopwood Awards in Short Fiction and the Novel (The University of Michigan, 1995), and a scholarship to attend the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference (1997). Her stories have appeared in The Literary Review and Ararat, and an article was published in the Summer 1997 of the latter. She is currently working on a novel and a collection of short stories that draw on wartime experiences in Lebanon and the difficulties of emigration.
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