The Keys to My House: A Gaza Diary by Palestinian journalist Sami al-Ajrami, assisted by Italian daily la Repubblica colleague Anna Lombardi, is a powerfully humanizing record of the ongoing war in Gaza, diligently translated by Jim Hicks with Anna Botta. Retired academic/editor Hicks also provides an illuminating introduction. Al-Ajrami bears unblinking witness to the destruction of Gaza as he loses his home, family, and friends, while he survives another day to report relentless atrocities to the outside world. Black-and-white photographs add visceral urgency. The first, placed before al-Ajrami's first entry and setting the tone for what follows, captures his "breakfast nook," where he began every morning. It no longer exists, and is the place he misses most; he can return to it only through the photo he "look[s] at every day."
On October 13, 2023, a week after the Hamas attack on Israel, al-Ajrami fled his four-story, multigenerational home, "the house... built literally stone by stone by [his] family." For the next six months, into April 2024, basic necessities of food, water, shelter, medicine, fuel, and power dwindled to inhumane levels. Bombings accelerated, hospitals shut down, displacements proliferated, whole families disappeared, corpses piled up. Al-Ajrami's father died from lack of medical care. But joy was still possible: al-Ajrami's teen twin daughters managed to bake him the "best cake" in impossible circumstances for his 57th birthday. Through sober observations and unadorned facts, al-Ajrami documents the quotidian ordinariness of human needs--quenching thirst, feeding hunger, finding safety, longing for comfort and community--amid unspeakable horrors. His memoir honors the lost and celebrates the living. --Terry Hong