Joude Jassouma’s Je viens d’Alep, itinéraire d’un réfugié ordinaire (I Come from Aleppo, Itinerary of an Ordinary Refugee), coauthored by Laurence de Cambronne, is the first narrative recounting the migration of an undocumented Syrian emigrating to France as a result of severe political crises in Syria during the regime of Bachar al-Assad, president and commander-in-chief of the Syrian Armed Forces. In 2016, owing to the civil war in Syria that had erupted five years earlier, Jassouma, his wife, and his daughter were among some twenty-five thousand undocumented Syrians who made irregular border crossings into the European Union following the eastern Mediterranean route, the most traveled sea route to mainland Greece. Jassouma’s flight from Syria began in June 2015, when he left Aleppo alone, entered Turkey illegally, and traveled by bus to Istanbul, where his wife and daughter joined him three months later. Because of a lack of professional opportunities in Istanbul, Jassouma, Aya, and Zaine began their migration to Western Europe. In February 2016, they reached the coastal town of Didim, Turkey, and traveled in an inflatable boat across the Aegean Sea to the Greek Isle of Farmakonisi. They were then transferred by Greek authorities to a refugee camp on the island of Leros, where they undertook initial migrant documenting, and arrived in Athens on March 7, 2016. After three months of additional refugee processing, in June 2016 the three members of the Jassouma family were placed in Martigné-Ferchaud, a rural village of twenty-five hundred inhabitants in Brittany, France, as part of the European Union’s new migrant relocation and resettlement program. There they applied for permanent asylum in that country.Readers will discover that Je viens d’Alep is much more than the migrant itinerary announced in the title: it is a complex, multifaceted narrative encompassing manifold genres. Jassouma’s narrative, generally organized chronologically, is a sort of memoir in which he recounts important life events taking place from childhood, through adolescence, and into adulthood. He describes his work in the clothing manufacturing industry and electronics repair and explains that his middle school education included compulsory lessons in military history aimed at indoctrinating Syrian youth into an anti-Israeli—and anti-Western—ideology. Having earned baccalauréats in electronics and literature, he pursued university degree in literature at the University of Aleppo, where, during an exchange program at the University of Clermont–Ferrand, France, he noted the social and political freedoms among students there, which contrasted greatly with life in Syria. There he also met the woman he would later marry. His knowledge of French additionally allowed him to earn money by teaching French at public and private schools. Jassouma’s narrative thus also exhibits the characteristics of a Bildungsroman, as he reveals his intellectual, social, and professional development while gaining crucial life experiences that prepare him for a productive future in lands outside of Western Asia.Jassouma’s references to some thirty works French literature portraying diverse dimensions of the human experience on both personal and general levels will be particularly stimulating to readers well versed in the field. Of particular note are Hugo’s Les Misérables (1762) and Zola’s Germinal (1894), which portray class struggles and social upheaval, and two French Bildungsromans whose heroes’ experiences parallel, in a certain sense, Jassouma’s development from adolescence to adulthood: Julien Sorel in Stendahl’s Le Rouge et le Noir (1830) and Frédéric Moreau in Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale (1869). He cites the importance of Vercors’s Le Silence de la mer (1941–42), Éluard’s Liberté (1942/1945), and Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince (1943), works set in the atmosphere of Western Europe during World War II, which are more explicitly related to the contemporary political crisis in Syria. By referring to the works of Rousseau, Voltaire, and Beaumarchais, French Enlightenment thinkers who praise Syrian civilization, Jassouma reflects moreover on the importance of political and religious freedom, independence and agency, and human rights—qualities that have gone missing in Syria under the oppressive regime of Bachar al-Assad.Jassouma intersperses numerous details of Syrian history, including events related to past and recent political conflict leading to the escalating civil war that began in 2011. He addresses actions undertaken by central political players, not only the Syrian presidents Hafez al-Assad and his son Bachar and their domestic and foreign allies, but also the multiple and frequently mutating factions opposing the Syrian government. In order to guide readers through these pages, Jassouma adds nine “Annexes”—nearly thirty pages—at the end of the narrative proper. Readers will particularly appreciate the chronology of Syrian history between 1920 and 2016, the names and descriptions of the principal rebel forces fighting one another in the war, and explanations of the diverse religions historically practiced in the Syria. Jassouma also includes maps that orient the reader’s understanding of the geographical distribution of these political factions in Syria. Data on the number of Syrians who were imprisoned, tortured, killed, or displaced within Syria and in neighboring countries as well as statistics on undocumented refugees who arrived in Europe between 2015 and early 2017 and their relocation on the European continent shed light on the unfathomable extent of the present crisis in Syria and its effects on migration.In his chronological description of the adventurous travel itinerary from Syria, through Turkey, and to Greece, Jassouma explains strategies that allow migrants to bypass restrictions on physical itineraries and lead to daring and dangerous clandestine border crossings. His experiences are shaped through the dynamic interplay of migrant networks, human smugglers, transit brokers, and other players in the migration industry. He also relies on recent innovative information communication technologies, devices, and networks essential in today’s transnational migration processes, such as SMS, WhatsApp, GPS, Google Maps, and Google Drive, to which he gains access on his smartphone. These prove to be most crucial when Jassouma, Aya, Zaine, and some eighty other undocumented Syrians undertake a harrowing nighttime Aegean Sea crossing from Didim to Farmakonisi in two inflatable boats.Jassouma’s observations on his experiences at the refugee camp near the Port of Lakki on Leros reveal the complexities of the contemporary migrant situation in the Greek Isles, which are both maritime borderlands and liminal and transitional transnational spaces for those traveling from Western Asia to Europe. He also makes some of his most profound statements on the plight of undocumented immigrants, including the notion that in these spaces of transition, migrants are essentially prisoners in a “no man’s land” until they are officially processed. Although his family’s fate is uncertain, Jassouma relies on his well-established relationship with France, his proficiency in the French language, and knowledge of French literature and culture to support their migration to Europe. At the refugee camp, he meets several international aid workers from France who, impressed by his strong language skills, enlist him to serve as their Franco-Arabic interpreter. Before Jassouma’s departure for Athens, these women ask him to “friend” them on Facebook. Among these humanitarian aid volunteers whom he “friends” is Laurence de Cambronne, French journalist, literary scholar, novelist, and humanitarian who consistently supports his family’s successful quest for legal residence in France and becomes the coauthor of Je viens d’Alep.At a refugee camp near in Athens during the next stage of the migration itinerary, Jassouma reveals the complexities of state-based immigrant controls rendered all the more complicated by the relationship between undocumented migrants entering the European Union and increased—and newly created—security borders within the Schenghen Area itself.Moreover, in April 2016, having been granted an interview with immigration officials at the French Embassy to discuss his request for asylum, Jassouma must explain what it means to identify as “Sunni,” the branch of Islam frequently associated at that time with al-Qaeda. Jassouma describes his peaceful nature and attempts to distance himself from prejudice derived from religious stereotypes. After passing his medical examinations, on May 25, 2016, he learns that his family will be relocated to Martigné-Ferchaud. Shortly after arriving in France, Jassouma applies for a protection subsidiaire (one-year temporary refugee visa), and in the fall of that year, while his paperwork is being processed, Cambronne meets with Jassouma in Martigné-Ferchaud, where they begin cowriting Je viens d’Alep. He enrolls in the Master’s Program in Linguistics at the University of Rennes 2 and the following month, despite many obstacles and challenges that arise during the assessment of his demand for asylum, Jassouma, his wife, and their daughter obtain this one-year visa.While the coauthors are correcting the final proof of Je viens d’Alep, Jassouma adds a chapter titled “Journal de décembre 2016,” written in ten entries between December 3 and 22, 2016. Among other reflections on his migrant Odyssey, Jassouma states that in his book he intends to provide an alternative image of refugees from Muslim countries in the wake of recent terrorist attacks in France. He names those taking place at the offices of Charlie Hebdo carried out by al-Qaeda’s branch in Yemen, the siege on the Hyper-Casher Kosher supermarket, the coordinated attacks on the Bataclan theater, the Stade de France, and Parisian street cafés organized by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), and the truck attack carried out by the Islamic State during Nice’s Bastille Day celebration in 2016. In the final entry, Jassouma repeatedly praises the concept of “liberté” in France, and states his desire to integrate linguistically and culturally into French society. By drawing attention to the fruitful contributions that undocumented migrants can make to European society, Jassouma justifies his demand for permanent asylum. He thus concludes his narrative on a threshold, projecting forward to the possibility of his family’s eventual status not as Syrian refugees, but as citizens of France.Je viens d’Alep will therefore be of significant interest to readers eager to gain insight into the deeply intertwined complexities of contemporary Syrian politics, the physical and psychological challenges of transnational migrants from Syria, the legal processes and obstacles encountered by undocumented migrants during their quest for asylum, and the experiences of newly relocated Syrian refugees in Europe. The work will also attract those exploring Mediterranean migrations from Western Asia and the Middle East to Europe in the broader contexts of transnational migrant studies, migrant mobilities, and globalization studies.Translations of Je viens d’Alep have been published in Brazil (Editora Nemo/Vestígio, 2017) and Romania (Editura Niculescu, 2019). An English translation, currently under contract, will broaden the work’s readership and permit Jassouma to reach a wider audience of scholars and other readers interested his extraordinary migratory experience.