ANTOUN ISSA Rebirth. Reviewed by Sandra Hogan

As Lebanon is again torn by war, Antoun Issa recounts his mother’s experience of the Civil War of the 1970s and her immigration to Australia.

In one year from June 1976, more than 12,000 Lebanese immigrants arrived in Australia seeking refuge from the Lebanese Civil War. One of those immigrants was Laila Khalil, a young Maronite Catholic, whose father had been shot dead while she watched.

Fifty years later, Laila’s son Antoun Issa tells the story of Laila’s life during the civil war in Rebirth: A love story from the depths of war.

A seasoned journalist, Issa shifted to a new style of writing to bring his mother’s story to life. Rebirth is a factual, research- and interview-based story, but Issa has dramatised scenes to make them vivid. He explains why he needed to move away from objective reporting:

History is rarely told from the perspective of the poor, from those crushed by abuses of power. This book is not a journalistic endeavour, but a human one.

Immigrants like Laila come to Australia to forget and to start new lives. They want a safe place to bring up their children and they rarely talk about what happened before. But children don’t need words to know their mothers are grieving.

Issa studied International Relations at university and became a journalist who specialised in the Middle East. His first posting was in Lebanon. In 2018 he came home to Melbourne for a holiday and asked his mother to tell him about her experiences in the Lebanese Civil War. That interview was the beginning of this book.

My extensive journey has, all along, been a quest for an answer to my mother’s sorrow. A sorrow that very early in my life became my own.

The story begins before the war began, in the neighbourhood of Jisr el-Basha in eastern Beirut, where Laila leaves school at 16 to work as a dressmaker so she can help her father, Fares, to support their family. Laila’s mother Nour is endlessly creative in finding ways to put food on the table for her children: chopped parsley, tomatoes, onions, burghul, homemade flat bread and smoked eggplant with tahini. On rare festive occasions, there is meat.

In this culture, women stay in the background: decisions are made by men, politics is done by men, and wars are carried out by men. Issa reverses the focus. Rebirth is dedicated to Issa’s mother and grandmothers and the focus is always on the women. The descriptions of food preparation and the collaboration of women give warmth and interest to the prewar chapters, as does the story of Laila’s growing love for the local hairdresser, Nicholas. When war begins, the women stay in the foreground and we only see violence when it comes into their homes or streets.

From this family’s small rented home, we hear of distant shelling and stories of clashes between Christian Phalangist militias and Palestinian fighters from the nearby refugee camp. Then full-scale war breaks out and the house is in the middle of shooting and revenge knifings. It is no longer safe for the Khalils to go to work; they hide at home with mattresses on the windows and rely on a cousin to bring boxes of lentils and rice when he can reach them. Nicholas has disappeared without a word to Laila, and she does not know what has happened to him.

When ragged, arrogant soldiers from both sides bang at their door, Laila’s father refuses to let them take his sons as soldiers. He gives them food, explains he wants to be at peace with them, but he will not let them take his boys. A man of peace, he saves his children at the cost of his own life.

Laila is a brave, resourceful woman and she finds a way to escape from the war and bring her family to safety. The name of her safe place is Australia and her method of escape is marriage. In Melbourne she finds the life she wants – an end to hunger and danger and the chance to raise her own family – but there is a price to pay.

To be a migrant was to be wrenched from the innate warmth of belonging to a place. To walk upon stones not paved by ancestors, eat grapes from vines not planted by forebears, and drink water from unfamiliar springs.

Like all successful immigrants, Laila worked hard, adapted, fitted in and never complained. With silence, she protected her children from her harsh history. But no amount of silence can prevent trauma from being passed down, as Antoun discovered. The cure for him, as an adult, was to spend years patiently uncovering his remarkable mother’s story. An examined life is painful, but there are benefits, as Antoun found:

As I discovered, writing this book, trauma and loss are not all we inherit through the generations. We inherit love too. An indigenous love that stems from the land where the spirits of our ancestors dwell.

Memoirs about women by their sons are unusual and my impression is that they tend to be about abandoning mothers, such as My Life in Orange by Tim Guest and Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs. Issa’s story overflows with tenderness and gratitude for his mother: this is touching and provides readers with relief to this chapter in the long story of Lebanon’s suffering.

Antoun Issa Rebirth: A love story from the depths of war Hachette Australia 2026 336pp $34.99

Sandra Hogan is the author of bestselling non-fiction spy story With My Little Eye. Her memoir My Mother’s Secret will be published by Allen & Unwin in 2027.

You can buy Rebirth from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW. You can also buy it from Booktopia. We receive a small commission if you purchase through these links.

You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.

Tags: 1970s, Antoun | Issa, Australian writers, family stories, immigration, Lebanese Civil War, Lebanon, memoir, war