THE PEDDLER, by Stephen Louis Moses, is a historical novel about a Christian shepherd from western Syria who goes to America in 1900 to be a pack peddler, and returns to Syria nineteen years later after having made the transition from the Old World to the Modern World, where he helps his family recover from al-harb al-akbar, the Great War, and joins the nationalist movement for Syria’s independence. The main question presented in The Peddler is what happens when a nation rises-up and cries for its freedom only to be silenced by greater powers? Or, as the main character, Machoud Aziz, the peddler, might put it: how do we account for the loss of freedom in a modern world where all things are weighed and measured, indexed and accounted for, and the ledger balanced?

In Part I, The Peddler begins in Syria in 1900 in Wadi al-Nasara, the Valley of the Christians, a region dominated by Christian villages that settled western Syria from the Holy Land a thousand years ago during the Holy War, what the Franks called Le Crusades. Machoud is a learned shepherd who is sent to America by his father to peddle its “streets paved in gold” in the hope of increasing his family’s station in life. He learns America is not the land of milk and honey as advertised and its streets are paved in the same mud as the streets in Damascus, Beirut or Marseilles. But, for Machoud, returning to Syria a failure is a fate worse than death.

In Part II, instead of a steam ride home, Machoud heads west to America’s fields of gold as so many did before him. He makes a plan to build his own peddling empire, but his plans are put in jeopardy when he becomes trapped in a dispute between the Syrian Orthodox Bishop in America and the Bohemian editor of the largest Arabic-language newspaper in America, al-Hoda, The Light. The dispute between the Bishop and the editor is played out in the courts of Manhattan and on Washington Street, where the Syrian Colony lives, and threatens to sink his plans like Russia’s Baltic Fleet in the Straits of Tsushima.

In Part III, modernity comes to Wadi Nasara in the form of the mechanized army of the Ottoman Empire and changes Syria forever. During the Great War, the Syrians revolt against the Ottoman Empire and refuse to join the War. As a result, Djemal Pasha, the wartime governor of Syria, brutally suppresses the population, earning the sobriquet as-saffa, the butcher. The Ottoman army makes its way to Wadi Nasara in search of conscripts with calamitous results for the al-Aziz. Machoud’s brother Ibn Amin is taken as a prisoner together with the other men of military age and sent to a labor camp in the desert of Iraq, where the Ottomans and the Germans are frantically building a railroad that connects Diyarbakir to Basra in an attempt to neutralize Britain’s control of the Suez Canal and turn the tide of the War in their favor.

The Syrian people engage in the struggle for independence, first, from the Ottoman Empire, and then, in Part IV, from the victorious Allies, who want to treat Syria as the spoils of war. Defenseless against an invasion after the War, the Syrian people rise up to fight for istaqlal taam, complete independence, against a colonialist France who wants to take revenge for the Battle of Hittin, when Salah ad-Deen defeated the Knights Hospitalers ending the Crusades. While Faisal’s government tries to negotiate a diplomatic solution to spare the Syrian people war, Machoud joins together with a ragtag militia of nationalists who rise-up to fight the French army [mithla al-nimr al-mujahid] and prevent the French from entering Damascus and occupying Syria. After a tense standoff, the Syrians meet the French army at Maysaloun Pass twenty-five kilometers west of Damascus, where the they suffer a humiliating defeat and lose their independence, but gain an identity as a nation of Syrians.

The Peddler tells the story about the changing relationships between the subjects of an empire and the citizens of a nation-state at a time when the Old World fell away and the Modern World formed. The Peddler tells a story as old as civilization itself that applies ever moreso today – the loss of freedom without justice is tyranny.

About the Author

Stephen has been writing for over thirty years. Stephen conceived of The Peddler as the first novel in a trilogy about America and the Middle East in the hundred years since they first met after the Great War. He is a third generation Syrian-American, and has studied, traveled and worked in the Middle East periodically since 1992. Stephen is a practicing attorney living in northern California.