Book Review: The Roots of the Guava Tree
The Roots of the Guava Tree: Growing Up Jewish and Arab in Colombia by Sonia Daccarett
Publisher: She Writes Press
Publication Date: August 12, 2025
My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars
Publisher’s Description:
Sonia Daccarett grew up with a Jewish mother and a Christian Palestinian father in Colombia during the drug-war 1980s. When she asks her parents questions about their family’s ethnicity and religion they answer evasively, defining their family religion and ethnicity as “nothing.” Grandparents and family members who speak Yiddish, Hebrew, and Arabic and fled from places called the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Russia, Bethlehem, and the Ottoman Empire, does not sound like “nothing” to Sonia.
At the same time, Sonia grapples with her American education at school. She is both enchanted and challenged by the tropical landscape of her childhood in a remote suburb of Cali, which is rapidly changing as cocaine trafficking and drug cartels begin to dominate the city’s life.
As she tries to discover what her family is, Colombia begins unraveling around her through violence, kidnappings, and the death of acquaintances and friends. At the same time, her parents’ marriage and their personal identities are rocked by the faraway Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Soon, she will have to decide whether to stay in Colombia with her family or leave them behind to find the answers she seeks.
Sonia Darccarett’s memoir, The Roots of the Guava Tree, is about being the child of a Christan Palestinian father and a Jewish mother in Columbia. Both of her parents were humanists so this isn’t so much a book about having a dual identity and having to figure out how to meld them. It’s more a book about how she felt like she had no identity. Whenever she asked her parents about religion, they told her they had no religion and that she should never talk to anyone about religion because it would just cause problems. That was hard because almost all of her classmates in the English language school she attended were Catholic. They didn’t know she was half Jewish and said Anti-Semitic things around her. She struggled with feeling like she didn’t fit in.
Sonia’s parents were distant in other ways. Her dad preferred to spend his time in his study reading newspapers to spending time with the family. Her mother was a very serious, almost gloomy person. In their effort to shield Sonia from anything religious, they didn’t even let her attend her grandparents’ funerals because they would be religious ceremonies. It’s interesting that whenever Sonia asked about religion, they told her she could decide what she wanted to do when she was an adult but didn’t make any effort to teach about the religions they grew up with. She wondered often how she could make that choice with no information.
The Roots of the Guava Tree is an insightful memoir about growing up feeling like an outsider in your own country.
(I received a complementary copy of this book for review.)
