Why I Wrote the Book: Sisters of Fortune
My grandmother would often say: “children should be seen and not heard;” this was difficult, considering my three siblings, my parents, and I lived with her in a multi-family Midwood home in Brooklyn. But I was my grandmother’s favorite. She knew it, and I knew it, and my siblings knew it. My grandmother lived on the ground floor, we lived on the second and my grandfather took the third. When we got too loud, my grandmother would jam the hard edge of a broom into her ceiling (our floor) to get us to quiet down.
But at the end of every day, she’d allow me to climb into bed with her for the start of “Jeopardy!” Her comforter smelled like Icy Hot and Butterscotch. Ascending the dim staircase that connected all three floors felt like traveling between worlds. The third floor, my Grandpa Nissim’s, was of the old country. Aleppo. A world I had come to know through the traditions we practiced and the food we ate.
My grandfather escaped Syria as a child in the early 1950s and settled in Haifa before emigrating to the states in his early twenties. He barely spoke English when he met my grandmother on a Manhattan-bound F train, but he was handsome and charming and when he smiled, his cheeks plumped and the dimple in his chin expanded, revealing something deep and true. If you want facts and figures, dates and ages, I don’t have them. My Grandpa Nissim didn’t know his exact birthday, so we celebrated during December because he was delighted by Hannukah. He ate clementines by the dozen and drove a massive white truck littered with graffiti to and from his warehouse, where he wholesaled everything from musical jewelry boxes to lightbulbs.
We lived on the middle floor; my parents, my two younger sisters and my older brother. Our world was that of “the community.” Brooklyn is home to the largest Syrian Jewish population in the world; a community with deep cultural ties to the “homeland” and an identity heavily reliant on customs and traditions. There is a premium placed on women marrying well—and usually young—and as far as value systems go, childbearing and food reign supreme. As I set out to write my first novel, published in 2025, Sisters of Fortune, I realized I was still that little girl—and then teenager—toggling among three floors. Three worlds.
I ran feverishly up and down those stairs, trying to piece together the fragments of my grandfather’s earlier life. Convincing my American grandmother that I was a capable conversation partner. Distinguishing myself from my two sisters, keenly aware that one day all three of us would wade into the same (shrinking) dating pool of Syrian Jewish men. I told myself stories about who I wanted to become. In these stories, Brooklyn was not merely the setting but the main character. A borough with a different world on every street corner. I traversed these worlds and I told myself stories and I wrote. I wrote from a place of safety in my Syrian-Jewish enclave, where my days were saddled by predictability and my future was promised, if only I’d just accept it.
I wrote from a place of discovery and rage and frustration and love. I wrote from a sense of home so total, that to question my place in it felt like betrayal. I think many children and grandchildren of immigrants must feel this way. I wrote Sisters of Fortune for anybody who’s ever felt suspended between two, or three, or perhaps a dozen different floors. I wrote from my spot in the staircase, to be seen and heard.
Esther Chehebar is a contributing writer at Tablet magazine, where she covers Sephardic Jewish tradition and community, and a member of Sephardic Bikur Holim, a non-profit supporting the growing Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn.
