
During a heated exchange in Part 2 of Mona Mansour's The Vagrant Trilogy, the Palestinian scholar Adham, while living in London, says of his brother stuck in the Middle East, "He only knows how to be a refugee and wait." His ex-wife, who wants Adham to help him get his brother out of there, snaps back, "It's so easy to say when he's just an abstraction to you." From over here in New York, it's easy for us to see the plight of refugees as an abstraction, be they Palestinians, Ukrainians, or any...