Trapped: A Mother's Quest to Reclaim Her Daughters: 18 (Memoir and Biography) - Softcover

Alexandra Kollontai

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1771833483 ISBN 13: 9781771833486

Publisher: Guernica Editions (CA), 2019

Synopsis

When Alexandra attempts to end an abusive marriage, her husband Tareq abducts their infant daughters from their Montreal home and deposits them with his family in a primitive village in Jordan. Trying to retrieve them through legal means, Alexandra comes face to face with Arab cultures where children belong to the father's family and women have no rights to them. She puts a promising career as a medical researcher on hold, sets off alone to Jordan and succeeds in an audacious plan to smuggle her daughters back home. But upon returning to Canada, she finds a judicial system that is unable to protect her children from being kidnapped again -- this time for good, forcing her back to a life with the abusive husband. For the next twenty years, while achieving a PhD and working as a respected scientist, she submits to her husband's tyranny for the sake of her daughters. Her coping mechanism is to dissociate herself from constant verbal and emotional abuse and live as an observant stranger trapped in a life not of h

About this title

About the Author

Born in Germany, Alexandra Karb grew up in Montreal. She studied science and pursued a rewarding career in medical research, but lived a personal life of trauma. This is a memoir of her twenty-year odyssey in several countries to protect her young daughters and herself from tyranny in their own home.

From the Back Cover

Imagine that the charming, seemingly Westernized immigrant man that you fall in love with turns out to be self-centred, controlling, and cruelly manipulative - but only when no one is around to witness this behaviour. Imagine that, to stop you from divorcing him, he kidnaps your infant children and leaves them in his primitive Middle Eastern village. Imagine trying to retrieve them through legal means, only to come face to face with Arab cultures where children belong to the father's family and women have no rights to them. Imagine going to live in that village, coming to know his clan, and then, at great risk, smuggling your children out of the country -- only to be convinced that the authorities can do nothing to prevent your husband from kidnapping the children again, so that remaining married seems the only choice. While achieving a PhD and working as a respected scientist, the author copes by dissociating herself from the emotional abuse. With perceptive and sympathetic eyes, Alexandra Karb recounts her twenty-year struggle to free her children and herself from this nightmarish scenario. She takes us from Canada to Germany, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, while she records the fascinating, peculiar, and often disturbing aspects of the cultures she inhabits.

Edition details

• Publisher: Guernica Editions (CA)
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1771833483
• ISBN 13: 9781771833486
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 340