Trapped

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.