They Told Me Back Home Would Be Beautiful

This “deeply felt memoir of race and history that defies social erasures of the diasporic Palestinian experience” (The Whiting Award Judges Citation) explores Elena Dudum's transformational journey and evolving relationship to Palestine. My father scours the web for century-old magazines about Palestine. For years, he would talk about these mysterious documents but rarely show them to anyone. “I have proof,” he would say to whoever would listen, “that Palestine exists.” In her Palestinian Christian home in San Francisco, Elena Dudum was raised in a household ruled by her father's lectures. He taught her everything: the story of her grandparents' flight from their homeland, the history of her family's orange groves, and the facts of the ongoing occupation of Palestine. Above all, he taught her not to forget. Soon his lessons consumed her childhood, and Elena found herself shrinking from an inheritance that felt both sacred and suffocating. For years, she resisted it all until a family trip to Palestine shattered the abstraction of her homeland. Checkpoints, razed olive groves, soldiers—it was all plainly in front of her, as were the ghosts of her family's past. What was once always just out of reach, now pressed against her body. Back in the United States, something in her quietly unraveled. She tried to outrun what she now knew by burying herself in elite institutions and the rising world of tech, where ambition was rewarded and history was inconvenient. Eventually, the inheritance she thought she could escape demanded reckoning. Braiding rich personal narrative with archival fragments and cultural critique, They Told Me Back Home Would Be Beautiful traces one woman's journey as she returns—slowly, deliberately—to her father's lessons, determined to claim them on her own terms.

Elena Dudum is a Palestinian American writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Time, Cosmopolitan, and Bon Appétit, among others. In 2025, she was awarded the Whiting Nonfiction Grant for Works-in-Progress for early chapters in They Told Me Back Home Would Be Beautiful. Her work has been supported by The de Groot Foundation, Tin House, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and Hedgebrook. Born in San Francisco, she now divides her time between New York and London. They Told Me Back Home Would Be Beautiful is her first book.