Immigrants from the Middle Eastern region known as Ottoman Syria (which included modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel, and from which those Cedar Rapids arrivals likewise came) began arriving in New York City in significant numbers in the late 19th century. Both fleeing the aftermath of the 1860 Syrian Civil War and pursuing the global economic opportunities created by the 1869 opening of the Suez Canal, these Syrian immigrants belonged to a number of distinct ethnic and religious groups, including not only members of the Druze Islamic community, but also Arab Christians from Ottoman Syria’s Mount Lebanon region. This already diverse immigrant community began to settle in and create a new neighborhood in Lower Manhattan near Battery Park, living in close proximity to the area’s existing Irish, Slavic, and Scandinavian communities yet concentrating sufficiently to lead to the neighborhood’s new nickname of Little Syria (or sometimes, as an 1899 New York Times article termed it, the Syrian Quarter).
Every member and descendant of that Syrian immigrant community has a unique American story, but here I want to focus on a few inspiring individual examples. Marie Azeez (1883-1957) immigrated to New York from the Mount Lebanon region when she was just 8 years old, arriving in 1891 with her parents and older sister Alice. Her father Tannous Azeez started a successful jewelry business, and with its profits was able to send his very precocious younger daughter to Washington, D.C.’s Washington College for Young Ladies, from which Marie graduated when she was just 17. By that time she was already contributing journalism to a number of Arabic-language periodicals such as al-Da’ira (1900-01), considered the first magazine published in Arabic in the Western Hemisphere. She married that magazine’s publisher Esau el-Khoury in 1902, but when he died in 1904 and her father passed away in 1905 she took over the jewelry business and for the next half-century made it even more successful still (while continuing to write). A 1926 Christian Science Monitor profile called her “a traveler, a poet, a philosopher, [who] into every necklace, bracelet, pendant puts the complexity and subtlety of her own nature.”