Jordan Salama
When I call up Jordan Salama, he has just finished a cross-country train trip from New York to California. It’s his first time in the Golden State and he has woken up early to take a beginner’s class in Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic, the Jewish Arabic dialect of Baghdad his mom’s family speaks.
“I’ve been on this mission to learn Arabic for the last year and a half,” Salama tells me as he walks through San Francisco early in the morning. “But it’s really hard, because what dialect do I learn? My family doesn’t even speak the regular Muslim dialects. The professor said, ‘welcome to the first class of beginner’s Judeo-Baghdadi Arabic maybe ever.'” The class is part of 12 new courses in rare Jewish languages offered by the Oxford School of Rare Jewish Languages.
But we’ll get to his family later, because first, we have to discuss his debut book. “Every Day the River Changes: Four Weeks Down the Magdalena” is a travelogue of the Jewish writer journeying down Colombia’s Magdalena River, a nearly thousand-mile river running through the heart of the Latin American country.
Salama, the son of a Syrian Argentinian Jewish father and an Iraqi Jewish mother, writes about never feeling truly at home in the United States, and about how traveling feels inherently Jewish to him. Salama’s journey — which he undertook as a senior in college, no big deal — takes him from the Magdalena’s source in the Andes to its mouth on the Caribbean coast. He travels by boat, bus and more to traverse the nearly 1,000 miles.
I talked to Salama about the Jewish tradition of trading stories, how he hopes travel will look in the future, and where he hopes to go next.
