| The recently published Kisses From A Distance, Cune Press, Seattle, Wash., chronicles the family of Orlando writer Raff Ellis. The non-fiction work is about three Lebanese families and their struggles in Lebanon and America in the early Twentieth century.
The author researched and wrote the memoir after the discovery of a cache of letters in his mother’s personal effects after her death. The letters were sent to Lebanese American University to be translated and after reading them many times Mr. Ellis decided they would form the basis for a memoir. He then undertook a journey that would last nearly eight years before the work was completed.
The expedition took the author to libraries, bookstores, archives, and remote mountain villages where he recorded the oral histories of relatives and village elders in Lebanon. The book spans nearly one hundred years starting with the tale in 1895 of the author’s grandmother’s abduction from a convent in the mountains of Lebanon. The chronicle, often told in the character’s own words, examines the Lebanese ethos through the lives of family members—both in Lebanon and America. The reader is taken on a journey that includes Ottoman oppression, Lebanese emigration to America, the travails endured during World War I by those left behind, and conditions the immigrants found upon arrival in America.
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