Trapped: A Mother's Quest to Reclaim Her Daughters
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Trapped: A Mother's Quest to Reclaim Her Daughters

Trapped: A Mother's Quest to Reclaim Her Daughters

by Alexandra Karb

Overview

When Alexandra attempts to end an abusive marriage, her husband Tareq abducts their infant daughters from their Montreal home and deposits them with his family in a primitive village in Jordan. Trying to retrieve them through legal means, Alexandra comes face to face with Arab cultures where children belong to the father's family and women have no rights to them. She puts a promising career as a medical researcher on hold, sets off alone to Jordan and succeeds in an audacious plan to smuggle her daughters back home. But upon returning to Canada, she finds a judicial system that is unable to protect her children from being kidnapped again — this time for good, forcing her back to a life with the abusive husband. For the next twenty years, while achieving a PhD and working as a respected scientist, she submits to her husband's tyranny for the sake of her daughters. Her coping mechanism is to dissociate herself from constant verbal and emotional abuse and live as an observant stranger trapped in a life.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781771833486
Publisher: Guernica Editions, Incorporated
Publication date: 04/01/2019
Series: MiroLand , #18
Edition description: First edition
Pages: 330
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Born in Germany, Alexandra Karb grew up in Montreal. She studied science and pursued a rewarding career in medical research, but lived a personal life of trauma. This is a memoir of her twenty-year odyssey in several countries to protect her young daughters and herself from tyranny in their own home.

Read an Excerpt

With horror, I understood Tareq was doing what he had always done to me. The facts as well as my reality and experience, were all twisted and misrepresented. I wondered, would he succeed with this strategy in the court?I was silent and gazed at the judge on his high bench, a dignified older gentleman with grey hair, wearing a long black robe. Does he have any idea what life is like in a Jordanian village? Has he seen how little girls are treated there? Does he care? I thought.

Table of Contents

Prologue: The Kidnapping 1

1 Beginnings 7

2 First Love and Heartbreak 15

3 A Stranger in Germany 29

4 An Ultimatum and a Choice-1975 37

5 Broken Promises and Shattered Dreams 53

6 The Robot Mother 65

7 Attempts at Escape 71

8 A Village in Jordan, December 1979 77

9 Return to Montreal 123

10 Jordan, Spring 1980 129

11 Escape over the Allenby Bridge 135

12 The Condemnation 145

13 Dissociation 151

14 Montreal-Beginnings and Disappointments 169

15 Ventures in Saudi Arabia 197

16 Vacation in Jordan and Germany 231

17 Goodbye to Mutti 249

18 Cracks in the Pretend Family - the 1990s 257

19 The Death of Djido - Jordan, 1996 271

20 Freedom at Last 287

Epilogue 305

Acknowledgements 311

About the Author 313

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