Once a Syrian, always a Syrian

Maria Margaronis

• Blood-Dark Track: A Family History by Joseph O'Neill
  Granta, 338 pp, £16.99, February 2001, ISBN 1 86207 288 4

Joseph O’Neill’s grandfathers, one Irish, the other Turkish, were both imprisoned without trial during World War Two. Jim O’Neill was arrested in 1940, when Eamon de Valera’s Government, fearful that IRA activities might compromise Eire’s neutrality, rounded up all known IRA men. He was held for four years at the Curragh internment camp in County Kildare. Joseph Dakak was seized by the British at the Syrian border in April 1942 as he travelled home by train from a lemon-buying venture in Palestine, and detained for more than three years in a series of British and French concentration camps on (undeclared) suspicion of being an Axis spy. In both families a tense silence surrounded these episodes. Sensing that his grandfathers must have done something wrong, O’Neill set out to learn what had happened to them; in the process he learned a great deal more than that. His interest, he explains, is not political; and what he knew of most historical subjects when he began this book could, he says, ‘be written out on a luggage tag’. But (like Cary Grant, perhaps, in North by Northwest) he found himself irresistibly drawn in.