Sonia Daccarett joins the Author Spotlight this week to chat about her memoir
Author Name: Sonia Daccarett
Book Title: The Roots of the Guava Tree: Growing Up Jewish and Arab in Colombia
Book Genre: Memoir
Release Date: August 12, 2025
Publisher: She Writes Press
Welcome, Sonia! Please tell us a bit about your book.
The Roots of the Guava Tree is a coming-of-age story about a girl trying to understand her identity growing up with a Jewish mother and an Arab father in Colombia as the drug war 1980s change her country forever.
What drew you to write a memoir about your experience?
I really appreciate memoir as a genre, because the stories are so rich with all the facets of human life and experience. I wrote this memoir for readers who are interested in the experience of being multicultural and multilingual, of growing up with different and diverse ethnic cultural influences, and the experience of a childhood woven with different strands of identity.
What made you want to tell this story?
Many immigrants who grew up in places and cultures that are so different from where they spend their adult lives have a sense of bifurcation, of lives that may be wonderful and full but very different – perhaps diametrically opposed – to the lives they had where they came from. Through writing about my childhood, I wanted to integrate two very different phases of my life. I aimed to capture my memories of a time and a place that has changed…Cali, Colombia in the 1970s was different, perhaps simpler and more innocent for me as a child, and I wanted to register the sensory details of my childhood. The tropical weather, the aroma of the jasmine tree in my front yard; the enveloping and sometimes oppressive heat of Cali, the chlorine smell of the pool, the buzzing and squawking of the tropical birds and insects. My childhood was so full of beautiful, sensory details, and suddenly I felt an intense need to write them down.
I was also drawn to thinking deeply about my parents and grandparents – in a way that I didn’t or couldn’t growing up – and what their lives, decisions and challenges must have been like as immigrants and the children of immigrants in Colombia. Finally, the 1980s (and later) were tough and tragic years for many Colombians, and I felt moved to write about experiencing violence and political chaos while living “regular life.”
I also wrote my story of growing up in a family with a unique and historically challenging cultural identity to inspire others to know they’re not alone. I felt so different than everyone around me, and only later in life discovered how common this is, that so much of the human experience is shared. I hope to inspire others to find and tell their own cultural identifies and stories by sharing mine.
Where can readers find you?
Thank you, Sonia! The Roots of the Guava Tree is out NOW.
The Roots of the Guava Tree
A debut contemporary memoir about a young woman struggling to understand her identity as the daughter of a Jewish mother and Christian Palestinian father, coming of age in Colombia as increasing violence and the instability of the 1980s engulf her country.
Sonia Daccarett grew up with a Jewish mother and a Christian Palestinian father in Colombia during the drug-war 1980s. When she asks her parents questions about their family’s ethnicity and religion they answer evasively, defining their family religion and ethnicity as “nothing.” Grandparents and family members who speak Yiddish, Hebrew, and Arabic and fled from places called the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Russia, Bethlehem, and the Ottoman Empire, does not sound like “nothing” to Sonia.
At the same time, Sonia grapples with her American education at school. She is both enchanted and challenged by the tropical landscape of her childhood in a remote suburb of Cali, which is rapidly changing as cocaine trafficking and drug cartels begin to dominate the city’s life.
As she tries to discover what her family is, Colombia begins unraveling around her through violence, kidnappings, and the death of acquaintances and friends. At the same time, her parents’ marriage and their personal identities are rocked by the faraway Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Soon, she will have to decide whether to stay in Colombia with her family or leave them behind to find the answers she seeks.
Author Bio:
Sonia Daccarett is a writer and communications professional. Born in Colombia to a Christian Palestinian father and a Jewish mother, she moved to the United States and received an undergraduate degree in journalism from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a master’s degree in international and public affairs from Columbia University. For more than two decades, she worked on strategic communications initiatives with corporate and non-profit clients and currently writes and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.