The Dressmaker of Khair Khana
The Dressmaker of Khair Khana Gayle Tzemach Lemmon Nonfiction, Harper, 2011 Paperback, 243 pages Khair Khana is in Afghanistan, a country known to me as war-torn and the place where Osama Bin Laden was killed. That is the macro picture. But this book gave me a micro shot of Afghanistan through the story of Kamil and her sisters. Fresh from reading a memoir called Reading Lolita in Tehran, I still have the full grasp on how women were treated when the Mujahideen (holy warriors) are running the Muslim country. Both events narrated in Reading Lolita and the times when the Dressmaker of Khair Khana was established happened in the 1990s and both stories were born out of the fact that women in these two Muslim country were suddenly limited in their clothing and space. This book chronicles the triumph of the human spirit in times of adversity, specifically that of a woman during the precarious times. When suddenly the times changed in Afhganistan, Kamila saw herself alone to ...