Commentary: Searching for ties to the Middle East in my mother’s old photos

Among a stack of photos from my mother’s childhood is a black-and-white picture from when she was 7 or 8. She’s standing on the sunlit balcony of her family’s apartment in Cairo. Her face looks directly into the camera, half in shadow.

Revisiting old photographs has become like the rituals my mother tried to preserve at our home in Ohio — the way she’d prepare Turkish coffee when my maternal grandmother would visit; the lamb she’d cook at Christmas with slivers of almonds and raisins buried in