Salom Rizk (also known as Sam Risk; born 15 December 1908 in Ottoman Syria, died 22 October 1973 in Silver Spring, Maryland) was a Syrian-American author, best known for his 1943 immigrant autobiography, Syrian Yankee, perhaps the best-known piece of Arab American literature in the middle part of the century.
[1] The book has been called "a classic of the immigrant biography genre",[2] especially for the way Rizk's story portrays the American Dream[3] and the virtues of cultural assimilation[4] at the expense of his home country, which he finds loathsome when he returns for a visit.
[6] He also sponsored a drive for the Save the Children Federation, using advertisements in such magazines as Boys' Life to request families send their extra pencils, so that these could be donated to needy school-children around the world as a way of promoting freedom and democracy and fighting tyranny.
[8] At the same time, he has been told "many wonderful, unbelievable things" about the United States by his teacher, who describes it as "a country like heaven...where everything is bigger and grander and more beautiful than it has ever been anywhere else in the world...where men do the deeds of giants and think the thoughts of God".
At the same time, the goals and achievements of the Pen League could no longer be followed, as the increase in anti-Arab racism (in the wake of the Arab-Israeli conflict then unfolding) made the writers' Arab heritage more of a burden to them, giving them a sense of a "dislocated past".