Life After Baghdad

Somekh, a noted student of modern Arabic culture, relates his life as a university professor and writer, taking the reader to Oxford, Princeton and Cairo, and introducing scholars and writers he befriended: S D Goitein, Mustafa Badawi and Haim Blanc, among others. This title presents his story.

Memoirs of an Iraqi Jew, interspersed with essays on Jewish life and history. Kazzaz was born in Baghdad in 1923; after the pogrom in Baghdad in 1941 (see pp. 209-235), he went to the American University in Beirut to study medicine. After 1948 the Iraqi government, frustrated by the establishment of the State of Israel, launched an anti-Jewish campaign that included, inter alia, arbitrary searches in Jewish homes and arrests. In 1950, the Jews were suddenly allowed to register for emigration. Kazzaz's childhood sweetheart, Louise, was the first to overcome her fears and register, thus paving the way for others. That same year, Kazzaz went to Israel to marry Louise. In 1954 they emigrated to the U.S., where Kazzaz became a psychiatrist.

Lieutenant Colonel Jay Kopelman won the hearts of readers everywhere with his moving story of adopting an abandoned puppy named Lava from a hellish corner of Iraq. He opened the door for other soldiers to bring dogs home, and in From Baghdad to America, Kopelman once again leads the pack with his observations on the emotional repercussions of war. Here, for the first time, Kopelman holds nothing back as he responds to the question, “Why did you save a dog instead of a person?” The answer reveals much about his inner demons—and about the bigger picture of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He talks about what it’s like to return to the States and examines the shocking statistics to come out of Iraq: Depression, suicide, alcohol abuse, and broken relationships are at record highs for the men and women who serve there. Kopelman credits Lava with helping him to endure combat and the pain of war, as well as helping him deal with the surprising difficulties of returning to everyday life. Civilians have a hard time understanding what being a Marine means, and the adjustment to living among them is hard for these soldiers. This book attempts to shed light on that for all readers.

The fascinating story of the Iraqi Jews told through the life of the author's grandmother 'Last Days in Babylon is a marvel ... An amalgam of political commentary, history and personal memoir, it offers a poignant testimony to an obliterated people' Sunday Times 'This is a history unknown even to most Jews. Benjamin narrates it fluently and passionately' Independent Marina Benjamin grew up in London, feeling estranged from her family's Middle Eastern ways, refusing to speak Arabic or eat their food. But when Benjamin had her own child a few years ago, she realised that she was losing her link to the past, inspiring a journey to Baghdad and into her family's history. Her discoveries will haunt anyone who seeks to understand a country whose ongoing struggles continue to command the world's attention. By turns moving and funny, Last Days in Babylon is an adventure story, a riveting history and a timely reminder that behind today's headlines are real people whose lives are caught in the crossfire of misunderstanding, prejudice and ambition.

Since the fall of Bagdad, women’s voices have been largely erased, but four months after Saddam Hussein’s statue fell, a 24 year-old woman from Baghdad began blogging. In 2003, a twenty-four-year-old woman from Baghdad began blogging about life in the city under the pseudonym Riverbend. Her passion, honesty, and wry idiomatic English made her work a vital contribution to our understanding of post-war Iraq—and won her a large following. Baghdad Burning is a quotidian chronicle of Riverbend’s life with her family between April 2003 and September of 2004. She describes rolling blackouts, intermittent water access, daily explosions, gas shortages and travel restrictions. She also expresses a strong stance against the interim government, the Bush administration, and Islamic fundamentalists like Al Sadr and his followers. Her book “offers quick takes on events as they occur, from a perspective too often overlooked, ignored or suppressed” (Publishers Weekly). “Riverbend is bright and opinionated, true, but like all voices of dissent worth remembering, she provides an urgent reminder that, whichever governments we struggle under, we are all the same.” —Booklist “Feisty and learned: first-rate reading for any American who suspects that Fox News may not be telling the whole story.” —Kirkus

In Farewell, Babylon, Naim Kattan takes readers into the heart of exotic mid-19th-century Baghdad's then-teeming Jewish community. Jews had lived in Iraq for 25 centuries, long before the time of Christ or Muhammad, but anti-Semitism and nationalism were on the rise. In this beautifully written memoir, a young boy comes of age and describes his discoveries -- of work, literature, patriotism, the joys of lazy Sundays swimming in the Tigris. He also talks eloquently of his greatest discovery: women and love. This is a story of roots and exile, of thirst for life and life's experiences. However, more than that it is a tribute to a lost world, an ancient Eastern city in which Iraq's Kurds, Bedouins, Sunnis, Shiites, Chaldeans, Catholics, and Jews all lived together in a rough, rewarding sort of harmony.

According to legend, the Garden of Eden was located in Iraq, and for millennia, Jews resided peacefully in metropolitan Baghdad. Memories of Eden: A Journey Through Jewish Baghdad reconstructs the last years of the oldest Jewish Diaspora community in the world through the recollections of Violette Shamash, a Jewish woman who was born in Baghdad in 1912, sent to her daughter Mira Rocca and son-in-law, the British journalist Tony Rocca. The result is a deeply textured memoir—an intimate portrait of an individual life, yet revealing of the complex dynamics of the Middle East in the twentieth century. Toward the end of her long life, Violette Shamash began writing letters, notes, and essays and sending them to the Roccas. The resulting book begins near the end of Ottoman rule and runs through the British Mandate, the emergence of an independent Iraq, and the start of dictatorial government. Shamash clearly loved the world in which she grew up but is altogether honest in her depiction of the transformation of attitudes toward Baghdad’s Jewish population. Shamash’s world is finally shattered by the Farhud, the name given to the massacre of hundreds of Iraqi Jews over three days in 1941. An event that has received very slight historical coverage, the Farhud is further described and placed in context in a concluding essay by Tony Rocca.

"Sasson Somekh's memoir takes shape like a series of telling snapshots from another time and place. The time is the 1930s and '40s and the place, Iraq, where Somekh and his family were part of the country's then-flourishing Jewish community. The book offers an intimate view of this milieu and manages both to describe vividly the young Somekh's intellectual and emotional growth and to map the now-vanished world of Baghdad's book stalls and literary cafes, its Arabic-speaking Jewish bank clerks, outdoor movies at the Cinema Diana, and bonfires by the Tigris. As the pieces of Somekh's unsentimental memoir accumulate, they also mount in meaning. The book celebrates the ups and downs of Iraqi Jewish life as it also portrays the eventual dissolution of the community in the early 1950s."--BOOK JACKET.