By Michael Weingrad in Mosaic Magazine
Life
After Baghdad: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew in Israel, 1950-2000 is the newly
translated volume of memoirs by the Iraqi-born Israeli scholar of Arab
literature Sasson Somekh. It is not nearly as beguiling as its
predecessor, Baghdad, Yesterday: The Making of an Arab Jew, which
appeared in 2007 in one of the handsome little Gallimard—inspired
paperbacks put out by the Jerusalem—based Ibis Editions press.
Nevertheless, it is welcome, not only for continuing Somekh's story, but
for adding another book to the shelf of those produced by the last
generation of Jews to have been born and raised in Iraq.
The Jewish presence in what is today Iraq dates back to the 6th century B.C.E. and stretches through the Middle Ages to modern times. After Baghdad became the seat of the Islamic Caliphate in the 8th century, it developed into the political and spiritual capital of the Jewish world, and its rabbis, intellectuals, merchants, and officials shaped what Judaism would be for centuries afterwards. Jews continued to occupy an important place in the city right up into the modern period. The census in 1917 reported that Baghdad's total population of 200,000 was forty percent Jewish, a larger proportion of the total than in Warsaw, Odessa, Vilna, or any of the famous Jewish centers of Europe. When the British took over the region from the Ottomans after World War I and created the state of Iraq, Jews, already receptive to educational and cultural influences from Europe, were at the vanguard of the heady transformations of an imported modernity that included streetcars, cinema, education for women, and a liberalizing monarchy under the British-installed Faisal I.
Under the new regime, many Jews moved into the middle classes, and some became prominent in finance, banking, and trade. Others contributed to the arts and to modern Arabic literature, poetry, and drama. In the 1920s, a Jew served as the country's minister of finance. Jews wrote the first Iraqi short stories in Arabic, and they produced some of the best-known singers and musicians in Iraq, indeed in the whole of the Arab world.
Continue reading.
For more Traditions news, check out our Life
After Baghdad: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew in Israel, 1950-2000 is the newly
translated volume of memoirs by the Iraqi-born Israeli scholar of Arab
literature Sasson Somekh. It is not nearly as beguiling as its
predecessor, Baghdad, Yesterday: The Making of an Arab Jew, which
appeared in 2007 in one of the handsome little Gallimard—inspired
paperbacks put out by the Jerusalem—based Ibis Editions press.
Nevertheless, it is welcome, not only for continuing Somekh's story, but
for adding another book to the shelf of those produced by the last
generation of Jews to have been born and raised in Iraq.The Jewish presence in what is today Iraq dates back to the 6th century B.C.E. and stretches through the Middle Ages to modern times. After Baghdad became the seat of the Islamic Caliphate in the 8th century, it developed into the political and spiritual capital of the Jewish world, and its rabbis, intellectuals, merchants, and officials shaped what Judaism would be for centuries afterwards. Jews continued to occupy an important place in the city right up into the modern period. The census in 1917 reported that Baghdad's total population of 200,000 was forty percent Jewish, a larger proportion of the total than in Warsaw, Odessa, Vilna, or any of the famous Jewish centers of Europe. When the British took over the region from the Ottomans after World War I and created the state of Iraq, Jews, already receptive to educational and cultural influences from Europe, were at the vanguard of the heady transformations of an imported modernity that included streetcars, cinema, education for women, and a liberalizing monarchy under the British-installed Faisal I.
Under the new regime, many Jews moved into the middle classes, and some became prominent in finance, banking, and trade. Others contributed to the arts and to modern Arabic literature, poetry, and drama. In the 1920s, a Jew served as the country's minister of finance. Jews wrote the first Iraqi short stories in Arabic, and they produced some of the best-known singers and musicians in Iraq, indeed in the whole of the Arab world.
Continue reading.
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There
are very few things in this world I love more dearly than the World
Cup. Every four years, like a crazed pilgrim to the pitch, I shun all
other forms of human engagement, chant the names of Cameroon’s captain
or Croatia’s midfielder as if they were life-giving mantras, and howl as
the titans of soccer kick, block, and tackle their way into eternal
glory.
On
a cold day in late March, I sat in room 103 of Harvard University’s
Sever Hall with about 60 undergraduates, listening to Ruth Wisse talk
about Avrom Sutzkever. A partisan and a survivor of the Vilna Ghetto,
Sutzkever was one of the 20th century’s greatest Yiddish poets. The
reading that day was of his surrealistic prose poem “Green Aquarium,”
which Wisse, a small, gray-haired woman wearing a purple, smocklike
jacket, had translated for her master’s thesis in the early 1960s. She
explained how Sutzkever used the horrors of the Holocaust as a metaphor
for the artistic process — “Walk over words as over a minefield,” he
writes near the beginning — and how his conception of poetry as “the
only credible alternative to barbarism” countered Theodor Adorno’s
dictum, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” What she didn’t
tell the roomful of undergrads, still sleepy after the recent spring
break, is that Sutzkever was the reason she was teaching the class at
all.