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Farewell, Babylon: Coming of Age in Jewish Baghdad
Book by Naim Kattan
222 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1976
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August 27, 2016
The author of this book, whose 88th birthday is today, August 26, 2016, was born in Baghdad in 1928. In the '40s there were 350,000 Jews living in Baghdad, he says, but when America intervened in Iraq in 2003, there were around 20 Jews left there.
Arabic is his native language. He says that adding new cultures works easily; it's losing one's native language that's hard. He wrote his first short story in Arabic at 14 years old but it took him until age 38 to publish his first literary work in French. Then, when he finally moved to Canada, he settled in Montreal since that's where the French speakers were, only to discover all the French speakers were Catholic. He again broke new territory, publishing book reviews of English-language works in a French Catholic paper--something that wasn't being done previously.
As he was coming up, the new reality is that the Ottoman Empire was no more, nor was Turkish, and Arabic was the language. But Jews, Christians, and Muslims each spoke a different version with their own accents and words, the Muslims borrowing only from classical Arabic. By opening up your mouth to speak, you id'd yourself. When speaking to an official, the most illiterate Jew would try to throw in a few Muslim terms, often butchering them in the process--an occasion for ridicule and humor. Ordinarily, then, when in mixed company, the young Jewish intellectual types would strait-lace their language into the Muslim format. The author recounts an episode in their youth when he and his friend Nessim were the only Jews in a literary discussion and Nessim began to speak the Hebrew dialect. Naïm copped out, taking an intermediate course, but Nessim boldly held to his course, and, after a while, the Muslims hesitantly allowed their lips to pronounce terms from the Jewish dialect.
That was a one-time occurrence. Others, particularly Jews, were second-class citizens. The pursuit of cultural pluralism did not catch on. Arab nationalism was rising, and looking to Germany was part of that. After WWI, Britain had become the hated occupier and Germany the potential anti-colonial ally, so, while Jews were as fiercely pro-Iraqi as anyone, Germany was making itself the mortal enemy of Jews. It was complicated.
In 1941 the news was that the German army was invincible. Everywhere but Baghdad, apparently. Suddenly chaos reigned. Iraqi forces had not prevailed. The British forces had advanced, but paused at the gates. Temporarily all authority was suspended. The Bedouins rose up, gathering a mob of Muslims, sparing the Christians, as they advanced first on the poorest Jewish part of town, where the most damage was done. It was the Farhoud , a pogrom. It lasted one day, and then the Iraqi army came in and restored order, but in one day the Iraqi Jewish community lost all their pride in having been able to get along with the Arab majority.
After that Jews haunted the passport office for days, only gradually absorbing what had happened--by minimizing it, on the part of some. No major exodus yet occurred. The possibilities for emigration were severely limited. Tehran? Shanghai? Calcutta? Indonesia? --wherever there was some cousin or uncle who had preceded them. America was out of the question. Rampant corruption revealed itself in the dealings with the passport office.
Meanwhile, life must go on.
His paternal grandmother, "the doctor's mother," had high status, dispensing medical remedies to one and all. Was the uncle a doctor? No, he was a lab technician, but no matter, he still brought home potions for her to use. When she made calls, he as a child would accompany her and while he waited would be allowed into the masters' gardens where he could have oranges, apples, and blackberries, the memory of which later would bring the Garden of Eden to mind.
Most Jews worked at crafts specific to towns that were leaving behind their primitive conditions. They were blacksmiths, carpenters, shoemakers, spice merchants, fruit sellers, and businessmen of all kinds. There were many clerks and low-level officials. We placed a high value on office work and the sorriest-looking individual in charge of documents enjoyed more prestige than any manual laborer. ...
The Jews were the backbone and sinews of the Iraqi state. They played this role unwillingly, in self-defense When the British army first entered Baghdad, in 1917, forcing the Ottomans into their last retrenchment, their main concern had been to announce to the Arab population that the hour of liberation had sounded, the hour of independence was near. They needed interpreters to call out the good news and only the Jews could respond to the need.
The schools of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, established some twenty years earlier by French Jews in order to bring the light of the West to their co-religionists in backward countries had prepared my father and uncles for the new tasks created by the change of regime and the new master. They were among the first candidates for the privileged posts of interpreters for the British army.
His father and another uncle, and later his brother, became civil servants in the post office, where all the other workers were Christian and Muslim. But after work, the cultures were segregated.
Living on the edge of the Muslim world, we could sense its strangeness, which was often transmuted into exoticism. For us it was also a world of hostility and compromise. We were close to the Muslims and consequently it was imperative we avoid their blows, appeal to their goodwill. As long as they left us alone.
When a Jewish mother reprimanded her son, she would call him a Muslim. The Muslim mother returned the insult by calling her offending son a Jew.
Often on Yom Kippur the Muslims wouldn't shop. Why miss out on the greater variety that would be available the next day?
The professions Jews could go into were subject to ever-tightening quotas as WWII approached. Whereas previously all had been welcomed for medical studies, now only two Jews in a year got in. They were strictly barred from the army and diplomatic corps. Only being a lawyer was permitted.
The well-to-do communities were separate from the poor. I didn't know there were Kurdish Jews, thought to be hard workers and to make the best servants.
But the greatest divide was between the sexes. The Christians and Jews, unlike the Muslims, would take their wives (and offspring) to an island out in the river--but nevertheless they were veiled, no matter which group they were from. It was a traditional society. Muslims used the same word for wife and honour: ardh, according to the author, and were highly reactive regarding the purity of wives and sisters; no relationship could be allowed between a woman and man in a different ethnic group. A Jewish girl who became involved with a Muslim or Christian in even the slightest way was likely to end up in the red light districts, unless she could be extricated. At the tiniest (to modern eyes) infraction of total neutrality between a young man and woman--such as a love note--she would be married off as fast as a suitable suitor could be found. As a teenager inexorably drawn to any girl, for example the neighbor's servant (a Kurdish Jew), the author had to consider that he held her reputation, in his hands. Even if she reciprocated, any move on his part could ruin her. No chatting was countenanced, not even with the sisters of friends he was visiting. Women were unapproachable mysteries.
Yet--and this is the great surprise--the other side of that picture were the ubiquitous red light districts. Here was the mirror image: women grabbing the men's crotch as they walked by, every obscenity allowed, and here, it appeared, it didn't even matter whether the guy was Muslim, Christian, or Jew--the last province of pluralism. So these young men with their literary interests who knew of the differing roles of women in Western society, were deprived of the companionship of women except in its most physical form. How ironic, considering the stereotypical Muslim opinion of degraded Western society!
After completing the French school, the author passed examinations with a Frenchman from Lebanon who encouraged him. Then he and his friend, needing two more years of education, landed in a Muslim school where they were the ones with literary interests and Arabic language skills, where they excelled even at required learning of the Koran, but where the teacher wouldn't call on them and the other students hounded them.
After the war, hopes were up, but that's when Zionism became a sign of disloyalty, so that Jews were torn, Zionist or Communist, and eventually neither was allowed. Eventually, around 1951, the mass exodus finally did begin. Jews were allowed to leave, but only if they gave up their Iraqi citizenship and their possessions. Many went to Israel, also Europe and the U.S.. But the author was long gone, first, in 1947, to postwar Paris, having been awarded the first French grant to an Iraqi citizen after the war, on the basis of his education plus the later mentoring by the Lebanese Frenchman.
Jews had been in Iraq for 2,500 years, ever since the Biblical exilic times. When Cyrus said they could leave Babylon and go home to rebuild the Temple, some had remained. They had been there longer than Christians or Muslims. The Jewish community of Baghdad has become another culture that exists no more.
This book was first published in French, in 1975. It was published in English in 2007.
Here's a piece by Naïm Kattan on whether a Jew can also be an Arab, in which he also covers some of the sane history that I did. http://jewishrefugees.blogspot.com/20...
April 3, 2013
Ten years ago the world was in turmoil after the ill-advised invasion of Iraq by American-led forces. Over the last two weeks there has been considerable comment on what happened--and didn't happen. Sadly, it seems that the lot of Iraqis is perhaps even worse than it was before.
This kind of reflectioin always sends me looking to see what I've read in the past that might resonate with the future. One of the most interesting is Naim Kattan' memoir Farewell, Babylon, first published in French in 1975 and in English in 1976 by McClelland and Stewart. In 2005, Raincoast brought it out again: it seems to have disappeared from their list, but Amazon.ca insists it is available. Certainly, it is worth looking for.
Winner of Quebec’s top literary award the Prix Athanse David in 2004 as well as the French Légion d’Honneur, Kattan has published 32 books of poetry, essays and fiction in French since he came to Canada in 1954. His first literary language was Arabic, however, and it still holds a part of his heart. The nuances of Arabic dialect and vocabulary are center stage in the opening section of his memoir and set the tone for a drama of the loss of one world and the discovery of another. Kattan’s observations also cast welcome light on Iraq: what we see today grew from the colonial, Muslim-dominated society Kattan grew up in and from which he escaped.
Kattan begins by explaining that he and his friend Nessim are the only Jews in the group of young intellectuals who meet each evening in a Baghdad café not long after World War II. They argue about the foreign literature they are reading and the difficulty of creating a unique Iraqi literature in the newly independent country. Kattan and Nessim had rejoice
d like everyone else when the British were forced to give up control, but nevertheless they feel themselves outsiders. No matter that the Iraqi Jewish community dates back 2500 years to the times of Babylon and the Bible, or that the best Arabic grammarians come from the Alliance Israélite school or that the best students on Arabic examinations are Jews: Jews are different and the Jewish dialect is considered comic. Needless to say, Kattan usually speaks classical Arabic when discussing with his friends.
One night, however, Nessim makes a strong political statement by insisting on speaking it: “we were Jews and we weren’t ashamed of it.” The others are surprised, but slowly the Muslims began to listen with “respect.” Indeed, Kattan says, “in the heat of discussion Janil and Said borrowed some of our familiar expressions. They stammered over words they had heard so often but never allowed to cross their lips…Nessim's tenacity bore fruit.”
From that beginning, one might think that Iraq might be able to build a country for all its people, but the section which follows show how the book’s bittersweet ending could be nothing but the end of the Jewish community.. Kattan takes us back to the Farhoud, the vicious pogrom which began on a hot night in May, 1941. British forces had beat back German-backed Iraqi insurgents, but before they could enter the city angry Bedouins swept in. “A wind of impunity was blowing…The Jews would bear the cost of this repressed hunger, this devouring thirst. Two days and a night. We could hear shots in the distance…”
Luckily, the conflagration stops just short of Kattan’s house when the Iraqi regular forces take control of the city. Slowly things return to normal and young Naim is allowed to grow up precocious and loved. His first story is accepted by an avant-garde literary magazine while he is still in short pants; he dreams of women in a society where all respectable females wear veils, he wanders the crowded streets of Baghdad, visits its many gardens, swims in the mighty Tigris.
As the book goes on, however, it becomes clear that there will be no place for Kattan in the modern Iraq, no matter how deep his roots in the region or how elegant his Arabic. His family begins the long process of getting passports right after Farhoud. He transfers to the Alliance Française school and starts to dream of studying in Paris. His friends—Muslim and Christian as well as Jewish—begin their own lives. Then he gets a scholarship to study at the Sorbonne. The memoir ends as he leaves Baghdad on a bus headed for Beirut, and thereafter for France. He will not see his family for five years, when he visits them in a settlement camp in Israel.
How many other Iraqi exiles are now looking for their families--or mourning them?
If anything, Farewell Babylon is more important now than ever. Translator Sheila Fischman has deftly captured the fluidity and charm of Kattan’s style, making it read as if had been conceived in English originally.
This kind of reflectioin always sends me looking to see what I've read in the past that might resonate with the future. One of the most interesting is Naim Kattan' memoir Farewell, Babylon, first published in French in 1975 and in English in 1976 by McClelland and Stewart. In 2005, Raincoast brought it out again: it seems to have disappeared from their list, but Amazon.ca insists it is available. Certainly, it is worth looking for.
Winner of Quebec’s top literary award the Prix Athanse David in 2004 as well as the French Légion d’Honneur, Kattan has published 32 books of poetry, essays and fiction in French since he came to Canada in 1954. His first literary language was Arabic, however, and it still holds a part of his heart. The nuances of Arabic dialect and vocabulary are center stage in the opening section of his memoir and set the tone for a drama of the loss of one world and the discovery of another. Kattan’s observations also cast welcome light on Iraq: what we see today grew from the colonial, Muslim-dominated society Kattan grew up in and from which he escaped.
Kattan begins by explaining that he and his friend Nessim are the only Jews in the group of young intellectuals who meet each evening in a Baghdad café not long after World War II. They argue about the foreign literature they are reading and the difficulty of creating a unique Iraqi literature in the newly independent country. Kattan and Nessim had rejoice
d like everyone else when the British were forced to give up control, but nevertheless they feel themselves outsiders. No matter that the Iraqi Jewish community dates back 2500 years to the times of Babylon and the Bible, or that the best Arabic grammarians come from the Alliance Israélite school or that the best students on Arabic examinations are Jews: Jews are different and the Jewish dialect is considered comic. Needless to say, Kattan usually speaks classical Arabic when discussing with his friends.
One night, however, Nessim makes a strong political statement by insisting on speaking it: “we were Jews and we weren’t ashamed of it.” The others are surprised, but slowly the Muslims began to listen with “respect.” Indeed, Kattan says, “in the heat of discussion Janil and Said borrowed some of our familiar expressions. They stammered over words they had heard so often but never allowed to cross their lips…Nessim's tenacity bore fruit.”
From that beginning, one might think that Iraq might be able to build a country for all its people, but the section which follows show how the book’s bittersweet ending could be nothing but the end of the Jewish community.. Kattan takes us back to the Farhoud, the vicious pogrom which began on a hot night in May, 1941. British forces had beat back German-backed Iraqi insurgents, but before they could enter the city angry Bedouins swept in. “A wind of impunity was blowing…The Jews would bear the cost of this repressed hunger, this devouring thirst. Two days and a night. We could hear shots in the distance…”
Luckily, the conflagration stops just short of Kattan’s house when the Iraqi regular forces take control of the city. Slowly things return to normal and young Naim is allowed to grow up precocious and loved. His first story is accepted by an avant-garde literary magazine while he is still in short pants; he dreams of women in a society where all respectable females wear veils, he wanders the crowded streets of Baghdad, visits its many gardens, swims in the mighty Tigris.
As the book goes on, however, it becomes clear that there will be no place for Kattan in the modern Iraq, no matter how deep his roots in the region or how elegant his Arabic. His family begins the long process of getting passports right after Farhoud. He transfers to the Alliance Française school and starts to dream of studying in Paris. His friends—Muslim and Christian as well as Jewish—begin their own lives. Then he gets a scholarship to study at the Sorbonne. The memoir ends as he leaves Baghdad on a bus headed for Beirut, and thereafter for France. He will not see his family for five years, when he visits them in a settlement camp in Israel.
How many other Iraqi exiles are now looking for their families--or mourning them?
If anything, Farewell Babylon is more important now than ever. Translator Sheila Fischman has deftly captured the fluidity and charm of Kattan’s style, making it read as if had been conceived in English originally.
November 27, 2008
Our images of Iraq today are quite tainted by recent events. This book tells of a very different era, a time of more openness and cooperation in the early 1940's - in the evolving years after attaining self-rule from British occupation. The Jewish community in Baghdad (in the era before the birth of the Israeli state) was accepted and respected.
The author was a young Jewish intellectual who enjoyed meeting with Muslim and Christian friends and discussing European literature, and their dreams for the future of Iraq. But persecution against Jews (by Bedouins) eventually starts here too. There is a poignant scene as the family waits for a raging mob to approach. There are less desirable scenes of the sexual maturation of the young men. The author eventually escapes to Paris and begins a new life.
For those who have interest in the countries and cultures described here, there is much to appreciate in the book.
The author was a young Jewish intellectual who enjoyed meeting with Muslim and Christian friends and discussing European literature, and their dreams for the future of Iraq. But persecution against Jews (by Bedouins) eventually starts here too. There is a poignant scene as the family waits for a raging mob to approach. There are less desirable scenes of the sexual maturation of the young men. The author eventually escapes to Paris and begins a new life.
For those who have interest in the countries and cultures described here, there is much to appreciate in the book.
October 14, 2014
I finished it just three days ago and I already forgot what it was about.
January 25, 2019
Farewell, Babylon is the memoir of a Jewish Iraqi ex-pat, talking about his adolescence in 1940s Baghdad. I thought this was gonna be a really interesting book and it mostly ended up being superficial adolescent boy angst that was super boring and irritating. He barely touched on topics that I would have loved to see more fully developed (like the pro-German sentiments that some Iraqis felt because they were the enemies of Iraq's colonizers and how that put Jewish Iraqis in a difficult position because Nazis weren't exactly subtle with their antisemitism or how the creation of Israel affected the Jewish diaspora in the Middle East). Instead there was chapter upon chapter about him visiting prostitutes and obsessing over how much a mystery women were. It basically felt like every other self-important adolescent boy's "coming of age" story that has ever been written and just as boring as all the ones that came before.
July 14, 2018
The story of a boy from a community of Jews who'd lived in Baghdad since the time of the deportation by Nebuchadnezzar. They had settled and thrived, living relatively amicably with their neighbours - Christian or Muslim - for centuries. As they engaged in intellectual and social debate in homes and meeting places, they thought of themselves as Iraqis, all united against a common enemy: the hated English. At least, so Naim thought.
That was until the coming of the Farhoud, a sudden genocidal eruption of violence by the Muslims in the few days of transition between the leaving of the Germans (after the British victory in the Anglo-Iraqi war) and the return of the young king from Iran.
From that time in 1941, the Jews of Baghdad began to leave their ancient home. A community that had existed to millennia left as soon as they could, for whatever land would offer them refuge.
The story of the Farhoud has disturbing echoes me of the story by David Kupelian about the Armenian genocide: http://www.wnd.com/2015/04/the-armeni...
The transitional timing, of course, suggests threshold issues.
Kattan describes Jews as "the nomads of God" who take shelter under his watchful eye, in a community. Like the Muslims, he explains, "except that for them the desert and the divine breath, physical exile in the immensity of the earth and the exile of the soul in submissiveness to God, are the same thing. We [Jews] don't need an exterior desert, we have learned how to carry God in our baggage." (p 174)
"Muslims used the same word for wife and for honour: ardh. Sensitive to anything that touched the purity of their wives, mothers or sisters, they nevertheless gave in to studied obscenities." (p 186)
That was until the coming of the Farhoud, a sudden genocidal eruption of violence by the Muslims in the few days of transition between the leaving of the Germans (after the British victory in the Anglo-Iraqi war) and the return of the young king from Iran.
From that time in 1941, the Jews of Baghdad began to leave their ancient home. A community that had existed to millennia left as soon as they could, for whatever land would offer them refuge.
The story of the Farhoud has disturbing echoes me of the story by David Kupelian about the Armenian genocide: http://www.wnd.com/2015/04/the-armeni...
The transitional timing, of course, suggests threshold issues.
Kattan describes Jews as "the nomads of God" who take shelter under his watchful eye, in a community. Like the Muslims, he explains, "except that for them the desert and the divine breath, physical exile in the immensity of the earth and the exile of the soul in submissiveness to God, are the same thing. We [Jews] don't need an exterior desert, we have learned how to carry God in our baggage." (p 174)
"Muslims used the same word for wife and for honour: ardh. Sensitive to anything that touched the purity of their wives, mothers or sisters, they nevertheless gave in to studied obscenities." (p 186)
January 16, 2017
Reading this memoir about Jewish youth growing up in Iraq during WWII was a culturally interesting walk. The text was a bit flowery, but then the author is also a poet. I do wish he had gone into much more depth. It seemed a bit shallow considering what was going on at the time. He mainly concentrated on his and friends' intense interest in poetry, languages, literature, and all things French. While I was upset by how the Jews were treated by the Muslims, I was fuming at how both Jews and Muslims treated women. Nothing I didn't already know, but it still makes me mad.
June 12, 2018
If you're looking for a book about Baghdad, or Jews, or - horribile dictu - Jewish Baghdad, keep on walking, this book is not about those things. It's 220 pages about the authors youth, written in extremely boring way without mentioning his surroundings. On page 81 the author's French teacher summarizes his pupil's composition-work for class as "Not only did you not deal with the subject but you've given me an unbelievable piece of gibberish", obviously the author hasn't learned his lesson from those words.
October 22, 2014
A coming of age memoir about Jewish life in 1940s Iraq. The book begins with a pogrom in 1941 and ends in 1947 when the author left the country. Although Baghdad was somewhat westernized, I was surprised by how traditional the society was: women were still secluded from male society (especially among Muslims), and marriages were still arranged with just a few minutes of contact between bride and groom.
July 22, 2011
I found this title fairly interesting. It gives a good biographical look at a Jew living in Iraq. No "fireworks" or extremely dramatic stuff, just a good look at the human elements of the situation and some of the hardships encountered.
December 28, 2012
A coming-of-age memoir of a Jewish boy in Baghdad in the 1940s; I learnt a few new things but this is a poor translation which really marred any pleasure in the book. Had I known it was originally published in French I would have read it in that language.
January 6, 2013
Interesting account of life in pre-1948 Jewish Baghdad, although not as flowing due to obvious translation of the work (it was originally published in French). Still good for those interested in Middle Eastern history.
October 15, 2008
Life in mid-20th century Baghdad from an unexpected point of view. Interesting, but not captivating.
December 24, 2008
"A fine portrait of a particular place and time that is no more."
- Library Journal
"In all respects, a most moving and haunting work."
- Montreal Star
- Library Journal
"In all respects, a most moving and haunting work."
- Montreal Star
February 3, 2011
I am reading the history of iraq from other viewpoint
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