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6 books match the query 'Baghdad'

cover of Baghdad, Adieu: Selected Poems of Memory and Exile

Baghdad, Adieu

Selected Poems of Memory and Exile

Salah Al Hamdani

Seagull Books, 2018

Iraqi poet Salah Al Hamdani has lived a remarkable life. The author of some forty books in French and Arabic, he began life as a child laborer, with little or no education. As a political prisoner under Saddam Hussein, he learned to read and write Arabic; once he was released form prison, he continued to work against the regime, ultimately, at age twenty-one, choosing exile in Paris. He now writes in French, but he remains a poet of exile, of memory, wounded by the loss of his homeland and those dear to him.
 
This landmark collection gathers thirty-five years of his writings, from his first volume in Arabic, Memory of Embers, to his latest collection, written originally in French, For You I Dream. It offers English-language readers their first substantial overview of Al Hamdani’s work, fired by the fight against injustice and shot through with longing for the home to which he can never return. 
 
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cover of Baghdad, Mon Amour: Selected Writings of Salah Al Hamdani

Baghdad, Mon Amour

Selected Writings of Salah Al Hamdani

Salah Al Hamdani

Northwestern University Press, 2008

Baghdad, Mon Amour is a memoir by Salah Al Hamdani centered on his imprisonment under Saddam Hussein, his subsequent exile in France for more than thirty years, and his emotional return to Baghdad and seeing his family again after all those years with feelings of tremendous joy but also guilt for having “abandoned” them. The beauty of Al Hamdani’s prose and poetry is skillfully captured in Sonia Alland’s translation.
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cover of Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic: An Introductory Text

Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic

An Introductory Text

Assaf Bar-Moshe

University College London, 2024

A one-of-a-kind textbook teaching Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic.

This textbook is dedicated to spoken Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic—the native tongue spoken by the Jews of Baghdad and other towns of Southern Iraq—and is designed to guide beginners to an advanced level of speaking. It focuses on common expressions, introduces Baghdad’s historic Jewish culture, and guides readers through sample texts, key vocabulary, grammar points, and exercises, as well as particular topics, such as greetings, family, shopping, and cuisine.
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cover of Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge

Ghost Riders of Baghdad

Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge

Daniel A. Sjursen

University Press of New England, 2015

From October 2006 to December 2007, Daniel A. Sjursen—then a U.S. Army lieutenant—led a light scout platoon across Baghdad. The experiences of Ghost Rider platoon provide a soldier’s-eye view of the incredible complexities of warfare, peacekeeping, and counterinsurgency in one of the world’s most ancient cities. Sjursen reflects broadly and critically on the prevailing narrative of the surge as savior of America’s longest war, on the overall military strategy in Iraq, and on U.S. relations with ordinary Iraqis. At a time when just a handful of U.S. senators and representatives have a family member in combat, Sjursen also writes movingly on questions of America’s patterns of national service. Who now serves and why? What connection does America’s professional army have to the broader society and culture? What is the price we pay for abandoning the model of the citizen soldier? With the bloody emergence of ISIS in 2014, Iraq and its beleaguered, battle-scarred people are again much in the news. Unlike other books on the U.S. war in Iraq, Ghost Riders of Baghdad is part battlefield chronicle, part critique of American military strategy and policy, and part appreciation of Iraq and its people. At once a military memoir, history, and cultural commentary, Ghost Riders of Bahdad delivers a compelling story and a deep appreciation of both those who serve and the civilians they strive to protect. Sjursen provides a riveting addition to our understanding of modern warfare and its human costs.
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cover of Memories of Eden: A Journey Through Jewish Baghdad

Memories of Eden

A Journey Through Jewish Baghdad

Violette Shamash

Northwestern University Press, 2010

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.

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cover of The Last Jews in Baghdad: Remembering a Lost Homeland

The Last Jews in Baghdad

Remembering a Lost Homeland

By Nissim Rejwan

University of Texas Press, 2004

Once upon a time, Baghdad was home to a flourishing Jewish community. More than a third of the city's people were Jews, and Jewish customs and holidays helped set the pattern of Baghdad's cultural and commercial life. On the city's streets and in the bazaars, Jews, Muslims, and Christians—all native-born Iraqis—intermingled, speaking virtually the same colloquial Arabic and sharing a common sense of national identity. And then, almost overnight it seemed, the state of Israel was born, and lines were drawn between Jews and Arabs. Over the next couple of years, nearly the entire Jewish population of Baghdad fled their Iraqi homeland, never to return.

In this beautifully written memoir, Nissim Rejwan recalls the lost Jewish community of Baghdad, in which he was a child and young man from the 1920s through 1951. He paints a minutely detailed picture of growing up in a barely middle-class family, dealing with a motley assortment of neighbors and landlords, struggling through the local schools, and finally discovering the pleasures of self-education and sexual awakening. Rejwan intertwines his personal story with the story of the cultural renaissance that was flowering in Baghdad during the years of his young manhood, describing how his work as a bookshop manager and a staff writer for the Iraq Times brought him friendships with many of the country's leading intellectual and literary figures. He rounds off his story by remembering how the political and cultural upheavals that accompanied the founding of Israel, as well as broad hints sent back by the first arrivals in the new state, left him with a deep ambivalence as he bid a last farewell to a homeland that had become hostile to its native Jews.

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