סמיר נקאש: מעולם אחד לאחר — מעיראק לישראל
سمير نقاش: من عالم إلى آخر — من العراق إلى إسرائيل
Geula Elimelekh
In: Cultural Pearls from the East: In Memory of Shmuel Moreh (1932–2017), ed. Meir Hatina and Yona Sheffer, Brill, 2021, pp. 142–160.
1 Introduction: From Exile to “Double Diaspora”
“By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.” This, the opening verse of Psalm 137, reflects the anguish and the yearning of the Judean exiles to Babylon after the conquest of their homeland and the destruction of the First Temple. This sense of expatriation is reflected in Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson’s contemporary observation that “the feeling of exile does not necessarily accompany the condition of exile.”1 Exile is not only a physical condition, but also—and perhaps mainly—a psychological reaction. The concept of exile is a pivotal theme in the Jewish religion and consciousness and also the ethos motivating the Zionist Movement. In his article “Invisible Exile: Iraqi Jews in Israel,” Zvi Ben-Dor notes that the myth of the Jewish exile helped “create a justification for—an understanding of the necessity of—the Jewish return to Zion,” and adds that the negation of exile is an important principle of Zionism.2 However, for many Jews who immigrated to Israel and became new citizens of the Jewish homeland, the immigration experience was not a homecoming, but rather an act of leaving home behind and arriving in an alien land. The unique condition of being a citizen of Israel yet feeling like a foreigner or refugee there exposes the unbridgeable discrepancy between the mythos of the Jews’ return to Israel, as expressed in Zionist ideology, and the feeling of alienation that many new immigrants felt. Ironically, the land that epitomizes the exilic concept in Western culture—Iraq (Babylon)—was the homeland of many people who experienced this paradox most acutely.3 Referring to Iraqi Jews who came to Israel between 1950 and 1952, Nancy Berg writes that their immigration was part of realizing the Zionist vision, yet for many of them,
1 Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, “Galut,” Encyclopaedia Judaica 7 (1971): 275–297.
2 Zvi Ben-Dor, “Invisible Exile: Iraqi Jews in Israel,” Journal of the Interdisciplinary Crossroads
31 (April 2006): 142; also Israel Yuval, “The Myth of the Jewish Exile from the Land of Israel: A Demonstration of Irenic Scholarship,” Common Knowledge 12/1 (2006): 33.
3 Ben-Dor, “Invisible Exile,” 142.
leaving their birthplace resulted not in a sense of homecoming but rather in a hopeless state of uprootedness and dislocation. Berg argues that leaving one place for another, emigrating from one country to settle elsewhere, has unique connotations and an absolute emotional value that can be associated with the exilic state, whether that state is a consequence of compulsion or choice.4 The Iraqi Jews’ emigration can undeniably be described as forced, because already from World War II and even earlier, they had faced an increasing wave of persecution.5 True, the Jews who emigrated did so also out of a desire to realize the 2,000-year-old dream of returning to the Jewish homeland. However, Berg contends that even people who appear to leave their birthland willingly actually often do so due to factors beyond their control. They may not wish to leave, but there are circumstances when leaving is preferable to staying. Hence, an exile is a person deprived of his or her homeland.6 Berg’s characterization is applicable to the Iraqi Jews since, were it not for the new sociopolitical and economic circumstances that emerged in Iraq in the 1940s, most of them would probably have stayed in Iraq, despite their yearnings for the Land of Israel. Osman Hajjar writes that the Jews of Iraq considered themselves an integral part of Iraqi society and the blatant activities of the Zionist Movement conflicted with their desires. Many Iraqi Jews did not wish to leave their birthplace and “return” to a homeland that existed for them only in the Torah. The end of Iraqi Jewry, says Hajjar, was tragic, because in Israel this community suffered cultural and linguistic alienation.7
4 Nancy Berg, Exile from Exile: Israeli Writers from Iraq (New York: SUNY Press, 1996), xiii, 3.
5 Esther-Meir Glitzenstein writes in her book Zionism in an Arab Country: “Only the unfore-
seen reactions by Iraqi society to the Denaturalization Law and the resultant changes in economic, social and security conditions convinced the Iraqi Jews that they had no chance of security and stability in Iraq and prompted the masses to register. Most people registered voluntarily, on the assumption that their future in Israel, despite all the difficulties, would be better than the future that awaited them in Iraq. But due to the circumstances described above, they arrived in Israel as persecuted, destitute deportees.” Glitzenstein, Zionism in an Arab Country: Jews in Iraq in the 1940s (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 209. 6 Berg, Exile from Exile, 4. 7 Osman Hajjar, “Exile at Home: Samir Naqqash—Prophesy as Poetics,” in Arab Literature: Postmodern Perspectives, eds. Angelika Neuwirth, Andreas Pflitsch, and Barbara Winckler (London: Saqi Books, 2010), 274, 279. We should also mention that “transit camp literature,” which Iraqi-born writers have compiled in Hebrew, is generally characterized by the stark contrast between the expectations of the new immigrants and the fact that the veteran residents did not welcome them. This literature describes the grim physical conditions of the transition process, in contrast to the lifestyle enjoyed in Iraq, and the culture clashes that occurred between the new immigrants and the established residents. See Berg, Exile from Exile, 67.
In fact, many Iraqi Jews found themselves in a state of “double diaspora,” as S.T. Schwartz calls it.
Double diaspora […] is the sense of being caught between sets of discrepancies between homeland and hostland that contradict each other; a double-diasporic person is caught between two contradictory relationships of belonging.8
For a Jew to experience double diaspora, or “a second Babylonian exile,”9 in the State of Israel is no simple matter, for how can Israel, the Jewish State that is supposed to be the Jews’ place of redemption, be a place of exile for them?10 It nevertheless transpires that Israel, which was founded on the principle of “ending the Diaspora,” and which aspired to transform the Jews’ mythical-religious bond with their ancient homeland into an actual relationship within a modern state, managed to create a double diaspora for some of its new citizens, as well as the Palestinians.11 Exile, even when it is not “double,” is associated with concepts of instability, anxiety, alienation, and wandering. In their study of nationalism, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari suggest that since humanity is in constant flux, with people moving from place to place, individuals do not really have a fixed and finite homeland that belongs to them. This puts into question the idea that nations are stable entities associated with a particular territory and that nationalism means identifying with one single state.12
2 Samīr Naqqāsh in Linguistic and Cultural Crisis
Among the wrenching experiences suffered by Baghdadi Jews as described in Jewish narratives, one is especially pervasive and common, namely, leaving the city behind. How, then, does one reconstruct a lost world, a lost life? For most,
8 S.T. Schwartz, “The Concept of Double Diaspora in Sami Michael’s Refuge and Naim Kattan’s Farewell, Babylon,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 30/1 (2010): 93. 9 Shimon Ballas, HaMaʾabarah (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1964) (in Hebrew), 51; see also fn. 34 below. 10 Ben-Dor, “Invisible Exile,” 138. 11 Schwartz, “The Concept of Double Diaspora,” 94. 12 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? Hugh Tomilson and Graham Burchell, trans. (New York: Colombia University Press, 1994), 21.
memory is capricious and unreal. However, Samīr Naqqāsh defied the forces of history to insist on an almost preternatural remembering in the face of physical and temporal distance.13 Naqqāsh (1938–2004) was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Baghdad which, like many families, was forced to leave in the early 1950s. He never felt at home in Israel and continued to write in Arabic. To him, the great wave of emigration to Israel was a forced expulsion from the paradise of his childhood in Baghdad. He tried several times to leave Israel, going to Turkey, Iran, Lebanon, Egypt, India, and finally to the United Kingdom, but he was always disappointed and returned to Israel. In his novels, Naqqāsh represented the collective conscience of the Jews of Iraq, depicting their sudden uprooting from their natural milieu to a new home that was not prepared to receive them in a respectable or respectful way. He considered himself an Iraqi exiled writer, whether he lived in Israel or abroad. Naqqāsh was not alone in his life-long traumatic identity crisis resulting from his forced emigration. Reuven Snir in his recently released book Who Needs Arab-Jewish Identity? presents “six [Iraqi literary] personalities whom even scholars have referred to as having one identity” but goes on to write:
However, it can easily be seen that what has united these individuals has been their tendency towards inessential solidarities, that is, a community of intellectuals presented as monolithic proved to be nothing other than singularities. Take the film Forget Baghdad, for example,14 with its five participating personalities: Sami Michael, Shimon Ballas, Musa Huri (1924–2010), Samir Naqqash (1938–2004), and Ella Shohat (b. 1959). Apart from their common ethnic origins, they hardly have anything in common. The differences between those joint layers of identity that all of them share, such as Iraqiness and Arabness, are more significant than the differences between the layers of identity such as Israeliness and Hebrewness that they share with non-Arabized Jews.15
13 Lital Levy, “Self and the City: Literary Representations of Jewish Baghdad,” Prooftexts 26/1–2 (Winter/Spring 2006): 190. 14 Samir, Forget Baghdad: Jews and Arabs—The Iraqi Connection. Documentary Film (Seattle: 2002). The mononymous Samīr is an Iraqi who was born into a Shiʿi Muslim family in Baghdad in 1955 but has been living in Switzerland since 1961. 15 Reuven Snir, Who Needs Arab-Jewish Identity? Interpellation, Exclusion, and Inessential Solidarities (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 174.
3 Naqqāsh’s Works of Jewish-Iraqi Nostalgia
We have seen that exile is the loss of or separation from one’s homeland, to be disconnected from a particular geographic environment, from society and family, in other words, to be in exile means to lose the physicality of one’s heritage though not necessarily a sense of heritage that can be borne in the mind, language, and culture. Exile in Naqqāsh’s works carries not so much a geographical significance of transiting from one country to another, but rather it has the meaning of an internal mental exile. Naqqāsh’s affinity for the Jewish people and Jewish tradition is very evident in his works. This sense of exile, a kind of overarching second exile, which the writer carries in his heart, is a consequence of a profound sense of loss of Jewish tradition. And from his perception, it is an absurdity that Israel, the Jewish State, has detached so many of the Jewish people from their ethnic and religious roots. This acute sense of exile is especially prevalent in the works of Samīr Naqqāsh, who came to Israel as a boy of thirteen. He often deals, directly or indirectly, with the poignant question of whether the Iraqi Jews’ immigration to Israel really ended their state of exile. In examining his works, one finds that his answer to this question is clearly negative. The Iraqi community’s immigration to Israel—whose establishment was supposed to be the Jews’ salvation—not only failed to save them, but in his view left them in a far worse condition. They lost the advantages they had enjoyed in Iraq and found themselves in a shocking and humiliating state of affairs that sometimes led to abject poverty and a complete loss of human dignity. Exile, as noted at the outset, is not just a physical condition but also a psychological state, which involves an acute sense of alienation and longing for the “old country.” In Berg’s words, it leads to the development of “certain mental structures, ways of attempting to bridge the distance.”16 Indeed, in Naqqāsh’s works, Iraq becomes an object of yearning and nostalgia. His memories of the past are far more vivid and real than his experience of the present. He tried to return to Iraq physically, by fleeing to Lebanon with his cousin at the age of 15, only two years after arriving in Israel, and also mentally, through constant nostalgic reminiscing. In an interview with Ammiel Alcalay, he explained that he had never managed to acclimate in Israel:
16 Berg, Exile from Exile, 4.
I cannot bring myself to terms with this society. I am an honest man, and society here is not straight, it’s as simple as that. Everyone is at war with each other. […] Even in Egypt […] I feel an enormous difference. When I am there, I simply find myself. I can enter into society. […] Israeli society is still composed of a number of societies. […] The society hasn’t crystallized completely.17
On another occasion Naqqāsh said,
The move from Iraq to Israel represented not only a movement through space, but also through time. They put us back hundreds of thousands of years—a dramatic transformation from one universe to another, a dislocation far greater than covered by an airplane crossing a mere 600 kilometers from one Middle Eastern location to another.18
In fact, Naqqāsh did not even attempt to integrate in Israel, but rather sought to maintain his connection to Iraq by cleaving to his Baghdadi-Arabic dialect, culture, and customs, and enshrining them in his works. He also attempted to find a “third homeland,” traveling to Lebanon, Iran, India, and England—but ultimately, he returned to Israel. Like many immigrants from Iraq and elsewhere, he developed a crisis of identity, which involves a sense of alienation from one’s surroundings and even from oneself. Other Iraqi-Jewish writers describe a similar sense of exile. Sami Michael described his own internal conflict: “From the moment I arrived in Israel, there was a struggle between ‘the State of Sami Michael’ and ‘the State of Israel.’”19 Shimon Ballas, who lived in Tel Aviv and Paris, also described exile as a pivotal element in his life.20 Naqqāsh indeed attempted to overcome the loss of his childhood home and motherland through his writing, which is profoundly autobiographical. Lillian Dabby-Joury writes,
17 Ammiel Alcalay, “Signs in the Great Disorder: An Interview with Samir Naqqash,” in Keys to the Garden, edited by idem (San Francisco: City Light Books, 1996), 108–109. 18 Ben-Dor, “Invisible Exile,” 136. 19 Samir, Forget Baghdad. 20 In his work Last Winter, Ballas describes the lives of Middle Eastern Communists living in exile in Paris. His novel Outcast is based on the life of a real individual, Ahmad Soussa, a Jew from Baghdad who converted to Islam in the 1930s. The “real” Soussa chose to become part of modern Iraqi society, but Ballas’ Soussa spends his life in a state of double exile: a stranger in both the Jewish community he left and the new Iraq. Ben-Dor, “Invisible Exile,” 136.
The resounding oath of the Book of Books, uttered by the first exiles on the rivers of Babylon, mysteriously reverses its direction and flows [backwards], from Zion to Iraq, in the works of the last generation of the Babylonian exiles. The literary enterprise of Samir Naqqash preserves and perpetuates Iraq as an essence and a timeless experience. [It preserves] the geographical Iraq as well as the one which transcends the geographical boundaries: the exterritorial Iraq that the Jews carry in their hearts, while holding in their memory the rivers of Babylon and pledging, in the words of the ancient oath, “If I forget thee, O Iraq.”21
As for the question of language, the writer in exile usually finds himself in a new linguistic environment, and must choose whether to continue writing in his native language or try writing in a newly acquired tongue. This is a decision of momentous significance for, as noted by Nurit Buchweitz in the introduction to the book To Write in the Language of the Other (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2010), language is not just a practical convention used by a certain ethnic group in speaking or writing, but is also, and perhaps mainly, a vehicle for expressing that group’s culture and consciousness. Language expresses the self and cannot be separated from thought and awareness. These observations definitely reflect the persona and work of Samīr Naqqāsh, who wrote in Arabic though he lived in the Hebrew-language environment of Israel from a relatively young age. Hajjar believes that Naqqāsh suffered from a morbidly traumatic sense of dislocation, and therefore cleaved tenaciously to his native Arabic.22 Naqqāsh refused to forgo his native language, not only because it was difficult for him to learn and gain fluency in his new language, but because he asked, as did Milbauer, “Why […] would a foreigner take such a painful and exhaustive endeavor as mastering a new language in order to eventually make it into a medium of his art, a means to reach an audience, an instrument of intellectual survival?”23 He also clung to it out of a desire to hang on to the language, culture, spirit, and essence of Baghdadi Jewry, including its
21 Of course, the original is “O Jerusalem.” Lillian Dabby-Joury, “Samir Naqqash—An Examination of His Narrative Works,” in Zion and Zionism among the Jews of Spain and the Orient, eds. Warren Harvey et al. (Jerusalem: Misgav Yerushalayim, 2002), 579 (in Hebrew). 22 Hajjar, “Exile at Home,” 275. 23 Asher Z. Milbauer, Transcending Exile: Conrad, Nabokov, I.B. Singer (Gainesville, FL: University Presses of Florida, 1985), xii.
branches in Persia and India and its new incarnation: the first generation of Israeli-Iraqi Jews.24
4 Stories of Two Competing Worlds
After immigrating to Israel, Naqqāsh, a Mizrahi Jew, was seen as the “other” in Israeli society. He chose to cling to his native tongue in order to preserve his cultural heritage, for language, as Foucault noted, reflects identity. By writing in Arabic, Naqqāsh declared himself part of the Iraqi nation and denied his Israeli identity. In Samīr Naqqāsh’s works, the feeling of exile expresses itself by creating a constant contradiction between two worlds: his childhood in Iraq, representing a world that no longer exists, in contrast to his then-present life in Israel. The author constantly wanders between Iraq and the Land of Israel, between the here and the there, and vice versa. His longing for the old world is also a longing for the Iraqi-Jewish tradition lost forever, or as his sister Samīra says, “We kept the holidays and the customs. For him tradition was associated with romanticism. He was a romantic, and for him tradition was a longing for the life he had in Baghdad before he emigrated to Israel.”25 Stories sprinkled throughout his collections provide a fair number of examples of the conflict between his two worlds. In the anthology Yawm ḥabilat wa-ajhaḍat al-dunyā (The day the world conceived and miscarried), several stories deal with the lives of the Iraqi Jews and contain numerous religious and traditional motifs. The setting of Laylat ʿaraba (Willow night),26 the fourth story in the collection, is in a sukkah, the temporary shelter built for the Sukkot festival (or the Feast of Tabernacles). It is Hoshana Raba, the last night of the seven-day holiday, which Iraqi Jews called Willow Night.27
24 Dabby-Joury, “Samir Naqqash,” 578. In Ballas’ novel HaMaʾabarah, Haim-Vaad is a symbol for integration into Israeli society. He was born in Iraq, but he learned Hebrew fluently and quickly grasped the ways of Israeli bureaucracy. 25 Neri Livneh, “Samir Who?” Haʾaretz (August 3, 2004) (in Hebrew). 26 Samīr Naqqāsh, Yawm ḥabilat wa-ajhaḍat al-dunyā (Jerusalem: al-Sharq, 1980), 161–226. 27 Among the customs of this night are the wearing of white clothing and the lighting of many candles, as one does on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, because according to the Kabbalah this is the day on which God finalizes His judgment of all mankind—the dead as well as the living. People stay up all night and study Torah. See Mordechai Eliahu, Observances of Tabernacles and the Celebration of the Torah (Jerusalem: Darkhei Horaʾa le-Rabbanim, 2000), 41 (in Hebrew).
The story contrasts an Israeli Willow Night, here and now, with the way the tradition was kept in Iraq thirty years previously.28 The opening comprises the following questions: “What is this profound silence that lies heavy on one’s breathing? Why does this wandering silence not remove its ice-cold hands from us?”29 The Jews’ detachment from their past had brought about their downfall: “Today things collapsed. They fell, broken like statues, and we were emptied, turned into ruins. Nothing was left inside us except for old age and fear of everything. The only thing that remained was the cruel silence.”30 In the same collection, Fī bayt al-khiraq wa’l-khawāriq (In the house of tatters and wonders) tells the tale of two elderly sisters who immigrated to Israel. They take solace in their visits from Menashe, the old man who comes to their house every Friday to eat lunch. The unnamed narrator, a relative of the sisters, follows their inner world while also exposing the reader to the collapse of the world of his own childhood in Iraq and his descent into the Israeli inferno.31 Thirty years have passed since the two sisters came to Israel and abandoned their safe haven in Iraq. “The tall fortress collapsed. It was the most secure of all fortresses, in which mind, axiom and human life lived in peace […] And suddenly your new world arises, made of pure legend.”32 In the story “Ṭanṭal,” from another book Anā wa-hāʾulāʾi wa’l-fiṣām (I, they and ambivalence), the sense of exile is amplified. In the first part of the story entitled “Baghdad 1946,” an anonymous narrator shows us a wonderful lost world. Comparing the past with the present, the narrator describes the large house with much sentimentality and nostalgia, saying, “but the old was always more beautiful than the new.”33 The longing for this house materializes in the description of the fragrance of orange peel drying on a coal oven (manqal); the decorated wicker fans (marāwiḥ al-khūṣ al-munaqqash), which were safer and quieter than the electric fans; the tea that has been heated in a steaming samovar and which was more palatable than the tea prepared on an electric stove; and the small, delicious pita breads (al-ḥannūn), which Umm Jamīl, the baker, brought out of his oven for the children.34 The most impressive part of the old house was his
28 Naqqāsh, Yawm ḥabilat wa-ajhaḍat al-dunyā, 173. 29 Ibid., 161. 30 Ibid., 165. 31 Reuven Snir, Arabness, Jewishness, Zionism: A Clash of Identities in the Literature of Iraqi Jews (Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute, 2005), 219 (in Hebrew). 32 Naqqāsh, Yawm ḥabilat wa-ajhaḍat al-dunyā, 63. 33 Samīr Naqqāsh, Anā wa-hāʾulāʾi wa’l-fiṣām (Jerusalem: al-Sharq, 1978), 67. 34 Ibid., 68.
grandmother’s room with a Qashānī rug (sajjāda qashāniyya), on which there was a large, adult-sized “cradle” in which the mother or grandmother could sleep and hold a baby. In the second part of the story, entitled “Israel, at the beginning of the fifties,” the narrator and his family are cast into another world, where a dark, dusty tent has replaced the big house. While his grandmother does not complain, because that has never been in her nature, “thick rust clouds up her face and wraps it in patient, silent grief.”35 The narrator—a boy only twelve years old at the time embodies Naqqāsh, who was about the same age on arriving in Israel—sheds his childhood and instantly becomes an old man. He cannot accept the new reality of life in a transit camp. There, he and the others fall victim to floods, hunger, thirst, and a life of idleness, while the government representatives shirk off any responsibility, telling them, “You came from backward countries in which people live no differently than they did in the Middle Ages.”36 However, most of the camp’s residents become accustomed to the new reality and forget their former lives, which in Naqqāsh’s eyes might have made them seem at odds with his memories. In the story’s third section, “Israel, 1970,” the narrator gives dramatic expression to his sense of loss and exile. Now thirty-year-old man, he returns to the transit camp “after I wasted long years abroad in search of my lost life,” defining himself as being with “downtrodden head, body and soul.”37 The transit camp has been improved in the years that have passed, but nevertheless, seeing it he feels completely detached and repressed, as someone who has lost his whole world—both his Iraqi past and his Israeli past—and feels that all is vanity, all is a delusion. The devastating effects of exile are also reflected in the collection of short stories Nubūʾāt rajul majnūn fī madīna malʿūna (Prophecies of a madman in a cursed city). Published in 1995, some fifteen years after “The day the world conceived and miscarried,” this book also laments the loss of the old values and, in fact, echoes a deepening of Naqqāsh’s pessimism. It shows the characters sinking into a later stage of exile, which is much worse than the earlier years. This because the society they now inhabit pitches them into an abyss of corruption and bondage driven by their abject instincts and desires, which ultimately lead them into total madness.
35 Ibid., 79. 36 Ibid., 80. 37 Ibid., 84, both quotations.
The first story in this collection, “The voice of the whip and the silence of the creator,” portrays Israeli society as the complete antithesis of Iraqi-Jewish society and describes the exodus from Iraq as a terrible and fateful mistake.
Years ago the mistake was made and it was as sharp as a sword, as decisive as fate, as obliterating as an eraser […] For 40 years I have been careful not to fall. The tree was once tall and stood firm in the storm, and I said, “I shall not fall victim to the temptation of the [local] norm.” Astonished by the number of idols and graven images, I said, “Infidels! I shall not worship what you worship,” and I kept my promise.38
The protagonist, who lives in an alienating environment and tries his best not to be tempted by the ways of the “infidels,” is subject to the rule of several authorities and is caught in a hopeless situation. “I fell into the stinking and reeking swamp of wretchedness. The stench of rot choked me and its turbid waters surrounded me from every direction.”39 The corruption of the people around him is evident in many ways, and he lives in constant terror that the filth will contaminate him and harm his “sanity of mind.” He has long since been exposed to the lies and deception that hide behind many masks. Even the emblems of beauty, such as butterflies, have disappeared and are replaced with germs, snakes, and scorpions. He therefore decides to isolate himself, mentally and spiritually, from the world, but his friends and family beseech him and do not allow it. Eventually, he capitulates and becomes enslaved to an ugly and tyrannical wife. She hits him with a whip, shouting: “Say ‘I hear and obey!’ Say ‘I hear and obey!’”40 Exile is a form of bondage and, wishing to escape it, the protagonist (like Naqqāsh himself) can only return to the world of his childhood. Recalling his early years, he extols the kindness and morality that characterized the old world, presenting it as the complete opposite of corrupt Israeli society. He recalls how one day he hit a foolish girl named Badriyya, who had lice-ridden hair and was filthy. His father gently rebuked him, telling him that the girl was no different from himself and his sisters, but poverty and neediness had brought her to this state. His aunt bathed the child, combed out the lice, and dressed her in clean clothes.
38 Samīr Naqqāsh, Nubūʾāt rajul majnūn fī madīna malʿūna (Jerusalem: Association for Jewish Academics from Iraq, 1995), 75. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid.
The protagonist’s experiences are now completely different: he is surrounded by scoundrels and villains and has even lost his freedom, sinking into the depths of hell and so becoming no different than Badriyya. Now he is wretched, forced to eat peels and scraps like a dog. Tragically, he understands that neither hallucinations, daydreams, nor memories of the past will save him from his state of exile and destroy the deadly forces to which he is enslaved. In the second part of the story, a monster appears and forces him to carry out Sisyphean tasks: “After midnight, bent under the weight of the rock, I took one last step before it repeated its endless tumble back into the abyss.”41 The allusion to the myth of Sisyphus is not accidental; it evokes the absurdity, loneliness, deception, and alienation that are the lot of modern man.42 However, unlike Camus’ Sisyphus, who is liberated through his struggle,43 the narrator in the Naqqāsh story is unable to escape from the bondage of his inner torment. Corruption and madness come to a head in the collection’s title story, “Prophecies of a madman in a cursed city.” This story is surreal in character and contains intertextual allusions to biblical characters and episodes. The narrator is instructed by God to take a woman named Gomer for a wife, though he is sterile. This is a transparent allusion to the Prophet Hosea, whose book begins, “Go, take yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord. So he went and took Gomer, the daughter of Diblaim” (Hosea 1: 2–3). Hosea prophesied at a time of great crisis for the people of Israel and foresaw the impending destruction. The command to take “a wife of whoredom” lent personal poignancy to his prophecy. Having experienced betrayal on his own flesh, he could more effectively rebuke the people of Israel for betraying their God. Naqqāsh’s story likewise describes a reality in which people betray the Creator by choosing to emulate the devil instead of Him: “I created you in my image, but you disobeyed Me and refused to be cast in My image.”44 The narrator in the story has a friend, Ezekiel, from among “the exiles of Tel Aviv.” This is an allusion to Ezekiel 3: 15: “I came to the exiles who lived at Tel Aviv near the Kebar River.” The reference to the cursed town of Tel Aviv is no coincidence. The last part of the story, which mentions “a city in which man
41 Ibid., 81. 42 In Myth of Sisyphus, Camus presents nature and the world as hostile to man, which is the source of alienation, existential absurdity, and man’s inability to understand the world. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Knopf, 1964), 14. 43 Camus writes, “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Camus, 123. 44 Naqqāsh, Nubūʾāt, 26.
has died and God demonstrates his tyranny,”45 again expresses the author’s despair of life in Israel.46 The narrator has a divine revelation in which God addresses him as “son of man”—an intertextual allusion to the vision of the dry bones in Ezekiel. However, unlike Ezekiel, what he sees is not a hopeful vision of resurrection but rather a nightmarish vision of incest, idol worship, and unbridled lust:
What do you see in the vast wasteland around you? [the Lord asked]. I freed myself from the grip of Gomer, of my children, of the gullible old man, of my psychiatrist, and finally even of the midget-giant […] I cast my eyes over the wasteland and was horrified at what I saw. I whispered to my Lord, hardly hearing my own dying, whispering voice; I see a wasteland, Lord, full of corpses: dead men and women, naked as on the day they were born, their shame exposed. And lo! The naked corpses arise. The men, my Lord, seek out the women and the women seek out the men. I see them lusting after flesh […] Fathers are not ashamed to copulate with their daughters and sisters with their brothers […] I see the heavens, your heavens, raining gold, and everyone rushes forth [to collect it] […] Without waiting to wash themselves of the corruption [of the grave], they rush toward the showers of gold […] A man who just copulated with his sister now sinks his claws into her to tear the gold out of her hands, and a woman who just copulated with her father now closes her fingers around his throat until he faints […] Lord, in an eye blink the gold is formed into a calf, and now they dance around it yelling, chortling and fornicating.47
At the end of the story, the narrator’s psychiatrist wants to hospitalize him, but he decides to flee.48 The story ends with the narrator trapped in a state of obsessive paranoia.
45 Ibid., 27. 46 Snir, Arabness, 234. 47 Naqqāsh, Nubūʾāt, 14–15. 48 Taking flight from the horrors of corrupt humanity living in hellish worlds is an ending that Naqqāsh deems a natural and fitting escape in his storytelling. Like the narrator in Prophesies of a Madman, Shaul Hillel in the title story of the collection The Day the World Conceived and Miscarried flees from the synagogue on the Day of Atonement after witnessing grotesque worshippers and repulsive behavior there. As he retreats from the synagogue, Shaul is moved to ask, “Is the moment of the world’s destruction drawing near?” (Naqqāsh, Nubūʾāt, 44).
Another story in the book, under the Arabic title Dunyā al-makhālīf (Topsy-turvy world), describes a Sodom-like city of villains. “The supreme heavenly being” decides to raze the city to the ground. Generations later another city like it appears, but this time the supreme heavenly being is absent. In this latter-day setting, an anonymous voice tells the narrator about a utopian city that once existed, where the people had glowing faces, their doors were always open to the poor and the needy, and all their deeds were charitable. From what we know of the author’s inclinations, it is not difficult to identify this utopian city with Baghdad of the 1940s, which Naqqāsh adored, and the Sodom-like city with Tel Aviv, which the previously mentioned story explicitly describes as a cursed city. In the title story of the collection, Anā wa-hāʾulāʾi wa’l-fiṣām (I, they and ambivalence)—just like in the story “Ṭanṭal”—the narrator waxes nostalgic about his wealthy childhood home in Baghdad. He was taken to school by a private driver, his room was full of toys and he was surrounded with love. The narrator also misses the particular atmosphere of the city, the unique traditional dishes, and the family’s large garden abundant in fruit trees and singing birds. Gurjī is the protagonist’s Hebrew teacher, who teaches him to read, write, and pray. Gurjī is a unique character. He is a poor old man dressed in filthy rags, and a great miser who is afraid to marry lest his wife poison him and take his money. But he is also a devoted teacher who works from dawn until dusk and walks great distances, even in the scorching summer heat and bitter winter cold, to visit the homes of the Jewish families whose children he teaches. He and the boy read from the Bible, and the boy thinks,
I read about the Promised Land, but it is in Iraq that I live and breathe. It is here that I learn and dream and plan the future. On holidays, people shake hands and say, may you live long, God willing. Next year in Jerusalem. […] May they announce the establishment of the State of Israel tonight.49
Another wretched character is Moshe, the carpenter who comes to the family home to fix a lock but only manages to break it further. Despite this, the narrator’s mother feeds him and invites him to come and eat at their house every day. The process of exile—for Naqqāsh sees the exodus from Iraq as a second exile—begins when rumors start spreading about the impending establishment
49 Naqqāsh, Anā wa-hāʾulāʾi wa’l-fiṣām, 131–132.
of the State of Israel. Riots and street protests break out, and the Jews fear attacks on their homes. This is the first stage of the crisis in which Iraq’s Jews found themselves in the late 1940s. The boy is deeply affected by the situation. He feels as though a violent storm is shaking the Jewish community. And indeed, armed men break into the homes of the Jews, search them frantically, and arrest men, women, and even children, who are taken to prison and tortured. Jewish civil servants are fired, first senior and then minor ones. One of the latter is Salīm, a friend of the family who works as an inspector for the telephone company. After being fired, he tries to commit suicide and eventually, starts working in his uncle’s butcher shop. Even Gurjī is arrested, for teaching Hebrew. Asked by the interrogator if he does not know teaching Hebrew is forbidden, he answers, “I’m an Iraqi and the son of an Iraqi. I have been teaching Torah for as long as I can remember, and as you know, the Torah is written in Hebrew. This has been our Torah since the creation of the world. Do you expect us to pray in German?” The interrogator says, “Zionist traitor. Take him inside.”50 The boy’s family is in a better position, for his father has a Muslim business partner and many Muslim friends in high places. The family therefore continues to live peacefully, with armed soldiers guarding their home. “In our house friendly parties are held every night,” the boy says.51 In a conversation with the father and his partner, the boy’s aunt nevertheless suggests that perhaps the Jews should emigrate to Palestine, but the father warns her about the poverty that prevails there, and refuses to acknowledge the persecution of Iraq’s Jews. Sammy the engineer, a family friend who is aware of the persecution, advises the family to emigrate to Iran. Full of confusion, the boy asks his father where the Jews’ country is, and the father replies, “We have lived and will continue to live in Iraq. This is our land, but that land [Palestine] is our land as well.”52 After Iraq passes a law revoking the citizenship of any Jews who leave the country, the family decides to flee Baghdad. They ride in the car of the father’s Muslim business partner, and manage to pass all the checkpoints. On their way, they visit the tombs of the prophets, where they all mumble: “Who knows if we will ever meet you again […] Perhaps this is the last time.”53 Gurjī very poignantly expresses the terrible tragedy of Iraq’s Jews who are forced to move to a “strange land.” He weeps, and his tears mingle with those of his ancestors who sat by the river of Babylon and wept as they remembered
50 Ibid., 146. 51 Ibid., 142. 52 Ibid., 132. 53 Ibid., 159.
Zion. However, Gurjī is weeping not because he yearns for Zion but for the opposite reason, because he is being forced to return there.
Two tears stand in his lightless eyes and then slide down his ruined face. His life’s work all gone. Such a shame, all the toil and the weariness. […] Where will we go now? We have been anchoring here for 2,000 years. Our homes, our livelihood and the tombs of our ancestors are all here. Shall we go now and live in a strange land? Shall we cast our souls into danger, like blind birds?54
Gurjī tells the boy’s mother that he has heard there is hunger in Palestine and that the people all live in tents. He considers staying in Iraq, trusting God to provide his livelihood. Asked why he is unwilling to give up his Iraqi citizenship, he replies, “Khākhām Dāwīd (Rabbi David) said in his Sabbath sermon that it is still early. Letters arriving from Palestine tell of the hardship and hunger of the new immigrants. We must not act like a herd.”55 The carpenter Moshe is likewise reluctant to leave for Israel. He says he plans to give up his citizenship, yet he finds excuses to delay, stating that he must finish his work first. Gurjī intervenes and supports Moshe, asking people to stop pressing him to emigrate. “Do you want him to chase after the fetid swamp? Only I have been wise and have not given up my citizenship.”56 One day, when the family is certain that Moshe has already left Iraq, the boy sees him and happily runs to tell his mother. Moshe mumbles that he was ashamed to visit the family after he had lied and said he was going to Israel. He explains that he has stayed because the Jews need him. With everybody gone, he has been asked to serve as the synagogue caretaker. For Moshe, this is an opportunity to change. Now that people need his help, his status improves, and the crudeness that previously characterized him is replaced with humanity. The family members hang their heads and “silently live the contradiction and the mute tears that flow in secret and tell the tale of the harmony that was severed by the parting [from the homeland].”57 Telling of the brotherhood that
54 Ibid., 160, 173. 55 Ibid., 146. 56 Ibid., 165–166. 57 Ibid., 168. The motif of tears permeates this story. The author’s image evokes a perfect picture of the profound sorrow that lasted throughout the Babylonian exile and—in Naqqāsh’s opinion—even after the return to the Land of Israel in 1948. Naqqāsh chose two pitiable characters, Gurjī and Moshe, whose tears mingle with their exiled forefathers’ teardrops that fell like rain into the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers of Babylon 2,000 years earlier.
prevailed between the Jews and the Muslims and of the bitter and painful parting from Muslim friends, the narrator adds, “We have been left without an identity. Our roots, sunk deep into this land for thousands of years, have been torn but not severed. Baghdad, half of whose residents were Jewish, is changing. The Jews are growing few, gradually disappearing.”58 The synagogues empty of worshipers, schools empty of their Jewish pupils, and hospitals empty of their Jewish doctors and nurses. The tombs of the saints are left silent and bereft of visitors. The boy suffers an internal rift. On the one hand, he understands the Jews must leave Iraq, but on the other, he still lives and breathes his wonderful childhood that is “like a good, solid tree” with roots planted deep in the soil. This chapter of the story ends with a lament: “I mourn for you, oh halls of childhood! I mourn for the seat of joy and of cherished memories! I mourn for the fathers, the prophets and the saints […] I mourn for you, my soul! I mourn for you, all things that have been lost!”59 Upon arriving in Israel, the narrator says, “The era of slaps has begun.”60 Even before the newcomers disembark from the plane, a man and a woman arrive and spray them with DDT. He says, “From the very beginning the voice of our humanity was smothered in insecticide.”61 Shaʾar Aliya immigration camp seems to him like a prison, where the process of obliterating the newcomers’ human dignity is completed. Some eighteen months after their arrival, the boy and his family, walking around Jerusalem, find Gurjī lying on the sidewalk. He has become a homeless man who sells newspapers and sleeps on the street. He has aged and is even filthier than before, and his face reflects a deep sadness. Eventually he dies. “Here in the eternal city he gave up the ghost, penniless.”62
5 Conclusion: Escape through Memory
Naqqāsh’s portrayal of Gurjī and Moshe the carpenter is compassionate and even admiring, despite their apparent crudeness and repugnant physical appearance. Through them, he challenges the false world in which we live, a world that worships material wealth and physical beauty. For him, these two wretches embody all that is genuine and true: inner beauty, simplicity, and
58 Ibid., 169. 59 Ibid., 160. 60 Ibid., 182. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid., 190.
wisdom free of pretense or deception. They represent the old world, the first Babylonian exile that is lost and is replaced with the infinitely more bitter exile in Israel. When a man like Samīr Naqqāsh is exiled from his homeland, he loses not just a home but the very civilization, the ancient and rich world that gave him a sense of identity and belonging, and indeed made him the person he was. The Jewish community in Iraq, whose families could trace their heritage back to the Babylonian exile, lived and cherished their unique religious observances, customs, and traditions. So when circumstances wrenched the whole community out of one orbit and into another, the loss was physical as well as mental, emotional, and spiritual. As shown in this article, Naqqāsh and other like-minded Iraqis apply memory to their fiction in an attempt to restore and preserve their old world.
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