החיפוש אחר זהות ביצירותיו של סמיר נקאש

البحث عن الهوية في أعمال سمير نقاش

Geula Elimelekh

Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 49, No. 1, January 2013, pp. 63–75

DOI: 10.1080/00263206.2012.743888

The intellectual life of the Jewish community of Baghdad underwent a great transformation in the 1920s. The change was led by a handful of intellectuals imbued with the vision of integration with Arab culture. The Jews’ assimilation into the various aspects of cultural life constitutes an accurate reflection of the Jewish community’s feeling, especially during the 1920s and 1930s, that Iraq was the Jews’ one and only homeland.1

When scholars examine the works of the first generation of Jewish writers in Iraq, who were active in the first half of the twentieth century and wrote in Standard Arabic, they can see, as Shmuel Moreh writes, ‘that the Jewish writers tried to strike roots in the literary life of their country of birth and its culture, economy and society. They wanted to create a typical Arabic-Iraqi literature’.2 These writers had a very elegant style, thanks to their tireless study of the Arabic language, the language of the Iraqi intelligentsia, which they preferred over French and Hebrew.3

The mass migration of the Iraqi Jewish community to Israel (1950–51)4 dealt a death blow to the idea of integration and to the adherents of the pro-Iraqi orientation.5 The Jewish intellectuals who came to Israel from Iraq found that the Arab culture was alive and active in their new home as well. Mandatory Palestine had been a centre of intellectual life, drawing its inspiration mainly from Egypt. However, the urban Arab intellectual elite mostly abandoned the State of Israel after the War of Independence in 1948. The combination of these two events, the demise of local Palestinian culture and the influx of Jewish intellectuals to Israel, drove the latter to energetic activity in the field of Arabic culture; their talents also served the authorities. But the harsh conditions, the difficulties they encountered in their attempts to adapt to their new society, the fact that they did not know Hebrew, discouraged many of these intellectuals. Despite these obstacles, their love of Arab culture was such that some resumed their Arabic writing careers. In the mid-1950s the number of Iraqi Jews in Israel who were writing literary and journalistic texts in Arabic rose significantly. Now, however, they addressed mainly the burning social and political issues of the day, instead of the traditional motifs of love, ethics, fate, the status of women, etc., with which they had previously dealt. But because they lacked an audience, they quickly abandoned these efforts at writing in Arabic and began to produce texts in Hebrew.6

Samīr (Moshe) Naqqāsh (1938–2004) was born in Baghdad and migrated to Israel in 1951. He was the youngest Jewish writer who came to Israel after the establishment of the state, and remained an anomaly on the Israeli literary scene. He continued writing in Arabic, while other Jewish writers who had come from the Arab world to Israel switched to Hebrew. In the years 1958–62 he spent time in Turkey, Iran and India, but during the greater part of this period he lived in Iran, where he learned and mastered the Persian language. In the years 1972–75 he studied Arabic and Persian literature at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and in 1978 he received his MA degree in Arabic language and literature. His thesis was titled ‘Jewish Writers and Poets in Iraq’. His first literary works were published in 1958 in the magazine al-Mir_sad.7 His oeuvre consists of writings in three genres: novels, short stories and drama. As previously mentioned, Naqqāsh was the youngest of the Jewish authors who had migrated to Israel from the Arab world and remained an unconventional writer on the Israeli literary scene. Another unconventional figure was Yitzhak Bar-Moshe (1927–2003). He, like Naqqāsh, only began to publish his works at the beginning of the 1970s. Snir notes that the quality of their writings, as well as their timing, clearly indicates that they stemmed from a common cultural background, encouraged by the circumstances of their lives.8

But their common background notwithstanding, Naqqāsh’s oeuvre can hardly be considered a direct continuation of the Arabic literature of Iraqi Jewry. In fact, he represents a more extreme development, which confirms the tremendous influence that Arab culture had on Iraq’s Jews. As an example, we may compare Bar-Moshe’s trilogy A House in Baghdad (Baytun fı Baghdad) to Naqqāsh’s works, as both of them addressed similar themes. However the latter’s novels are much more complex, so much so that Bar-Moshe has described them as ‘unreadable’ and ‘unpleasant’, because of the effort demanded of the reader.9 And yet Naqqāsh is a master of language, completely fluent in Standard Arabic and in Iraq’s Jewish and Muslim colloquial dialects. As Lilian Debi-Guri notes, Naqqāsh is ‘a talented Israeli storyteller of Iraqi origin. There can be no doubt that after this generation of speakers of the Judeo-Arabic dialect of Iraq is gone it will remain alive only through the literary works created with its treasures’.10

Naqqāsh’s worth has been recognized by both Jewish and Arab scholars. In fact, Egypt’s Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature Naguib Mahfouz has described him as one of the greatest artists of Arabic writing. Naqqāsh consistently wrote only in Arabic, while other Jewish writers who had migrated to Israel from the Arab world wrote in Hebrew. In my view, Naqqāsh’s adherence to Arabic can be attributed to a number of factors:

1. He grew up in a culture in which literary Arabic was greatly admired. 2. Hebrew was the language of the Zionist movement.11 By producing works in Arabic Naqqāsh gave expression to the alienation he felt shortly after his arrival in Israel towards this movement which, so he claimed, shared the blame for the ruined lives of thousands of Baghdadi Jews. As Reuven Snir notes:

When the State of Israel was founded Naqqāsh was filled with national pride, but this feeling was dashed to pieces after he came to Israel, due to the

economic and social crisis that beset his family. He declared at every opportunity that Arabic was his first language and that he would continue to write in it, although he also tried to write in Hebrew, without success.12

3. Naqqāsh argued that he was able to express himself most accurately in Arabic, ‘the language he imbibed together with his mother’s milk’.13 In Israel he continued to broaden his knowledge of Arabic culture, as if he were still living in Iraq.

Naqqāsh uses not only literary Arabic. He also makes frequent use of the spoken dialects as well, as a reflection of the contacts between religious and ethnic groups in Iraq. The dialect he uses most is that of the Jews of Baghdad. As Yitzhak Bar-Moshe noted, his descriptions of the concerns and worries of Iraq’s Jews made it necessary for him to use their language.14 Of course, this had the effect of restricting his readership. At the same time, there can be no doubt that Naqqāsh’s adherence to Arabic is also closely connected to his search for identity. His first story collection The Mistake (Al-Kha_ta’) was published in 1971. Six of the stories deal with the lives of Jews in Iraq, and two with the Arab–Israeli conflict. The stories are written in a very polished style (despite the fact that Naqqāsh came to Israel at the age of 13) which shows perfect control of the Arabic language and a profound understanding of the fundamentals of the modern short story. The stories reflect the author’s extensive knowledge and an acquaintance with Western schools of philosophy and literature, especially existentialism, surrealism and stream-ofconsciousness. The fictional world he creates in his stories reflects his broad artistic and intellectual horizons.15

In the Introduction to the collection, Naqqāsh wrote:

I do not think that when you read the book you will ignore the fact that it contains two facets, the external narrative facet and the internal philosophical facet . . . We are born and we die despite ourselves, and between our birth and death lies this passing imposed journey, life. The present is a huge illusion . . . and we march relentlessly towards the future. But this future quickly turns into an illusional present, and then into a non-existent past. All facts thus become invalid, and are replaced by the absurd.16

Subsequently, Naqqāsh published more story collections, novellas, plays and novels, the last of which appeared in 2004. One of the dominant issues in Naqqāsh’s writings is his search for identity. This is understandable in light of his opinion that the mass emigration of Iraqi Jewry to Israel was a tragedy: ‘This was the most miserable ‘aliyah [Heb. immigration to Israel], one that lost its standing in every sense of the word.’17 The conflict that tormented him from the time he came to Israel until his dying day was his inability to sever himself from his previous identity as a Jew born in Iraq and to adopt the new identity of an Israeli Jew. In this article I describe the writer’s inner conflicts as an alienated Jew who went through the travails of the move to Israel, and who could not overcome the trauma of his forced abandonment of his homeland, and found it very difficult to develop a sense of belonging in Israeli society. I focus on stories from the following collections:

I and They and Ambivalence (’Ana wa-ha’ula’i wa-l-fi_sam), 1978, and The Day the World Became Pregnant and Miscarried (Yawma _habilat wa-’ajha_dat al-dunya), 1980.

Naqqāsh’s stories consist mainly of memories and impressions in which his past, especially his childhood, predominate. In them two worlds are in conflict – his childhood in Iraq as the symbol of a bygone world and his present life in Israel. In his mind he wanders between the Land of Israel and Iraq, between here and there. The Day the World Became Pregnant and Miscarried deals with the lives of Iraqi Jews. The stories, full of Jewish themes, tell of Iraqi Jews in Baghdad, India and Israel.18 The title story, which takes place on the Day of Atonement, reveals to the reader the inner world of a youth who looks back in yearning towards his childhood. The plot of the story ‘Willow Night’ (‘Laylat ‘Araba’),19 the fourth story in the collection, takes place in a sukkah (temporary dwelling) on the seventh day of the Jewish festival of Sukkot (Tabernacles), which Iraqi Jews called Willow Night.20

Sukkot is a national and family holiday, with a characteristic and unique ‘guest ceremony’.21 The guests in the sukkah constitute an interesting and attractive gallery of the community’s middle and upper class, realistically described in passages that also possess surrealist elements.22 All those who were present eventually emigrate to Israel and, according to Naqqāsh, are heartbroken in the process.23

The story begins with a question: ‘What is the deep silence that lies heavy on the soul? Why does the wandering silence refuse to lift its ice-cold hand from us?’24 The narrator is a witness who describes a Willow Night in Israel during the first years after the immigration, and another, the last one to have taken place in Iraq some 30 years before. The atmosphere at the get-together ‘here’ in Israel is of paralysis and death, in contrast to the Willow Night that took place ‘there’ in a large Baghdadi sukkah overlooking a blooming garden. The present-day gathering is dry and emotionless and lacks faith. The loss of faith is a direct result of the loss of identity.25

Iraqi Jews sitting in their sukkah in Israel

cry over the love . . . they create it from the greatest delusion, a delusion which thickened, doubled and filled the view ever since the masks were torn offthings that had appeared to be solid. Human love seemed like a ridiculous delusion . . . Despite my distress, I am not hallucinating. I feel it on my flesh, full of wounds like Job. My soul has been cut up into bits of flesh.26

Ironically, these people who gathered to commemorate their departed relatives and acquaintances and to pray for their souls are themselves dead, mentally and spiritually: ‘Suddenly the world forgets . . . it ignores us, drives us to dig up graves, where we search for ourselves in the memories of the beautiful sugar-sweet evenings’ (pp.186–7). The author mentions a number of his relatives who passed away in Israel: his father, who died before the age of 50, his younger brother, and his grandfather. All three died of heartache (pp.161–2). The repeated negatives in the following quote emphasize the emptiness of the present: ‘Indeed, there is no sukkah there, no prayer quorum, no cries of joy, no merriment, no tumult’ (p.161). Merriment and tumult stand in diametric opposition

to the sad faces and the ‘bleak dust of thoughts’ that characterize Willow Night in Israel. The narrator returns to the sukkah of his parents’ home in Baghdad. It was a happy time that would last for ten days, from the end of the Day of Atonement to the final day of the Sukkot festival. The high point of the festivities occurred on Willow Night. His memories focus on the holiday dishes (sha’riyya, rice-shaped pasta; m_tabbaq, rice cooked over a layer of tomatoes and onions), the large balcony (_tarma) on which the sukkah was built, the orchard with its fruit trees, the garden and its herbs, and the oil lamps whose wicks his grandmother prepared from dry date palm leaves. In one corner of the sukkah a high chair was placed for the Prophet Elijah. Psalters, siddurim and makhzorim (prayer books) were placed in a stack on it. The beds on which the men slept in the sukkah had white lace covers. The youthful narrator ran back and forth between the sukkah and the front door, to greet the guests. Each guest who arrived opened ‘another window of light’ in the boy’s heart (p.174). His uncle Hasqel Ezra, a modest and pious man, never took off his red fez and silk robe. Naqqāsh presents the reader with a special world, populated by characters who differ in their dress and speech, and whose innermost thoughts are revealed. A dominant theme in Naqqāsh’s stories is the connection with the past, with his childhood. His perception of his childhood brings a tragic moment, because it concerns a time that is gone forever. In this spirit the author uses the expression ‘our dear departed childhood’ (tufulatuna al-marhuma), a kind of contradiction in terms, because childhood symbolizes life and not death. Furthermore, in contrast to the world of the present, the childhood world the author reconstructs is one in which ‘angels’ wings hovered around him. We filled that world with soaring warmth and happiness’ (p.163). The loss of his childhood is described as a sudden occurrence, a complete break with the past, which cast him into old age (p.162). According to Naqqāsh, ‘old age’ consists of elements that are the opposite of those that constitute the concept of ‘childhood’. The elegiac tone of the passages quoted above results from his feeling that everything is being undermined. He views the past with nostalgia, love and great appreciation. The loss of his childhood world brought about a loss of values and created a vacuum. ‘Today things collapsed, fell and shattered like sculptures, and we became empty, we turned into a heap of ruins. We were left with nothing but old age and fear of everything. Nothing was left but the cruel silence’ (p.165). The narrator longs for the ‘green plant’ (al-nabta al-kha_dra’), searches for a colourful and delicious ‘lost love’ (al-hubb al-_da’i‘) and yearns for ‘the smell of the soil in which God planted the Garden of Eden and then destroyed it because of Adam’s sin’ (p.173). The narrator’s obvious doubts and insecurity are the result of his awareness that the new world is not real. ‘This deception became so solid and overwhelming that it became as clear as sunlight ever since the barriers fell from the things that previously had appeared solid’ (p.172). Furthermore, the new world is materialistic, a world of masks in which men have become mere husks, while ‘in those days’ people used to gaze into a man’s soul and heart and not at his external appearance or bodily imperfections. The collapse of the old world also gave rise to fear of passing time, old age and death. In the past, in childhood, man controlled time, but in the present man has

become not only a slave of time, but its toy as well. Naqqāsh ‘smashes the time that separates the two worlds, breaches the walls, and sits there, in Iraq, his cultural heritage, in all naturalness’.27

Furthermore, characteristics that once were considered good are now considered bad, as exemplified by the story of Admon’s life in ‘Willow Night’. Admon was a good man who did not know how to lie. He was so naı¨ve that ‘if I had told him that a camel had climbed onto the roof or that a rooster had laid an egg he would have believed it’ (p.170). But Admon’s innocence today is considered not merely stupid, but insane. Admon disappears, just as the old world has been lost. ‘I stopped getting news of him since this world changed’ (p.177). The passage reminiscing about Admon is written in the style of a funeral oration.

It is very likely that Admon died spiritually, physically and existentially. He died because of his kind heart. He must have been transformed into bones over which the soil bends in affection. His insane, naı¨ve kindness was without a doubt transformed into a memory. (p.177)

Admon’s annihilation is also the loss of feeling. ‘But love fell victim, as did emotion and feeling. Our reality can also only be realized through memory’ (p.181). Another character the author uses to show the tremendous gap between the old world and the new in ‘Willow Night’ is Salım, who held the post of Inspector of the Telephone Network in Baghdad. The narrator does not tell us what changes occurred in Salım’s personality; rather, he enumerates the traits of the old world, and then adds that ‘after that things collapsed in our world’ (p.183). The old world’s perfection and harmony make it comparable to a ‘well-composed necklace’ (‘iqd mandud). This world’s gradual disappearance implies a violation of its order and harmony. The narrator aspires to recreate the lost perfection, and therefore he compares the gathering of the people for prayer on Willow Night to the arrangements of beads in a necklace. The loss of even a single bead frightens him, because it implies imperfection and a loss of harmony:

There is a mystical desire to complete the beads of an ordered necklace. This human experience can lose one of its most attractive features if the necklace loses one of its beads; the experience will then be deficient. Deficient entities frighten me, missing things frighten me. I have a feeling of wellbeing only when the thing is whole. (p.191)

Those who were uprooted from the old world experience a process of physical and spiritual disintegration and descend into an abyss of spiritual poverty and degeneration. One of the characters in ‘Willow Night’ who turns into a shadow of his former self is Hasqel Ezra, who used to speak with longing about Rishon Le- Zion, where he had fought in the First World War and where he hoped to be buried. When he came to Israel he lived in a tent in Rishon Le-Zion, but he was no longer the same Hasqel Ezra the narrator had known in Iraq:

His shrivelled, exhausted body melted. Even his soul melted. Uncle Hasqel Ezra forgot even himself. He lost his soul and was transformed into a moving

robot . . . Uncle Hasqel Ezra passed away. He never knew that his bones would become one with the soil of Rishon Le-Zion, never knew that he had trodden on the soil of his beloved memories.28

The narrator relates the immigrants’ sufferings through their reflection in his own tortured soul, not by way of harsh expressions. He depicts the dream, the rude awakening and the distorted reality they face by means of a sophisticated surrealistic description.29 ‘And despite the blurred face of our bewitched and ugly world, our task for this night has not been accomplished yet.’30

Indeed, in the old world the religious, social and cultural values were clear. All those who lived in this world felt safe and protected from foreign elements that could undermine their harmonious existence. The collapse exposed deep layers in the psyche of the author and his protagonists, which had been repressed until the moment they were uprooted from their homeland thanks to the comprehensive system created by the Jewish community in Iraq and elsewhere. Beyond its storyline, ‘Willow Night’ is a metaphor for the universal fall of a complete value system.31 In her paper ‘Samīr Naqqāsh – an Inquiry into His Narrative Fiction’, Debi-Guri writes:

The Iraqi experience in his books draws from a specific local source, but has no boundaries, because the Jews, the main component of that experience, are a human group with no boundaries that lived in Iraq and dispersed, carrying Iraq with it as a fundamental experience and a hallmark of its essence. Samīr Naqqāsh turns Iraq, with its many cultures and religions, into a boundary-less symbolic concept, despite his precise descriptions of local experiences.32

Naqqāsh did not choose the sukkah by chance. Indeed, he took an element of Jewish life which on the one hand symbolizes safety and protection and, on the other, man’s ephemeral and fragile existence, and gave it a universal meaning. The collapse of the old world means the collapse of what had protected Iraqi Jewry.

Rootlessness is a major motif in Samīr Naqqāsh’s stories. A rootless protagonist is one who is torn away from where he grew up. The feeling of rootlessness is always combined with descriptions of the ways of life in the land from which the protagonist was removed. In an interview published in the journal al-Sharq Naqqāsh declared:

I am not a continuation of anyone, not even of myself. I am a continuation of man’s problems and change as they change, in a way that I think contributes to these problems . . . From a subjective mental perspective I don’t consider myself as belonging to any one place or society ever since circumstances uprooted me from Iraq and these same circumstances refused to replant these roots in Israel.33

Although Naqqāsh views himself as uprooted, he in fact remains planted in Iraq, as proven by the fact that he chose to continue to write in Arabic.

His sense of being uprooted stems from the collapse of the old world order, from being torn away from a previous perfection. The narrator in Naqqāsh’s stories feels at a loss and feels admiration, nostalgia and yearning for things that are disappearing. The figure of the uprooted Jew appears in the stories of prominent Hebrew writers around the turn of the twentieth century: Y.D. Berkowitz, M.Y. Berdichevsky and others. Such Jews were uprooted in the wake of changes in Jewish society and under the influence of various economic, social and spiritual developments among the Jews of Eastern Europe. An analysis of Naqqāsh’s stories shows that the uprooted Jew he describes is quite similar to the emigrating Jew in the writings of Y.D. Berkowitz; Naqqāsh’s protagonists, too, were torn from their past and their family traditions, and were left with neither present nor future. However, in contrast to the uprooted Jews in European-sourced Hebrew literature, Naqqāsh’s characters remain spiritually and mentally attached to their past despite the physical and geographical distance.

The story ‘Tantal’ that appears in the collection entitled I, They and Ambivalence (’Ana wa-ha’ula’i wa-l-fi_sam) deals with a belief in demons and how this belief evolved after immigrating to Israel. In the first part we learn about the narrator’s happy childhood, when the family would sit together on cold winter evenings, united by the stories they told and heard. His grandmother provides the connecting link between the present and the past. ‘She [his grandmother] was the only one in this palace who represented the old world in a wonderful way . . . This face shines with a divine light that reflects the purity of the angels.’34 Her figure also embodies faith in God, reconciliation with one’s fate, submission and obedience.35 The grandmother stands for the world of the narrator’s childhood, the world he lost. The legends about the demon Tantal that his grandmother and uncle told him were an inseparable part of that enchanted world. After the protagonist was uprooted he was unable to find peace, because he ‘is still searching for this lost life’, his identity. He fails in his quest and as a result becomes detached from his new surroundings and thus secluded in his own inner world.36 He now perceives the outside world as vanity and delusion. His present life has no meaning and he becomes depressed, as expressed in the following harsh statement: ‘A man of no deeds, without love and without motivation’ (p.84). In the title story, ‘I, They and Ambivalence’, the author expresses anxiety at being torn from his home, his city and his homeland, Iraq. His longing is expressed in the repetition of the sentence ‘And in our house, every night, there were parties with friends’ (p.142). But although his home is still capable of providing warmth and safety, and life there proceeds as it should, outside there is a great ‘storm’ (p.141). The Jews’ situation becomes ever more precarious; they are accused of treason, and many are thrown into prison, where they are brutally tortured (p.146). The Jews of Baghdad are described as puppets on a string that pulls other Jews.37

It is the emigration to the Land of Israel that gave rise to the feelings of uprootedness among Naqqāsh’s protagonists. In other words, the uprooted Jew in Naqqāsh’s stories did not become so out of an inner motivation to abandon his town (as is the case in the stories of Berkowitz, Berdichevsky and Gnessin), but due to external factors, namely the establishment of the State of Israel, which caused the situation of the Jews in Iraq to deteriorate.

The witness as narrator in ‘I, They and Ambivalence’ has no feelings towards the Land of Israel, the so-called ‘Promised Land’: ‘I read about the Promised Land. But I live and breathe in Iraq, where I study, dream and plan my future.’38 The fact that he has such deep feelings towards Iraq and none towards the Land of Israel makes him feel embarrassed and confused. His inner conflict is one that takes place in the minds of the other Jews of Baghdad as well. He looks at their faces and discerns a mixture of fear, happiness and confusion (p.132). When the son, the story’s protagonist, asks ‘Where is the land of the Jews?’ his father answers in bewilderment, ‘We lived and still live in Iraq. We are Iraqis and this is our land. But over there is our land, too’ (p.132). He is afraid that this change will bring destruction in its wake. The worsening in the situation of Iraq’s Jews impinged on their economic and social life as well. Many Jews were dismissed from their jobs and were forced to do work they considered below their status and abilities. An example of this is provided by the story of Salim, who, as noted above, worked as Inspector of the Telephone Network. He was dismissed and became a vendor of chickens (p.142). A similar fate befell Hugı al-Naghl, who worked as a guard at the train station and then became a street vendor (p.144). Although the youth (who is also the witness as narrator) in the story ‘I, They and Ambivalence’ and his family leave Baghdad, they refuse to admit that they had fled because of the persecution of the Jews. The Hebrew teacher, Jurjı Dalwiyya, expresses the author’s protest against leaving Iraq and migrating to the Land of Israel. He asks how a person can abandon the place where he was born, where he lives his life, and where his property and the graves of his ancestors are to be found (p.160). He compares his strong ties to Iraq to a tree with deep roots: ‘The good tree is strong and its roots are embedded in the dear soil’ (p.160). His abandonment of Iraq is likened to death; he laments the loss of his childhood world. ‘I grieve for you, the children’s homes, I grieve for the thousands of dear friends and the place in my chest, I grieve for you, my soul, I grieve for you, all the lost things’ (p.16). The theme of a split appears in the story ‘I, They and Ambivalence’, where the boy as both witness and narrator reaches the end of the line: He disintegrates and sinks to the bottom of the Tigris River (p.183). Drowning signals death; however, it seems that here it also signifies Naqqāsh’s desire to become united forever with one of the things he loved most in Iraq, the Tigris. But his separation from his old world meant death, even if his physical body continued to live. When he came to Israel he tried to mend the split, unsuccessfully. ‘I try with all my might to adapt to things, to mend the tear, to become used to the slaps, but the split within me rebels and its widening fear splits and turns into a cave’ (p.187). Not only he, but also his friends and relatives feel the pain of being separated from their world. They sense that this separation means an end to the quiet life that they had led so far. But despite the pain this knowledge brings, they bow down and accept their fate in silence (p.168). The narrator did not want to give up his Iraqi citizenship, but did so out of necessity. For him this was not a mere formal act, but something with a much deeper meaning: it symbolized the loss of his identity. The passage in which he hands his ID card over to the Iraqi officer and he renounces his citizenship evokes the feeling that from this moment on, the people’s identity becomes blurred. Expressions such as

‘stripped us of our belonging’ (naza‘a ‘anna intima’ana) (p.168) and ‘we were uprooted’ (’uqtuli‘na min al-judhur) (p.168) clearly reflect the state of uprootedness. The author personifies the word ‘belonging’ (’intima’). ‘Belonging stretches its neck from the innards and cries over the remnants of the contradiction.’ The opacity of the phrase ‘remnants of the contradiction’ (’ashla’ al-munaqada) is not coincidental; it points to the absurdity inherent in being uprooted (p.168). In order to highlight the tragedy of the uprooting of Iraq’s Jews, the narrator, immediately after this passage, describes the harmonious relations that existed between Jewish and Muslim women,39 and how Umm Fadil, a Muslim woman and a friend of the family, reacted to the news of its impending emigration.40 The narrator cannot reconcile himself to leaving Iraq, and insists that he is still somehow connected to ‘this land’. He adds, ‘We have lost our identity, but our roots that have been spreading beneath this land for two thousand years were detached but not torn away.’41 Of course, there is little consolation in his distinction between detachment and being torn away. To the contrary, uprootedness is more complex and difficult than a total cut-off, because he is constantly accompanied by memories of his lost world and as a result feels alienated from his new surroundings, and incapable of adapting himself and becoming integrated into it. Another image that sheds a tragic light on his forced detachment from his old world is that of his daily walk to the river with his sister, yet another expression of yearning for the lost world of his childhood (p.170). The emigration from Iraq had unfortunate effects on all of the Jews, but especially so on the soul of the youth. The situation worsens on their arrival in Israel. On landing at the airport the Jews already feel barely human, but even the modicum of their humanity that is left abandons them when they are sprayed with insecticide: ‘Our humanity was strangled in the very first minute. We were drowned in insecticide and now we are nothing but animals’ (p.184). While the conditions of the Jews who had emigrated from Iraq worsened, the lives of those who remained, such as Moshe al-Najjar, improved (p.187). The immigrants lost their humanity while he, who had been bestial, now became human (p.191). Another story in the I, They and Ambivalence collection, ‘’Ihudı’ (‘Jew’), describes the relationship between the narrator and the Muslims. The story paints a picture of a profound sense of belonging to Muslim society. ‘They know him, all know him, and all are his friends and brothers.’42 The story’s protagonist, Shaul, does not agree with the view of most Jews that Jews differ from those around them. In a conversation with his father the latter says that because Shaul is a Jew he must be careful and not rely too much on the friendship that his Arab friends and neighbours show him. The son responds, ‘Jew. . . Jew. . . You’ve annihilated us with this word. Isn’t a Jew a human being? Does he have horns? Stop it. You’ve heard this word so often that you’ve come to believe that Jews are worthless. . .’ (p.209). In this connection we should mention Lilian Debi-Guri’s opinion, that ‘despite the elegiac tone that occasionally accompanies the motif of the annihilation of worlds in his stories . . ., he also exposes it mercilessly through its corruption, absurdity and bizarreness’;43 for example, his description of one of the guests in the sukkah, Dahud al-‘Ajami, of whom he says, ‘His nose is nothing more than a huge block of flesh’ (p.193), while his son Sabih is ‘the second cross-eyed person to join our sukkah after Salman’ (p.195).

But Naqqāsh takes a forgiving view of these people, because ‘in those days we used to see in people, despite their defects, their souls and inner secrets, and not their physical deformities’ (p.195).

Loss of identity among the Jews of Iraq resulted from the collapse of their old world and an attendant feeling of rootlessness. Naqqāsh, in his realistic style and elegiac tone, describes the damage done to the immigrants by their forced uprooting from Iraq and the move to Israel, which led to their spiritual annihilation, including a loss of identity, and in some cases to physical annihilation as well. Naqqāsh’s generic uprooted protagonist suffers from a profound loss of identity and a cultural, social and spiritual rupture. His loss of identity involves also the loss of his religious belief. However, his uprootedness and loss of identity are not the result only of external social and cultural factors, but derive also from man’s inner soul. Proof of this is Naqqāsh’s refusal to write in Hebrew, which expresses his refusal to become part of Israeli society. The Arabic language represents the old world, which, despite its fragility (because every human experience is fragile), protected those who sought refuge in it. Naqqāsh’s adherence to Arabic and his multi-dialectal language play an important role that goes well beyond its use as a vehicle of expression. Language in his writings has a dominant independent existence, thus providing the best evidence for his search for an identity in a world that is no more.

Notes

1. R. Snir, Arabness, Jewishness, Zionism (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 2008), pp.49, 74 (Hebrew).

2. S. Moreh (ed.), Short Stories by Jewish Writers from Iraq, 1924–1978 (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1981), p.

16.

3. Snir, Arabness, p.

53. Snir notes that according to the writer Shalom Darwısh Hebrew had become a purely liturgical language. See S. Darwısh, Kull shay’ hadi fial-iyada (Jerusalem: Association for Jewish Academics from Iraq, 1981), p.

200.

4. At the time of the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, there were about 135,000 Jews living in Iraq, more than half in Baghdad. Many Iraqi Jews were well-to-do and highly placed. The persecutions against the Jews began at the end of 1947, after the UN General Assembly passed a resolution on 29 November, which approved the partitioning of the Land of Israel. Iraq participated in the war against Israel and was the only Arab country that refused to sign the armistice agreements at the war’s end. After the proclamation of Israel’s independence in 1948, thousands of Iraqi Jews were arrested and imprisoned. The Zionist movement was outlawed. Jews who wanted to leave for Israel risked the death penalty. Many other restrictions were placed on Iraqi Jewry; they were forbidden from moving from one city to another, to enter schools and hospitals, and more. The Israeli government was aware of the appalling situation of the Jews in Iraq and sought ways to bring them to Israel. One solution was by a tortuous, dangerous land route by way of which about 3,000 Jews managed to escape to Israel between December 1949 and February

1950. Later in 1950 the Iraqi government relented and allowed the Jews to leave the country on condition that they give up their citizenship, their property, and their right to ever return. The reason behind the Iraqi authorities’ change of heart is not clear; apparently, a number of factors played a role. See http:// www.moia.gov.il/Moia_he/AboutIsrael/ezraVenechmia.htm.

5. N. Qazzaz, The Jews in Iraq during the Twentieth Century (Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute, 1991), p.294 (Hebrew).

6. Snir, Arabness, pp.252–4,

309.

7. The organ of the MAPAM Party in Arabic, published variously as a biweekly, weekly and daily. It ceased to appear after the late 1960s.

8. Snir, Arabness, p.

188.

9. Ibid., pp.198,

202.

10. L. Debi-Guri, ‘Arabic and Hebrew in Samīr Naqqāsh’s Stories’, Ma’ariv, 28 Nov. 1986, p.29 (Hebrew).

11. S. Somekh considers Hebrew to be the strongest and most stable national component in Israeli society, Iton 77 (Oct. 1983), p.46 (Hebrew).

12. Snir, Arabness, p.

202. Snir adds, ‘Naqqāsh’s relationship with the Hebrew language is a complex issue because of his own contradictory statements.’

13. In a statement he made to S. Moreh, published after his death in Ha’aretz under the headline ‘Samīr Who?’, 3 Aug. 2004 (Hebrew).

14. Y. Bar-Moshe, ‘Naqqāsh’s Stories’, Bamaaracha, Vol.18, No.209 (May 1978), p.

2. (Hebrew).

15. Snir, Arabness, pp.203–

4.

16. S. Naqqāsh, Al-Kha_ta’ (Jerusalem: al- Sharq, 1971), p.

8. This passage echoes Heidegger’s idea that man’s existence is directed from the outset towards annihilation, and that human life is based on absolute nothingness.

17. R. Yona, ‘I Am an Iraqi Jewish Arab: A Conversation with the Writer Samīr Naqqāsh’, Davar, 29 May 1992, p.24 (Hebrew).

18. S. Shapira, ‘Journeys into the Soul’, Davar, 19 Sept. 1986, p.21 (Hebrew).

19. S. Naqqāsh, Yawm (Jerusalem: al-Sharq, 1980), pp.161–

226.

20. Some Iraqi Jews wear white on Willow Night and light candles like on the Day of Atonement, because according to the Kabbalah, this is the night when a man’s fate is finally sealed. It is customary to stay up all night and to study the Torah, according to Rabbi Mordechai Eliahu, Laws of Tabernacles and the Feast of the Torah (Jerusalem: Darkei Hora’a le-Rabanim, 2000), p.41 (Hebrew).

21. According to Jewish tradition, these ‘guests’ are the souls of the Jewish nation’s patriarchs, who visit the sukkah and bless those in it. For this reason, guests are welcomed on this holiday.

22. L. Debi-Guri, ‘Samīr Naqqāsh – an Examination of His Narrative Works’, in W. Harvey et al. (ed.) Zion and Zionism among the Jews of Spain and the Orient (Jerusalem: Misgav Yerushalayim, 2002), p.595 (Hebrew).

23. According to S. Aviv, ‘An Arabesque on Lost Love’, Ma’ariv, 22 Aug. 1986, p.

26.

24. Naqqāsh, Yawm, p.

161.

25. The narrator’s faith has lapsed. He no longer cares about building a sukkah, and he spends Willow Night in a coffee shop (ibid., p.226).

26. S. Naqqāsh, The Day the World Became Pregnant and, Miscarried, trans. from Arabic by R. Naqqāsh (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Poalim, 1985), p.131 (Hebrew).

27. Yona, ‘I Am an Iraqi’, p.

27.

28. Lilian Debi-Guri writes, ‘Naqqāsh uses the technique of reversing the word order in order to describe the difference and contrast between the reality as imagined before emigration to Israel and the new immigrants’ encounter with the actual reality.’ See Debi-Guri ‘Samīr Naqqāsh’, p.

596.

29. Ibid.

30. Naqqāsh, Yawm, p.

225.

31. Debi-Guri, ‘Samīr Naqqāsh’, pp.570–

8.

32. Ibid.

33. From an interview with Samīr Naqqāsh by Shmuel Moreh, published in al-Sharq, March 1978, pp.79,

81.

34. S. Naqqāsh, ’Ana wa-ha’ula’i wa-l-fisam (Jerusalem: al-Sharq, 1978), pp.68–

9.

35. Her submissive behaviour is expressed by the way she sits: she shrivels up and sits in the corner of the room. Ibid., p.

68.

36. ‘I returned to the transit camp (ma‘abara) after having wasted many years outside of Israel, in search of my lost life.’ Ibid., p.

84.

37. ‘These are Jewish puppets that were stuffed in Jewish schools and then thrown out into the streets of Baghdad, and Jewish hands pulled the strings’ (ibid., p.31). This passage hints that envoys from the Land of Israel distributed propaganda among the Jews of Baghdad to convince them to leave Iraq and migrate to the Land of Israel.

38. Naqqāsh, ’Ana wa-ha’ula’i wa-l-fisam, p.

131.

39. ‘In the living room on the Persian Kashan rug our women and their women relax’ (ibid., p.168).

40. ‘After that there was no answer, only a broken sob came out of the telephone receiver, a sob that turned into bitter crying’ (ibid., p.161).

41. Ibid., p.

169. The Iraqi-born Jewish writer Shalom Darwısh (1913–97), who was well-known for his anti-Zionist views, also mentions the venerable history of the Jews in Iraq. ‘We have been in Iraq now for two thousand years, and we shall remain there for another two thousand years, perhaps until the Messiah comes. Therefore, we must live in peace with the Iraqi people, and if this people is opposed to Zionism we must be careful and restrained. After all, we want to live, and Zionism according to the law of the land is a crime that can lead to the gallows. So in order to preserve the community’s safety and intactness we, or at least the community’s institutions, must refrain from any Zionist activity.’ See S. Darwısh, ‘Relations between the Community Institutions and the Pioneer Underground in Baghdad’ (Hebrew), in Z. Yehuda (ed.), From Babylon to Jerusalem (Tel Aviv: Tserikover, 1980).

42. Ibid.

43. Debi-Guri, ‘Samīr Naqqāsh’, p.581.