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Chapter 15 The start: movies, book reviews One of the few personal papers I managed to take with me to Israel, where I arrived as a new immigrant in February of 1951, was this: January 31, 1951 To Whom It May Concern: Mr. Nessim Rejwan contributed film criticisms to this paper from June 1946 to August 1948 and book reviews from May 1947 to August 1948. These were a regular and popular feature of the paper. Mr. Rejwan also contributed occasional articles on a variety of topics and his work was of a very high standard. G. Reid Anderson, Editor, The Iraq Times The circumstances which had led me, seemingly so arbitrarily, to stop contributing my ‘‘regular and popular’’ reviews to the Iraq Times precisely in August 1948 had to do with the first Arab-Israeli war and the debacle of the Iraqi army in that war, and I don’t intend to go into them. Here I will tryand recapitulate the circumstances in which I started writingregularlyforthatEnglish -language,British-controlledBaghdaddaily. Those in fact were my first steps in ‘‘journalism.’’ With the exception of a few pieces which I had contributed to the local Arabic press—all on nonpolitical subjects—and an Arabic rendering of a wartime pamphlet by the political science professor Harold J. Laski, mycontributions to the Iraq Times represented my very first efforts in the business of writing. It was Elie, with whom I shared most of my intellectual interests, who, one day in what seemed to be out of the blue, told me he decided to approach Anderson, offering to contribute a weekly book column to the paper. I saidWhat? The explanation was simple.The editor, an old man whowasalsoatypicalsampleofthecolonialBritishsahib,hadjustretired and Anderson, about thirty years of age, was the new editor; he must be 160 the last jews in baghdad more open to such an offer. Sure enough, Anderson accepted the offer, and Elie’s first reviews were extremely well written, highly sophisticated, and rather biting. A few weeks after he started his contributions, Elie one day again took me completely by surprise when he suggested that I offer the Times my services as a film critic, undertaking to speak to Anderson about it himself. I hesitated—partly out of stage fright but really because I did not think my English was good enough. After some agonizing and a good deal of prodding, I gave in and took the plunge. In the years 1946–1948 I wrote regularly on movies, three and sometimes four short reviews a week, under the pen name which Elie suggested —The Nightwatchman—while Elie himself continued to contributebookreviews .ShortlyafterElieleftforLondontostudy,inthesummer of1947,IwasaskedbyAndersontotakeupthebookcolumnaswellasthe movies. Since my intellectual interests had, by that time, become almost purely literary—and since, too, ‘‘politics’’ was not a safe subject for anybody in Iraq to write about anyway—the books I selected for reviewing were mostly novels and works of belles-lettres, with only a few that dealt with general social, philosophical, and political subjects. In those days, my knowledge of Iraq itself, and my interest in its affairs and in those of the Arab world, amounted to very little indeed. In fact, I became used to seeing myself as a kind of amateur literary-cultural critic, an observerand connoisseur of British, American, and European literatures—roughly in that order. Asfarasmyviewsandattitudesonthesematterswereconcerned,Iwas fiercelyand overlyavant-garde and rather rash with my judgments. It was in those days that Elie and I stumbled onVirginiaWoolf’s essay ‘‘Middlebrow ,’’ in which she coined that word to indicate all that she found obnoxiousandobjectionableinculture .Sheherself,shewrote,wasa‘‘highbrow ’’andratherproudof it.Assuch,shewasabletoappreciate,respect, and even enjoy ‘‘lowbrow’’ culture and literary works. ‘‘Middlebrow,’’ however, was something else again. Judging it ‘‘neither here nor there,’’ neither fish nor fowl, she held everything she found ‘‘middlebrow’’ in contempt.What is more, shewas outspoken enough to name names, relegatingtheworksofArnoldBennett ,H.G.Wells,andSomersetMaugham to the middlebrow variety—and into the dustbin. As far as Elie and I were concerned, we perceived ourselves as being militantly highbrow, and as such we gladly and enthusiastically tolerated what we chose—mostlyarbitrarily—to call lowbrow. Anything that even remotely smacked of the ‘‘middlebrow’’ was rejected by us out of hand and made an object for the most merciless of assaults. the start: movies, book reviews 161 james agate and i InthosedaystheIraqTimessubscribedtothefeatureserviceofthe Daily Express of London, a mass-circulation daily known for its sensationalism and a preoccupation with sports and what was then considered ‘‘sex...

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