Exile from Exile: Israeli Writers from Iraq (review)

Hebrew Studies 40 (1999) 391 Reviews EXILE FROM EXILE: ISRAELI WRITERS FROM IRAQ. By Nancy E. Berg. SUNY Series in Israeli Studies. pp. xvi + 212. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996. Paper, $18.95. Relegated to the margins in both literary systems, the literature which the twentieth century Iraqi Jewish authors have produced in Arabic and Hebrew has remained almost totally ignored, until recently. Nancy Berg's Exile from Exile is a welcome attempt to rescue their works from oblivion for English readers. Clearly aware that the writing of Iraqi Iewish authors "belongs to the category of exile literature" as they themselves were twice "exiled" (once from Iraq to Israel, and there "banned" from canonical Israeli literature), Berg offers a reading of the existing corpus of their works that places these "within the dual concepts of exile and Israeli literature" (p. 14). The first part of the book opens with a chapter on the issue of exile and Jewish writing in general. The epigraph quotes a saying by the Jewish Arabic-language writer Samir Naqqash (born 1938): "I don't exist in this country, not as a writer. a citizen nor human being. I don't feel that I belong anywhere, not since my roots were tom from the ground" (p. 3). Exploring the tenn exile in general as well as within Jewish tradition (galut), the author states that "the move to Israel from Iraq is an end to the national state of exile and the beginning of a personal exile from one's homeland" (p. 13). Concentrating on the process of urbanization and secularization in modem times and the tragic events of the Farhad pogrom, (June 1-2, 1941), the second chapter deals with the history of the Iewish community in Iraq. As the Jews in the 1920s and 19308 were doing their uunost to integrate into Iraqi society, anti-Jewish feelings were building up within the Arab population, triggered in part by the bloody clashes between Zionists and Arabs in Palestine. The third chapter deals with the Jewish writers of modem Iraqi fiction and focuses on Anwar Sha'iil (1904-1984). Ya'qub Bilbiil (born 1920) and Shalom Darwish (1913-1997). As Jewish writers had as a main slogan "Religion pertains to God and the homeland to all," we fmd striking Arabic and Iraqi patriotic motifs in their works. or even a bluffmg of their own religious identity since they lived in such symbiotic contact with the general Arab Muslim culture. Towards the end of the 1940s but especially during the early 1950s, many Iraqi writers and poets emigrated to Israel. Those who preferred to stay did not hesitate to express their love of Iraq even after the establislunent of the Jewish state in 1948. Berg's study deals only with prose fiction but it is of course poetry that gives the most vivid Hebrew Studies 40 (1999) 392 Reviews expression to the feeling of these writers. For example, Mrr Ba~rr (born 1911), who saw himself as "an Iraqi Arab of Jewish religion," expressed his Iraqi patriotism during one of his more difficult hours in verses such as: "What sin have I sinned in my life, for which I am so cruelly and harshly punished? I Is it my struggle and my stand on the side of my Iraq and of the Tigris and the Euphrates?" In April 1969, less than three months after the execution in Baghdad of nine Iraqi Jews, Anwar Shii'iil stood before the Conference of Arab Writers in Baghdad and recited a poem which included the following verses: "My heart beats with love of the Arabs, my mouth speaks their language proudly I Do not they and I share a common source? The distant past drew us together... My childhood flowered on the waters of the Tigris, and the days of my youth drank of the Euphrates I 0 Homeland of Arabism, blessed be you as a shelter whose generosity shines in its streets." Only in the early 1970s did Ba~rr, Shii'iil, and other men of letters realize that despite their continuing Iraqi patriotism, the fate of Babylonian Jewry had been sealed and they left, in spite...