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Chapter 7 The great crash and us Idon’t know how these things work—nor, I suspect , do professional economists. In later years, of course, I learned about the Great Crash of 1929; but then that happened inadistantlandandtowell-to-dofolks.Thepreciseeffectsthatcrashwas to have on a tiny, primitive mercantile community in a provincial town like Baghdad—the mere fact that there could have been such effects— have always been something of a mystery to me. The fact remains, however ,thatitwasonlytwoyearsafterthecrash,andaslightlylongerspanof time after my brother Eliahu’s marriage, that the world economic slump startedtotakeitstollamongmembersof Baghdad’sbusinesscommunity. Eliahu, for one, first ‘‘went broke’’ (tala’ kasser, or shabbar) and was enabled to settle at a certain percentage his accumulated debts with whatevercash he possessed and/or was presumed to undertake to pay. Shortly afterward, he was officially declared bankrupt (aflas). One of the results was that we had to find another, cheaper tenancy, far more modest than the one we had. It was at the Gabbays’ house, situated in the fashionable ‘Aquliyya quarter,thatEliahuwasdeclaredofficiallybankruptandhadtoservetime in prison. At the time of the trial, Eliahu was so ashamed and felt so helpless that he attempted to take his own life, with the rather primitive device of drinking from a bottle of gasoline—upon which Father snatched the bottle and started drinking its contents himself. Among other unseemly things that happened to us there, at a timewhen everybody’s nerves were onedge,FatheroncegotsomadatsomethingSimha—myjuniorbythree years—had done that he tried to strangle her with his bare hands. By the spring of 1932, we had to move from the Gabbays’ house to Beit Rahel, situated in the much poorer neighborhood of Taht el-Takya. We had to be crowded into one large room overlooking the narrow street, which obviously went to my brother’s family, and a tiny attic, over the room used by the landlady’s youngest son Naji. It was at Beit Rahel that a romance of sorts was started between Naji and my older sister Najiyya. the great crash and us 63 After an interval of some months of utter misery and penury following his release from prison, Eliahu used to spend his days in one of the coffee shops in the commercial center, usually Qahwat Moshi, Moshe’s teashop—andgraduallyhegotintothebusinessof brokerage,workingas middleman between wholesaler and importer on one side and retailer on the other, in his own line of merchandise, haberdashery. Eventually, we were able to leave Beit Rahel, moving to the diwankhana, the part of the home originally built for the master of the house and his male friends, at Beit Abul Juss off the far more airy and fashionable Al-Mutanabbi Street. This was a two-storyconstruction with a large innercourt and a tiny plot in the midst of which one or two fig trees stood and gave fruit in season. najiyya and naji It was shortlyafter we moved to Beit Abul Juss that Father was to exercise hispaternalauthorityforwhatmusthavebeenthelasttime.Itwaswhenhe managed to have his way in the matterof Najiyya’s betrothal. Naji one day paidusanunexpectedvisit,askingtospeaktoFather.Everybodyguessed what was on the young man’s mind. To be sure, following our move out of Beit Rahel no one knew exactly what went on—if anything—between thosetwo,althoughallhadtheirsuspicions.Wheretheywereseeingeach other—if indeed they continued to do so—and the exact nature of their relationshipnooneknewforcertain.Apparentlysomesortofcontactwas maintained in strict secrecy, and—such were the strange norms of those days and of that society—that in itself almost automatically ruled out any thought of a proper relationship past or future. And so when Naji finally came—all by himself, with no matchmaker, elder relative, or mutual acquaintance—to ask for his daughter’s hand in marriage,Fatherrefusedadamantly.Hisreplyhadastrangeringoffinality to it that I still recall vividly.We are not, he assured theyoung suitor, looking for a husband for our daughter, ‘‘neither you nor anyone else.’’ What maddened me at the time was that we must, almost as a matter of course, have been praying for a suitable match, and that the proposed one was not at all bad. In retrospect, I think what really irked Father was the suspicion that something wrong and vaguely sinful had been going on between those two—and that wasn’t the right way for young people to enter into holy matrimony. It must have been a traumatic experience for Najiyya, with whom I was to develop a special attachment in later years. Even though she did 64 the last jews in...

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