Nissim Rejwan tells us, quoting W.H. Auden, that he always fought for the right to remain “a private face in a private place.” Readers of good faith will want to respect his declared intentions. Yet those who have found their way to this memoir are, like the author himself, unlikely to have avoided the bruising impact of the powerful political forces that overwhelmed the private interests and aspirations of most Iraqi Jews and terminated centuries of Muslim-Jewish coexistence.

Over a century of Arab-Zionist conflict has made it difficult for those with no direct experience of it to imagine Jews like...

It has often been said that New York is a Jewish city. I think one can safely say the same about Baghdad of the first half of the twentieth century. At the time of writing, barely twenty Jews, most of them elderly, live in my hometown. The one monument these Jews have left is a synagogue where, as their ancestors did from time immemorial, they keep praying for “the welfare of the city,” as Jews in the Babylonian diaspora were bidden to do by the Prophet Jeremiah some three millennia ago. For those who, like myself, were born, grew up,...

There are two theories concerning the etymology and origin of the name Rejwan. According to my late father, one of his ancestors was so red in the face that people used to remark: “He’s as red asrejwan”—the wordrejwanbeing colloquial Iraqi Arabic for purple, crimson, or red, the original word in classical Arabic beingurjuwan. In those days people did not usually have surnames, men and women being known either by their nicknames or patronymics; but in the lifetime of that ancestor of mine a law or custom appeared whereby people were required to have a family...

Had she been a social scientist or a cultural anthropologist, I am sure Mother would have become a great advocate of the theory known as “the self-fulfilling prophecy” and would have been the first to elaborate the theory, even before William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki proposed it in their classic,The Polish Peasant in America and Europe. Thomas and Znaniecki advanced the thesis that in our study of man it is essential to find out how people define situations in which they find themselves, since “if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.”

This, precisely,...

Na‘ima, my eldest sister, died peacefully in her sleep one night in November 1980, aged seventy-seven. A few years before her death, I made a habit of visiting her in her tiny immigrant housing flat in Netanya, where I usually stayed a night or two. Na‘ima’s memory was phenomenal. For hours on end she used to answer my queries about those early days, describing the conditions in which our family lived before and just after my birth. One day she recited to me this old rhymed saying of the Jews:

Hayi lulayi aghdha khfifi

‘Ala walad id lat’shilon

Akel mamghatta...

Father was my only source of mental nourishment for at least the first seven years of my life. Homebound and with pretty little to do, he used to spend hours explaining things that used to perplex me and answering my nagging questions. I don’t remember having asked any of the questions usually put to parents by clever and highly imaginative boys—such as the one as to whether a crocodile would overpower a tiger or the other way round. My questions—judging at least from the answers I still remember—were of a much “higher” character: What was in the...

A New York friend of mine, a writer notorious for her outspokenness, once wrote in a letter in the course of one of her periodic reprimands: “Why, Goddamnit, didn’t your father and mother send you to the Baghdadian equivalent ofcheder? Ideas of human values did begin, you know, before the Voltairian Enlightenment, and even the Enlightenment’s ideas are Isaiah’s.”

But they did send me to one—well, to what was the Baghdadian equivalent of the East Europeancheder(which must mean “room”). It was calledl’estadh(the master) and what that master taught us brats there was to read...

I don’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 in a distant land and to well-to-do folks. The precise effects that crash was 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, that it was only two years after the crash, and a slightly longer span of time after my brother...

It was only toward the end of 1945, when I was almost twenty-two, that I finally got my secondary school certificate. It was a very narrow escape, so to speak, since in the final exams I failed in history and by some mistake or a miracle got 54 in mathematics. The problem of having to sit again for the history exam at the end of the summer vacation caused me a great deal of anxiety throughout the vacation, especially since I could not muster the will-power to really prepare for it properly. By that time I had cultivated so many...

In the mid-1950s, observing young men and women in their teens embracing, kissing, and “necking” openly in the streets, buses, and underground stations of London, Paris, Rome, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem, I could not help thinking of the long years of sexual deprivation of the youth of the Baghdad in which I was born and grew up. And I own that these feelings were not always free of a kind of envy, a nagging awareness of what members of my generation missed in terms of vital human experience.

But it was a life not totally devoid of awards. I don’t...

The years 1937–1939 I spent in almost total idleness as far as work and regular schooling were concerned. The elementary school certificate, marking the successful conclusion of the six forms of primary school, I had finally got in 1938. To be sure, this otherwise indifferent piece of paper entitled me to admittance to an Intermediate School; but what with one thing or other—mainly no doubt the great aversion to schools that I had developed in my years in Madrasat Ras el-Qarya—I did not take that step. It was only toward the end of 1940, when I was...

One day early in 1971, making my usual round of the bookshops, I picked up what I would say was almost a personal book—a book which, by virtue of its time, its quality, and its contents amounts to a faithful record of my intellectual and mental development during a crucial decade of my life. The book wasThe Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, all in four manageable and now low-priced paperback volumes. Reading the book, or even browsing in it here and there, was quite an experience. Throughout the 1940s in Baghdad I had followed Orwell’s...

The one and only productive thing I remember doing during the whole month of May 1941 was reading the bulky William Collins’s edition ofThe Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. I was then out of a job anyway and in the second form of my intermediate school; I don’t quite remember whether there was school during that month of war, but our stay inBeit Abu Ya‘qoubenabled me to have my own quiet corner to read.

Although the trouble had started early in April and had resulted in the escape from his palace of the Regent Abdul Ilah, actual...

At some point my mind began to wander—I cannot say exactly when. I was sitting there in this university auditorium attending a very special and exclusive seminar given by Professor Bernard Lewis, one of the most distinguished historians of the modern Middle East. The subject was Arab-Jewish relations, Jews in Medieval Islam, and “anti-Semitism in Islam.” The lecturer was speaking about what he called “the myth” of Spanish Islamic tolerance toward Jews and how it had been fostered precisely by Jewish scholars in Europe in this century, allegedly using it as a stick with which to beat their Christian...

The first poem that I was to read and appreciate in English was Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” It seems like a strange start—almost as if you began a book with the last sentence. But in my case it was rather natural—a result of the circumstance that, on the one hand, I had no formal education of any kind in English and in English literature and, on the other, my enthusiasm for the new coupled with my budding friendship with Elie. At first, Elie used to come to me in the bank to return the...

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, TheIraq Times

The circumstances which had...

One Sunday noon in the summer of 1948, while in the bookshop giving the finishing touches to the week’s book column, a messenger came in with an envelope bearing my name and bookshop address. It read:

Dear Rejwan,

Owing to the prevailing depression of business I find it necessary to cut down our expenditure on editorial contributions. It is with regret therefore that I have to inform you that as from the end of this month we will be unable to publish book reviews and we will also have to stop film criticism. You will appreciate that I did not...

By early 1950, what with me being out of a job and members of our circle studying to be lawyers or employed in various minor government positions, the fact of my decision to emigrate was known to all my friends, so that the act of bidding good-bye to them spread out over a period of a few months. The material aspect of the move was easy enough to tackle—no real estate to sell, no furniture to speak of, a mere $750 in savings to transfer illegally. The only worldly goods I could have claimed to possess were my private...

It is all but impossible to pinpoint a date or an event with which the position of the Jews of Iraq began to deteriorate and take the course leading finally, and inevitably, to the destruction of the community. Some observers link it with thefarhud. Others maintain that the whole process started only with the adoption by the U.N. General Assembly of the Partition Plan for Palestine late in 1947.

I do not pretend to offer anything like a satisfactory answer—which in any case I think doesn’t exist. However, in a book published in the mid-1990s on Iraq’s involvement...

On March 2, 1950, the Iraqi minister of interior, Salih Jabr, introduced to parliament a draft law by virtue of which Iraqi Jews were to be permitted to leave the country provided they gave up their nationality. Jabr told the deputies that the government was prompted to take this measure owing to the mass exodus of Iraqi Jews by illegal means. He explained that, since martial law was lifted on December 17, 1949, illegal emigration increased, and it was “not in the public interest to force people to stay in the country if they have no desire to do so.”...