Baghdad, Yesterday: The Making of an Arab Jew

Cultural writing. Middle East Studies. Biography and Memoir. A wise and often gently funny memoir by one of the world's authorities on Arabic literature, this book offers an intimate view of Jewish life in Baghdad in the 1930s and 40s. It describes vividly the young writer's intellectual and emotional growth and maps the now-vanished world of Baghdad's book stalls and literary cafes, its Arabic-speaking Jewish bank clerks, tuxedoed Iraqi-Jewish weddings, outdoor movies at the Cinema Diana, and bonfires by the Tigris. As the pieces of Somekh's unsentimental and sharply drawn memoir accumulate, they also mount in meaning "It is hard to overstate the beauty, originality, lucidity, gentleness, wisdom, and importance of Baghdad, Yesterday"--Ma'ariv.