News
I’ve been interested in the complicated modern history of Iraqi Jews for some time, so I was thrilled to come across Adam Shatz’s latest piece in the LRB. It’s a review of two recent memoirs — Violette Shamash’s Memories of Eden and Sasson Somekh’s Baghdad, Yesterday. Here’s the opening paragraph:
On 27 April 1950 a man whose passport identified him as Richard Armstrong flew from Amsterdam to Baghdad. He came as a representative of Near East Air Transport, an American charter company seeking to win a contract with Iraq’s prime minister, Tawfiq al-Suwaida, to fly Iraqi Jews to Cyprus. Only six weeks earlier, the Iraqi government had passed the Denaturalisation Act, which allowed Jews to emigrate provided they renounced their citizenship, and gave them a year to decide whether to do so. Al-Suwaida expected that between seven and ten thousand Jews would leave out of a community of about 125,000, but a mysterious bombing in Baghdad on the last day of Passover, near a café frequented by Jews, caused panic, and the numbers registering soon outstripped his estimate. The position of the Jews in Iraq had been deteriorating with alarming speed ever since the outbreak of the Arab-Israeli war in 1948: they were seen as a stalking horse for the Zionists in Palestine, and were increasingly rewarded for their expressions of loyalty to Iraq with suspicion, threats and arbitrary physical assaults. By the spring of 1950 the question was when, not whether to leave, and on 9 May NEAT signed a contract with the Iraqi government to organise their departure.
For Richard Armstrong and NEAT, the uprooting of the Middle East’s most ancient Jewish community was not a mere business transaction: it was a mission. Armstrong was really Shlomo (né Selim) Hillel, an Iraqi-born Mossad agent; NEAT was secretly owned by the Jewish Agency; and Israel, not Cyprus, was the refugees’ ultimate destination.
The full essay is available here. Only the Somekh book is available in the states, but I’m sure the one by Shamash can be had online.
On the eve of Election Day, the Guardian newspaper has asked a few American writers what they think of the presidency of George W. Bush. As you might expect, none have anything good to say about him. There is outrage, there is anger, but there is also humor. Here’s Tobias Wolff:”When I see someone being rude to a waiter, or blocking the road in a Ford Expedition, or yakking loudly on a cell phone in a crowded elevator, I naturally assume they voted for George W Bush.”
My favorite take–by which I mean the one that comes closest to my own experience–is Aleksandar Hemon’s:
I became an American citizen in November 2000, around the time of the infamous electoral impasse and the Supreme Court decision that gifted George W Bush his first presidency. I had ended up in the USA in 1992 because of the war in Bosnia. For eight years I was an alien resident – a contradiction in terms – before I decided to cross the big threshold and fully enter the home of the brave. Hence my first fledgling-American sentiment was full-fledged embarrassment at the democratic process that allowed the candidate for whom the minority of voters had cast their ballots to become the President of all.
What made things worse was that W was/is the American stereotype come true – ignorant, incurious, congenitally uncomfortable with thought.
You can read the entire piece here.
My apologies for the lack of posts this week. I’ve been sick, and my enormous workload isn’t helping. I hope to have something in this space soon.
Moroccan judges seem to be in a competition to find out who will issue the most excessive, most ridiculous, and most embarrassing ruling for the country. The latest example comes from the town of Ait Ourir in the province of Marrakech, where a high school student named Yassine Belassal was arrested, tried, and promptly sentenced to 18 months’ imprisonment for insult to the king because he allegedly wrote “God, Nation, Barça” on the blackboard.
Morocco’s motto is ‘God, Nation, King’; Barça is the Spanish soccer team FC Barcelona.
Belassal is in his senior year and also a national champion in karate. He may or may not have had legal representation at his speedy trial; he may have written the motto on a wall outside or on the blackboard in class; he may have acted alone, or with a group of three friends; his last name might be Belassal or Ait Ben-Lassal—the facts of the case are somewhat unclear. What is clear, however, is that he is now in prison, serving a sentence at the Boulmharez jail, for what seems like a harmless case of football hyperbole.
You can find out more about the case from Al Massae (in Arabic) or El Mundo and El Pais (in Spanish.) For some legal background, check out the blog of Ibn Kafka. There is also a Facebook group.
The BBC reports that the British Library has digitized some rare recordings of fifty-seven 20th-century writers’ voices. The collection includes the only known recording of Virginia Woolf’s voice (my God, not at all as I had imagined it!). You can also listen to a comment by John Steinbeck about the context and process of writing The Grapes of Wrath. I wish all of the archive were available online, but it’s not.