Category: literary life

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.

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.

I was asked to guest-edit an issue of the Nigerian magazine Farafina, and I am thrilled to report that some of the contents are now online: fiction by Hisham Matar, poetry by Mathew Shenoda, essays by Anouar Majid, Wail S. Hassan, and Karim Kettani, criticism by Nouri Gana, artwork by Lalla Essaydi, and photography by Hoda Mana, Simona Schneider, and Alex Yera.

Subscribers should be getting their copies in a couple of weeks.  If you don’t subscribe yet, you can go here.

Last fall, at the Ferrara festival of literature, I was lazily waiting for my turn at the coffee shop when I noticed a bunch of policemen sweep through the lobby and enter the auditorium where the authors present their books. The Carabinieri were there to protect Roberto Saviano, the journalist who has exposed the workings of the Camora (the Neapolitan mafia) in his book Gomorrah. He has been under police protection for two years already but now the Camora goons have announced that they want him dead by Christmas. Saviano says he wants to flee Italy.

A 38-year-old man from Iowa is facing a 20-year prison sentence for allegedly possessing Japanese comic books that the government deems “obscene,” because they supposedly depict teens engaging in sexual acts. No photographic images were found in his possession–only comic drawings published in Japan, a small portion of which involved depictions of sex acts.

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, which usually helps cartoonists with legal matters, is taking a special interest in the case; it is the first time a private collector is being prosecuted:

Handley’s case began in May 2006 when he received an express mail package from Japan that contained seven Japanese comic books. That package was intercepted by the Postal Inspector, who applied for a search warrant after determining that the package contained cartoon images of objectionable content. Unaware that his materials were searched, Handley drove away from the post office and was followed by various law enforcement officers, who pulled him over and followed him to his home. Once there, agents from the Postal Inspector’s office, Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, Special Agents from the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation, and officers from the Glenwood Police Department seized Handley’s collection of over 1,200 manga books or publications; and hundreds of DVDs, VHS tapes, laser disks; seven computers, and other documents. Though Handley’s collection was comprised of hundreds of comics covering a wide spectrum of manga, the government is prosecuting images appearing in a small handful.

You can read about the case here. The thing I find strange about it is the fact that drawings, which are products of the imagination, just like novels, can be considered obscene and subject to child pornography laws. And where does one stop? Would Utamaro’s woodblock print Lovers in an Upstairs Room, which has been exhibited in museums around the world, fall under this same category?

(via Neil Gaiman’s blog)