Farewell Babylon

A classic memoir about growing up in Baghdad in the 1940s, by a grand old man of Canadian letters.Here is the exotic world of one of the East's ancient cities, where Naim Kattan was born into the heart of its then teeming Jewish community. In this evocative memoir, a young boy comes of age, discovering work, literature, patriotism, racism―and women and love. Farewell, Babylon is a story of roots and anguished exile, of thirst for life and life's experiences. Above all it is a memoir of a lost world, a magical city in which Iraq's Kurds, Bedouins, Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived together in a rough sort of harmony.

Kattan, Naïm

Biographies & Memoirs

Souvenir Press

Arts & Literature

Souvenir Press Ltd.

From the melting pot that was Iraqi society comes a tale, recounted by a grand old man of Canadian letters, of growing up as a Jewish boy in Baghdad in the 1940s. Naim Kattan was born into an intellectual Jewish family in Baghdad in 1928. He, his brother, and his friend Nessim were the only Jews in a group of young men who met every evening in a cafe to talk passionately abut creating a national Iraqi literature in their newly independent country. They had good reason, for although the Jewish community in Iraq dated back 2500 years, and Jews were abmong the best Arabic scholars in the country, they were never considered equals by the Muslim majority. In 1941, after British forces defeated the German-backed Iraqi insurgents, angry Bedouins entered Baghdad before it could be secured and began the Farhoud, the massacre of Jews in the city. The violence stopped just short of the Kattans' house, but the family immediately began the long application process for visas. Kattan began selling stories to literary magazines and speculating about the role of women in a country where even Jewish women wore veils. He eventually won a scholarship to the Sorbonne and left his family, not to be reunited with them until five years later, when he found them in a settlement camp in Israel This is a memoir of identity, of growing up in a tumultuous polyglot society, of change both personal and societal, of finding one's place in life. Here is a fascinating portrait of a people, a city, a state, and a culture that are as troubled today as Kattan found them sixty years ago.

MCCLELLAND STEWART

La mémoire et la promesse: Essai (Collection Constantes ; 37) (French Edition)

Éditions HMH

Adieu, Babylone: Roman (French Edition)

LA PRESSE

A young Iraqi Jewish boy, in the Baghdad of the 1940s, is fired with the desire to write and inspired by the poetry of Arabic but finds his education and his allegiances transformed to other settings

Farewell, Babylon (English and French Edition)

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

Taplinger Pub. Co

The son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, Abraham Moses Klein (1909-1972) dreamed of a country where all might live according to their beliefs and religion. He was a lawyer, political activist, university lecturer, journalist, and poet, who received the Governor Genenral's Award for Poetry in 1948.

A.M. Klein (The Quest Library, Number 13)

Dundurn Press

Farewell, Babylon: Coming of Age in Jewish Baghdad

Community & Culture

Raincoast Books

Farida (34) (Essential Translations Series)

Literary

Guernica Editions Inc.

Adieu, Babylone: Mémoires d'un juif d'Irak

History

World

ALBIN MICHEL

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Books by Kattan, Naïm