Carol Isaacs (The Surreal McCoy)
In the 1940s a third of Baghdad’s population was Jewish. Within a decade nearly all 150,000 had been expelled, killed or had escaped. This beautiful gentle but candid graphic memoir of a lost homeland is a wordless narrative by an author homesick for a home she has never visited.
A snatch of music takes us to an ancestral home in the old Jewish quarter of Baghdad, the narrative leads us literally through the streets and up into houses, we sleep on the roof looking up at the sky full of stars. It’s domestic, cosy but the people with us are ghosts, shadows etched into the fabric of the buildings. In between pages of journey and discoveries we have very short statements from people who recall their time living in Baghdad, just a few highly descriptive lines of family life which give us the narrative for the illustrations on the next few pages.
As a personal narrative it’s a superb book, you sink into it and it enfolds you with its magical charm. The very limited text doesn’t give space for exploring many of the nuances of Jewish Arabic interactions, but the afterword offers some more insight. I was enchanted by this book.
Out now £16.99
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