Overview

This unique feature on Iraqi Jewish writers includes short stories, excerpts from novels, and poems – written by 17 authors – all of whom are of Iraqi descent. For several centuries, Iraqi Jews were key contributors to Iraq’s rich social and cultural tapestry – active in all areas of life as novelists, poets, essayists, journalists, musicians, composers, singers, and artists. Sadly, all this came to a tragic end with the massive transfer-emigration and forced displacement of Iraqi Jews in the 1950s to Israel. The feature also includes introductory essays about the authors and poets, who are of different generations, traversing a wide range of languages – from the poetry of the Mani brothers at the turn of the 20th century to the works of Almog Behar and Mati Shemoelof in the early noughties. The texts raise universal questions of belongingness, exile, diaspora, cross-national affinities, and cross-linguistic possibilities. All texts were either translated directly from Arabic (approximately two-thirds) or from Hebrew, with one written originally in English.

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9781913043285

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Samuel Shimon was born into a poor Assyrian family in Iraq in 1956. He left his country in 1979 to go to Hollywood and become a film-maker, travelling via Damascus, Amman, Beirut, Nicosia, Cairo and Tunis. In 1985 he settled in Paris as a refugee. He began writing autobiographical short stories in 1979, which were published in Arab newspapers, and poetry in 1985. In Paris his small press, Editions Gilgamesh, published a number of volumes of poetry and fiction by Arab authors including two collections of his own, Old Boy and Rain of my Mother’s Letters. In 1996 he moved to London, where he has lived ever since, working as a journalist. His passion for literature led him in 1998 to co-found Banipal magazine of modern Arab literature in English translation, which became internationally renowned. He is currently editor-in-chief of the Spanish edition of Banipal magazine, which he set up in 2020. A profile in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 2003 described him as “the Initiator” and “a tireless missionary for literary matters”. In 2005 his autobiographical novel An Iraqi in Paris was published in Arabic, with a limited edition in English translation published the same year. A continuing best-seller in Arabic, described as “a manifesto of tolerance”, it is published in Moroccan, Lebanese and Egyptian editions. In 2002, he founded and edited the hugely popular Arabic literary website www.kikah.com for a number of years, then, in 2013 started Kikah Arabic magazine for international literature (both closed due to lack of funding). He also edited A Crack in the Wall (2000), poems by sixty Arab poets from the last two decades of the 20th Century, was editor of Beirut39: New Writing from the Arab World (2010), and the short story collection Baghdad Noir (2018).

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