 Naim Kattan
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We lived side by side in the lost Babylon
Celebrated Jewish writer Naim Kattan grew up peacefully in the heart of Baghdad, until all was swept away in 1941, writes Mohammad Urdun
Farewell, Babylon by Naim Kattan, Souvenir Press, £12.99. order this book
I REMEMBER the Baghdad Naim Kattan lovingly describes in this memoir. I didn’t know it as an adolescent Jew like Kattan but with a fond intimacy nonetheless.
I recall my last visit just a few years ago when it was still an intoxicating mix of broad shopping boulevards, formidable towers and traditional streets of overhanging balconies and careworn stonework stained by a century of detritus.
At once Baghdad, the Jewel of the East, pitched you into a world where tradition lived cheek-by-jowl with modernity, where Starbucks and Tesco had yet to tread.
But that all came crashing down with the Anglo-American invasion of 2003, which makes the English translation of this story of Kattan’s childhood in Baghdad during the World War II and its aftermath all the more poignant.
First published in French in Kattan’s adopted Canada in 1975 it took until this year for an English edition to emerge.
Quite why is a mystery – a result perhaps of the possessiveness of French literature toward one of its most decorated sons.
Kattan, who moved to France in the late ’40s and then Canada in the mid-50s, has become a cultural icon in French-speaking Canada where he has been a respected journalist and a writer of more than 32 books. He headed the Canadian oversees cultural department and has had gongs galore pinned on him, from top literary prizes to the prestigious Order of Canada and France’s Legion d’Honneur.
Farewell, Babylon is the story of how he came of age and finally left Baghdad for Paris. Written three decades later, it wanders the winding alleyways of his youth, while he dreamed of France and women just beyond his grasp. It’s a story of how he found his politics amid festering religious and cultural conflicts at a time when the sun was setting on Britain’s Empire, Nazism rose in Europe and new ideas of liberty, nationalism and socialism were juxtaposed with traditions separating men and women, Jews and Muslims.
For Iraq’s Jews Nazism was a terrifying shadow but it was the Ottoman and then British occupations that determined their lives. Descended from the people of Abraham, Iraq’s Jews were among the first inhabitants of ancient Babylon 2,500 years ago. Until the ’40s they had been more or less settled, living on good terms with the Muslims for 13 centuries.
All was swept away in the hot summer of 1941 when the infamous Farhoud pogrom erupted. As Britain’s army fell back on all fronts and Iraq was plunged into a lawless hiatus in which tens of thousands of Bedouins descended on Baghdad’s Jews.
Kattan and his family huddled together surviving only by a twist of fate but thousands of others suffered murder, rape and plunder. Order was quickly established but trust was slower to return and Jews started to escape oversees.
The Jews weren’t hounded as in Europe but nor were they afforded full entry into society. Institutional discrimination had always excluded them from top government posts, medicine and science and now doors closed more firmly.
Outside of business, for which a Muslim partner was often needed to open doors, law was one of the few professions open to them and literature, which Kattan dreamed of conquering. But Jewish schools produced the best scholars and the Jewish districts were integral to the city.
Ironically it was Zionism that proved one of the final nails in the coffin for Iraq’s Jews. Many breathed a secret sigh, looking forward to a Jewish homeland.
But there were many who opposed its vision of a religious Apartheid and even those like Kattan, whose internationalist views would never have permitted him to support Zionism, were tarred with the same brush.
Life worsened for those left behind, harried by officialdom and more or less finally pushed out in the ’50s, after Israel’s bloody birth.
Adolescent Kattan’s driving ambition had been for an Iraq in which Jews and Muslims lived equally. A budding writer, he dreamed differences between the ethnic groups manifest most obviously in dialects which marked a Jew from a Muslim from a Kurd, would give way to a multi-racial glasnost. Besotted with French writing and European social ideas, the schoolboy Kattan hawked around his articles until they were eventually published, calling for Iraqi literature to unite under a common banner, a foundation stone in the new post-colonial country.
He recalls the wonder of his childhood as he discovered the streets of central Baghdad – Bettawiyeen, the magnificent Al Rashid boulevard and the iconic Abu Nawas, a glorious corniche that hugged the edge of the Tigris.
Kattan and his pals also frequented the cafés on Al Rashid where arguments over literature and politics raged amid the thick fug of nargileh smoke and a back drop of backgammon, chess, cards and strong coffee.
Between heated discussions over the future of Jewish literature, French novelists and philosophers, Kattan and his friends discussed the other burning issue – women.
A furtive glimpse of a woman’s arm sent pent-up desires rushing to the surface.
Conflicted, Kattan dismissed such carnal obsessions as the worst of Orientalism but then guiltily frequented the brothels of his neighbourhood.
Bettawiyeen, where Kattan lived, was a better-off Jewish quarter. Most Jewish men were labourers, craftsmen or low-level clerks and women sewed, took in laundry or were in service. But Kattan’s father, uncle and brother were civil servants able to guarantee his education.
When I last saw Bettawiyeen three years ago – pot-holed, dusty and crowded with the same two-storey houses, now of faded beauty – it was still known as the Jewish area though only a few score families remained, supporting a large synagogue that hastily closed after Baghdad fell. Ghostlike, the families clung to the shadows of what had been an ancient home for Jews since the time of Abraham.
After wars, invasions and a 50-year exodus nothing now remains of Iraq’s Jews. Kattan himself, perhaps haunted by his own ghosts, has never gone back. Instead he relives his childhood visiting Babylonian and Assyrian exhibitions in Europe’s great museums and with a backward glance, comments sadly: “What a waste! A country that cannot hold on to all of its citizens!”
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