Farewell Babylon

Coming of Age in Jewish Baghdad

By: Naim Kattan

Narrated by: A. C. Fellner

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.

©2005 Raincoast Books (P)2008 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

"A fine portrait of a particular place and time that is no more." (Library Journal)
"In all respects, a most moving and haunting work." (Montreal Star)

Marvelous

This is a great account of Baghdad in 40s. But also of modern Iraq as well. What made it so great is not only the description of that time many Iraqis growing in that age can associate with , but its historical account of Iraqi Jews, and their existential struggle in the modern state of Iraq. This is in parallel with author inner existential alienation, reflecting the mindset of any educated middle class conscious of Western modernity in their teens at that time(and generations to come after). It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that this is very much needed in understanding socio-polotical evolution of events in recent Iraq with such random events that started with The Farhood and kept widening to involve all other circles , and almost all other ethnic groups, to eventually engulf all of Iraq, depleting it of its middle class intelligentsia , starting the assault on Its Jews back then, with justification to include almost all of Iraq that ended up with its complete ruin. I can certainly connect the dots from Rashid Ali Al-Gaylani through 1958, then 1963 , the ascend of Saddam to power and his disasters to what followed up to this point.

MY HOPE IS THAT AN ENGLISH TRANSLATION WOULD BE AVAILABLE OF THE AUTHOR SECOND AND THIRD PART OF HIS BIOGRAPHY.