Baghdad, Yesterday

Sasson Somekh's wise and often gently funny memoir Baghdad, Yesterday takes shape like a series of telling snapshots from another time and place. The time is the 1930s and 40s and the place, Iraq, where Somekh and his family were part of the country's then-flourishing Jewish community. The book-which was highly acclaimed when it was published in Israel in 2004 and which has since been translated into Turkish and Arabic-offers an intimate view of this milieu and manages both to describe vividly the young Somekh's intellectual and emotional growth and to map the now-vanished world of Baghdad's book stalls and literary cafés, its Arabic-speaking Jewish bank clerks, tuxedoed Iraqi-Jewish weddings, outdoor movies at the Cinema Diana, and bonfires by the Tigris. As the pieces of Somekh's unsentimental and sharply drawn memoir accumulate, they also mount in meaning. The book celebrates the ups and downs of Iraqi Jewish life as it also portrays the eventual dissolution of the community in the early 1950s.

For years one of the world's leading authorities on Arabic literature and among modern Hebrew's most respected translators from contemporary Arabic poetry, Israel-Prize-winner Sasson Somekh has spent decades writing and teaching about a wide range of Middle Eastern cultural topics, and his personal and professional experience put him in a unique position to look back and reflect on the rich, startling, and now-vanished universe of mid-twentieth-century Baghdad.