Farewell to Dejla: Stories of Iraqi Jews at Home and in Exile Tova Murad Sadka (Academy Chicago Publishers)
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Tova Murad Sadka, who grew up in Baghdad, joined this exodus, moving first to Israel and later to the U.S., where she lives now. In Farewell to Dejla, she uses the short story to explore the travails of Iraqi Jews, both in their homeland and in dispersion. Though marred by crude ethnic and religious stereotypes, her book offers a sensitive treatment of a community’s existential fears and an exquisite probing of the painful and comic aspects of culture clash. It’s especially resonant in light of the current situation in Iraq, where Islamist terrorists have taken advantage of the Bush administration’s postliberation incompetence to wage war on the country’s remaining religious minorities. A mass exodus of Christians has resulted, transforming Iraqi demographics; many Yazidis of northern Iraq and Mandaeans of the south have also been forced to bid farewell to Dejla (the Tigris River) and Al-Furat (the Euphrates).
Yet Sadka’s feminism sometimes pushes her animus in unexpected directions. In “Shoula and the Moslem Man,” for instance, Shoula’s Jewish brother is just as oppressive in his way as the Muslim pervert harassing her from afar. And in “The Rooster Crows,” a Muslim woman rebels when her husband decides to marry their young daughter off to a friend and take the friend’s own young daughter as his second wife.
Even without such flashes of eloquence, Sadka’s decision to write in English would have been wise. Iraqi-Israeli novelists such as Shimon Ballas and Eli Amir, who write in Hebrew, and Samir Naqqash, who wrote in Arabic, remain virtually unknown in the English-speaking world. Even the most celebrated novel about Iraqi Jewish life, Sami Michael’s Victoria, has been translated from Hebrew to English for publication in the UK but never published in the States. Farewell to Dejla appears here at a time of heightened interest in all things Iraqi, and will hopefully spur the publication of more fiction and nonfiction exploring the largely ignored history of Iraq’s Jews. v
