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"Sasson Somekh's memoir 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 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 cafes, its Arabic-speaking Jewish bank clerks, outdoor movies at the Cinema Diana, and bonfires by the Tigris. As the pieces of Somekh's unsentimental 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."--BOOK JACKET.
Translation is intercultural communication in its purest form. Its power in forming and/or deforming cultural identities has only recently been acknowledged, given the attention it deserves. The chapters in this unique volume assess translation from Arabic into other languages from different perspectives: the politics, economics, ethics, and poetics of translating from Arabic; a language often neglected in western mainstream translation studies.
This first biography of a Palestinian writer also provides a moving account of the ways “ordinary” individuals are swept up by the floodtides of both war and peace Beautifully written, and composed with a novelist’s eye for detail, this book tells the story of an exceptional man and the culture from which he emerged.Taha Muhammad Ali was born in 1931 in the Galilee village of Saffuriyya and was forced to flee during the war in 1948. He traveled on foot to Lebanon and returned a year later to find his village destroyed. An autodidact, he has since run a souvenir shop in Nazareth, at the same time evolving into what National Book Critics Circle Award–winner Eliot Weinberger has dubbed ...
The writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff (1917–1979) offer a refreshing reassessment of Arab-Jewish relations in the Middle East. A member of the bourgeois Jewish community in Cairo, Kahanoff grew up in a time of coexistence. She spent the years of World War II in New York City, where she launched her writing career with publications in prominent American journals. Kahanoff later settled in Israel, where she became a noted cultural and literary critic. Mongrels or Marvels offers Kahanoff's most influential and engaging writings, selected from essays and works of fiction that anticipate contemporary concerns about cultural integration in immigrant societies. Confronted with the breakdown of cosmopolitan Egyptian society, and the stereotypes she encountered as a Jew from the Arab world, she developed a social model, Levantinism, that embraces the idea of a pluralist, multicultural society and counters the prevailing attitudes and identity politics in the Middle East with the possibility of mutual respect and acceptance.
Life after Baghdad is a follow-on volume to author Sasson Somekh's highly successful Baghdad, Yesterday Ibis Editions, Jerusalem, 2007], which told of Somekh's boyhood in the city of his birth and the circumstances under which his family decided to forsake Iraq, a land in which they were rooted for centuries, and move to Israel. The first book was highly acclaimed in the Times Literary Supplement and London Review of Books - and from the Israeli Ha'aretz, "It is hard to overstate the beauty, originality, lucidity, gentleness, wisdom and importance of Baghdad, Yesterday." This present book continues the story where the previous volume ends. Sasson Somekh, a noted student of modern Arabic cult...
Aimée Israel-Pelletier examines the lives of Middle Eastern Jews living in Islamic societies in this political and cultural history of the Jews of Egypt. By looking at the work of five Egyptian Jewish writers, Israel-Pelletier confronts issues of identity, exile, language, immigration, Arab nationalism, European colonialism, and discourse on the Holocaust. She illustrates that the Jews of Egypt were a fluid community connected by deep roots to the Mediterranean and the Nile. They had an unshakable sense of being Egyptian until the country turned toward the Arab East. With Israel-Pelletier's deft handling, Jewish Egyptian writing offers an insider's view in the unique character of Egyptian Jewry and the Jewish presence across the Mediterranean region and North Africa.
This book studies the phenomenon of freethinking in medieval Islam, as exemplified in the figures of Ibn al-R wand and Ab Bakr al-R z . It reconstructs their thought and analyzes the relations of the phenomenon to Islamic prophetology and its repercussions in Islamic thought.
“An exceptional exposé of the sufferings of the Iraqi and Mizrahi Jews in Israel during the 1950s.” —Övg Ülgen, Shofar Between 1949 and 1951, 123,000 Iraqi Jews immigrated to the newly established Israeli state. Lacking the resources to absorb them all, the Israeli government resettled them in maabarot, or transit camps, relegating them to poverty. In the tents and shacks of the camps, their living conditions were squalid and unsanitary. Basic necessities like water were in short supply, when they were available at all. Rather than returning to a homeland as native sons, Iraqi Jews were newcomers in a foreign place. Impossible Exodus tells the story of these Iraqi Jews’ first deca...
The Arab Radical Left explores the entangled histories of Left-wing trends across the Mashreq and Maghreb regions in the 'Long Sixties'. Based on an analysis of textual and audio-visual materials, it surveys radical Left traditions in the Arab world that took shape between the 1950s and 1970s. The book is divided into three thematic parts that are compiled of case studies utilising a multitude of perspectives in political theory, history, literary studies and sociology. In the first part, the authors study revolutionary circulations of men, representations, and know-how. The second part is devoted to interrogating the multifaceted tensions between local, regional, and global challenges. The final part scrutinises the transformations of political subjectivities and invites reflection on the general shift from a revolutionary configuration of temporality to the closure of time - and the so-called 'Left Melancholy'. The result is a balanced account of Left-wing revolutionaries that provides new insights into the history of the Middle East as well as contemporary radicalisation processes and authoritarian rules.