Review:The Wolf of Baghdad: Memoir of a Lost Homeland, Carol Isaacs

By Steven Barfield

Cartoonist and musician, Carole Isaacs’s innovative graphic narrative tells the unfamiliar and tragic story of how Baghdad’s large and well-integrated Jewish community (c.150,000), was driven from Iraq by official pogroms and unofficial riots during the 1940s and early 1950s. The Jewish community had lived happily in Baghdad for many centuries before they felt forced to flee and their history dates back to the Babylonian captivity c. 586 BCE.  A book of ghosts and phantoms, The Wolf of Baghdad is told from the point of view of Isaacs herself, an Iraqi-Jewish descendant, and conjures up this lost world of the Jewish community of Baghdad in a completely wordless, graphic narrative whose dreamscape is as powerful as it is evanescent. 

It is at once a deeply personal story and at the same time evocative of a time and place long since disappeared. Jewish Baghdad is both lost to Isaacs and lost to history as hardly any, perhaps no, Jewish residents remain. Isaacs remarks: ‘I’ve been living in two places all my life; the England I was born in, and the lost world of my Iraqi-Jewish family’s roots.’ There is also a motion comic version with a music soundtrack (from the Jewish-Iraqi tradition) that is available as a DVD-ROM and VoD to rent or buy at http://www.thesurrealmccoy.com/shop.html. Isaacs has also toured the motion comic version at many festivals with a live music accompaniment (Isaacs herself plays accordion and keyboards).

Carole Isaacs is well known as a cartoonist by her pen name, The Surreal McCoy, in such magazines as The New Yorker and there is something deliberately surreal and poetic about both the images of the narrative and her overall approach. On a summer night Isaacs is transported by the power of Baghdadi Jewish music which comes drifting into her flat as she remembers her dead grandmother and in turn the stories of Baghdad from long ago. She travels there in a vision where she encounters ghost-like inhabitants who turn out to be her departed family members. It is in this respect, a narrative driven by loss. Her companion for her wandering through the city is a wolf, a talismanic symbol of protection from evil for Baghdad’s Jews.  She is clearly a living visitor, although somewhat disguised in a traditional Iraqi Jewish cloak (which belonged to her grandmother) and head covering, as was common in 1930s Baghdad. This makes her blend in, while the other figures are depicted as much more insubstantial. They are shown as translucent and in outline.

In the interaction of these ghostly figures we see the business of normal everyday life as it went on in Baghdad: buying some bread or fruit in the souk, cooking in a house and going to school. It is a strength of the text that we see so many scenes of everyday life happening which reminds us how the community had endured there in relative peace for millennia.

There is no doubt one of the main characters of the narrative is the fabled city of Baghdad and Isaacs does an excellent job of conjuring up the hidden alleyways and Islamic architecture of this fabled Iraqi city.  There is a beautiful double page image of the Baghdad skyline at dawn (see figure 3) and Baghdad is shown to be opulent and overflowing with trade and life (see figure 4). Isaac’s has an exemplary eye for detail and whether it is an image of her grandfather the Rabbi reading by the light of an oil lamp (p.37), families sleeping on the rooftops in summer (pp. 47-48), or a child learning to swim in the Tigris river (p.88), these conjure up a very replete world.  While Jewish houses are identifiable by a star of David inscribed into the façade this seems to have no ominous quality to begin with. Instead, good neighbourliness is more the order of the day as Baghdad’s different communities successfully co-exist alongside one another. 

Arguably, the wordlessness of the narrative does make the reader work a bit harder to follow the story than if there had been dialogue. However, it is very appropriate for such a dream-like narrative and forces you to feel something of the estrangement of the familiar that Isaacs herself feels as she sees unusual sights and sounds. Our dreams often come without words. It also leaves open the question of what language it should be in.  The Baghdadi Jews spoke and wrote in Arabic and in exile, many Iraqi Jewish writers like Samir Naqqash (1938 –2004) continued to preserve the same longstanding Arabic literary tradition. 

Strictly speaking this is not memory, as much as imagination working with her memory of what her relatives had told her about Jewish life in Baghdad; it is the imagination which turns these memories into something strangely alive. This is not an unfamiliar strategy in poetic texts and we might think of the imagination as a means of transporting us to long lost places  in Keat’s ‘Ode on A Grecian Urn.’ Or to use a more modern example, which is specifically from the Polish Jewish surrealist tradition, we might think of Tadeus Kantor’s (1915-1990) famous theatre performance. The Dead Class (Umarła klasa), where he is transported back into his school days before the Holocaust changed everything.

As the narrative continues it becomes graver and more disturbing, as the growth of antisemitism in Iraq increases with the rise of Arab nationalism. The Farhud (June 1–2, 1941) was an emblematic pogrom against the Jews led by supporters of the defeated pro-Nazi government of Rashid Ali that killed many. The narrative shows the growing hostility to Baghdad’s Jews in terms of what we see happening to them rather than explaining it. Like Isaacs, the reader is immersed in the narrative and a bystander to what happens – in both dreams and history events cannot be altered and we are always visitors. Images become fragmented and the colour tone becomes noticeably darker and more reminiscent of nightmare than dream. Fear sets into the community as crude leaflets bearing swastikas are dropped from an aircraft. While in another scene, antisemitic Arab leaders are displayed in a panel shaped like a swastika (p.128). And yet, good neighbourliness does not completely disappear and it is two Arab family friends who play good Samaritan and block the street on which Isaacs’ ancestors live and save their lives from rioters (p.159), while Christian Arab priests hide other Jews in a church. The text suggests that recent politics and prejudice cannot destroy all human values.

Perhaps the starkest image though is of a desecrated and destroyed synagogue which shows how bold and imaginative Isaacs can be with her panels.

After her family flee Baghdad as virtually all Jews were forced to, Isaacs wakes up in her apartment in London, an amulet made from a wolf’s tooth, sinn el-dheeb,  around her neck. This is the wolf who accompanied her in her dream travels but for all its vaunted powers to avert the evil eye, we cannot help but think it is shown to be a flimsy piece of folklore when compared to the power of real-world events. Or perhaps the wolf is simply dismayed at humanity’s propensity for hate?  Although in her vision the wolf does gently tug Isaacs away from the emotional carnage she sees in the Baghdad of the past and returns her to her own home. 

The task of the explanation of events is left to the afterword, where the events we see are presented with a historical context. Although the lives of Isaac’s ancestors are explained in the narrative itself by means of brief portraits as they appear, this does not give us a full historical picture. This may make it hard to follow the novel for some readers, but the compensation is that we feel the bewilderment of this long-standing and very assimilated community as events spiral out of their control and beyond their worst nightmares of what could happen. For those who are interested there are published historical accounts of what happened to Baghdad’s Jewish community and The Wolf of Baghdad does not claim to be a history book.  This is a poignant, compelling story whose inventiveness in terms of its visual narrative will leave the reader moved as the best historical fiction often does. Isaacs invites us into a world that has disappeared irretrievably, but it makes us feel and think about larger issues of change, dispossession and exile which are such an integral part of contemporary experience.

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Steven Barfield, was a British academic for most of his career, teaching principally at the University of Westminster, London. More recently he has been an educational consultant and has taught, mentored, and advised throughout the middle east. He is a Visting Research Fellow at London South Bank University.