Memories of Eden: A Journey Through Jewish Baghdad

Violette Shamash was born in the last years of the Ottoman Empire into one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world, which at that time made up 40% of the population of Baghdad.

The book has been complied from notes and writings that she made for her children and grandchildren, and she writes a lot about daily life during her childhood - playing games with her cousins, walking to school through the bustling souk, preparing for the High Holy Days. Their milkmaid brings a cow to the house and milks her on the doorstep; their seamstress stays in the house for a month at a time.

In the 1930s, Violette is in her early 20s, and Baghdad is developing. The first department store opens - selling Bally shoes and Petit Bateau children's show more clothes! Even more exciting, Violette spends 1933 and 1934 in Palestine visiting her sister, enjoying sea-bathing (in Baghdad, women were only just stopping wearing the veil in public), flirting with young men, and buying her first proper bra ("a revelation - until then bras had not been made to enhance bosoms but rather to flatten them by tying them down").

At the same time, however, the anti-semitic propaganda coming out of Europe is finding a ready audience in Iraq, and eventually undermines the distant, but not hostile, relationship between the communities. This leads to the Farhud, a terrible attack in 1941 which marked the beginning of the end for the Jewish community. Violette and her family emigrate almost immediately afterwards. Her description of spending the two days hiding out in different locations, listening to the chaos overtaking the city, is vivid and terrifying.

Recommended for: a fascinating glimpse into life in Baghdad in the early years of the twentieth century. show less