Name: Roz's review of Farewell, Babylon by Naïm Kattan
Item: Farewell, Babylon
Rating: 2
Author: Roz

Naïm Kattan

In Farewell, Babylon, Naim Kattan takes readers into the heart of exotic mid-19th-century Baghdad's then-teeming Jewish community. Jews had lived in Iraq for 25 centuries, long before the time of Christ or Muhammad, but anti-Semitism and nationalism were on the rise. In this beautifully written memoir, a young boy comes of age and describes his discoveries -- of work, literature, patriotism, the joys of lazy Sundays swimming in the Tigris. He also talks eloquently of his greatest discovery: women and love. This is a story of roots and exile, of thirst for life and life's experiences. However, more than that it is a tribute to a lost world, an ancient Eastern city in which Iraq's Kurds, Bedouins, Sunnis, Shiites, Chaldeans, Catholics, and Jews all lived together in a rough, rewarding sort of harmony.

Coming of Age in Jewish Baghdad

Farewell, Babylon

Farewell, Babylon is the memoir of a Jewish Iraqi ex-pat, talking about his adolescence in 1940s Baghdad. I thought this was gonna be a really interesting book and it mostly ended up being superficial adolescent boy angst that was super boring and irritating. He barely touched on topics that I would have loved to see more fully developed (like the pro-German sentiments that some Iraqis felt because they were the enemies of Iraq's colonizers and how that put Jewish Iraqis in a difficult position because Nazis weren't exactly subtle with their antisemitism or how the creation of Israel affected the Jewish diaspora in the Middle East). Instead there was chapter upon chapter about him visiting prostitutes and obsessing over how much a mystery women were. It basically felt like every other self-important adolescent boy's "coming of age" story that has ever been written and just as boring as all the ones that came before.

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Farewell, Babylon by Naïm Kattan

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Farewell, Babylon by Naïm Kattan