Biography
Excellence in Scholarship and Learning
Excellence in Scholarship and Learning
Life after Baghdad
Memoirs of an Arab-Jew in Israel, 1950–2000
Sasson Somekh served as professor of Arabic literature at Tel Aviv University for many years, and at other centres of learning in Europe and the US. He has published many books, including a ground-breaking monograph about Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz (Leiden, 1973). During the 1990s he served as director of the Israeli Academic Center in Cairo.
Life after Baghdad is a follow-on volume to the author’s highly successful Baghdad, Yesterday (Ibis Editions, Jerusalem, 2007), which told of Sasson 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. It was highly acclaimed in the TLS and London Review of Books, and in the Israeli Ha’aretz, “It is hard to overstate the beauty, originality, lucidity, gentleness, wisdom and importance of Baghdad, Yesterday.”
The present volume continues the story where the 2007 volume ends. Somekh, a noted student of modern Arabic culture, relates his life as a university professor and writer, taking the reader to Oxford, Princeton and Cairo, and introducing scholars and writers he befriended: S.D. Goitein, Mustafa Badawi and Haim Blanc, among others. He devotes a major section to Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006) with whom he maintained a close comradeship for three decades, and from whom he received the following letter: “Both our peoples knew extraordinary partnership for many years in ancient times, during the Middle Ages, and in the modern era, with quarrels being few and far between. Unfortunately, we have documented the disputes a hundred times more than the periods of friendship and cooperation …”
| Paperback ISBN: | 978-1-84519-502-1 |
| Paperback Price: | £16.99 / $22.50 |
| Release Date: | November 2011 |
| Page Extent / Format: | 170 pp. / 229 x 152 mm |
| Illustrated: | Yes |
Preface
Chapter 1: The Transit Camp
Chapter 2: Scouting About the Land
Chapter 3: The Tigris and the Jordan
Chapter 4: “The earth shall rise on new foundations”
Chapter 5: Lovers of Arabic in the First Hebrew City
Chapter 6: Days with Alexander Penn
Chapter 7: An Interrupted Dialogue
Chapter 8: Father
Chapter 9: Higher Learning in Lower Tel Aviv
Chapter 10: Roman à clef: Three Years at the Academy of the Hebrew Language
Chapter 11: A Family of My Own
Chapter 12: Mustafa
Chapter 13: Translating Literature
Chapter 14: Haim Blanc
Chapter 15: Saturday Evenings at the Goiteins
Chapter 16: Students and Colleagues
Chapter 17: 1988—Two Experiences
Chapter 18: A Modern Egyptian Sinbad
Chapter 19: Cairo—The Four Masters
Chapter 20: Cairo—End of the Century
Chapter 21: An Encounter with Taha Hussein’s Granddaughter
Chapter 22: Naguib Mahfouz—Thirty Years of Friendship
Sasson Somekh is Israel’s literary
expert on modern Arabic literature and a fine writer in his
own right. Born in Baghdad and educated in Oxford, he became
a prominent literary figure and left-wing intellectual circles
in Tel Aviv. Baghdad, Yesterday (2007) recorded the fascinating
story of a precocious Jewish teenager living in an Arab country
before and just after the establishment of the State of Israel. Life after Baghdad is the second volume of his autobiography
covering half a century of his illustrious career in Israel.
But Sasson Somekh is much more than an academic expert on the
literature of Israel’s neighbors. He is a living proof of the
possibility of a civilized dialogue and cultural cooperation
between Jews and Arabs.
Professor Avi Shlaim, St. Antony’s
College, Oxford, author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the
Arab World
Reviewed in Forward
https://forward.com/culture/163133/sasson-somekh-israel-arab-literature-iraqi-jew/
Books can be ordered by phone or online
Ordering in the UK, Europe, Asia, Australasia, South America and Rest of the World
Gazelle Book Services
Direct sales tel.: +44 (0)1524 528500; email: sales@gazellebookservices.co.uk
Web ordering: www.gazellebookservices.co.uk
Ordering in the United States and Canada
Independent Publishers Group (IPG)
Direct sales tel.: (800) 888-4741
Web ordering: www.ipgbook.com
Bookseller Ordering
Information is provided under the Resources tab.
eBook Ordering
e-Book type availability can be sourced via www.ipgbook.com by book title. Kindle availability is via Amazon .com and .co.uk sites.