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Life after Baghdad
Memoirs of an Arab-Jew in Israel, 1950–2000

Sasson Somekh
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 …”

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 Shalim, St. Antony’s College, Oxford, author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

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