On my second day in Iraq, my translator took me out for a tour of
the Kurdish city where I would make my home for the next year. He
pointed out the park built atop a field where Saddam's forces once
performed executions. He took me to the market where village women
with tattooed faces sold small bunches of narcissus to signal the
arrival of spring. On the outskirts of town, past the endless maze
of cement-block houses built by the nouveaux riche, was a
neighborhood of mud-walled houses and small, winding allies. "We
call this Jewlakan—the Jews," he told me. "This is where the Jews
once lived."
My translator sounded nostalgic about the departure of his Jewish
neighbors, even though at 26 he was too young to have seen even the
last of them flee. Iraq's Jewish community was one of the oldest in
the world. Abraham was born near Babylon. A photographer I know is
the son of Iraqi Jews who were born in Baghdad. He grew up in Great
Neck and he told me his parents always thought of themselves as Arab
Jews. Jews were an important part of Iraqi society up until the
1930s, when anti-Jewish sentiment began to build. My translator said
the last of the Kurdish Jews left Sulaimaniyah by 1970.
I thought this reference to the exiled community would be an anomaly
during my year in Iraq. But it wasn't. Iraqis mentioned Jews all the
time—not always in reference to Israel and often with more affection
than I would ever have expected.
I had taken a job teaching journalism to Iraqis from all over the
country. The Iraqi who hired me advised me not to tell anyone about
my faith. Other journalists who had worked in Iraq said the same. So
for the first time in my life, I planned to pass. But as what? A
born-again Christian? A Muslim convert? An atheist?
* * *
In his 1989 book, From Beirut to Jerusalem, Thomas Friedman writes
about being the only full-time Jewish-American reporter in West
Beirut during the Israeli invasion. He didn't hide his religion from
those who asked about it directly, but he didn't offer it up either.
"I quickly discovered, though, that people assumed you couldn't
possibly be Jewish," he writes. "After all, what Jew in his right
mind would come to Beirut?"
These days in Iraq, the assumption of some—really, a radical few—is
that the entire Western media is populated entirely by Jews. Jill
Carroll, the Christian Science Monitor reporter who was held hostage
in Iraq for three months, said she recited the Lord's Prayer in an
effort to convince her captors she wasn't a Jew. She said her
kidnappers assumed all members of the Western media were Jewish and
she fought to convince them otherwise in order to save her life.
Kidnapping wasn't a concern in the quiet Kurdish city where I would
be living. The Kurds have a reputation for being secular and are
especially fond of Americans. But my students would be Iraqis from
Fallujah, Ramadi, Mosul, Basra, and Baghdad. They would come from
all faiths and ethnic groups. I wasn't sure how they would respond
to meeting a real live Jew. Would Iraqi people get it when I
explained that my family had no connection to Israel and that my
mother's worst nightmare is that I become Orthodox? I thought the
concept of being a cultural Jew might not make it in translation. So
I set out to pass.
From the start, I failed miserably. Religion is a formidable part of
Iraqi life, and my students inevitably asked me about my faith. I'd
smile and shrug, changing the subject. One of my favorite students
was an old newspaperman from Kut. He spoke fondly of the time when
Jews lived in his city on the Tigris to the southeast of Baghdad. He
was embarrassed by the sectarianism of today's Iraq and he saw the
Jews of yore as a sign of a worldliness he now longed for. I didn't
tell him I was Jewish in part because I thought he already knew.
But my coworkers were more difficult to dodge. They were young
journalists, eager to learn about the world. The war—and the wave of
foreign correspondents it attracted—had given them a crash course in
Western culture, and they were hungry for more. They were fluent in
English as well as Kurdish and Arabic. All were fiercely secular,
except my translator, who was trying on Muslim fundamentalism for
size.
But my translator was full of contradictions. He was equally
obsessed with Agatha Christie books and Moqtada al-Sadr speeches. He
was born in Halabja, the Kurdish town gassed by Saddam in 1988. He'd
been a Kurdish nationalist until the American invasion of Iraq, but
he'd recently traded that ideology in for a brand of radical Islam
born on the streets of Fallujah. He had watched—and enjoyed—every
episode of Friends. He also railed endlessly about the soulless
West. "Everyone there is disconnected," he would say. "No one
believes in God."
On my second night in the country, my translator took me to his
brother's house for a baby naming. We ate okra on a woven mat with
his nieces and nephews. The family passed out candy and offered
endless cups of strong, sweet tea in tiny glasses. The children
crowded around me and tried to teach me Kurdish. The baby's father
took an informal poll at the party in order to choose the child's
name. Everyone liked Heshu, the Kurdish word for a cluster of
grapes. A cousin who was an imam blessed the baby. I would watch
Heshu grow during my year in Iraq, looking at her increasing girth
and strength as a measure of my months in the country.
The family treated me as an honored guest. The bearded imam thanked
God for the birth of the baby and asked me to say a few words. "This
baby is lucky to be born into a family where there is so much love,"
I said sheepishly.
Even in the midst of all this joy, my translator's family did not
want to forget what their people had suffered. At the end of the
night his brother pulled me aside to show me a set of picture
postcards of the 5,000 Kurds who died in Halabja's poison gas
attack. He wanted to make sure I knew what had happened to his
people. Like so many Kurds, he was afraid that the world had
forgotten them. Or worse, that no one believed it had happened at
all.
"I have a secret to tell you," I said to my translator a few days
later. "I'm Jewish."
He wasn't surprised. He knew on some level, even if they had not
said it directly, that other journalists he had worked for during
the war had also been Jewish. One had taken him to dinner in Baghdad
for a Seder of sorts.
I told him because I wanted him to know that I had a family, just
like he did, and a sense of tradition and duty. I wanted him to know
that I had dinner with my grandparents at least once a week growing
up. That I felt guilty being away from my family for the holidays. I
couldn't have told him anything about who I was without saying that
I was Jewish. Maybe it wouldn't have meant anything to him. But I
realized it meant a lot to me.
Perhaps it wouldn't have been a sin to lie, but it did feel like a
mitzvah to tell the truth. Iraqis were welcoming me into their homes
and looking to me as their teacher. Wasn't it only fair that I gave
them a little of myself?
The next person I told was the blue-eyed long-lashed Casanova of our
staff. He loved to drink whiskey. One night at the Chinese
restaurant—the only decent place to eat in town—I taught him to say
"L'chaim" when he toasted. He batted his eyelashes and reveled his
perfect, guttural chet. He taught the blessing to all his friends,
secular intellectuals who felt subversive uttering a Hebrew word.
* * *
Less than a month into my gig, Passover approached. I told my boss
I'd like to make a meal for the half-dozen staff members who knew my
secret. My boss had spent most of his life in London. His father was
a former peshmerga, a Kurdish freedom fighter, who had returned to
help rebuild the country. My boss brimmed over with excitement about
the prospect of a Seder in his garden. He invited the whole staff to
the Seder, doubling the number of people who knew I was Jewish.
My boss spent the day sipping red wine and roasting the lamb. He
spread long white tableclothes over the tables in the garden. I
spent the day channeling my grandmother Anna, who worships food. I
made roasted potatoes with garlic and dill, a lemony carrot and
parsley salad, a Greek salad, green beans, and a minted yogurt
salad. There wasn't time to find matzo, so I made do with
traditional Kurdish bread. As I laid out the paper-thin sheets of
nani tiri, I thought about the Kurdish people, who have experienced
so much suffering. Their bread was the kind of bread that one could
pack up in a hurry and keep for a long time. Kurdish women soaked it
in water to give it body, but of course we would eat it dry.
I made charoset with apples, wine, and walnuts—though I later found
out Iraqi Jews traditionally use date syrup in theirs. I used the
red radishes my grandfather likes for the bitter herbs, because I
couldn't find any horseradish. My boss roasted the lamb and brought
six bottles of surprisingly good Greek red wine.
I was so focused on the meal that I gave little thought to the
haggadah. A friend had suggested using a nontraditional version
downloadable from the Internet. I loaded it onto a laptop and went
to the table.
The Iraqi summer had already descended on us, so the air was thick
and hot that night, with only a hint of a breeze.
"I hear this is a holiday about slavery?" said the most literal of
my colleagues, a philosopher and arak drinker.
I taught the table to say the shehechianu. And then I suddenly
became my grandfather—rushing through the story of the Exodus as if
I was in a speed-reading competition.
"Slow down," the philosopher said. He wanted to know more about
Moses, who features prominently in the Koran. I told them he was
abandoned as a baby and grew up in the palace of the Pharaoh,
unaware that he was Jewish. But somewhere in his heart, I wagered,
he must have known his true faith.
I had failed at concealing my true faith, just as Moses had, and
took it upon myself, albeit in much smaller measure, to lead a group
in tracing Moses' earlier footsteps, through the story of
liberation.
For the first time, I was telling the story of the Exodus to a group
of people who had known oppression and liberation in their
lifetimes. The Kurds at the table felt that they had been liberated
by Saddam's defeat. But even their most joyous occasions were laden
with reminders of the suffering they had endured.
As we sat in that quiet garden, others all over Iraq were hiding in
their houses or hunkering down in their basements. Even if they were
relieved by the fall of the old regime, their lives were becoming
increasingly unlivable. I knew my students from outside the Kurdish
region felt that their personal liberation was still far away. I
made up my own blessing. I asked everyone at the table to pray that
all Iraqi people would one day experience freedom. I also asked them
to pray that we would all always remember what it was like to be
slaves and that we would never subject other human beings to a
similar fate.
I don't remember that night clearly because I drank the required
four glasses of wine. I'm not a drinker and I don't like red wine,
but I couldn't resist toasting along with the table. I told everyone
to fill their glasses to overflowing as I had once seen Lubavitchers
do at the only traditional Seder I'd ever attended. But it wasn't
just the alcohol that made me giddy. I was also experiencing real
joy. The air buzzed with it. My face flushed with it. It was the
kind of joy that is meant to be intoned in Jewish prayer. Thank you
God, for bringing this group of people together to perform this
ancient ritual for the first time in this place.
Jessie Graham is a writer and radio reporter.
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