Sasson Somekh - Baghdad Yesterday

Baghdad Yesterday

At the age of 70, Somekh wrote the first volume of his autobiography, Baghdad, Yesterday: The Making of an Arab Jew. The book was published in Hebrew and has been translated into Arabic, English and Turkish. In the book he describes his life as a Jewish child and teenager in Baghdad during the first 17 years of his life. He speaks of being a secular Jewish child from a secular Jewish home. He shows that the educated middle class that achieved prominence in the 1930s and 40s was the main influence on the norms of life in the Jewish community. Also, he shows that the Jews of Iraq enjoyed neighborly relations with their Muslim neighbors. Perhaps not ideal relations, but mutual respect between neighbors.

The second volume, Yamim Hazuyim ("Call it Dreaming") was published in 2008. It describes his life between Tel Aviv, Oxford, Princeton, and Cairo between 1951 and 2000. The book moves between the four major stations of his life: Tel Aviv - where he lived and worked for 40 years as a professor of Arabic literature, Oxford - where he received his PhD, Princeton - where he was occasionally a visiting professor in the 1970s and 80s, and Cairo - the city he did much literary research in, and where he was the head of the Israel Academic Center.