Early Life
Yusuf Salman Yusuf was born in Baghdad in 1901 to a father from an Assyrian village in the province of Mosul, northern Iraq. His family was humble, and his father is recorded as having made his living selling cakes and sweets. In 1907 he moved with his family to Basra in the south of the country in search of a better livelihood.
Yusuf attended the Syriac Christian School in Basra from 1908 to 1914, and the American Mission School in the city from 1914 to 1916. His education was then interrupted as his father had fallen ill and he had to seek employment for the family’s upkeep. He first took a job as a translator and clerk with the British Army in Basra, before moving to Nasiriyah in 1919 to help his brother run a mill. In 1924 he returned to Basra and gained employment as a clerk at the Electricity Supply Authority.
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“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
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