Tenants and Cobwebs

✍ Scribed by Samir Naqqash

• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Year: 2019
• Tongue: English
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

Samir Naqqash's stirring novel Tenants and Cobwebs nostalgically commemorates the lost culture of an ancient Iraqi Jewish minority living amidst a majority Muslim population in 1940s Baghdad. The plot unfolds during a time of great turmoil: the rise of Iraqi nationalism and anti-Jewish sentiment fueled by Nazi propaganda; the Farûd, a bloody pogrom carried out against Jewish residents
of Baghdad in 1941; and the founding of Israel in 1948. These pivotal events profoundly affected Muslim-Jewish relationships, forever changing the nature of the Jewish experience in Iraq and eventually leading to a mass exodus of Iraqi Jews to Israel in 1951.

Tenants and Cobwebs deftly narrates the lives of Jewish characters who refuse to leave Baghdad despite these tumultuous times as well as those who are compelled to leave but nonetheless cling to the life they know. While the Jewish residents appear to live peacefully and harmoniously in the same Baghdadapartment complex...