In the 1940s a third of Baghdad’s population was Jewish. Within a decade,
nearly all 150,000 of Iraq’s Jews had fled. Of those remaining, most escaped
in the 1970s or were killed. Today, fewer than half a dozen remain.
This graphic memoir of a lost homeland is a wordless narrative by an
author homesick for a home she has never visited. Illuminated by family
portraits and testimonies, it is a moving, personal story that also pays
tribute to the lost history of the Jews of Iraq.
Transported by the power of music to her ancestral home in the old Jewish
quarter of Baghdad, Carol Isaacs encounters ghost-like inhabitants who
are revealed as long-gone family members. As she explores the city,
journeying through their memories and her imagination, what she sees at
first is successful integration, and cultural and social cohesion. Then the
mood turns darker with the fading of this ancient community’s fortunes.
Throughout, she is accompanied by a wolf, believed by Baghdadi Jews
to protect them from harmful demons.
Says Isaacs: ‘I’ve been living in two places all my life; the England I was
born in, and the lost world of my Iraqi-Jewish family’s roots.’
Carol Isaacs will be touring ‘The Wolf of Baghdad’ throughout 2019-2020 to festivals including UK
Jewish Film Festival and Jewish Book Week.
Carol Isaacs is a musician and, as The Surreal McCoy, a well-known cartoonist published in the New
Yorker, Spectator and Sunday Times.
‘The Wolf of Baghdad’ is also an animated slideshow with its
own musical soundtrack, which is often performed by a live band including Isaacs on accordion and keyboards, playing music
of Iraqi and Judeo-Arabic
origin.
Carol Isaacs has also worked with
many artists including Sinead
O’Connor and the Indigo
Girls. She is co-founder of the
London Klezmer Quartet. She
lives in North London.
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