Between cohesion and collapse: Iraqi Jewish community life in the novels of Tova Murad Sadka and Mona Yahia

This article offers a comparative literary analysis of Tova Murad Sadka's No Way Back (1984) and Mona Yahia's When the Gray Beetles Took Over Baghdad (2000), two novels by Iraqi Jewish women writers that together form a diptych of communal displacement. Sadka's novel documents the social norms, family authority, and political anxieties of Baghdad's Jewish community during the 1930s and 1940s; Yahia's depicts the survival strategies and eventual flight of those who remained after the mass emigration of 1951. The article argues that, read comparatively, these works produce a layered literary historiography of Iraqi Jewish experience, attending to communal life before emigration and to its dissolution under successive political pressures. Three interconnected dimensions are examined: social organization and the regulation of daily life; the impact of political transformation on minority belonging; and the processes of forced departure and exile. The article demonstrates how literary narrative preserves experiential dimensions of historical displacement that conventional accounts render invisible.