Fiction Produces Reality

This article explores the reception by Iraqis of the Arabic translation of the Hebrew novel The Pictures on the Wall (2015) by Tsionit Fattal Kuperwasser, and the significance of these responses to contemporary Iraqi discourse about Iraqi Jews. The novel tells the tragic story of Nuria, an Iraqi-Jewish woman who rebels against patriarchal society in the Iraq of the first half of the twentieth century. She loses three sons in various disasters; the fourth, born after the death of his brothers, chooses, like many other Jews in 1951, to emigrate with his parents to Israel. After the publication of the novel’s Arabic edition, Iraqi intellectuals have made contact with the Israeli author, and have written about her and the novel in the Iraqi media, while she herself has published in Iraqi newspapers. The reception of her novel by Iraqis exemplifies the emergence of a new dialogue in Iraqi society, one that seeks to read and learn about the Jewish minority that lived in Iraq for centuries but left their country of birth during the 1950s. The article demonstrates that Kuperwasser’s novel, like other novels penned by Jewish writers of Iraqi origin, is sold, taught, and read in Iraq because it fills a chapter on Iraqi-Jews that has been forgotten in Iraqi history. The author, who was educated in the Israeli education system, experienced a similar trajectory, realizing that the culture and history of Iraqi Jews is hardly taught in Israel. Iraqis, for their part, are not concerned by the fact that she is an Israeli. On the contrary, as an Israeli of Iraqi origin, they consider her novel an attempt to preserve the cultural heritage of her parents, and proof that Iraqi Jews are Iraqi as much as they are Israeli.