Abstract
Co-authored book review of the new translation of Samir Naqqash’s Tenants and Cobwebs! Naqqash, one of the most remarkable Iraqi-Jewish writers, captured the complexities of exile, language, and identity in his work. This novel, now available in Hebrew, offers a powerful glimpse into the world of Iraqi Jews. In this novel, one of the central works of his literary corpus, Naqqash seeks to provide a literary explanation for the departure of most Iraqi Jews from their homeland—a homeland that was also the setting of his dream to be an Arab writer, a dream he never abandoned throughout his life. Naqqash returns to 1940s Baghdad, a multilingual and multicultural city, and attempts to reconstruct its linguistic and social mosaic through the microcosm of an apartment building where Jews and Muslims live together. He rebuilds the shared life and neighborly relations that once existed, a building that stands resilient against the winds of change and division brought by colonial occupations, nationalist struggles, and wars. Yet even this house ultimately succumbs to the transformations of time, as the cobwebs that form around it create walls and partitions between its residents, mirroring the national and religious separations imposed by war. These divisions distinguish Jews from Muslims, Iraq from Israel, leaving the house empty and abandoned, stripped of its inhabitants.