[COLD OPEN, SOUND OF BANGLES JINGLING] In my family, I grew up with my grandmother's bangles, hearing them, seeing them all the time, and she used to cook a lot, use her hands a lot. So I was listening to the bangles, seeing the bangles, and just, I guess it wasn't something I consciously thought about, that it was just like it was the music in the background of being a woman, was wearing bangles. And she had a lot of bangles
[MUSIC, INTRO] This The Book of Life, a show about Jewish kidlit, mostly. I'm Heidi Rabinowitz. Sarah Sassoon's debut picture book, Shoham's Bangle, was named a 2023 Sydney Taylor Notable Book by the Association of Jewish Libraries. Based on Sarah's family history, it's the story of a Jewish family's escape from Iraq to Israel. We don't often get Mizrahi representation in kidlit, so I was particularly excited to learn more from Sarah.
Sarah Sassoon, welcome to The Book of Life.
Thanks for having me, Heidi.
Sarah, Shoham's Bangle is your first book. What is it about and what inspired you to write it?
So Shoham's Bangle is about a young girl from Iraq who has to leave with her family in 1950 and go to Israel. And she's got a very special bangle that she shares lots of different experiences with, with her grandmother. There's a musical element to these bangles that accompanies her in her day. And suddenly they have to leave and she can't take her bangle. And it's like something's missing for her. They go on this journey to Israel. Her grandmother gives her a surprise and I won't ruin the surprise. The bangle's there for her and with that she can continue her relationship with her grandmother and continue a new life in Israel, but not forgetting where she comes from, which her bangle also reminds her of. This was inspired from my own family story. All my grandparents are Iraqi. My father was born in Baghdad. And one of the few stories that I was told growing up was about my aunt at the airport, that she wouldn't give her ring. So this inspired me to write Shoham's Bangle about a little girl who was able to take her jewelry, just in another way. When the Jews left Iraq, they went by the airport, and at the airport, there were officials checking their bags, and they used to even burn around the fedoras of the men's hats to make sure that they weren't hiding any jewelry or coins or any valuables. They weren't allowed to take anything with them besides 50 dinars. So my aunt was a little girl of about seven, she was with my grandmother, and they were checking my grandmother, they were checking the baby, they made my grandmother unswaddle the baby and check that she wasn't hiding anything with the baby. And they check all the suitcases of course. And then they looked at my aunt and they saw she had a ring on her finger. And they said to my grandmother, you allowed her to keep her ring. And my grandmother said, she wouldn't take it off. So my aunt was listening to all this. And she was very feisty. And she was very proud. And she was, I guess, ashamed about the way these officials -- they were women, the women used to check the women -- the way they were speaking to her mother. And so she pulled off her ring, she just threw the ring at the officials as an act of defiance. It was it was quite a dramatic moment. And I think it was, it was part of the trauma for many Iraqi Jews, was this leaving with nothing and that humiliation at the airport of being checked. It's something everyone remembers, and any Iraqi who sees my book, they all have their stories. These stories, the story of the Iraqi Jews leaving, wasn't something I grew up with. It was something that I've had to research over the last few years very intensively to understand the whole story. And it's something I learned in bits and pieces growing up. So my aunt, for example, took me aside once and said, Don't be ashamed of who you are. Do you know who you are? You are a Babylonian Jew. You come from like the princes of David. And I didn't understand what she was talking about. We were in Sydney, Australia. My grandparents had moved there with the whole family in the late 60s. I was born in Australia and I had no idea of this Iraqi background, and yet it's all I knew, at the same time. It just wasn't spoken about. It's a very strange dissonance.
What is the significance of bangles in Iraqi culture in general and to you in particular?
Bangles are very significant. Iraq is a modern concept. It was a country created by the British basically, it was the kingdom of Iraq in 1932, officially, became the Republic of Iraq in 1958. Before that, it was under the Ottoman Empire, before the British Mandate came in after World War I in 1918. The reason I go into this history is that under the Ottoman Empire, jewelry was very important. They didn't have banks in those days. So the jewelry was like putting money in a bangle and earrings and necklaces, women, like they were the bank. The jewelry was given to the wife, the mother, to girls, and they were kept at home. And it was portable. And it was quite a practical thing in those days in the time of the Ottoman Empire. And it was a status thing as well. When you got married, you'd give your fiance a bangle. The amount of jewelry you had was a status thing. It's still that way. And it wasn't only in Iraq, it was actually across the Middle East. It's still very popular today. So you'll see a lot of Middle Eastern women have bangles and my family, I grew up with my grandmother's bangles, hearing them, seeing them all the time, and she used to cook a lot, use her hands a lot. So it was listening to the bangles, seeing the bangles. And just I guess it wasn't something I consciously thought about. But it was just like it was the music in the background of being a woman, was wearing bangles. And she had a lot of bangles.
What is the connection between your family and the characters in the book? Was Shoham a real person and was Nana Aziza a real person?
They are real. I wanted these names to be remembered Shoham's actually my aunt, she was Souham in Iraq, she became Shoham in Israel, because Souham was too Arabic. And Nana Aziza is actually my grandmother, that I've had a very close relationship with her. She was always cooking and baking all day long. I name all my uncles as well, who were born in Iraq. I think I wanted to put everyone's names in because this is such a forgotten story. And it's such a not spoken about story that I needed to name it, I needed to put everyone back where they belong.
Shoham cooks and bakes a lot with her Nana Aziza within the story. And I'm kind of surprised actually that there were no recipes at the back of the book. So if you could have included a recipe, what would it be?
So if I could have included a recipe would have been baba tamar. It never occurred to me to add a recipe. I would have happily added, and in the education I provided to Kar-Ben, I added lots of cookie recipes. Baba tamar is a wonderful cookie. It's a date filled cookie. It's a bit complicated, though, like all Iraqi Jewish cooking, most of it takes time. And the ability to kind of stuff the cookie with the dates that you've crushed and flatten it. It's a skill actually, you need to see it and feel it. And the only reason I know how to make it is because I used to make it with my Nana Aziza.
So it's a an apprenticeship cookie.
Yes, it's a generational cookie. I think most of Iraqi cooking is that way. When I cook now I cook to return to my grandmother, to cook according to the way she cooked and the way it tasted with her. I'm not interested in the easy kind of recipes to cut corners. I really, really want to capture the way she cooked. Because I feel like it's something that's getting lost.
Well, then maybe it makes sense that there wasn't a recipe at the back, because these recipes really need to be shown, not just told on paper.
Yeah, exactly. Maybe through a YouTube clip.
Yeah. Your story includes Operation Ezra and Nehemiah. Can you tell us more about what that was?
So Operation Ezra and Nehemiah was an amazing airlift created by the Mossad and Israel to get the Iraqi Jews out. I think it was one of the biggest airlifts in history. Jews from Iraq consider themselves Babylonian Jews all the way back from the Judean exile in 586 BCE with the destruction of the First Temple, and a lot of our customs, a lot of our food, can be traced back to the Talmud, which was developed in Babylon. My grandmother always said how beautiful life was in Baghdad, which is why I actually began with my question in my research, so why did they leave? If the Tigris River was such a wonderful place where Muslims, Christians, and Jews met at the coffee shops, only the men obviously... my grandmother described how she used to swap bread with her Muslim neighbor. They really had very real, very good relationships. A third of Baghdad was Jewish in 1917. They were integral to the society just like American Jews are integral to American society, Baghdadian Jews saw themselves as Iraqis. And the Jews were very much part of the Senate, they were part of commerce. They were part of every aspect of a modern country emerging in the Middle East. That's, that's where the Jews were, they were very proud of their position. So why did they have to leave? was always my question. It's complicated, because you kind of have to understand the history leading up to the airlift in 1950-51. Antisemitism was increasing in Iraq, there was the farhud in 1941, which was a massive pogrom against the Jews. They've got 180 names of people who were killed, officially, but over 600 more at least were killed and put into a mass grave. It was a massive riot. And they say that the only people who survived were people who were saved by their Muslim neighbors. Then with the creation of Israel in 1948, and the rise of antisemitism that had been happening before with pan-Arabism, which is just Arab nationalism, things became really bad for the Jews. And so Jews began escaping, smuggling themselves out. It was a very dangerous time, there was even a time where I think over 600 Jews were in prison. It was it was just a terrible, terrible, uncertain time to be a Jew, scary. In 1950 they created the taskit law, which was the law allowing Jews to leave. Before they weren't allowed to leave. There were no passports for Jews, you could not leave Iraq, you had to smuggle yourself out, as I said, it was very dangerous, because if you were caught, you were arrested and put in jail. And robbers could take advantage. So it was just perilous to escape and yet, still thousands were leaving. So this law was to contain the number of Jews leaving and also to make it official, also take away all their valuables. So Operation Ezra and Nehemiah was to get the Jews safely to Israel. One of the reasons the Iraqi government allowed it was they thought it would cripple Israel. Israel at the time was a fledgling state. It was in a deep depression. They didn't have resources for themselves, let alone 120,000 immigrants. Shlomo Hillel was an Iraqi who had moved to Israel earlier on, and he helped to orchestrate this mass aliyah. He tells the story of being called in to speak to Levi Eshkol, who was the Housing Minister at the time, and Levi Eshkol says to him, You cannot bring all the Iraqi Jews here, we don't have houses, we don't have food. We don't have jobs, you cannot bring them. And Shlomo Hillel was very upset by this. He left the office and he gets called by Ben Gurion. Ben Gurion says, I know you've been to Levi Eshkol, and he's right. We don't have houses, we don't have food, we don't have jobs. But you have to bring the Jews from Iraq, we do not want another shoah. We don't want another holocaust. And that gave Shlomo Hillel the go ahead to organize this major airlift. And it was complicated. When the Jews arrived in Israel, they only knew Hebrew from their prayers. They were suddenly seen as Arab Jews. They weren't seen as modern, educated, established Jewish community and they were treated quite badly. And the conditions were shocking in refugee camps. Jews coming from Europe at the time came broken, and the Iraqi Jews came whole, with their families. So they experienced their brokenness in Israel. And that was a trauma. But they also saw the European Jews and knew their story, they knew about the Holocaust, obviously, I think it's another reason the story isn't told as much, because it was shadowed by this tremendous pain of people who had lost their families in Europe.
You've mentioned in your book launch video and elsewhere, the importance of the theme of being together. And you talked about how the Iraqi Jews at least got to be together with their families through the trauma of leaving their home. Can you talk a little bit more about that importance of being together and that theme in your book?
Family is everything. In Iraq, a traditional home is built around a big courtyard. And there's rooms with the windows leading to the courtyard and the outside world is kind of shut out. A family would live together, not just a mother and father, it meant the grandparents, the uncles and aunts with their children too, cousins grew up together around this extended wider family. In Israel when you first arrived, they were broken up. And it was even more shocking for them because they were sharing tents with strangers in the shar aliyah, that was the first camp they'd arrive at, it was like the initiation camp, and then they'd be shipped off to whatever ma'abarot were available for them. The ma'abara is the other transit camps. They're called transit. So it was meant to be for a short period. But I mean, I interviewed a man whose family was in the ma'abara at Pardes Hanna for 10 years. So my family, I had family that ended up in Jerusalem, and Petah Tikva, and Kiryat Ono, and Zikhron Ya’akov. And so they weren't all living together as they would have in Baghdad. And they weren't living as Jewish communities anymore, just Babylonian, with their customs and also the respect and their positions, everything was broken for them.
Interesting. You mentioned in your book launch video, that Iraqi Jews feel a personal connection to the Torah, because of the prophets being buried in Iraq. Can you tell us more about that?
In Kirkuk where my grandfather's grandfather was the chief rabbi, there was the burial of Daniel the prophet who went into exile with King Jehoiakim and there's the famous grave of Ezekiel in Al Kifl. The Jews used to go on pilgrimage every Shavuot to pray at his grave. Every grave has stories told about miracles, and it's very much part of their culture to visit these graves. In fact, women used to go on pilgrimage to graves to pray, I think was one of their ways of leaving the house, actually. My grandmother grew up by the prophet Ezra the scribe, by his grave in Al-ʻUzair, which is in the south of Iraq, it's still there today. It's now a mosque. And she grew up with this presence of Ezra the prophet, of Ezra the scribe. She used to light candles for Ezra the scribe and bless us in the name of Ezra the scribe, it was very much part of the way we were brought up. So Shabbat and all the festivals were just so natural and part of our lives because I think Iraqi Jews saw themselves as the Jews all the way from the time of the Bible. Basically, the Bible officially ends with Ezra, the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, with the return to Judea, but the Jews who stayed in Babylon are the Jews we come from, so there's like this direct line, and being a Jew is just the most taken for granted thing in the world.
Wow. So you were telling me that you enjoyed listening to the episode of the podcast about Sephardic history and culture, and in that episode, we kind of went through the definition of what is it to be Sephardic. So can you talk about the definition of Mizrahi?
So it's such a great question. Mizrahi means Middle Eastern but also from North Africa, the Moroccans. As Iraqi Jews, it was interesting to always be called Sephardic because I always thought to myself, But I'm not Spanish. And only recently did I resolve this dilemma inside of myself, because a lot of the Sephardi Jews also came to Baghdad with the expulsion, but they assimilated into Babylonian culture in Baghdad. Everyone assimilated into Babylonian culture, if you were Ashkenazi, you did not establish an Ashkenazi shul. You became Babylonian. It was seen as the more authentic culture, the more authentic Judaism. And so to be a Mizrahi Jew is actually to come from very old Jewish communities, which are very important. And this is where our research needs to go. Now we need to find our old stories, because it tells the bigger Jewish story. In fact, one woman I interviewed told me the most wonderful thing, she said every Jew should see themselves as Babylonian. Because Jews originally were in Babylon after the destruction of the Second Temple, the Jewish center of life moved to Babylonia. So it's a different way of thinking about things.
What are you working on next?
So actually, my next project that I've just finished the first draft of, is a novel in verse, it's like Shoham's Bangle, but enlarged; it's a year in the life of a girl in Baghdad and then a year in the ma'abara, in the transit camp.
So that's interesting. So you're going to basically mine the same story but tell it in a more detailed way for a different age group.
Exactly. I'm going to explain Shoham's Bangle, basically I'm going to answer the questions, Why did the Jews have to leave? What was the reality in Israel for the Iraqi Jews? What is it to be an Iraqi Jew? And what was very important to me was also to try and capture as many customs and festivals and as much Iraqi Jewish flavor, Babylonian Jewish flavor, as possible, because that's exactly what's getting lost.
It's Tikkun Olam time. What action would you like to call listeners to take to help heal the world?
Elie Wiesel speaks about how overwhelming it can be sometimes to experience all the suffering in this world because we get so much information on the news. And he says, What can we do in response?And that is to be present in our every day and do one small thing at a time. Mother Teresa said, what can you do to promote world peace? She said, Go home and be with your family. So that's what I would say would make our world a better place, if we all were present for our families, and in the small acts every day.
That fits in so well with the theme of your book, of the importance of family and being together.
Yeah, it's an Iraqi Jewish value as well, just to be there for your family and for every person who walks into your life.
Lovely.
Thanks.
Is there anything else that you want to talk about that I haven't thought to ask you?
Maybe just to say that it's been so special to be here to share my Iraqi Jewish story. I think one of the nicest things about my book has been getting feedback from other Iraqi Jews, Mizrahi Jews, Jews who just have not owned their Middle Eastern background, because their parents haven't told them their stories. They've said to me, I have a bangle too, and I want to know the story. So I just encourage everyone to go and see what special objects you have in your history and go find their stories, because they're important. And it's been such a privilege to share this Iraqi Jewish story with you. So thank you.
Sarah Sassoon, thank you so much for speaking with me.
Thanks so much, Heidi, for having me. It's been such a pleasure.
[MUSIC, DEDICATION] Hi, this is Aimee Lucido, author of Recipe for Disaster. This is Amanda Panitch, and I'm the author of The Two Wrong Halves of Ruby Taylor. This is Primose Madayag Knazan, and I'm the author of Lessons in Fusion. We'll be joining you soon on the Book of Life podcast and we'd like to dedicate our episode to anybody who doesn't feel like they fit in.
[MUSIC, OUTRO] Say hi to Heidi at 561-206-2473 or bookoflifepodcast@gmail.com Check out our Book of Life podcast Facebook page, or our Facebook discussion group Jewish Kidlit Mavens. We are occasionally on Twitter too @bookoflifepod. Want to read the books featured on the show? Buy them through Bookshop.org/shop/bookoflife to support the podcast and independent bookstores at the same time. You can also help us out by becoming a monthly supporter through Patreon. Additional support comes from the Association of Jewish Libraries, which also sponsors our sister podcast, Nice Jewish Books, a show about Jewish fiction for adults. You'll find links for all of that and more at BookofLifepodcast.com Our background music is provided by the Freilachmakers Klezmer String Band. Thanks for listening and happy reading!
