Memories of Eden

According to legend, the Garden of Eden was located in Iraq, and formillennia, Jews resided peacefully in metropolitan Baghdad. Memoriesof Eden: A Journey Through Jewish Baghdad reconstructs the last yearsof the oldest Jewish Diaspora community in the world through therecollections of Violette Shamash, a Jewish woman who was born inBaghdad in 1912, sent to her daughter Mira Rocca and son-in-law, theBritish journalist Tony Rocca. The result is a deeply textured memoir-an intimate portrait of an individual life, yet revealing of the complexdynamics of the Middle East in the twentieth century. Toward the end of her long life, Violette Shamash began writing letters,notes, and essays and sending them to the Roccas. The resulting book begins near the end of Ottoman rule and runs through the BritishMandate, the emergence of an independent Iraq, and the start of dictatorial government. Shamash clearly loved the world in which shegrew up but is altogether honest in her depiction of the transformationof attitudes toward Baghdad's Jewish population. Shamash's world isfinally shattered by the Farhud, the name given to the massacre of hundredsof Iraqi Jews over three days in 1941. An event that has receivedvery slight historical coverage, the Farhud is further described andplaced in context in a concluding essay by Tony Rocca.