The Wolf of Baghdad

'Enthralling and moving. It is magical.'-Claudia Roden

In the 1940s a third of Baghdad's population was Jewish. Within a decade nearly all 150,000 had been expelled, killed or had escaped. This graphic memoir of a lost homeland is a wordless narrative by an author homesick for a home she has never visited.

Transported by the power of music to her ancestral home in the old Jewish quarter of Baghdad, the author encounters its ghost-like inhabitants who are revealed as long-gone family members. As she explores the city, journeying through their memories and her imagination, she at first sees successful integration, and cultural and social cohesion. Then the mood turns darker with the fading of this ancient community's fortunes.

This beautiful wordless narrative is illuminated by the words and portraits of her family, a brief history of Baghdadi Jews and of the making of this work. Says Isaacs: 'The Finns have a word, kaukokaipuu, which means a feeling of homesickness for a place you've never been to. I've been living in two places all my life; the England I was born in, and the lost world of my Iraqi-Jewish family's roots.'

Auteur

CAROL ISAACS is a musician and, as The Surreal McCoy, a well-known cartoonist published in the New Yorker, The Spectator and the Sunday Times. The Wolf of Baghdad is also an animated slideshow with its own soundtrack often performed by a live band with Isaacs on accordion and keyboards, playing Iraqi and Judeo-Arabic music. Carol has worked with many artists including Sinead O'Connor and is co-founder of the London Klezmer Quartet. She lives in Chalk Farm, London.