Aouadi, Leila; (2020) Remembering the Lost Eden in Marina Benjamin’s Last Days in Babylon: The Story of the Jews of Baghdad. Moveable Type , 12 , Article 3. 10.14324/111.1755-4527.107.

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Abstract

Last Days in Babylon: The Story of the Jews of Baghdad (2007) explores the past life of Baghdadi Jews in the first decades of the previous century. In retrieving the splintered pieces of her own family’s history in Baghdad, Marina Benjamin embarks on a journey to Iraq after the American invasion of 2004. To move beyond war and devastation, Last Days straddles the borders between facts and fiction, remembering and forgetting, and in so doing conflates memory and history, nostalgia and writing. The mapping of Jewish Iraqi heritage onto the colonized landscape becomes a process of identification with the city, whereby Regina’s life, the author’s grandmother, is evoked as a sort of index to Baghdad before and after the departure of its Jewish minority. The Proustian vein that undergirds the narrative further implicates colonialism and its legacy in the ongoing plight of Iraqi people, including the few remaining Jews in Baghdad. Nostalgia/memory and reeling off past events from fragments cannot be conjugated without the gruesome present of Iraq and the Middle East. In this context, memories fail in assuaging the present pain and serve only to foreground suffering and helplessness.

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