Abstract:

Nissim Rejwan’s To Live in Two Worlds: The Pains of Displacement is a moving narrative of the practical spiritual affinity of one who loved Iraq’s Jewish heritage from its origin in the seventh century BCE through the arrival of Islam in the seventh century CE and his departure from Baghdad to Israel in 1951. He loved his Muslim fellow citizens in Iraq. And they loved him. Rejwan’s writings in this book reflect a profound sense of loss. The book includes segments of The Last Jews in Baghdad: Remembering a Lost Homeland which he dedicated to Elie Kedourie, his co-religionist and literary mentor. But he also included in the dedication three Muslim fellow writers whose lives like his swirled around the activities of Bagdad’s Al-Rabita Bookshop: Najib al-Mani, Adnan Raouf, and Buland el-Haidari. The affinities of these men were not consciously spiritual. They came naturally and unselfconsciously in their Abrahamic relationship.