I enjoyed this book, and found it quite informative. In this memoir, the author, Shamash tells of her family's ordeals in Iraq in the 1960's, and of their escape, first to Israel and then to Holland, where they settled and gradually built a new life as exiles. Shamash struggles with the concept of exile, especially since as a Jew her traditional identity is caught up inextricably with the idea of the Jews as a people in exile from Jerusalem, a city her family could have settled in after their escape. Instead they chose to leave Jerusalem and settle as refugees in a place where no one speaks Arabic, to live as outsiders in a place where most people are not Jewish, devout or otherwise.
This story offers a lot of insight into what it means to belong (or to not fit in), what place religion has in modern life, and how children can assimilate into new cultures without completely losing their identities. I liked, as well, how Shamash calls out the sexism of the traditional culture she was raised in, though by the end of the book she is still struggling to work out a stable compromise that she won't feel guilty about, to raise her daughter without the sexism, but with more of her family's cultural heritage than Shamash's fragmented childhood offered.
The last chapters of this book are weak, like they were just tacked on after the rest of the book was polished and ready to print. The transition from dental college and root canals to married life in New York is abrupt, and Shamash's storytelling before and after this point seems markedly different, as if the story up to this point is well rehearsed and polished, while everything after this point is a chaotic muddle. No doubt this is in part because while the majority of the book covers her earlier life, which she has had years to think about and come to terms with, she has yet to develop much perspective on her present state, so it is harder for her to tell the story of what her life looks like now. As a literary work, I'd prefer if this last part was as polished as the rest of the story, but as a memoir by a woman who is not dead yet and who is still developing the rest of her life-story, it works. ( )

A memoir of one of the last Jews to escape from Iraq in 1963

Now that the Jewish community in Iraq has been virtually eradicated, it's important and valuable to have this testimony to the tragedy. The author was a young child when her family tried, failed, and finally succeeded in escaping. The bulk of the book deals with the family's life as refugee immigrants in Amsterdam, where she came perilously close to falling through the cracks altogether, becoming a perpetual truant and nearly losing her chance at an education. The system seems to have failed her entirely; fortunately a time with a foster family in England helped her to turn things around. The strongest image from the book that remained with me was the school gymnasium in Amsterdam which was tall, built of concrete, and lighted by tiny windows high on the wall. Who could have known that it gave a child traumatic flashbacks to the prison where she and her family were incarcerated after their first, unsuccessful attempt to flee Iraq? Those of us dealing with refugees need the reminder to be sensitive to such unexpected triggers in daily life. And never take someone from a war zone to an air show (I didn't, but living under the flight path of the RCAF's Canadian Snowbirds' CNE air show is no better). ( )

What a beautifully written book! I very much enjoy reading about modern journeys people take and I read this book during Passover, the Jewish story of exodus. This was a timely tale and a beautifully written narrative about this woman's journey out of Iraq and to where she is today, struggling still between an Orthodox Jewish world and a secular world. ( )

The topic of how we are formed as people has always fascinated me. I enjoyed Shamash's memoir because it embraces the idea that we are made of our experiences- that what we do with those experiences and how we use them helps define us. I had very little knowledge of the Jewish population in Iraq before reading this memoir so I found it also to be informative and eye opening. ( )