ABSTRACT Naim Kattan wrote Farewell, Babylon in 1976 in French, and it was published and translated first into English in 2005. This Novel is a memoir by Naim Kattan that recounts his experiences as a Jewish teenager in 1940s Baghdad, just before his departure to France. The book explores Iraq’s multicultural society and the political and social tensions that led to the decline of the Jewish community’s status. Kattan wrote his memories of Baghdad about twenty-five years after he left it, after establishing himself in his new home in Montreal, Canada, where he became a respected French-Canadian author. To a large extent, his identity as a French-Canadian infiltrates the Jewish-Iraqi-Arab story and reshapes Baghdad. this article traces the mental map at the core of Kattan’s work: how Kattan shapes his memories of Baghdad 30 years later. The article argues that the depiction of Jewish existence in Baghdad and Kattan’s experience of adolescence emerges between the lines of the Tower of Babylon as represented by the Eiffel Tower—as fantasy, desire, and potential redemption. The Baghdad space, in a certain sense, exists as a mirror image to the space of Paris in the tension between fantasy and trauma.
issue 27 / n.1 (2025)
