The Strangers We Became: Lessons in Exile from One of Iraq's Last Jews

CYNTHIA

Refugees in Updos

THEY CAUGHT US IN ARBIL, almost two hundred miles north of Baghdad.

I was nine.

The month was October, 1972, and it was a long, hot, noisy ride in the open army Jeep, whose shredded roof canvas applauded us all the way back to our native city for sentencing. I sat next to my mother, clutching a brown-paper sandwich bag in my sweaty fist.

When we reentered Baghdad, some family friends pulled up alongside the Jeep and spotted us. Mama and Papi motioned to them, and the friends nodded. They understood.

The Shamash family had not made it over the border and would now need to be bailed out of jail.

And, now that they had seen us, it would not be long before the rest of Baghdad’s only three hundred Jews knew our fate.

 In Masbah, just a few miles from the Karrada detention center in southern Baghdad, Mama asked our driver if he would permit her a bathroom stop. "Allah yeghalicum," she whispered, beseeching G-d to bless him so that he might be merciful to her.

It worked. Reluctantly, our driver agreed. And Allah’s timing was perfect: we had stopped right in front of the home of another family friend, Um Aslan—mother of Aslan—who opened the door.

While Mama went in, the drivers guarded the rest of us waiting outside—my father; my brother David, who was fifteen; my sisters Linda and Olivia, who were seventeen and eleven, respectively; and me, the youngest. Mama’s plan was to get rid of all the money she had on her, which was 300 dinars—three months’ comfortable pay. It seemed a miracle that the officers had not found it yet; Mama had been transferring it between her bra and her burgundy pocketbook and back again, depending on where they’d looked last.

Now, while we waited in the Jeep, she left the money with Um Aslan, ridding us of the only remaining evidence that we had been trying to escape Iraq for good. "Insh’alla utelu’un, be salamah," Um Aslan had whispered into Mama’s ear, after giving her a kiss. May G-d release you, in peace!

 What did we want out of life?

To live without an eye goggling us, monitoring our every move.

To live without persecution.

What would we get instead?

Our own choices, our own limits, dictated from within.

Other than that, we had no idea.

The day and night before our capture had been harrowing. From the Arbil train station, we’d hoped to find some sort of transportation to Darbandikhan and then on to the Iraq-Iran border. Then the Jew-friendly Shah, the king of Iran, would free us. This seemed a better plan than trying to escape via the south, as many other Jews had done. Basra was known to have become tightly secured.

We’d taken a night train and lugged along two medium-sized suitcases, nothing more. The ride began in darkness. Then the sky outside gradually transformed into a fusion of sweet colors limned with gold, followed by cheerful bright sunlight. In Arbil, we disembarked and hailed a taxi whose affable driver agreed to take us to Darbandikhan. But first, he said, he would have to secure a customary permit—and he pulled over shortly after the drive began.

My family and I waited in the car.

Soon, another car pulled up in front of ours and we were asked to transfer. I don’t recall the face of the person who asked us to change cars; I can’t even be certain that I heard him, as I had been busy picking wax out of my ear, and I continued semi-rotating my index finger in the canal as he spoke.

Just do as they say, Papi said. And don’t say a word.

Silently, we transferred. We still held hope. Then we saw Merkaz el Sherta on the front of a large building up ahead.

Merkaz el Sherta means police station.

Our driver announced that he had some business to take care of inside and asked that we get out and follow him. We did. Inside, we were seated in a large room next to another family waiting quietly.

Oh! the other mother said to ours. Don’t worry. Apparently they’re looking for a Jewish family with three daughters and a son, and they thought we’re Jewish, since I’m traveling with my three daughters and son as well. They’re probably mistaken with you too.

Yes, was all that Mama said.

This woman’s assumption was not surprising. In Iraq, it was not common to know Jews, especially outside Baghdad. After all, in a population of eight million, a few hundred is just a drop in the bucket. Many non-Jewish Iraqis who had never met a Jew (or were unaware of having done so) even believed that Jews looked dramatically different from everyone else. One Muslim woman with whom Mama later became friendly confessed that she had expected us to have horns.

And why should anyone be jailed for taking an intercity train in one’s own country? We had learned from friends not to carry anything precious, such as a photo album, which might give away our ultimate intentions. We exhibited no evidence of being anything other than just another Iraqi family taking in a little sightseeing in the north.

After a while, the other family was dismissed and we were alone with a sergeant who hardly looked up from his desk. This gave us lots of time to study the strands of hair trying to cover his smooth shiny head. When he finally did look up at us, we saw that he had a thick, slightly lopsided, twirled-up mustache, like a lonely cactus in the middle of his dry brown face.

He asked my father for his ID card. My father handed over his YMCA card, which bore the last name Shamas, instead of Shamash. Shamas was a Christian name. Shamash was not.

It did not save us.

Naim! the sergeant shouted. My father’s name. "Ke tehreb! You were trying to escape!" The Arabic sounded like a blow to Papi’s chest.

The sergeant ordered our transfer to a prison nearby, also in Arbil, where again we sat for a long time, on a wooden bench in a room with another officer seated behind a desk. The officer, joined by a second one, began to search our belongings. While they questioned Mama, I sat on her burgundy pocketbook and cried—not entirely unaware of the distracting function I served.

After interrogating my parents at length, the officers turned their attention to me. We want to speak to her alone, one of them said. My parents could hardly object, so I was taken—along with a doll my father had given me just a few days before—into a small cement room alone.

Your parents, said the sergeant, who had deceptively rosy cheeks and a mustache (they all had a mustache; it seemed to be a requirement, like a badge). Have you heard them talk about Israel?

Before I had time to take a breath, he continued.

"Djwasees, huh?"

Spies?

Two years earlier, I had watched it on television: Jewish men in striped uniforms, hanged for all of Iraq to see. Djwasees! read the signs strung around their necks. Spies! The crowd around them was cheering. There was free transportation that day. Belly dancers were brought in from far and near. Mama had turned the television off with a sudden jerk of her arm, as though the knob had given her an electric shock.

Maybe this is how it starts, I thought, giving the ceiling a quick scan. No ropes. Maybe the big finale always takes place outside?

"From Izraeel?" the second officer sneered. The way he said it made the country sound very sinister indeed.

Did they give you this doll after putting their espionage device into its back and making it look like a cutesy tootsie toy? The second officer deformed his voice as well as his face, making the ends of his mustache pump up and down, for my benefit.

No, I said. But my response was merely a blur in the background of their conviction. Fuzz in the reception.

Sitting behind his desk, the red-cheeked sergeant pulled the device out of the back of my doll. He studied the mechanism and its various dangling wires from different angles, hoping it would connect him to a source. With all that turning, however, all the device could say was "Mama! Mama!"

The doll’s eyes, which were supposed to open and close whenever she said this, were in the process of being extracted from their sockets. The black eyeliner and exaggerated lashes I had colored onto her still framed the eyes that in this state needed no extra emphasis. Standing next to the seated sergeant, the paler officer continued with his disemboweling of my doll, just in case he had missed something.

Now the device said, over and over, "Meema. Meema." But the doll kept her smile. I tried to derive strength from her everlasting happiness. But as the sergeant pulled off her arms, with their manicured red fingernails, and then her legs, and threw each of her limbs into a different corner of the room, his frustration at not finding proof with which to accuse my parents only mounted. Then my doll’s head, with its gorgeous blond messy curls and red hat with a leopard-print brim, was flung against a different wall. My eyes followed her beautiful smile until it hit the ground, face down.

The officers looked at each other and giggled.

No, Sir, I tried again, in a low, shaking voice. My parents are not spies, Sir.

I shifted my gaze from the ruddy, seated sergeant to the officer standing beside him and tried to look as convincing as possible.

The sergeant tossed my doll’s empty torso at me from across the desk. It landed on the floor, next to my feet. I counted six holes. The little device pulled out of the back was still on the table, being investigated as seriously as if it were the black box of a downed plane. "Meema, meema . . ," it said, crookedly. Then there were a few seconds of quiet.

"Y’lla amshee!" shouted the standing man. Go out! He cocked his head toward the room’s steel door.

"Shukran, shukran," I said. Thank you. I wasn’t thanking the officers, and I didn’t expect them to hear me; I was thanking whatever higher power had convinced them to articulate those surreal words, announcing my freedom. I wanted to run, but my legs would not cooperate. I picked up my doll’s empty torso and then walked slowly to all the corners of the room to gather up her arms and legs and head. As I made this little tour, I remained alert to the men behind the desk in its center: the sergeant and his counterpart were like an evil blind spot. Was there anything else they could throw at me?

After picking up the pieces of my doll’s body, I looked around for her red jacket and matching skirt trimmed with leopard print. I felt that I had to unclutter their room from my mess. Holding all the pieces of my doll at once was difficult, so I rolled up my dirty shirt and made it into a kind of sling. As I left the room, in order not to seem disrespectful, I did my best to keep the heavy metal door from slamming shut. This required leaning against it with my full body weight, which was not much, and using all the strength I could recruit.

I left that room, but the room would never leave me.

My mother looked at the pieces of my doll, cradled in my shirt.

Here, she said, after a moment. Eat this sandwich already. Before it goes bad. And let go of your shirt. Put your doll in this. She held open the brown paper bag that the sandwich had been in. I’m sure we can fix it somehow. Later. Maybe.

 And yet that prison was not entirely without mercy.

That night, to our astonishment, a balding guard came over to where we sat and said, softly, I’m going to bring you some Kebab Arbili. Arbil is known for this delicacy.

As if we were tourists, sampling the area.

He went away and soon returned with kebabs, yoghurt, and white linens embroidered along the edges by his wife. I don’t want you to sleep on dirty mattresses, he said. Put these on your beds.

We were dumbstruck.

My mother was Jewish, he whispered. Kurdish Jewish. But I was raised Muslim.

Gratefully, we ate the kebabs, dry. The yoghurt was meant to moisten the meat, but, being kosher (and yet not so strict that we would not eat the halal, the nonkosher slaughtered lamb), we set the dairy component aside for later.

That night, my sister Olivia and I were restless. Olivia had a suggestion.

"Sanuti! Olivia said, calling me by my nickname. Let’s go to the bathroom and put the yoghurt on our face! Mama always says it’s good for the skin, remember? Come on, let’s go!"

We took the yoghurt into the prisoners’ bathroom. Olivia placed the glass cup in the sink and we took turns smearing the yoghurt all over our faces, as if we were at a spa. Giggling mutely, we pointed to where spots had been missed. The cup clinked a solitary note each time we scooped out a new dollop, sometimes dropping tiny white teardrops on the edge of the sink and onto the floor. When the cup was empty, we waited, our faces cold and wet. Then the yoghurt started to dry and crack. There was a tiny mirror in the bathroom, and I asked Olivia, who could see into it by standing on her toes, to lift me a little so that I could see myself, too. She did her best, which allowed me just a fleeting glimpse of my eyes: two black comets in white space. As it turned out, I didn’t really need the mirror after all, because when I looked at Olivia, I saw that we looked exactly alike.

When we felt certain our beauty treatment had worked its magic, we rinsed it off and dried our faces with our shirts.

Sanuti, Olivia whispered. Feel my skin! It’s so smooth!

She brushed her palm across her cheek while I took a deep breath and mirrored her, confirming the observation without words.

But skin is just on the outside. When Olivia had rinsed out the yoghurt cup and we returned to our room, we could hear our mother crying into her pillow. Olivia put the little cup on the floor next to our mattress, and as we got into bed we looked at each other solemnly.

Our faces were wearing very different masks now.

 The following morning, after more angry questions, the officers determined that we should be brought back to Baghdad. Hearing this, Mama put her arm around my oldest sister, Linda, and together they sat on the floor and cried. Olivia and I joined in, like a huddle before a game, while our father and David stood quietly to one side.

When we arrived at the Karrada detention center, back in Baghdad, I again inspected the ceilings. No ropes. Nor were there any ceiling fans. I’d heard horrible things about ceiling fans—that Jews were tied to the blades and given a ride until they admitted whatever their interrogators had in mind. But here, so far, the most ominous sight was the police sergeant himself. He had a mustache, of course, and a mouth like a crooked line that ran across his face and occasionally slid sideways into a sarcastic smile, as if tied from corner to ear by invisible