The English Pen Online World Atlas

Samir Naqqash

Saturday, 10 January 2009

Biography:

Samir Naqqash is a leading Israeli novelist who writes only in his mother tongue: Arabic. Born into a Jewish family in Baghdad in 1938, he was a youthful witness to the turbulent period of Iraqi struggles against the British puppet government. The thirteen-year-old Samir Naqqash and his family were among the Iraqi Jews transported to Israel in the 1951 airlift and subsequently housed in makeshift transit camps, together with immigrants from other Arab countries. The young Naqqash received a Hebrew education—a language he speaks very well. Yet his stories—the first of five collections appeared in 1971—and subsequent novels and plays are defiantly written in his native tongue.

Israeli literary circles puzzle over Naqqash’s refusal to write in Hebrew—a question to which Naqqash replied (in Hebrew) with some asperity in a recent interview: ‘What do you want of me? I am only preserving my autonomy!’ This defiance is perhaps what best characterizes his literary project. He is ‘simply’ writing in his own mother tongue, a global language; it is the world around him and its ‘lunacy’ that have made it a political struggle to do so.

The reception of this Israeli writer in the Arab literary world has also been guarded, although the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz has called him ‘one of the greatest living artists writing in Arabic today’. Here, though, Naqqash’s particular linguistic politics have created further difficulties. Naqqash writes in the high Arabic common in belles lettres, but in the frequent conversations between Iraqi Jews in his work he uses a particular Baghdadi-Jewish dialect spoken, in the late 1940s, by perhaps 140,000 of the city’s inhabitants and only 80 per cent intelligible to their Muslim or Christian compatriots. Today it is almost a dead tongue, and even Naqqash’s fellow Iraqi Jews have complained that it makes for difficult reading and has to be supplemented with intra-Arabic translations.

Excerpted from Nancy Hawker's article Mizrahi Wanderings. Read the full article here.