Over a lengthy career, Iraq-born Montrealer Naim Kattan has written more than 30 books of fiction, poetry, and criticism, for which he has received a cache of awards, including France’s Légion d’Honneur and the Order of Canada. Still, he has been only sparingly translated into English. Farewell, Babylon was first published in 1975, and it well deserves this reissue in it’s original English translation.

The book is about growing up as a Jew in Iraq during the 1940s and ’50s. Kattan’s Baghdad is a hot, quarrelsome city beset in equal parts by fear and desire. Its politics are frantic, its street life a mystery. Jews, Muslims, and Christians are suspended in a faltering balance. For Kattan, this clash of neighbourhoods and cultures is childhood: the terror of Farhoud, listening to the roaring mob of Nazi-sympathizers drawing near, waiting for their home and neighborhood to be destroyed; peeking from behind a closed shutter at the strange violence of Sbaya; the obscene difficulty of understanding a young woman, and finding love, despite hostile manners and oppressive custom. Despite their dissimilarity, these episodes are written with the same care and elicit the same anxiety in the reader. This anxiety consumes the young Kattan, and drives his desire for exile to Paris, the true promised land.

Kattan’s writing achieves an exquisite balance. Baghdad is realized as a whole world, not the simplistic military theatre it has become. Kattan’s writing on the domestic life of women is as fine and clear as the sections on school, politics, sin, or hatred. No element of the narrative takes precedence over another. Kattan also brings a subtle clarity to his younger self. He doesn’t try to correct this self, or offer justification or repentance for his poorer decisions, and he’s never condescending to his family and young comrades, even when their values and the values of their society are embarrassing or disagreeable.

This is the writing of witness, bringing the past forward and striving toward brilliant objectivity. Reading Farewell, Babylon is like following a rope into a dark, noisy corridor and slowly finding it illuminated. Thirty years after its initial publication, Kattan’s writing remains as effortless as living, and blissfully innocent of Iraq’s recent past. The better for us, because the real human theatre of Iraq is here.