{"id":29517,"date":"2024-03-14T09:00:26","date_gmt":"2024-03-14T09:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/?p=29517"},"modified":"2024-03-13T08:41:07","modified_gmt":"2024-03-13T08:41:07","slug":"the-wolf-of-baghdad-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/2024\/03\/14\/the-wolf-of-baghdad-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The Wolf of Baghdad"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nBy Carol Isaacs\/The Surreal McCoy<\/strong> (Myriad Editions)
\nISBN: 978-1-912408-55-9 (TPB) eISBN: 978-1-912408-71-9<\/p>\n

Contemporary history is a priceless resource in creating modern narratives. It has the benefits of immediacy and relevance – even if only on a generational level – whilst combining notional familiarity (could you tell the difference between a stone axe and a rock?) with a sense of distance and exoticism. In comics, we\u2019re currently blessed with a wealth of superb material exploring the recent past and none better than this enchanting trawl through a tragic time most of us never knew of\u2026<\/p>\n

A successful musician who has worked with The Indigo Girls<\/strong>, Sinead O\u2019Connor<\/strong> and the London Klezmer Quartet <\/strong>(which she co-founded) Carol Isaacs – as The Surreal McCoy – is also a cartoonist whose graphic gifts are regularly seen in The New Yorker<\/strong>, The Spectator<\/strong>, Private Eye<\/strong>, Sunday Times<\/strong> and The Inking Woman: 250 Years of Women Cartoon and Comic Artists in Britain<\/strong>. Some while ago she found great inspiration in a 2000-year old secret history that\u2019s she been party to for most of her life.<\/p>\n

British-born of Iraqi-Jewish parents, Isaacs grew up hearing tales of her ancestors\u2019 lives in Baghdad: part of a thriving multicultural society which had welcomed – or at least peacefully tolerated – Jews in Persia since 597 BCE. How 150,000 Hebraic Baghdadians (a third of the city\u2019s population in 1940) was reduced by 2016 to just 5 is revealed and eulogised in this potently evocative memoir, told in lyrical pictures and the curated words of her own family and their \u00e9migr\u00e9 friends, as related to Carol over her developing years in their comfortably suburban London home.<\/p>\n

Those quotes and portraits sparked an elegiac dream-state excursion to the wrecked, abandoned sites and places of a socially integrated, vibrantly cohesive metropolis she knows intimately and pines for ferociously, even though she has never set a single foot there\u2026<\/p>\n

As well as this enthralling pictorial experience, the art and narrative were incorporated into a melancholy motion comic (slideshow with original musical accompaniment). That moving experience is supplemented by an Afterword <\/em>comprising illustrate text piece \u2018Deep Home\u2019<\/em> (first seen in \u2018Origin Stories\u2019<\/em> from anthology Strumpet<\/strong>) which details those childhood sessions listening to the remembrances of adult guests and family elders, and is followed by \u2018The Making of The Wolf of Baghdad\u2019<\/em> explaining not only the book and show\u2019s origins, but also clarifies the thematic premise of \u2018The Wolf Myth\u2019<\/em> that permeates the city\u2019s intermingled cultures.<\/p>\n

\u2018Other Iraqis\u2019<\/em> then reveals some interactions with interested parties culled from Isaacs\u2019 blog whilst crafting this book, whilst a comprehensive \u2018Timeline of the Jews in Iraq\u2019<\/em> outlines the little-known history of Persian Jews and how and why it all changed, before \u2018A Carpet\u2019s Story\u2019<\/em> details 1950\u2019s Operations Ezra and Nehemiah which saw 120,000 Jews airlifted to Israel. Wrapping up the show is a page of Acknowledgements<\/em> and Suggested Reading<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Simultaneously timeless and topical, The Wolf of Baghdad<\/strong> is less a history lesson than a lament for a lost homeland and way of life: a wistful deliberation on why bad things happen and on how words pictures and music can turn back the years and make the longed-for momentarily real and true.
\n\u00a9 Carol Isaacs (The Surreal McCoy) 2020. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Carol Isaacs\/The Surreal McCoy (Myriad Editions) ISBN: 978-1-912408-55-9 (TPB) eISBN: 978-1-912408-71-9 Contemporary history is a priceless resource in creating modern narratives. It has the benefits of immediacy and relevance – even if only on a generational level – whilst combining notional familiarity (could you tell the difference between a stone axe and a rock?) … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The Wolf of Baghdad”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[42,115,102,122,170],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-of-british","category-biography","category-fantasy","category-historical","category-non-fiction"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4AFj-7G5","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29517"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29517\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29519,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29517\/revisions\/29519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}