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Outcast, by Shimon Ballas
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Haroun Soussan, narrator of Outcast and a Jewish convert to Islam, is a civil engineer and historian who’s just completed his life’s work, The Jews and History. The book opens with him getting an award from Saddam Hussein during the time of the Iran-Iraq war. Written in the form of an autobiography, the narrative moves in and out of the present, the recent, and more distant past, providing a unique and intimate chronicle of Iraq’s contemporary political history.
Shimon Ballas was born in Baghdad in 1930 and immigrated to Israel in 1951.
- Sales Rank: #2393302 in Books
- Brand: Brand: City Lights Publishers
- Published on: 2007-05-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.30" h x .60" w x 5.00" l, .48 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 210 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Publishers Weekly
A septuagenarian Israeli novelist who emigrated from Baghdad in 1951, Ballas fictionalizes the life of Ahmad Soussa, an Iraqi Jew who converted to Islam in the 1930s. Soussa ended up writing works used in anti-Jewish propaganda by Saddam Hussein's regime, and Ballas begins during the Iran-Iraq War of the mid-1980s, with his character, Ahmad Haroun Saussan, writing a memoir (this book) in which he tries to explain why he wrote The Jews in History, an enormous work taken up by the regime. What unfolds is Saussan's life story, the primal scene being his marriage to a non-Jewish American woman, Jane, when he's a visiting engineering grad student in the U.S. in the 1930s. The marriage results in Saussan's elder brother and acting family patriarch, Daniel, disowning Saussan and having him excommunicated from his hometown Jewish enclave at al-Hila. That trauma sets off a chain of events that ruins Saussan's marriage and makes for a too-pat justification for all of his subsequent actions. Ballas also assumes a familiarity with Iraqi history that most American readers won't have, but his writing in Saussan's unreliable voice is immediate, vivid and richly elusive. As a case study in the rationalization of personal and political contradiction, the novel is entirely clear.
Copyright � Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* As the Iran-Iraq War looms, civil engineer and historian Haroun Soussan receives an award from President Saddam Hussein. Soussan, 70, has seen great change in Iraq, though not enough of it according to his ideals. He has lived for an Iraq whose several religio-ethnic groups coexist in peace and equity. He is a cosmopolitan man, whose first wife, the love of his life, was American. He left her and his son in the U.S. for love of Iraq, and he still feels guilty about it. For Iraq, he left Judaism, embraced Islam, and fought Zionism as the nonpareil, ethnocentrist threat to his dreams. He has lost his closest friends because of politics. Despite everything Soussan believes and has done, however, what he was is not forgotten, and he feels an outcast not merely from the Jews and the West but within his homeland. Ballas, himself an Iraqi Jew who moved to Israel, has Soussan unburden himself in a prospective memoir in which he ranges freely in his past and often returns to his problematic present. So doing, Soussan reveals more about modern Iraq than nearly all Americans put together know, and Ballas creates one of the most relevant, most important characters in contemporary fiction. Olson, Ray
Review
" . . . reveals more about modern Iraq than nearly all Americans put together know, and Ballas creates one of the most relevant, most important characters in contemporary fiction." -- Booklist, Starred Review, June 1, 2007
"'Outcast' is the fictional memoir of Haroun Saussan, an Iraqi academic, a grandfather, a civil engineer and historian, a Jew who converted to Islam . . . Disturbing dreams help him to unify the disparate parts of his character and soothe his many regrets." -- The Los Angeles Times
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Good, but not up to expectations
By L. King
Perhaps some of the lyrical aspects of the writing has been lost in the translation to English. The book meanders through the life of of Haroun Soussan a Jewish convert to Islam in Iraq. I agree with the previous reviewer that the lack of chapter headings and jumping back in forth in time makes the book difficult to follow - I'd recommend reading it in a single sitting rather than multiple sessions as I did. Someone unfamiliar Iraq over the last 70 years would have difficulty reassembling the historical background. The style does augment the notion that Haroun is a static and lonely character who ages slowly but changes little as the world changes around him.
For me the book centres around the notion of personal identity and its relationship to others. Soussan defines himself as a Muslim and converts on principles of generality because Islam is presented as the alternative that embraces the culture at large and because he fails to connect to his brother Reuben and the Jewish community. In spite of this he concerns himself with Zionism and his life's work is a book "The Jews In History", the focus of which Ballas has unfortunately decided to hide from the reader. Yet his disappointment shows through between his imagined ideals of Islamic community and the reality of political and social life. This comes to the fore in the episodes of the 2 farhuds (progroms) against the Jews of 1941 and 1947 where his uncertainty of how he fits in with both communities and his discomforture that his granddaughter by Hamida his 2nd wife, was given the Jewish name of Sarah and the unexplored question of whether or not Jane, Haroun's first wife, raised his son Jamil as a Jew.
Biographical fiction is not my usual fare and I was motivated to read Outcast through Ballas' appearance in the (excellent) documentary Forget Baghdad. A more precise rating I would give this book is 3.75 stars. I would probably not recommend it to others but it is interesting and discussable.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
a good read for you historical/political buffs
By Elevate Difference
Outcast is a political story about the works of Haroun Soussan who is supposed to be based on a historical character Ahmad Soussa. Soussan is a Jewish man who converted to Islam. The story gives in inside look into life in Iraq before the war, leading up to and during Saddam Hussein's reign. Soussan has trouble grappling with the fact that there is a lack of loyalty for Iraq from fellow Jews in his country, and he tries to promote full integration and the revocation of minority privileges. The character appears to be strong in his beliefs and his loyalty to Iraq, causing him to leave his American wife and their two-year-old son behind in America. Here we follow this man's journey as he watches Iraq shift, change and develop, although not into what he'd hoped. Soussan is a civil engineer and, later, an historian.
The book is definitely geared toward an audience who is into Iraqi historical fiction. The book follows no conventional measures, and it is hard to follow at times due the author's tendency to go off into tangents. There are no defined chapters in the book, and the story is told in no distinct chronological order. A good read for you historical/political buffs. Check it out.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Fictional memoir . . .
By Ronald Scheer
This fictional memoir by Israeli writer Shimon Ballas interweaves a broad cast of characters with 70 years of Iraqi political history. Meanwhile it's also a very personal story that centers around three boyhood friends from a village near Karbala - two of them Arab Jews and a third Muslim. While their lives diverge over the decades following WWI, they remain bonded by their love of homeland and their deep desire to devote their lives to what each considers to be its brightest hopes for the future and independence from western colonialism - the control of the British in particular.
Advocating a secular government built on the ideals of an inclusive social order that grants advantages to no one, regardless of ethnic identity, the narrator Soussan finds himself at odds with the aims of Zionism and its aggressive separatism. Believing Islam to be more receptive to his political beliefs, he converts to Islam, alienating himself from his family, the Jewish community, and his old friend, the Jewish poet Assad. When anti-semitism grows in Iraq in the 1940s, Assad joins the 100,000s who leave the country for the new state of Israel. Their other friend, Kassem, becomes an ardent communist, whose life is spent in and out of prisons, finally fleeing into exile in Eastern Europe.
Educated in the U.S. and briefly married to an American, the narrator chooses to return to Iraq, leaving behind wife and son. They do not follow him as he hopes, and after years of a solitary life, working as a civil engineer in Baghdad, he marries again and fathers a daughter, while never ceasing to love his ex-wife. The commitment of his life to his homeland, even to the extent of adopting its religion, leaves him something of an exile in his own country, and there is a degree of melancholy as he remembers a life given to his country at the expense of love and lost friends. Yet Ballas leaves him with an assurance of his own integrity, and not a trace of bitterness or regret. Readers, however, may take less solace in the ending, as it closes just short of Saddam Hussein's war with Iran.
There's a lot of history compressed into this short novel, and the telling of it flows freely back and forth over decades of time. The personal and the political are also intimately interwoven, one always having an impact on the other. References to historical events may send readers to the Internet for background, but the occasional difficulties are well worth the effort to unravel. As the story of Arab Jews is not widely known or understood in the West, it's important to hear their voice. Beautifully translated.
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