The Wolf of Baghdad: Memoir of a Lost Homeland

In the 1940s a third of Baghdad’s population was Jewish. Within a decade nearly all 150,000 had fled. Of those remaining, most escaped in the 1970s or were killed. Today, fewer than half a dozen remain.

This graphic memoir of a lost homeland is a wordless narrative by an author homesick for a home she has never visited.  It is illuminated by the words and portraits of her family, along with an afterword with a brief history of Baghdadi Jews and background of this work. Says Isaacs: ‘The Finns have a word, kaukokaipuu, which means a feeling of homesickness for a place you’ve never been to. I’ve been living in two places all my life; the England I was born in, and the lost world of my Iraqi-Jewish family’s roots.’

Carol Isaacs is a musician and, as The Surreal McCoy, a well-known cartoonist published in the New Yorker, Private Eye and Sunday Times. The Wolf of Baghdad is also an animated slideshow with its own musical soundtrack, which is often performed by a live band including Isaacs on accordion and keyboards, playing music of Iraqi and Judeo-Arabic origin. Carol has worked with many artists including Sinead O’Connor and the Indigo Girls. She is co-founder of the London Klezmer Quartet and Hamsa.