Visionary Memoir: Arab Mother, Jewish Baby

By Dr. David Rabeeya

Visionary Memoirs: Arab Mother, Jewish Baby tells the personal story of an individual who was able to not only overcome numerous and incredible challenges and setbacks in both Iraq and Israel, but also to find physical and spiritual security in the United States. Both steadfast determination and psychological stamina and an unyielding sense of humor were utilized in order to triumph against many odds.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 6, 2002
• ISBN: 9781477179116

Dr. David Rabeeya

While Dr. David Rabeeya has dedicated his life to preserving the history and culture of Jews born in Arab lands, he has also written books for children and teenagers as well as detective stories, poetry, music and even comedy. This, his 50th publication, is from a Jew born in Baghdad Iraq who lived in Israel and now resides in America. His work reveals the soul of men and the universality of mankind.

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Copyright © 2002 by Dr. David Rabeeya.

ISBN:       Softcover       1-4010-5952-X

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Contents

PART ONE

To Never Abandon Your Roots:

Self-Analysis Of An Arab-Jew

Acknowledgement

Dedication

Author’s Note

Introduction

Chapter One In The Beginning

Chapter Two Exit From Eden

Chapter Three The Fate Of The Psalmists

Chapter Four Strange Fire

Chapter Five David And Goliath

Chapter Six Gideon’s Experiments

Chapter Seven My Mount Nebo

Chapter Eight Abraham’s Journey

Chapter Nine The Promised Land

Chapter Ten In The Belly Of The Whale

Chapter Eleven David Sings, Saul Attacks

Chapter Twelve The Blessing Of Jacob

Chapter Thirteen Jeremiah’s Leopard

Chapter Fourteen Forever Malachi

PART TWO

Arab Tears, Jewish Laughter

Dedication

Introduction

Why Do I Laugh?

Pearls Of Hikmat

Why Do Sephardic Jews Laugh?

…A Terrible Misunderstanding

My Sephardic Mother Taught Me Many Proverbs: Among Them…

From The Mouths Of Children…

This, That And The Rest Of It…

Sephardic Midrash (Exposition)

Sephardic And Ashkenazic Mess

Ashkenazic Are Water, Sephardic Are Fire

Hikmatisms

Words Of Wisdom Of Hikmat, The Son Of Naima And Nissim

True Or False?

Nevera Golden Path

Yankee Moses

The Siamese Twins: Isaac And Ishmael

American Jews Or Jewish Americans?

An Imaginative Story About Ashkenazic And Sephardic Jews

The End?!?

PART THREE

America: Divine Plans, Human Foibles

Dedication

Personal Note

Character

Epilogue

PART FOUR

FOREVER A TEACHER

Dedication

PART FIVE

Age, Aging And Acceptance

Dedication

Introduction

Aging

The Cultural/Religious Syndrome

The Philosophical Dimension

Epilogue

Part One

TO NEVER ABANDON

YOUR ROOTS:

SELF-ANALYSIS

OF AN ARAB-JEW

Acknowledgement

I wish to thank my fiancée, Arlene, for her support and encouragement in the completion of this publication. Her advice, as well as her editorial work, has been invaluable and extremely helpful and constructive. I also wish to thank Ms. Rachel Ticktin for her help with the arrangement and typing of this publication. Her patience is valued and her friendship is appreciated. Lastly, I wish to thank Oliva Cardono, from Bryn Mawr College, for her preparations of the designs for this book.

Dedication

Dedicated to my precious daughter, Naomi Abigail, who now has a better understanding of my trials after walking with our family in my footsteps on the road of our ancestors.

Author’s Note

Often the tragic and the comic are intertwined in our lives. Sometimes we are able to detect the limits of both realms, but often, they feed off of each other. It seems that laughing at other people with different backgrounds is a common human practice, but laughing at yourself is an art that demands courage and personal perspective, as well as the capacity to handle our difficult lives with a sense of humor and a touch of humbleness. Combining the serious and the funny, the mundane and the awesome, may provide a more complete picture of the victories and defeats of our journey on earth. It remains a mystery why the struggle of some is more difficult and intense than that of others, but the recognition that suffering and trials are part of human existence can somehow place our horrors in the larger scale of humanity.

In this context, writing my memoirs is both a frightening and rewarding experience. While objectivity in our own lives is rather difficult, attemptsto be realistic about personal events and experiences must be achieved, if we are not to turn the publication into a self-indulgent composition. Furthermore, by selecting certain episodes, we already cross into the realm of subjectivity, but it is left to every individual to make his/her own judgment about the scale of significance of various occurrences in the presented text. Indeed, personal interpretations of various happenings, processes, and developments can also hamper the objectivity of the description itself. This is the way it is!

it is quite difficult to totally separate ourselves from our feelings about the meaning of events and accidents in our personal life or in lives within the community. Actual personal experiences may blur and distort the objectivity of the picture, but may also, in some cases, supersede the work of those historians who draw their own conclusions on the basis of non-human testimonies and objects.

Being a member of a minority group often makes it difficult to convey a perspective that is different from that of the majority elite, which has the capacity to represent its historical views through the political and economic forces in its possession. Indeed, in writing my memoirs, I wore my own Judeo-Arabic glasses in order to draw the sense and meaning of events beyond my reach and control. It is my conviction that the study and preservation of my social customs and mores, as well as my perspective of Zionism and Israel, can both educate the reader and provide him/her with a human flesh and blood background to my life.

I am looking forward to revisiting my story when these writings are finally published.

Introduction

America, like love, is in the eye of the beholder. Being a naturalized citizen of this incredible country may offer a unique perspective unrealized by American born citizens. Living in three countries (Iraq, Israel, and America) can also add an additional dimension to the unbelievable drama called America, since America is not only a fascinating territorial entity, but also a unique idea in human history.

After three decades in the United States, I was able to collect sufficient experiences and observations about the people, history, society and culture of the place so that I can offer the reader American scenes as seen through my own binoculars and glasses.

In conclusion, praises and criticism of America do not diminish one bit either my love of America or its effect upon me in my own pursuit of tolerance and acceptance. My hope is that this publication will be read by Americans and non-Americans alike in order to continue the non-stop dialogues which makes this country great.

Chapter One

IN THE BEGINNING

Being one individual out of more than six billion people of the world is both an overwhelming and a humiliating experience. Furthermore, the number of the entire Jewish population in the world does not reach beyond seventeen million people, which is a minuscule number in relation to the entire population of the world. Being an Arab-Jew (sephardic) places me in a more diminutive and marginalized statistical data, since Jews with my background constitute only about fifteen percent of the entire Jewish population. In short, I am a minority within a minority trying to bring understanding of the history and the culture of a tiny group in the vast universe.

Like numerous other languages and cultures, my Judeo-Arabic culture of Iraq is in the throes of extinction. Indeed, ample reasons can be cited for this unavoidable phenomenon in post-modern times in which globalization is challenging the existence of many particular cultures and languages. However, political and socio-economic forces held by political and socio-economic elite within the state can accelerate the process of assimilation and acculturation of minority groups by demanding the surrender of their unique cultural background through pressure, threats, and intimidation.

It has to be stated that the loss of culture to universal international dynamics associated with modernity can somehow be rationalized on the basis of academic and intellectual processes. However, ignoring and marginalizing minority cultures by the excessive power of the majority often creates bitterness, anger, frustration, and despair among those who find the legitimacy of their inner psychological essence being challenged and attacked.

It can be argued that a culture with deep-seated roots can frequently survive even the most catastrophic historical events. Nevertheless, the bearers of minority cultures may also succumb to these same forces, resulting in the departure from the human scene both on physical and psychological levels. The defensive mode of many cultures facing the dominant culture of the state often affects the psychological and the mental status and position of the members of the indigenous culture, which sometimes lead to self-suicidal spiritual immolation by the oppressed themselves.

In the large cosmic order, the vacuum and the instability created by the loss of minority cultures do not have a great impression on the dominant cultures of the world. Only those who lose their indigenous culture are left with the cosmic silence, while the choice of striving either to artificially reconstruct their past or to accept their profound loss as a factual reality. This publication reveals both the insights and struggles of one indigenous soul whose Judeo-Arabic culture continues to flap its wings within the spirit of those few survivors of the loss of culture and country to which they can never return.

Being born in Baghdad, iraq, in a religious Jewish community, i perceived God as personal, controlling time, space, history, and man. This conception of my childhood was influenced and also strengthened by my Arab-Muslim environment. The ubiquitous and all-powerful Allah-Adonay was dominant in my reality, dreams and illusions.

I fear him and respect him. As an Arab-Jew child, I had the God of the synagogue, with his multiple names, incorporated with the multiple Muslim names around me. The name Allah was the dominant name on my lips, invoked dozens of times a day with regard to numerous requests and expectations. The word Allah was also heard frequently in the mouth of my father, mother, and all relatives of my large and extended family as well as my teachers in Alliance Francaise and the slah (literary prayer, synagogue in everyday use).

My perception of the Christian world was both vague and incredibly naive. I conceived my father’s Christian friends as the descendents of the ancient Greek people. I did not have any academic or scientific proof to my assumption on this topic, since my mother repeated this theological view about Christians based on the explanations of her own parents. In addition, since a child in a traditional society is not encouraged to ask the adults complicated questions, I decided to complement my knowledge and information on the basis of my wild imagination.

My parents as well as my relatives took Allah so seriously that it was their conviction that God had actually written the Torah (The Five Books of Moses) and in their prayers they pleaded before the Almighty to grant them peace in the physical and the mental aspects of their personal life. The stories and the legends about my ancestors (the Patriarch and the Matriarch) had seeped through my skin and bones and were absorbed into my inner self. In my mind, the Jewish past was the biblical past with its glory and splendor. As a child I had taken for granted that the Messiah will unavoidably come to my Taht-el-Takya neighborhood in the district of Qanbar-Ali of Baghdad.

Being a child in a family of twelve brothers and sisters was like a two-edged sword. On the one hand, I felt secure in the protection of my father (Baba), my mother (Nana), and the various adults in my life, but, on the other hand, I was left to answer many puzzling questions about various patterns of people’s behavior (love, hatred, cruelty, and mercy) to myself. God and the adults were both the protectors and the source of awe, fear and respect, while I was a tiny dot in the sea of the universe with all doubts and insecurities that I could master under my Judeo-Arabic environment.

In Iraq of the thirties, forties and fifties, the role of men and women were well defined. Nana is expected to be pregnant as often as her husband desires. The religious rationalization of this phenomenon was related to the biblical verse of … be fruitful and multiply, and avoiding the casting of male seeds in vain. Social reasoning for large families among Muslims and Jews were prevalent. Children were considered divine blessings, but they were also needed to secure the genes of the family for generations to come.

Large numbers of children assist in this social engineering process. Many children can also offer economic assistance in a poor family. The ladder of authority was very clear in my family, similar to the hundreds of thousands of Muslim and Jewish families. The hierarchy was unmistakable. Allah is above us all, parents come second and they are in charge of my life, behavior and well-being. Third in line were all adults in my life (teachers, rabbis, uncles, aunts, friends of the family, etc.) I was quite aware that, in those days, the child in Arab society came fourth in line. My parents used physical punishment to discipline me exactly the way it was done to them by their own parents. Furthermore, my homeroom teacher did the same.

In French school, a gentleman by the name of Monsieur Bonfils (literary, Mr. Good Son) sporadically used his twelve black sticks in order to bring to my attention that any deviation from the accepted social norms would be answered with brutal force. The offense could have been laziness in my academic preparation, dirty words or just because I began a fight with another child in class. Sometimes, my French teacher would assign a student with impressive grades to hold a ruler in his hands and to strike us on our hands if we did not sit properly on our chairs. In the Arab society of my childhood, the society looked at children as unfinished, unguided adults who needed the power of the adults in order to deliver them into maturity. Educational and psychological theories and practices concerning the development and education of children were not found in my home and school. This was Iraq of the thirties, the forties, and the fifties.

Psychologists and psychiatrists did not reside in my Arab society. Traditional patterns of children’s behavior were demanded from me like from others in their formative years. The whims and common sense of my parents were the keys for my social and psychological expectations. As a child, I was taken from my home with my siblings before every birth. I can easily recall the tension and whispers prior to the birth pangs of my mother. I was very scared and concerned because danger was obviously involved in pregnancy and birth. I was able to hear the Arabic piercing screams of my mother during her deliverance when I found myself at my neighbor’s house (Abu Dahood and Azurri families).

The Jiddi (midwife) Masooda who assisted my mother in her deliverance was shouting back demands to push the baby and to scream Allah! Allah! Allah! during the process. My mother was placed on a mattress in the largest room of my twelve-room house. After a day or two I came with all the other children to kiss my mother on her cheeks. My father used to place bags of almonds and sugar candies near her and often urged her to eat these particular foods claiming that they would assist her in her recovery. As usual after each birth my mother placed the khamsa, which was attached to a clove of garlic and a tiny blue stone to the dress of the new baby. The explanation was that these items would chase away evil spirits and demons eager to hurt the new child.

This custom never hurt my mother or the babies. Being a middle child offered me an opportunity to see my large family in both directions of the existential scope, but did not enhance my social status within the clannish world. My first-born brother Salman was a king with all privileges in my eyes. My parents left no doubt about his position in the social scale. The first born in my past society in Baghdad can intimidate and control his other siblings. Aware of his status, he did not hesitate to demand the performing of various chores for him. We resented his special treatment, but the social code led us to respect him. My parents were always there to assert his power. Superstitions and peculiar beliefs ran amok in my Judeo-Arabic community.

Since things could not be explained rationally by me, I found refuge in mythological and illusionary interpretations of reality. My rationalizations of my fears as a child in the ocean of the universe assisted me in my survival because the scientific part in my personal life was not accepted by my environment. our rabbis, who often served as mentors, heard our concerns and problems, but their suggested solutions almost always ended with a call to trust Allah. Allah can close and open gates at times of distress. He can cure the sick and reward the righteous. Indeed, in the commercial society of Baghdad, people committed sins and offenses like every place in the world, but, at the same time, a pious man and woman were cherished by the group, and the educated one was held in high social standard by the collective agreement.

My parents invented many Arabic terms to explain cures and stress. The voice of the nashar (similar to a darwish witch doctor) reached my ears several times in my childhood. The religion of the nashar was secondary but the belief in his magical power was unquestioned. Pouring water on sand in the location of faza or tarqa (sudden anxiety attack) was one way to remove the evil eye. I actually experienced the placing of the above sandy goulash on my forehead, legs, and hands in order to kill evil forces. Blessings, whisperings and supplications always accompanied this ritual. Folklore was the actual customs and mores in those days. It was not an abstract academic discipline, nor an exotic adventure. It was life itself.

One cannot be too nostalgic about his/her past, but negative and positive human elements can be found not only in the past but also in the present and the future. My house in Baghdad was also my home. First of all, my parents lived in the same dwelling for tens of years. The same neighbors were also there for a long time. They knew about events related to the cycle of life in my family and we knew about their cycles of their major occurrences. Birth, bar-mitzvah, wedding, death were not detached from the rhythm of everyday life. Poured emotions in all ceremonies were the rule and not the exception. Arabs and Jews are emotional people because I saw them and I heard them in their joyous and sad parties, holidays, songs and prayers. Emotional outbursts were not uncommon in my house at the time of serious disagreements between Baba and Nana. The temper of this lava burst for a short time and following the spill of anger, shouts and frustration, frequently came reconciliation demonstrated by hugs, kisses and embracing gestures. This was the norm in my childhood, both at home and in the community of Arabs like us.

In an unspoken fashion my father Nissim conveyed his love to my mother Naima. Physical abuse was never in existence in my house, but I was exposed to the fear of my parents’ infrequent high-pitched voices in their verbal fights. As a matter of fact my father had an endearing name for my mother Naima. He called her Na’man (the pleasant one). Like every child in my Arab society I was always puzzled by the extreme of emotions in my environment and the speed in which fights and reconciliation were so consecutive in their order and rhythm. I was always left with questions about the reason for the latem.

This self hitting and striking the face, the head, and the shoulder of the person demonstrated sometimes in my family’s circles as well as others in the community did leave me with feelings of horror and disbelief. The ritual can be expressed at a time of severe anger or at a time of disaster and death. While violently tearing the shirt into small pieces to express sorrow, feelings of despair and anguish was not a regular event, nevertheless, I witnessed it enough times to be left devastated and upset. When one of my neighbor’s children called Meir (nickname Meeloo) died after a long illness, I rose one morning to hear shrieking screams by the deqaqate (women hired to mourn the dead) and, being outside, I saw them tearing their hair with their hands in an uncontrolled human frenzy.

Allah did not explain to me all these powerful rituals that came to regulate life and death in an Arab society. My parents would not interpret the rational for these dramatic and traumatic events. They were just following them as part of their anthropological heritage. Living in Harat-al-Yahud (the Jewish sector) as an Arab-Jew child was only to identify the small area and not the world at large. I could only imagine what was happening beyond my small neighborhood. My small neighborhood was not a reflection of the rest of the world.

Sometimes I was convinced that the universe outside the Jewish sector is only a carbon copy of my incredible domain. After all, the distances that I walked from my home base were not very long. My father, who worked in the administration of the cable and post-office apparatus of Baghdad, used to take us to his work in the saray (governmental center). He was a supervisor of many clerks who worked in a long room with desks piled with files and papers.

The clerks were from many religious and ethnic backgrounds: Muslims, Christians, Armenians, Kurds, Sunnis, and Shi’is. One Christian clerk named Sabih attracted my attention because he possessed a motorcycle and he often took my father home and took us, the children, for short rides. The excitement and the thrill of these moments of ride remained resting in my child soul since I enjoyed the feelings of spiritual elevation many hours after these adventures. Sabih was a married man with children, but he befriended a beautiful dark Muslim woman by the name of Khalda who was being recognized as an inspiring Iraqi singer. Her beautiful melancholic voice about disappointing love was heard on the radio establishing her reputation as a national singer.

I became aware that something is wrong with this picture. I could not conceive that a man and a woman would have an extra relationship beyond their own spouses. words like adultery and extra-marital affairs were not comprehensible in my child mind, but Sabih’s public affection to Khalda created havoc in my heart concerning the possibility of disloyalty even among my own parents, despite the fact that that was only the fragment of my creative imagination.

The Tigris river passed only about hundred of meters from my father’s office. Beautiful gardens and colorful roses were carpeting the ground. The wall and the steps descending in the direction of the huge river were marbled in blue color indicating the level of the water at various times of the year. Floods often created colossal pools, which surrounded the many office buildings in the area. As a matter of fact Baghdad residents were expecting the water to appear in their neem (basements) during the spring when snow began to melt in the mountains of north Kurdistan. However, the neem was an excellent place to escape the brutal and burning heat of the summer.

In the cellar, we used to place our mattresses, spread our blankets, and sleep in a nice cool area. This was also the place in which my mother placed her long and big jars, in which she stored delicious pickles and tasty jams, the result of her own cooking of fruits and vegetables in winter time. The delicious aroma of the soaking in those greenish jars has accompanied me for a long, long time. Now back to the waters. The mighty waters of the Tigris almost became the source of my demise as a child. I was six years old when my father took me with my brother to fulfill the duty of many Arab boys. Swimming in the Tigris in a young age was supposed to indicate courage and manhood.

This was outside my control. This was the idea of adults, Dahood essebah (Dahood the swimmer), was a tall man with an incredible physical power with mighty muscles and wide bones. He picked me up in his sturdy hands and cast me in the cold water. It seems that was a routine ritual for Dahood, but for me this was a nightmarish experience. I had swallowed plenty of water in the deep. I totally lost my bearing and I was convinced that I was going to meet my Allah in a matter of seconds. Luckily, my father realized that I was not able to float and he urged Dahood to urgently jump into the deep waters and to bring me to the surface. The physical and the mental trauma had not disappeared, even now to this very moment.

Many stories were told to me by my parents about aggressive Iraqi governmental measures during the flood seasons in Baghdad. Lorries with soldiers and policemen used to roam the streets according to these reports and randomly picked up by force Iraqi citizens walking innocently in the streets. After driving them to the river’s banks they were ordered to fill hundreds of thousands of bags with sand to stop the water from reaching the center of the city of Baghdad and its suburbs.

Returning home safely was the personal responsibility of each Iraqi. The governmental agents promised nothing. some people were swept by the intense currents, some were injured and some returned home when the danger left the river. The cruelty of the Iraqi regime and the compassion of and the mercy of many individual Iraqis did not escape my attention as a native Arab-Jew of the country of my birth.

I remember walking to hathak essob (literally the other side) of Baghdad. A huge bridge was built to connect the east and the west of the city. I often walked on this bridge to visit my uncle Hezqel who was the stationmaster of a busy train station. One picture was ingrained in my mind associated with the bridge. Children often climbed up on the high poles of the bridge. They were jumping into the water. The estimated height was approximately about thirty and fifty meters and maybe more.

People were betting on the life of these poor children. The bet was if they can survive the jump and swim to the shore or if they would be drowned and not be seen again. Watching the death