Indeed, Jews have such a long history of ignoring clear and present dangers that this blindness is the one wound no Jewish memoirist can resist reopening. “It was too late, and we knew it,” writes Kattan. Yet, while some Iraqi Jews were finding exit doors already closed in their faces, a Jewish-Iraqi senator was busy planning “an enormous building to house a school, a gymnasium, a stadium.” The Jewish senator may have suspected the absurdity of his project all the while he was going ahead with it, but he was willing to turn the other cheek and look the other way, as the Jews of Germany looked the other way, guilty as all were of what the political thinker Edward N. Lutwak has called “the logic of passivity"—the ability to mistake the most idle forms of hope for cunning foresight and prudence. Everyone in the end falls prey to the misguided notion that the banality of history could not possibly repeat itself more than once every century.
And Naim Kattan treads the same path. Farewell, Babylon is the inspired memoir of Naim’s childhood and adolescence in Baghdad during the 1940s. Born in 1928 to a father who worked in the Iraqi postal administration, Naim grew up to consider himself a staunch Arabist with an indefatigable love for his homeland. The Kattans may have been ordinary, observant, hardworking Jews, and Naim was certainly an ambitious young man who was no less eager to publish than he was to find sex however he could. But nothing could have warned his family that 25 centuries of Jewish presence in Iraq would come to a sudden halt during their own lifetimes. Jews, after all, had been rooted in Iraq from before the time of the Persians, before the Greeks, before the Romans, before Islam. The logic of passivity’s favorite maxim is: let tomorrow dispel today’s fears.
