Carol Isaacs is the creator of the animated film The Wolf of Baghdad

In the 1940s, a third of Baghdad’s population was Jewish.

Within a decade, almost all 150,000 had been expelled, killed or escaped. This beautiful, wordless cartoon is both a portrait of Carol Isaac’s family and of the Jews of Baghdad. Isaacs says: “The Finns have a word, kaukokaipuu, which means a feeling of homesickness for a place you’ve never been. I have lived in two places all my life; England where I was born and the lost world of my Iraqi-Jewish family.”

Carol Isaacs is British and a descendant of Iraqi Jews. She plays both keyboard and accordion and is an active musician in pop and world music. She has visited the Jewish Culture Festival previously with the London Klezmer Quartet, which plays traditional klezmer, Jewish folk music with roots in Eastern Europe.

In addition, she has toured worldwide with many internationally renowned artists including Sinéad O’Connor (Ireland), The Indigo Girls (USA) and Ahmed Mukhtar (Iraq). Also known as cartoonist of The Surreal McCoy (published in New Yorker, Spectator, Private Eye). She has also created and drawn The Wolf of Baghdad, which we are now showing at the Jewish Culture Festival.

New genre According to Isaacs, the film represents a new genre called “motion comic”. You first see a page on the screen and the drawings then come to life one by one. These images are accompanied by music, usually Judeo-Arabic music with a focus on Iraqi Jewish melodies. This music is also usually performed live at screenings of the film, as with old silent films. And Isaacs, who is a very skilled musician himself, is usually one of the players as well.

The rich and often forgotten Jewish history of the Middle East

The Wolf of Baghdad is Isaac’s first so-called graphic novel and departs from her traditional work in comics, which tends to be more focused on satire and humor. But it also tells a much more personal story.

“The Wolf of Baghdad is about the life of her Jewish-Iraqi family in Baghdad, told through family anecdotes,” emphasizes Isaacs. “It’s mostly wordless, interspersed with family memories and reminiscences of the good times before they have to leave their homeland.”

Isaacs’ family was forced to leave Iraq during a violent persecution of Jews in the 1940s that marked the beginning of the end for Iraqi Jewry. This is called Farhud and is a fact she believes is not widely known, according to an interview with her in the Jerusalem Post from 2022.

“There has been a lot of representation of the Jewish experience in Europe, but not in the Middle East. Many people do not know that Jews existed in the Middle East. I thought it was time for us to tell our stories. We were a third of the population of Baghdad in the 1940s. The Jews had great cultural importance and lived quite happily,” she says.

The importance of Baghdad and the rich Iraqi Jewish heritage is evident in Isaacs’ work, even though she has not been there herself.

“My family didn’t really talk about Baghdad and what made them go. It was always this idealized place, and I had a weird nostalgia for a place I’ve never been”, says Isaacs.

But the rich history of Judaism in the Middle East does not stop in Baghdad, and Isaac’s latest work tells a new story that is even further away, though just as personal.

She calls it “Burma by Accordion” where she focuses on a trip to Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, where many Jews fled from the Middle East, including one of her relatives, whose story will be told alongside her own.

“It follows the story of one of my father’s cousins ​​who had to flee when the Japanese invaded Burma” according to Isaacs. “He fled Mandalay with nothing but his clothes and an accordion in hand, and walked through the jungle to India. No one from my family is there now, but they were happy and had a great life there. This is an element of my story,” says Isaacs.

Source: Jerusalem Post

Introduction and conversation about the film. In English.