Rachel: A Life in a Turbulent Century

This remarkable book is the story of the author's mother, Rachel, a girl born in the Jewish Quarter of Damascus, who in 1927 wins a scholarship to study in Versailles to become a teacher with the Alliance Israelite Universelle. Posted to Baghdad, she meets Victor, a young man from a wealthy Iraqi Jewish family, fresh from study in Germany.

The book follows their relationship, through the enormous and appalling upheavals of the twentieth century. The Holocaust is at first only a terrifying rumour to Syrian and Iraqi Jews, whose immediate problems result from the rise, following the collapse of the Ottoman rule, of a predominantly Muslim Arab nationalism whose sources in European fascism and Nazism make it a threat not only to Jews but to all the religious and ethnic minorities of the region, including the ancient Christian sects. The book covers the entire sequence of events, including the rise of Israel and the defeat of the Arab armies sent to suppress it, which led to the dispossession and expulsion, by the new nationalism, of virtually the entire Jewish community, in a vast act of what would now be called ethnic cleansing. In all of this Victor, extraordinarily, retains his nostalgia for an earlier, pre-Nazi Germany, and in the 1950s re-establishes himself in Hamburg.