Outcast - Softcover

Ballas, Shimon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0872864812 ISBN 13: 9780872864818

Publisher: City Lights Publishers, 2007

Synopsis

Haroun Soussan, narrator of Outcast and a Jewish convert to Islam, is a civil engineer and historian who’s just completed his life’s work, The Jews and History. The book opens with him getting an award from Saddam Hussein during the time of the Iran-Iraq war. Written in the form of an autobiography, the narrative moves in and out of the present, the recent, and more distant past, providing a unique and intimate chronicle of Iraq’s contemporary political history.

Shimon Ballas was born in Baghdad in 1930 and immigrated to Israel in 1951.

About this title

About the Author

Shimon Ballas was born in Baghdad in 1930 and emigrated to Israel in 1951. A major novelist, Ballas has published fifteen works of fiction, several important studies on contemporary Arabic literature, and numerous translations from Arabic. Although he began his career in Arabic, Ballas switched to Hebrew in the mid 1960s. Ammiel Alcalay is a poet, translator, critic and scholar who teaches at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center, where he is the Deputy Chair of the PhD Program in English. His latest work is Scrapmetal (Factory School, 2006). He is also editor and translator of Keys to the Garden, and Semezdin Mehmedinovic's Sarajevo Blues, both published by City Lights. Oz Shelach, author and journalist, was born in West Jerusalem in 1968.

Reviews

A septuagenarian Israeli novelist who emigrated from Baghdad in 1951, Ballas fictionalizes the life of Ahmad Soussa, an Iraqi Jew who converted to Islam in the 1930s. Soussa ended up writing works used in anti-Jewish propaganda by Saddam Hussein's regime, and Ballas begins during the Iran-Iraq War of the mid-1980s, with his character, Ahmad Haroun Saussan, writing a memoir (this book) in which he tries to explain why he wrote The Jews in History, an enormous work taken up by the regime. What unfolds is Saussan's life story, the primal scene being his marriage to a non-Jewish American woman, Jane, when he's a visiting engineering grad student in the U.S. in the 1930s. The marriage results in Saussan's elder brother and acting family patriarch, Daniel, disowning Saussan and having him excommunicated from his hometown Jewish enclave at al-Hila. That trauma sets off a chain of events that ruins Saussan's marriage and makes for a too-pat justification for all of his subsequent actions. Ballas also assumes a familiarity with Iraqi history that most American readers won't have, but his writing in Saussan's unreliable voice is immediate, vivid and richly elusive. As a case study in the rationalization of personal and political contradiction, the novel is entirely clear.
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*Starred Review* As the Iran-Iraq War looms, civil engineer and historian Haroun Soussan receives an award from President Saddam Hussein. Soussan, 70, has seen great change in Iraq, though not enough of it according to his ideals. He has lived for an Iraq whose several religio-ethnic groups coexist in peace and equity. He is a cosmopolitan man, whose first wife, the love of his life, was American. He left her and his son in the U.S. for love of Iraq, and he still feels guilty about it. For Iraq, he left Judaism, embraced Islam, and fought Zionism as the nonpareil, ethnocentrist threat to his dreams. He has lost his closest friends because of politics. Despite everything Soussan believes and has done, however, what he was is not forgotten, and he feels an outcast not merely from the Jews and the West but within his homeland. Ballas, himself an Iraqi Jew who moved to Israel, has Soussan unburden himself in a prospective memoir in which he ranges freely in his past and often returns to his problematic present. So doing, Soussan reveals more about modern Iraq than nearly all Americans put together know, and Ballas creates one of the most relevant, most important characters in contemporary fiction. Olson, Ray

Edition details

• Publisher: City Lights Publishers
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0872864812
• ISBN 13: 9780872864818
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 210