The Jewish Bride

Book excerpt: A Jewish girl suffers from anti-Semitic sentiments in the Iraq of the past century. A Kurdish girl finds her diary over sixty years later. What connects them?Rahila grows up under the growing anti-Semitic threats of the 1940's and loses her family and most people around her to the pull of Zionism and the state of Israel. She herself marries a Muslim, converts to Islam and stays in Iraq.Zara is part of the Arab Spring movement in Kurdistan and struggles to come to terms with her new-found, Jewish roots. She finds she is not the only one whose long forgotten past is looming heavily over her present and future.Two women, living in two different eras, play the main parts in Judit Neurink's novel situated in Iraq. Neurink, who lived in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq for over ten years, brings to life the past Iraq has chosen to forget, of the Jews who for centuries made up the fabric of the society.Using the stories of two strong women, she draws the pictures of Iraqi, Kurdish and Jewish families struggling to survive in a changing and often hostile world. The Jewish Bride covers a chapter in Iraq's history that is absent in what is taught in Iraqi schools and universities. While Jewish buildings and quarters have crumbled and all but disappeared, the knowledge about how Jews, Muslims and Christians used to live together in Iraq seems doomed to perish with the older generation. By telling these stories and mixing them with fiction, Neurink has made this lost past come alive again.The Jewish Bride is a powerful story that will touch and move readers from all over the world.