Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew
by Avi Shlaim
What it cost to become Israeli.
For you if
you want to understand 1948 through someone it happened to.
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Avi Shlaim was born in Baghdad in 1945 to a Jewish family that had been Iraqi for centuries. His family spoke Arabic, lived among Muslims and Christians, and had no particular reason to leave — until 1948 changed everything. The creation of Israel set off a wave of anti-Jewish violence across the Arab world, partly spontaneous, partly orchestrated, that made continued Jewish life in Iraq untenable. The Shlaim family arrived in Israel in 1950 as immigrants — Mizrahi Jews from Arab lands — and encountered a state that had been built by and for Ashkenazi Jews from Europe, and that classified them accordingly. Three Worlds is the memoir of living through all of this: the lost Baghdad of Shlaim's childhood, the disorienting new Israel of his adolescence, and the England where he eventually landed and built his career as a historian. It is also the book that makes Shlaim's scholarly work legible in a new way — the declassified archives he spent his career analyzing were, in a sense, the documents that explained what had happened to his own family. Winner of the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Israel
- Voice
- Written by a Israeli author
Three Worlds is the cleanest entry point into this whole body of work. Where Collusion Across the Jordan and The Iron Wall require the reader to hold a lot of historical apparatus, Three Worlds gives you the same history as a life lived — Baghdad to Tel Aviv to Oxford, across eighty years of the twentieth century's worst decisions. Shlaim is not a victim narrator; he's a historian who happens to have been present at the history. The book won the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History, which is given to works that are genuinely literary and genuinely historical — it's not a consolation prize for memoir. The thing that makes it essential for P&P specifically is what it does to the category 'Arab-Jew' — a phrase Shlaim uses deliberately, because its apparent contradiction is exactly the thing 1948 destroyed. Before 1948 there were Jews who were Arab. After 1948 that identity became incoherent. The memoir is partly about what it meant to live that erasure.
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For the family bookshelf
Same idea, written for a younger reader. Good for reading together.
