Departures
My parents had four children. I was the eldest. They had three daughters and finally a son. We are Iraqi Jews. Jews had lived in Iraq for two thousand five hundred years. We were there before the births of Christianity and Islam. We were there from the time of the Old Testament.
At any rate my parents have four children. I was the only one to be born in Baghdad because during and after WWII there was a severe rise in antisemitism. They made it uncomfortable for Jews to stay in the country they called home for millenniums. They then decided to make an example of one of the most prominent Jewish citizens. They arrested him and drove him to his home and executed him in front of his wife and children. Because of this action and the arrests of several Jewish men and the confiscation of the property of some others, Jewish families began to leave. My parents and their toddler daughter, me, were part of those who left. We left for Tehran where we settled until the revolution that ousted the Shah, at which time we moved to the United States.
My parents raised us in the way