The Wolf of Baghdad: An Iraqi Jewish Memoir

Carol Isaacs

2020

Illustration of a woman in an abaya standing on a balcony, peering into a room. Inside, a man in a yamulke reads a book.

In The Wolf of Baghdad, British artist Carol Isaacs retraces her Iraqi Jewish roots through a haunting graphic memoir that bridges memory and imagination. Subtitled Memoir of a Lost Homeland, the work takes readers on a journey through Baghdad’s vanished Jewish world, as Isaacs—drawn wearing an abaya—walks unseen among the ghosts of her ancestors. Neither fully present nor past, she embodies both exile and remembrance, bearing witness to a once-vibrant community now lost to history.

Credits

Carol Isaacs, illustration from The Wolf of Baghdad: Memoir of a Lost Homeland (Brighton: Myriad Editions, 2020). Used with permission of the publisher.

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Creator Bio

Carol Isaacs

b. Mid-20th Century

Carol Isaacs was born in northwest London to a Jewish family that fled Baghdad, Iraq, in the wake of the 1941 anti-Jewish riots known as the Farhud. She is the author of a graphic memoir and animated film about the lost world of Jewish Iraq, called The Wolf of Baghdad (2020). She works as a musician, playing the keyboard and the accordion, and as a cartoonist, The Surreal McCoy.