Lost within the oceans of American Jewish literature, camps, songs, and museums, is a history within a history: that of Sephardic American Jewry. Many of these Jews, also known as mizrachim (“Easterners” in Hebrew), came from Syria, Iraq, Morocco, and other places across the Middle East and North Africa before arriving on the banks of New York, where they settled within Jewish enclaves and struggled to preserve their cultures while fitting in with the mainstream.
From Baghdad to Brooklyn: Growing Up in a Jewish-Arabic Family in Midcentury America is prize-winning poet Jack Marshall’s account of growing up within such a setting. The Marshall family—formerly Mash’aal—settled in the Syrian neighborhoods of Brooklyn, and began American life in the ways of many immigrants, cycling through various jobs, languages and culinary creations. Marshall dropped out of Hebrew school, where he was the only mizrachi kid enrolled, and like all good Jews who rebel against their parents, he fondly recalls how “observing codified religious practice felt like being submerged in a magma of solidified past, the act of breathing itself gagged with anxiety.”
Much like his description of his Jewish education, Marshall’s tale as a whole is dotted with classic elements wrought poetic. Through letters, photos, phone calls, and poems, Marshall juxtaposes impressionistic memories of his Syrian-Iraqi-American childhood with snippets of recent phone calls and family gatherings.
He takes us with him as he struggles through school, discovers science and poetry, questions God, and stumbles toward becoming a man. Though his memories are pieced together randomly, like a late-night phone call, and his mother’s flow of Arabic words that string us along a retelling of a childhood in verse, they seem to promise an ultimate act of analytical synthesis.
Though we are escorted by poetic snippets of Arabic and aged rabbis, the complex twists and turns of race, identity, and religion in Brooklyn’s mixed Jewish communities are only gestured at through poetry, and never engaged head-on.
The layers of marvelous detail distract us from the memoir’s shortcomings, like its periodic digression from a larger narrative arc and, more unfortunately, from a sensitive exploration of the societal issues that ran through Marshall’s Brooklyn childhood.
Despite the depth of his writing, Marshall seems to not fully take advantage of his retrospective vantage point. Beautiful though the lyrical voice is, the world of Marshall’s mid-century Brooklyn childhood would benefit from cerebral engagement as well.
