Title: From Baghdad to Brooklyn
First published: 2005
Description: Inspired by the posthumous discovery of letters written by his father but never mailed, Jack Marshall’s memoir is both a moving story of a writer’s artistic coming-of-age and a lush, lyrical recollection of a childhood spent in Brooklyn’s Arabic-speaking Jewish community. Born in 1936 to an Iraqi father and Syrian mother who had immigrated to the United States, Marshall grew up in the hardworking Sephardic community—enveloped in an extended family that spoke little English, no Yiddish, and whose way of life owed more to their Middle Eastern homelands than to European Jewish traditions.

As the sights, sounds, and tastes of midcentury New York leap off the page, Marshall beautifully evokes the magic of youth and discovery. From playing “running bases” in the Brooklyn streets to making egg creams at Coney Island, from his mother’s rich kibbeh and baklava to the vast world revealed in the books of the New York Public Library, from the pleasures of music to the mysteries contained under a microscope, Marshall’s story is as enduring as it is original. And before he sets sail for Africa as a seaman on a Norwegian freighter, Marshall has, through his negotiation of language, culture, family strife, and issues of education, faith, and politics, shined a light upon the possibilities of our collective future.
Subjects: Social life and customs, Family, Children of immigrants, Sephardim, American Poets, Jewish families, Homes and haunts, Poets, American, Arab American families, Childhood and youth, Biography, Arab americans, Brooklyn (new york, n.y.), New york (n.y.), social life and customs, Poets, biography
Places: Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.), New York, N.Y., New York (State), United States
People: Jack Marshall (1936-)
Time periods: 20th century
LC classification: PS3563.A722 Z465 2005