Outcast (Paperback)

~ (Author), Ammiel Alcalay (Translator), Oz Shelach (Translator)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A septuagenarian Israeli novelist who emigrated from Baghdad in 1951, Ballas fictionalizes the life of Ahmad Soussa, an Iraqi Jew who converted to Islam in the 1930s. Soussa ended up writing works used in anti-Jewish propaganda by Saddam Hussein's regime, and Ballas begins during the Iran-Iraq War of the mid-1980s, with his character, Ahmad Haroun Saussan, writing a memoir (this book) in which he tries to explain why he wrote The Jews in History, an enormous work taken up by the regime. What unfolds is Saussan's life story, the primal scene being his marriage to a non-Jewish American woman, Jane, when he's a visiting engineering grad student in the U.S. in the 1930s. The marriage results in Saussan's elder brother and acting family patriarch, Daniel, disowning Saussan and having him excommunicated from his hometown Jewish enclave at al-Hila. That trauma sets off a chain of events that ruins Saussan's marriage and makes for a too-pat justification for all of his subsequent actions. Ballas also assumes a familiarity with Iraqi history that most American readers won't have, but his writing in Saussan's unreliable voice is immediate, vivid and richly elusive. As a case study in the rationalization of personal and political contradiction, the novel is entirely clear.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* As the Iran-Iraq War looms, civil engineer and historian Haroun Soussan receives an award from President Saddam Hussein. Soussan, 70, has seen great change in Iraq, though not enough of it according to his ideals. He has lived for an Iraq whose several religio-ethnic groups coexist in peace and equity. He is a cosmopolitan man, whose first wife, the love of his life, was American. He left her and his son in the U.S. for love of Iraq, and he still feels guilty about it. For Iraq, he left Judaism, embraced Islam, and fought Zionism as the nonpareil, ethnocentrist threat to his dreams. He has lost his closest friends because of politics. Despite everything Soussan believes and has done, however, what he was is not forgotten, and he feels an outcast not merely from the Jews and the West but within his homeland. Ballas, himself an Iraqi Jew who moved to Israel, has Soussan unburden himself in a prospective memoir in which he ranges freely in his past and often returns to his problematic present. So doing, Soussan reveals more about modern Iraq than nearly all Americans put together know, and Ballas creates one of the most relevant, most important characters in contemporary fiction. Olson, Ray

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 210 pages
• Publisher: City Lights Publishers (May 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0872864812
• ISBN-13: 978-0872864818
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #883,366 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a good read for you historical/political buffs, September 11, 2007

By	Feminist Review blog "various writers" (worldwide) - See all my reviews

Outcast is a political story about the works of Haroun Soussan who is supposed to be based on a historical character Ahmad Soussa. Soussan is a Jewish man who converted to Islam. The story gives in inside look into life in Iraq before the war, leading up to and during Saddam Hussein's reign. Soussan has trouble grappling with the fact that there is a lack of loyalty for Iraq from fellow Jews in his country, and he tries to promote full integration and the revocation of minority privileges. The character appears to be strong in his beliefs and his loyalty to Iraq, causing him to leave his American wife and their two-year-old son behind in America. Here we follow this man's journey as he watches Iraq shift, change and develop, although not into what he'd hoped. Soussan is a civil engineer and, later, an historian.

The book is definitely geared toward an audience who is into Iraqi historical fiction. The book follows no conventional measures, and it is hard to follow at times due the author's tendency to go off into tangents. There are no defined chapters in the book, and the story is told in no distinct chronological order. A good read for you historical/political buffs. Check it out.

4.0 out of 5 stars Good, but not up to expectations, July 28, 2009

By	L. King "Eclectic Reader" (Toronto Canada) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Perhaps some of the lyrical aspects of the writing has been lost in the translation to English. The book meanders through the life of of Haroun Soussan a Jewish convert to Islam in Iraq. I agree with the previous reviewer that the lack of chapter headings and jumping back in forth in time makes the book difficult to follow - I'd recommend reading it in a single sitting rather than multiple sessions as I did. Someone unfamiliar Iraq over the last 70 years would have difficulty reassembling the historical background. The style does augment the notion that Haroun is a static and lonely character who ages slowly but changes little as the world changes around him.

For me the book centres around the notion of personal identity and its relationship to others. Soussan defines himself as a Muslim and converts on principles of generality because Islam is presented as the alternative that embraces the culture at large and because he fails to connect to his brother Reuben and the Jewish community. In spite of this he concerns himself with Zionism and his life's work is a book "The Jews In History", the focus of which Ballas has unfortunately decided to hide from the reader. Yet his disappointment shows through between his imagined ideals of Islamic community and the reality of political and social life. This comes to the fore in the episodes of the 2 farhuds (progroms) against the Jews of 1941 and 1947 where his uncertainty of how he fits in with both communities and his discomforture that his granddaughter by Hamida his 2nd wife, was given the Jewish name of Sarah and the unexplored question of whether or not Jane, Haroun's first wife, raised his son Jamil as a Jew.

Biographical fiction is not my usual fare and I was motivated to read Outcast through Ballas' appearance in the (excellent) documentary Forget Baghdad. A more precise rating I would give this book is 3.75 stars. I would probably not recommend it to others but it is interesting and discussable.