Carol Isaacs is a musician and cartoonist, born in the UK to Iraqi-Jewish parents. The last of her family had fled Iraq by the mid-1960s and to all intents and purposes regarded itself as British, settling quietly and without fuss into suburban London. By then, nearly all of Iraq’s Jewish population of 150,000 had left. A lineage that stretched as far back as Babylonian times over 2,600 years ago, a life couched in the comforting cycle of the Jewish festivals – a home now gone for good, existing solely in memory and imagination.
In The Wolf of Baghdad Isaacs travels back to her lost homeland of the last century, in the company of an imaginary wolf whose protective powers were renowned in Iraqi Jewish tradition. She writes:
