Outcast

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.