‘The belief is current among Baghdadi Jews that the wolf keeps away spirits and demons.’ David Sassoon, scholar, 1917

Carol Isaac’s graphic memoir of a lost homeland revisits the old Jewish Quarter of 1940s Baghdad, home to a third of the city’s population which witnessed the death or expulsion of almost its entire community of 150,000. Journeying among its ghostly former inhabitants, she brings to life a lost world.

Carol Isaacs is a musician and, as The Surreal McCoy, a well-known cartoonist published in the New Yorker, Spectator and Private Eye. She has played with Sinead O’Connor, Indigo Girls and is co-founder of the London Klezmer Quartet.

Marina Benjamin is an author and senior editor at Aeon Magazine. She is a former arts editor of the New Statesman magazine and deputy arts editor of the Evening Standard newspaper in London. Marina’s latest autobiographical work, Insomnia, was published in 2018.

You might also like: The Wolf of Baghdad – Live Score at Songlines Encounters Festival on Sun 31 May.