Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online Volume 1, Issue 1 | Page 43

2/2/2016

Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online

Living in Romantic Baghdad: an American Memoir of Teaching and Travel in Iraq, 1924-1947
By: Ida Donges Staudt
Living in Romantic Baghdad: an American Memoir of Teaching and Travel in Iraq, 1924-1947. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse
University Press, 2012. 251pp. $29.95. ISBN: 9780815609940.
Volume: 1 Issue: 1
April 2013
Review by
Jamal En-nehas, PhD
University of Saint Boniface
Manitoba, Canada
Living in Romantic Baghdad: An American Memoir of Teaching and Travel in Iraq, 1924-1947 is a timely work which claims a unique place in the
literature of travel because of its credible, informative, and eyewitness-inspired style, enhanced by the author's insightful engagement with the
subject matter and the insider perspective which the events are related. The relevance of the book for today’s reader, in an admittedly volatile and
fractured world, resides in its ability to draw meaningful links, in serving as a reminder of how the past and the present are inextricably tied, and in
perhaps lending appropriate context to George Santayana’s frequently cited caveat against the suppression of memory and the bracketing of the
past: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” However, as is the case with similar works of art which can be claimed by
various fields and genres, Living in Romantic Baghdad…appeals to readers of diverse epistemological backgrounds and aesthetic orientations. The
editor, a graduate of the American School for Boys in Baghdad in 1941, the institution run by the Staudts and where John Joseph taught for four
years, emphasizes that the author intended the book to be a description of a journey, an exclusive memoir of teaching and travel, rather than a
historical account. The reader, nonetheless, might not see the rationale behind the injunction, for often the line of demarcation between a memoir
and a historical account—whether assessed generically or aesthetically—is rarely translucent. The way the events are sequenced in Ida Donges’
book, and the clear chronological structure of the book, makes the argument against history rather untenable.
The story of Living in Romantic Baghdad… is inspired by the innate desire to transgress the territorialized body and the confines of home and
domesticity which characterized the period between the Industrial Revolution and World War II, as images of Arabia Deserta and Arabia Felix
haunted generations of readers, and as the tradition of travel started moving beyond the luxury-d