The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Outcast, by Shimon Ballas
review by Michael Pinker

In Outcast Shimon Ballas introduces an old man, a Jew born in Iraq who converted to Islam in the 1930s, reviewing his divided existence. Honored by President Saddam Hussein at the publication of his The Jews and History, a somewhat flustered Haroun Soussan self-deprecatingly begins to recollect a career spanning the twentieth century in a memoir intended to be read after his death. Against a backdrop of events occurring during the British hegemony to the start of the Iran-Iraq War, he deconstructs his ambitions, intellectual proclivities, and strained personal relations. Haroun is American-trained, a civil engineer, one of the builders of modern Baghdad, who married an American in Beirut and had a son in the United States, yet returned to his homeland, leaving his family behind. A moralist, he ponders his inability to win a coveted diplomatic post, his failed first marriage, and estrangement from childhood comrades Assad and Qassem while justifying a lifelong struggle for integrity. If much of Iraqi politics during his tumultuous lifetime, the milieu of this tale, seems recondite, Haroun remains a sympathetic figure in his prolonged angst and dashed hopes. Ballas’s artistry feelingly renders a man fraught with regret for his first wife Jane, now dead, and lost son; for Assad the poet’s disappointment in him; for Qassem the Communist’s imprisonment and exile; for the misery of his scholarly daughter by his second wife, wed to a shiftless husband, mother to an unhappy child. In his study, contemplating his attempt to serve liberal ideals, Haroun offers an intimate view of a society now largely consigned to history. Shifting between past and present, his sanguine, reasonable voice reminisces over the uneasy consciousness of defeat, torn between two paths, two cultures, his life a careworn sacrifice to outmoded views, over which looms the disaster awaiting his beloved Iraq.