The month before

The season opened with Elul. In Baghdad, as across the Sephardi and Mizrahi world, selichot were said before dawn every morning from the first of Elul through Yom Kippur, forty days of them, rather than the last week that Ashkenazi communities keep. That is the habit behind the hours Ephraim gives below: a synagogue that starts at half past three in the morning was not unusual to him.

The rulings that governed the holiday came from the city itself. Rabbi Yosef Hayyim, the Ben Ish Hai (1835 to 1909), set down Baghdadi practice week by week, and his section for the week of Nitzavim, read just before the new year, is where the order of the holiday table below is fixed. What Iraqi Jews do on Rosh Hashanah is largely what he wrote.

After Tisha B'Av, joy comes back

Ephraim tells the year as a sequence. The fast of Tisha B'Av, the synagogue from morning to night reading lamentations, and then, in his words, the fifteenth of Av "already brings joy into the house," and the preparations begin.

The seder table

The table the evening opens with is a row of foods, each eaten after a short request that puns on its name. The order below is the Baghdadi one. The Hebrew or Aramaic name carries the pun; the Arabic is what the food was called in the kitchen.

• Datestamar · تمر That our enemies be finished (yitamu). Dates open the Baghdadi table; they were the city's fruit, and the same dates went into the silan on the shelf.
• Black-eyed peasrubia · لوبيا That our merits increase (yirbu). Cooked plain and sweet, not with vinegar or lemon; nothing sour went on the table these two nights.
• Leekkarti · كراث That those who wish us ill be cut off (yikaretu).
• Beet greenssilka · سلق That they be removed (yistalku). In Iraqi kitchens the beet went into kubba the same week.
• Gourdqara · قرع That the decree against us be torn (yikara) and our merits be read out (yikaru).
• Pomegranaterimon · رمان That our merits be as many as its seeds.
• Appletapuah · تفاح A sweet year. The Ben Ish Hai specifies the apple cooked in sugar, which is why Iraqi households kept sweet apple and quince preserves for the holiday rather than a raw apple in honey.
• The headrosh · راس That we be the head and not the tail. A lamb's head where it could be had, often on the table as pacha; the head of a fish otherwise.

Beyond the row itself: bread was dipped in sugar as well as salt, dishes were sweetened, and anything sour or bitter stayed off the table for both days. The greeting was the Sephardi one, tizku le-shanim rabbot, may you merit many years, answered with tizkeh ve-tihyeh, may you merit and live.

Morning, the shofar, and a boy's voice

Two customs sit inside that clip. Not sleeping during the day of Rosh Hashanah is a rule the Ben Ish Hai records, on the principle that a person who sleeps through the day of judgment has his fortune sleep with him. And the Psalms are the Sephardi practice of reading the whole book twice across the two days: three hundred chapters, the numerical value of the word kaper, atone. Ephraim's neighbours were doing it in houses that were keeping a memorial that week.

The evening service opened with the piyyut Ahot Ketana, "little sister," with its refrain asking that the year and its curses end. Before the shofar in the morning came Et Sha'arei Ratzon, the binding of Isaac retold verse by verse. Both belong to the Baghdadi rite as they do across the Sephardi world, and both are sung in the maqam the city's Jews sang everything in.

Three days without a refrigerator

When the first day of Rosh Hashanah fell on a Thursday, the second day was Friday and Shabbat followed: three days in which nothing could be bought and, in a Baghdad without refrigerators, nothing could be kept. Ephraim's account of how a household managed it is the most practical thing he says about the holiday.

What came after

Two or three days after Rosh Hashanah came kapparot: a chicken for every person in the house, taken to the slaughterer, with part of the birds given to the poor. A family of eight or ten had eight or ten chickens that week, and gave away two or three. Then Yom Kippur, the synagogue from morning to evening, the shofar at the close, and the meal after the fast. Two days after that, the sukkah went up in the courtyard: a large one, some four metres square, with big seats like sofas, built from wooden pieces the family kept from year to year and slept in at night.

Savta's new year

Savta Shula's tape has no holiday in it as such; it has her life, and the year turns inside it. One of her telephone messages, left for a daughter, is a new year's call. It runs, as she says it: a good year, be healthy, much health, succeed in everything, succeed in your luck, and then the long list every one of her calls ends with. Health first, and a good year, is the whole of her greeting.

In another passage she is reading a dream for a relative, and the dream is of apples. She found a leather bag, she says, and in its small pocket four or five green apples, green, green. Her reading: new, you will be new; a tree, you will receive a husband; and green, it will be green for you. There is nothing to fear. She was not keeping the holiday; she was telling a fortune. But the apple meant to her what it means on the table.

More of her voice, and the rest of Ephraim's, are on Savta Shula's page and the full interview.