Built of the tree the country ran on
Iraq had date palms in their millions, and the sukkah was made of them. Not only the roof covering: in Baghdad the walls were palm branches too, which is what set an Iraqi sukkah apart from the canvas and timber of European ones. The city's own authority, Rabbi Yosef Hayyim, the Ben Ish Hai, recorded palm fronds as the standard covering there, and gave a reason beyond their being at hand: the verse that the righteous flourishes like a palm.
A family did not build from scratch each year. Ephraim describes a frame of prepared timbers kept from one Sukkot to the next and reassembled, in a courtyard sukkah of about four metres square.
A room you sleep in
The detail that separates Sukkot in Baghdad from Sukkot in a cold country is the furniture. Ephraim's sukkah held four long seats, which he describes as being like sofas and also as beds, one along each side. The family did not visit the sukkah for meals. They lived in it, and slept in it, for the week.
This is less of a leap than it sounds. Baghdad summers drove households up onto their flat roofs to sleep, a habit the site's City Life section describes. Sleeping outdoors in early autumn was the ordinary thing; the sukkah just gave it a roof of palm fronds.
The timbers come out again
אחרי יום כיפור מתחילים להכין סוכה בבית. סוכה גדולה, בערך ארבעה מטר מרובע. יש ארבעה כיסאות גדולים כמו ספות. ומכינים עצים מוכנים, הכול מוכן, מדי שנה בשנה מכינים את העצים האלה ושומרים אותם, ומרכיבים אותם. וגם בלילה חיים בסוכה, ישנים בתוך הסוכה.
After Yom Kippur you begin to prepare a sukkah at the house. A large sukkah, about four metres square. There are four large seats like sofas. And you keep the timbers ready, everything ready. Year after year you prepare those timbers and store them, and you assemble them. And at night you live in the sukkah, you sleep inside it.
He places the building two days after Yom Kippur, which leaves the four days the calendar allows between the fast and the festival.
Four beds, one to a side
עושים את החוגגים בסוכה, בתוך הסוכה. בסוכה יושבים ארבעה אנשים. יש ארבע מיטות גדולות כאלה, כמו שפה, ארבע שפות, אחד, שתיים, שלוש, ארבע. [מילה לא ברורה] ושם אומרים, גם שתי לילות עושים. חול המועד, הולכים לברך על כל מיני דברים.
You hold the celebrations in the sukkah, inside the sukkah. Four people sit in it. There are four big beds like this, one to an edge, four edges, one, two, three, four. [a word here is not recoverable from the tape] And there you say the blessings, and two nights are kept. On the intermediate days you go to make the blessings over all sorts of things.
The night of the willow
The week's high point was the eve of Hoshana Rabbah, the seventh day, which Baghdadi Jews knew by the willow carried that morning: Leylat al-Arava, ليلة العربة, the night of the willow. It was kept awake, studying, and the Iraqi practice was unusual in that women stayed up with the men. Sarah Sassoon, who writes about her family's Babylonian customs, describes the women working at the back of the sukkah through the night making sha'ariya, the toasted vermicelli, listening to the learning as they worked.
Each night a chrai was lit for the ushpizin, the seven guests invited into the sukkah: a glass bowl of water and sesame oil floating seven cotton wicks. Pomegranates and palm branches were the decoration, both of them local.
That night produced the closest thing Baghdad has to a Sukkot literature. Samir Naqqash, born in Baghdad in 1938 and the most stubborn of the Iraqi Jewish writers in that he kept writing his fiction in Arabic until his death in 2004, set a story on the eve of Hoshana Rabbah, family and friends gathered in the sukkah in the joy and solidarity of the 1940s. Sasson Somekh, whose memoir supplies the City Life chapter of this site, admired the story and said plainly that he could not have written it: a film of religiosity covers it, and the Baghdad he knew was not that pious. Two Baghdadi writers of the same generation, the same night, remembered differently. Both are worth keeping.
Then the Torah is finished
Two nights, one to finish the Torah
וגם החג השני, יש לנו שני חגים. חג שמחת תורה ו... זאת אומרת, שמחת תורה, ואחר כך... שני לילות, לילה אחד סיום התורה והלילה השני זה של החג. לא זוכר את השם.
And the second festival too, we have two festivals. Simchat Torah and, that is to say, Simchat Torah, and then, two nights: one night the finishing of the Torah, and the second night the festival itself. I do not remember the name.
The name he is reaching for is Shemini Atzeret, which outside Israel falls the day before Simchat Torah. He is a man in his eighties recalling a calendar he last kept as a boy in Baghdad, and the gap is part of the record.
The year began when the holiday ended
One detail places the festival in the shape of an ordinary Baghdadi year better than any description of ritual. Government schools in Iraq opened on the first of September. The Jewish community's schools did not. They waited until Sukkot was over, and the community's children went back a few weeks after everyone else, because no one was going to start a school year in the middle of the month the family was living in the courtyard.
They start before Sukkot, we start after
אנחנו גומרים בית ספר, את החג פסח, אחרי חודש יוצאים לחופשת קיץ. שלושה חודשים, אצל הקהילה היהודית היה שלושה וחצי. בראשון לספטמבר בתי הספר של הממשלה העיראקית היו מתחילים. אנחנו היינו מתחילים אחרי זה, אחרי חג הסוכות. הם לפני סוכות, אנחנו אחרי סוכות מתחילים.
We finish school around Passover, and a month later we go out for the summer holiday. Three months, and in the Jewish community it was three and a half. On the first of September the Iraqi government schools would start. We would start after that, after Sukkot. They start before Sukkot; we start after Sukkot.
Where this comes from
- Ephraim Sharabani, interviewed March 2014, Saba Nissim's brother. The recordings and the full interview are on this site. His Sukkot passages are transcribed by machine and cleaned lightly; one unrecoverable word is marked rather than guessed.
- Rabbi Yosef Hayyim of Baghdad, the Ben Ish Hai (1835 to 1909), on palm fronds as the covering used in Baghdad, and the verse he attached to it.
- Sarah Sassoon, Iraqi Jewish author, on palm-branch walls, pomegranate decoration, the chrai lamp and its seven wicks, and the women of the household studying and making sha'ariya through the night of Hoshana Rabbah.
- Samir Naqqash (1938 to 2004), Baghdad-born novelist who went on writing in Arabic from Israel, for the story set on the eve of Hoshana Rabbah.
- Sasson Somekh, Baghdad, Yesterday, for his response to that story and for the disagreement between them.