Lesung mit Usama Al Shahmani

The Iraqi writer Usama Al Shahmani reads passages from his new novel "In the Depth of the Tigris Sleeps a Song." In conversation with Reto Bonifazi, he will also share some interesting insights about his writing and literature in general. About the novel: Gadi lives in Zurich as a lecturer in Hebrew language when his father is dying in Israel. He hasn’t had contact with him for over thirty years. Reluctantly, he travels to his father’s bedside, and after his death, he is left with an uncomfortable legacy: a bag of diaries and notes, as well as his father's last wish for half of his ashes to be scattered in the Tigris. As Gadi begins to read one of the notebooks, he encounters not only an unknown father but also a dark chapter of Iraqi history: the expulsion of the Jewish population who had lived there for over two thousand years, with the active assistance of the Nazis. Born in Baghdad in 1934, Gadi's father experienced exclusion up to the pogroms and fled to Israel. Despite his resistance, Gadi can no longer detach himself from his father's history and decides to travel to Baghdad with the urn. An impressive novel about a piece of Iraqi history that is inextricably linked to German and European past.