This long novel by the Israeli writer Sami Michael recounts the lives of an extended family of Jews in Baghdad, tracing their fate from before the World War One, when Iraq was part of the Ottoman (Turkish) empire, to modern-day Israel where the grandchildren and great-grandchildren end up (during 1950-51, about ninety per cent of Iraq’s Jewish community — about 150,000 people —moved to Israel).

Jews may well have existed for centuries in Baghdad, but so have floods, plagues, massacres and persecutions, such that, according to Michael, far from integrating into the surrounding cultures, these Jews ’huddled together in a cramped quarter, and most of them were born and grew up and grew old and died without ever leaving its confines’.

The confines in this novel are a squalid courtyard, around which the families live, and where the human occupants ’humbly recognise their transience’ alongside the much more durable population of beetles, scorpions, snakes, mice and carriers of ’seasonal diseases and cyclical epidemics’. Across the generations, from the ’living foundation’ and matriarch Michal downwards, a rigid hierarchy is in place: between the three brothers and their families (the always bankrupt Eliyahu and his family, ’excommunicated by the courtyard’, live in the lightless basement), and between men and women (between the women, which wife has her stove nearest the doorway in the huge shared kitchen depends on her husband’s prestige).

The novel focuses on the character of Victoria, granddaughter of Michal and daughter of vicious-tongued Najia and of brutish but ineffectual Izuri. If she is fat and therefore beautiful, and if the financial arrangements are acceptable to the two families, then Victoria, like other girls, is destined to be married off to a man considered eligible. This man could of course be like Victoria’s sickly uncle Yehuda or like the good-for-nothing Eliyahu or even like her cousin Miriam’s blacksmith, who jumps on her ’like a sledge-hammer’ and in one of his beatings breaks her leg. So of course the prospect of marriage preoccupies Victoria... Not just marriage but of course sex, a subject which the girls of the courtyard hardly talk about, or if they do only shyly and with great ignorance, but of course they are obsessed by nothing else and since the courtyard is crammed with people living one on top of the other, mostly literally, everyone knows everyone else’s business and information can be gleaned that way...

Enter Rafael. Rafael is a cousin of Miriam and Victoria, and both girls hope in their heart of hearts that they will become his chosen one. The novel’s real focus is Victoria and Miriam’s undying love for this supercilious, heartstoppingly attractive and spectacularly unreliable young man. For Rafael is different from all the rest, he emerges from the basement (he is a son of the wretched Eliyahu) in a European suit, he reads books (those of the men who know how to read don’t bother), and disappears mysteriously for long stretches of time. He is in contact with the developing world of the Middle East, and returns with tales from the Lebanon. He treats his surroundings in the courtyard with a disdain and distance which makes him very attractive indeed to every single woman there (except for Najia who loathes him, but precisely because he is so seductive).

Victoria, after years of lusting, suppression of lusting, waiting and uncertainty will one day be singled out for Rafael on one of his visits back to the courtyard. She will then go through what everyone has been waiting for — sex (Rafael is a more considerate husband than most) and childbirth — and will subsequently experience the rounds of sickly children, beatings and of course Rafael’s instant infidelity.

Edifying it is not: ’Ghosts, jinns, Evil Eyes, magic spells, miracles, and dreams that told the future’ are the daily nourishment of the women (who receive no education at all and are unable to read and write). They spend their time hatching spiteful jealousies over attractiveness to men and worrying about whether they will conceive a boy this time (girl children are ’another catastrophe’, sometimes left out to die on the flat roofs). They spy on others, look out for signs (usually of desire or sexual activity), and get shouted at by brothers, fathers and husbands.

Not to mention the beatings, roughhousing and rape. Not to forget the incest — a seemingly blissful father-daughter couple on the rooftop — and older men sleeping with girls hardly ten years old, adultery which is really de rigueur for any self-respecting husband, and a few irrelevancies like World War One (a great trauma for the conscripted Jews who had never borne arms or strayed further than across the river), the arrival of running water and the growing prosperity of the families of the courtyard (Rafael succeeds with his exercise-book factory, and he and Victoria will eventually move from the courtyard to a new house which is ’an anonymous door in a long row of doors’)...

This is a gutsy tale, where smash-and-grab lives are described in all their violent, raunchy earthiness. These lives may be mercilessly dismal and impoverished, but they seethe with straightforward angers, lusts, cravings and loathings. Although the novel has an interesting narrative structure (flashbacks and anticipations of the future), what the reader will remember is the steamy, dark and claustrophobic world of the courtyard, where almost anything can happen...

’Eliyahu’s children, emaciated from their long hunger, had invaded the kitchen and they were snatching the food straight from the boiling pots and devouring it in blind greed. One of them choked on a bone and vomited. They chewed with their mouths full, they burned their snatching fingers. The girls lifted their skirts shamelessly and shovelled pieces of lamb and joints of chicken and scalding rice into their dresses. Their hands dripped with oil, gravy ran down their chins. And Najia was beating their backs and slapping their faces, ready to rip off their sleeves in her fury as she struggled to rescue the pieces of meat into which their nails were digging, while the children, frantic with greed, ignored her. Pots overturned. Bare feet were scalded by the steam. In the end the children fled, their mouths and pockets crammed with meat and rice.’ p50-1