INTRODUCTION: That Little Street in Baghdad

As a crossroad for several eastern and western cultures, Iraq had the ingredients for a multiracial society. Nowhere this pluralistic culture is more evident than in the little street in Baghdad where I grew up. It was a middle-class neighborhood, with eucalyptus trees lining both sides of the street, and in the springtime the whole neighborhood would be infused with the intoxicating aroma of the blossoms of citrus trees planted all along the fences. Those shady places were like magnets for the neighborhood kids, where we used to play, fight, reconcile, tell stories, and chatter about everything and anything. As lunchtime approached, the time for the main meal of the day, we started playing our guessing game as the pleasant and most welcome aromas of food sneaked out of the simmering pots, and meandered along our street. We would sniff these floating aromas and guess whose mom is cooking what for that day. Although the dominant aroma would be that of stew and and rice, cooked practically everyday, the guessing would still be intriguing for there were so many kinds of stews to guess at. And almost always there would be a single distinctive aroma of a special dish, and we knew that one of us would soon be called by his or her mom to distribute samplings of that dish for the neighbors. As the custom had always been, it was not fit to return the neighbor's dish empty, so it would be returned with a comparable dish that is equally if not more delicious. Thus our guessing game was kept alive by this exchange of hospitality, and from those little dishes coming and going we came to learn a lot about people coming from all walks of life, and of diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds. Such diversity was not a unique situation in the city of Baghdad, which across the centuries became a melting pot of sorts for all these groups.

My maternal grandparents owned some date palm groves in southern Iraq, and my mother and her siblings, as she always liked to reminisce, led a carefree childhood in the midst of these date groves, chasing the sheep and goats, and stealing a sip or two of