Anwar Shaul
Anwar Shaul · Arts & Literature
Iraqi poet and journalist in Arabic, founder of the magazine Al-Hasid and screenwriter of the first Iraqi film
1904, Hilla, Irak ottoman — 1984, Kiryat Ono, Israël
Hilla, Bagdad, Kiryat Ono
Anwar Shaul is recognized among Jewish contributors to Arts & Literature — Iraqi poet and journalist in Arabic, founder of the magazine Al-Hasid and screenwriter of the first Iraqi film
Origins and early life
Anwar Shaul was born in 1904 in Hilla, in Ottoman Iraq, into the Jewish community that had lived in Babylonia since the time of the exile — a Jew who chose Arabic as the language of his art and Iraq as his homeland.
Work and career
A lawyer by training, he became one of the founders of modern Iraqi letters: poet, short-story writer, translator, and in 1929 founder and editor of Al-Hasid, the Harvester, the literary weekly that became the most read in Baghdad and opened its pages to the young writers of every community. He wrote the screenplay of the first Iraqi feature film, Alia and Issam, in 1948. When the Jews of Iraq left almost to a man in 1950-51, Shaul stayed, insisting on his place in the Arab culture he had served — a loyalty the state repaid with prison after the Ba'athist coup of 1963, from which a poem addressed to the regime, it is said, won his release.
Later years
In 1971, with the community reduced to a remnant, he emigrated at last to Israel, where he published his memoirs, and died in Kiryat Ono in 1984 — one of the last voices of the Arabic-language Jewish literature of Iraq.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_Shaul
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Iraqi poet and journalist in Arabic, founder of the magazine Al-Hasid and screenwriter of the first Iraqi film
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_Shaul
