A portrait of an Iraqi novelist as a young man, 1948-1950

الملخص EN

In 1946 Shim‘on Ballas joined the illegal Iraqi Communist Party (henceforth: the ICP).(1) He was 16 years old.

He recalls how his bourgeois family objected to his becoming a member of a party comprised of “these barefooted people,” while he came to feel solidarity with, and value the opinions of, Iraqis of various classes through his party activities.

Ballas recalls his participation in the Wathba, a series of demonstrations which protested the government’s pro-British policies: