Kattan spent the first years of his life growing up in Jewish Baghdad , and studied at the University of Baghdad from 1945 until 1947 . Those years of his life are explored throughout his novel '' Farewell , Babylon . '' First published in French as '' Adieu , Babylone '' in 1975 , his novel was translated by Sheila Fischman and published in English in 2005 . The early years of Kattan 's life were complicated . Kattan recalls in '' Farewell , Babylon '' the experiences of growing up in a community torn between Jewish and Arab nationalisms , the horrors of the 1941 Farhud , and anti-Semitism , but also Jewish successes in the cosmopolitan Arab city
Farhud
Farhud
Naïm Kattan