“A few days later, she writes a letter to the soldiers who destroyed her library. But she will not publish it. It feels obscene, she says, to talk about a house and possessions lost when hundreds of people are losing their lives on the streets of Iraq each day … How did she speak in her letter, I wonder, to the men from America who tore apart her copies of John Steinbeck and Al-Jahiz, and One Thousand and One Nights in the original Bulaq edition, printed in Cairo in 1835, it not only ripped but soaking wet?”
The Iraqi Suitcase by Laura Waddington
Source John Steinbeck’s speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1962. GJ Archive (YouTube)