For more than 2,600 years, Iraqi Jews built a thriving world in Iraq—one that collapsed within a single generation. This story tells this sweeping history through the life of Anwar Khadouri Chitayat, a gifted boy from 1930s Baghdad. As Iraq grew increasingly hostile toward its Jewish citizens, Anwar’s academic brilliance opened an escape route to America, even as his family faced imprisonment, perilous border crossings, and the exodus that emptied Iraq of nearly all its Jews. Anwar’s story is a testament to resilience, reinvention, and the enduring ties of family, illuminating both a vanished civilization and the building new worlds from the fragments of the old.