Do you ever wish you could go back in time and correct the past?

When I was a little girl, my Nana used to tell me stories about how she grew up in California during the Great Depression. She and her sister and cousins would collect and recycle aluminum cans on the beach so they would be able to raise the money to buy ice-cream cones. When World War II came, Nana’s tales evolved into funny anecdotes about pining away for soldiers overseas, and when she finally married her Navy man, all talk turned into memories of my own father’s childhood.

Most of the time—when Nana wasn’t telling her stories—she was often heckling me to learn how to cook, grow my hair long (I had a short bob) and stand up straight. Whenever I was at her house, she would always comment about how 1990s fashion didn’t compare to how she made her own clothes in the 1950s—or how women are supposed to cut their food into small pieces in order to lose weight. All of these “Nana-isms” drove me crazy, and, before I knew it, she was gone before I could appreciate her upbringing in vintage America.

I always thought she was trying to change me into someone who she thought was appropriate for her generation. In any case, when I picked up Marina Benjamin’s novel, Last Days in Babylon, the way I interacted with my Nana surfaced in my thoughts. For Marina, her Baghdadi grandmother, Regina, resembled the “Nana” in my story. Having grown up in London, Marina was always caught between two worlds: her Iraqi heritage and her present situation in England. She tells readers that she would run away from her parents’ and grandparents’ speculations over 21st-century norms, like going to college and choosing your own husband (but not at the age of 16). What Marina didn’t know was that her elders were trying to preserve a history that was practically wiped out in the Middle East.

Like me, Marina became curious about her grandmother when she passed away. All the hardships that Regina battled had made it possible for Marina to appreciate her British upbringing. She writes, “I have always understood that had it not been for my grandmother’s bravery, I would not own my Western freedoms.”

The author traces every detail of Regina’s life, back to her great-grandparents in Baghdad. The novel is thoughtful and heartbreaking at times because you know Marina speaks from within her own memories. She whisks you away to a time when Jews and Muslims coexisted peacefully, and explains what happened to the large Jewish-Baghdadi population before it was annihilated.

Last Days of Babylon will make you want to trace your own family’s history, and perhaps call your Nana (or Bubbe or Grandma) on the phone and catch up.

Marissa Grey is a JVibe editorial intern. She loves to read non-fiction and hopes to someday write her own novel about being a 20-something.