Total Education Show

The Total Tutor will interview Saul Silas Fathi. We will discuss the education system in Irag and his family life. He was born into a well-to-do Jewish family in Baghdad in 1938. Two former prime ministers lived on the same street and it was an “idyllic” place, he recalls. That ended for the country’s Jewish population in the late 1940s when the creation of Israel set off a wave of anti-Jewish sentiment. As a young boy, Saul witnessed public executions and his family was falsely accused of treason against the Iraqi government. Like all wealthy Jews, his family was labeled Zionist and Communist. When he was 10, he and his younger brother were smuggled out of Baghdad through Iran and eventually landed in Israel. In 1958, Saul worked his way to Brazil, where he nearly starved. Two years later, he came to the U.S. and joined the Army for three years. In Israel, Saul had studied aeronautics and in the Army was assigned to the 15th Aviation Company, the famed helicopter division in the Vietnam War. Back in the U.S. he earned a degree in electrical engineering from the University of Virginia and went on to found three high-tech companies over a 20-year period. Saul retired in 2003 to write his memoir, Full Circle: Escape from Baghdad and the return (Xlibris 2006). A review by the president of Military Writers Society of America, stated that Saul’s autobiography “takes the reader to places and events that one may only get to know about from small glimpses on The History Channel or in some old National Geographic Magazines. This guy has lived a life that would make a great movie.” Saul’s second book, published in March, 2006 is History of the Jews and Israel – 4000 years of history condensed into 76 pages. He is fluent in English, Hebrew, Arabic and Portuguese.