By DONNA BRYSON, Associated Press

BAGHDAD, Iraq (May 7, 2000 12:11 a.m. EDT http://www.nandotimes.com) - Professor Nahdim Jassour finds treasure in a sidewalk vendor's pile of used books: an Arab literary journal that's only 2 years old and another just a year old.

"Pas mal," the French-educated European studies specialist says with understated triumph, using the French words for "not bad" to describe his finds.

A friend, a prominent writer, asks for a look. The writer holds the paperbacks tenderly, then returns them to Jassour with a reluctance that speaks volumes about the effect on Iraqi intellectual and creative life of the U.N. sanctions imposed on Iraq after its 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

"There's no money to buy new books. It's hard for professors and students to travel to go to conferences, to go in search of books, to go in search of ideas," says Jassour, a professor at Baghdad University.

The sanctions and war have weakened the Iraqi dinar, while salaries, especially those paid by the government, have stagnated.

That has put new books out of reach for many teachers and students - and turned the sidewalk sale every Friday on al-Mutanabi Street into a popular spot for Jassour and his colleagues. Some come to sell their old books to buy others; some sell to buy more basic needs.

The sanctions and the politics behind them also have cooled universities and other academic institutions around the world to contacts with their Iraqi counterparts. Even if Iraqi academics could get invitations to international conferences and visas to go, a ban on air travel makes trips impractical for many.

Without new books and journals, poet Fatima al-Laithi says she feels isolated from the latest literary trends. But "the Iraqi cultural person is still creating, he has ideas," she says fiercely.

Al-Laithi's poems have a musical quality, and her reading is expressive. That style has helped her succeed in a second career on state television, where she interviews other artists.

Her husband, Ganim Hameed, is a well-known actor and producer who also has developed a second career in recent years. He buys and resells furniture and other valuables that Iraqis sell as the sanctions push them from the middle class into poverty. The couple's home in one of Baghdad's concrete apartment complexes is decorated with modern ceramics, the entrance hall crowded with chairs awaiting sale.

"The embargo has affected every Iraqi person, but the effect on each one is different, and their resistance is different," al-Laithi says.

"For me, I started with poetry. But when I saw the reach of poetry was very limited, I turned to television, and I worked with my husband writing plays. The point is not to surrender, not to get depressed."

Not everyone succeeds, her husband says.

"Some very famous and creative people have gotten depressed. Then they are paralyzed. Ten years is a long time," he says.

Hameed was just graduating from Baghdad University's Academy of Fine Arts when Iraq invaded Kuwait. He says he has never known the freedom to travel that some of his older colleagues have experienced. But he recently returned from a theater festival in neighboring Jordan, one of the few nations that maintain ties with Iraq.

For a return trip to Jordan, Hameed and a dozen other Iraqi actors have volunteered to perform a Russian tragicomedy directed by Fadl Khalil, dean of the acting department at Baghdad University.

The hero of the play dreams of setting fire to a temple to grab the attention of the gods and a place in history.

"We may feel we need to do something like burn a temple to make people pay attention," says Hameed, who plays a king seduced by the arsonist's destructive vision. But "we want not to burn anything, but to do something to make people pay attention to the Iraqi issue."

"We think that Iraq is like that temple, destroyed by primitive power," Khalil adds.

Resting after a late-night rehearsal, the actors, who hold day jobs as salesmen, teachers and civil servants, talk about visiting Jordan. All say they'll spend some of their time there looking for books that friends and colleagues have asked they bring back for the university library.

On al-Mutanabi Street, political scientist Kahtan el-Hamdani sifts through stacks of medical texts, accounting references, romances and thrillers in a yellowing Babel of Arabic, Turkish, English, French, German, Russian. He says the sanctions have had at least one beneficial effect.

"As the saying goes, what is forbidden is most desired," he says. "When we hear about a new book, everyone talks about it, everyone looks for it. There wasn't so much excitement when everything was freely available."