Vitalis Danon
Lia Brozgal and Sarah Abrevaya Stein, eds., Jane Kuntz trans.
Ninette of Sin Street
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017, ISBN: 978-1503601567
Reviewed by Judith Roumani*
This recently published translation of a novel from Tunisia was first issued in French in 1938 by the Editions de la Kahéna, of Tunis, a press established largely by the so-called Tunis school of Tunisian Jewish writers and intellectuals. This press was named after La Kahéna, the legendary female Jewish leader who led the Judeo-Berber resistance to Muslim invasion of North Africa in the eighth century. Vitalis Danon, though of Turkish rather than Tunisian origin, was a prominent member of this group and director first of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) school in Sfax in central Tunisia and later of the entire AIU school system of Tunisia.1 Arriving at the age of twenty, he spent fifty years in Tunisia.
Ninette of Sin Street is a precious resource as it brings us a taste of a world that is no more - the small town haras (Jewish quarters) and the red light streets of French-colonized Tunisia, at a time when little had changed from the past but even the most downtrodden Jews (those of ‘the gutter’ as our editors term it) were filled with hope. Hope presented itself through the AIU schools which, almost all over the Middle East and North Africa, through their dedicated, self-sacrificing, and underpaid teachers, brought a French-oriented, European education and values to Jewish families. The schools gave young Jews a stepping stone to the Western civilization that they aspired to. Ninette is an impoverished, precariously surviving single Jewish mother of an intelligent young boy whose success in the Alliance school, as well as her own determination, will lead to her dream of middle-class comfort and financial security. Though he did not come from quite such a dire situation, Albert Memmi’s acceptance and success at the Alliance school of Tunis in the 1930s likewise led to similar achievements as Memmi became a prominent French-Tunisian intellectual. Many other stories of Alliance graduates and their transformations and successes can be told.
This novel, however, concentrates less on the successes and upward mobility than on the depths. It is a Naturalist novel in reverse: circumstances do not grind this character down but rather make her more determined for her son at least to succeed. Ninette herself was born without prospects and lost her parents early — in effect, she was brought up first by her grandmother and then by the ladies of Sin Street, a street that existed in every provincial colonial town of Tunisia. She began her laundering career at twelve. She was trained as a laundress by her grandmother, but the specter of prostitution is always present. She loses her virginity to a no-good uncle who plies her with drink even though she resists, then takes refuge in a cheap hotel run by a kind Jewish woman and falls again. After running away, Ninette tries various shady living arrangements in which she is always the economically and sexually exploited one. Even her former protectors on Sin Street sometimes turn against her. In the struggle for bread and dignity, she always loses, but despite occasional bouts of depression her spirit pulls her back up. She gives birth to a son in the hotel which is her refuge, blessing Rachela the woman who gives her shelter, and cursing all the Jewish men who have betrayed her. Finally, when her son is six years old, pushed by her friends, the two of them present themselves to the director of the Alliance school. The novel consists of her confessions to the director on her twice yearly visits to the school, during which she reveals her shocking life story.
European Jews of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not romanticize Jewish life in the Middle East and North Africa¸ nor did they see it as a haven of picturesque traditional life. They did, in fact, believe that poverty and lack of morals went together. The Alliance Israélite saw itself as having ”a mission civilisatrice” toward Middle Eastern Jewry, just as France saw itself as having a similar civilizing mission toward its colonies. Like many colonized in the francophone orbit of influence, Jews eagerly embraced what was offered to them: a key to French culture. Vitalis Danon was of Turkish origin, from Edirne, and himself a product of the Alliance educational system. Danon had undergone teacher training in France and was posted to Tunisia, a country with which he had had no previous connection. Lonely at first and far from home, all his life underpaid, he eventually married a local Jewish girl, and entered provincial Tunisian life to the fullest extent he could. No doubt Ninette’s confessions and confidences are based on similar conversations he participated in and learned from. Such confessions could be viewed as a gift to an aspiring novelist. At the same time, he did his best to assist families suffering from poverty and social ostracism.
It seems that the director in the novel may have looked forward to the arrival of the young woman who was confiding in him. The reader derives this solely from her statements to him, as the director does not speak.
“Of course I’m not hiding Mr. Director, Sir. Why would I be trying to avoid you? Six months since you last saw me, really? How time flies, doesn’t it? Could that be? Me, I always think I’ll never make it to the end” (pp. 58-59).
The stories are pithy, picaresque tales initially of innocence betrayed, later of weary desperation once more betrayed. All levels of society take advantage of this woman without protection; even the rabbis are implicated in the arrangements that are to the benefit of everyone except Ninette. The Messianic rabbi from Djerba peddles hope, and it turns out that hope is what keeps Ninette going through her troubles. The saviors turn out to be the women of Sin Street, who join together to buy the boy a satchel and lunchbox, tell Ninette how to get him a smock and shoes, and advise her to take him to the Alliance boarding school. For the next six years, the school director shepherds him. And then, in the very last pages, his mother is offered a live-in job as concierge for a bank building on the town’s main avenue, enabling Ninette finally to leave Sin Street behind. She has pulled herself out of the ditch, with the help of friends, and her son will have his Bar Mitzvah and go to technical school. The story is one of progress, perseverance, and Alliance values, triumphing in the end over superstition and backwardness.
The tale is told by a consummate fictional storyteller, Ninette, who leaves the director on tenderhooks each time. Vitalis Danon successfully updated the Naturalist/Positivist narrative of adverse circumstances wearing down the morality and determination of the strongest, and produced a heartwarming tale of social redemption in a small Tunisian Jewish community. The scholarly additions to the volume are also most valuable: another narrative by Danon, old photographs, an enlightening introduction, and thorough bibliography. His novel is not only a tale of its time and place, an anthropological curiosity, but also an entrancing story, now brought to us by skillful scholars and an excellent translator, in a scholarly edition which sheds light on a little-known era.
* Judith Roumani is the editor of Sephardic Horizons. She has authored a number of publications about Tunisian Jewish literature, including an encyclopedia article, articles on novels by Albert Memmi, Ryvel, Marco Koskas, and a translation of a novel by Albert Memmi, The Desert, published by Syracuse University Press in 2015. Sephardic Horizons devoted one of its earliest issues to Tunisian Jewish literature, Vol. 1, No. 3.
1 These were the teachers of Albert Memmi, perhaps the most prominent writer to be inspired by the group, and who in 2020 celebrates his one hundredth birthday.