Jonathan Judaken and Michael Lejman, eds.

THE ALBERT MEMMI READER

Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2020. ISBN 10: 1496203232

Reviewed by Judith Roumani¹

All those who knew the French-Tunisian-Jewish writer Albert Memmi were deeply saddened at his passing just over a year ago, six months shy of his one hundredth birthday which would have been in December 2020. Memmi had many friends who appreciated his loyalty, humility, and encouragement over the decades, not to mention his inability to state anything but the truth as he saw it, and his unwillingness to compromise with fashionable trends. In this sense he also was not popular with either the left or the right, and garnered criticism along the way. Perhaps alienating both the left and the right is a sign of sanity in political circles, but there was much more to Memmi than that.

Events were in planning to celebrate his one hundredth birthday, but instead have been repurposed for marking the centenary since his birth. Not only symposia but also publications in his honor are in the works. This authoritative anthology, The Albert Memmi Reader, in preparation for several years, is a fitting memorial to the breadth and depth of his oeuvre, over eighty years of writing that spans poetry, novels, anthologies, journals, and essays. It is designed especially for English-speaking readers not able to access his huge output in French.

Memmi began writing from the age of nineteen, in 1939, but his first book, the novel Pillar of Salt (1953) burst upon the postwar publishing scene as an all-around iconoclastic novel by a young intellectual who participated in the dilemmas of both the colonized and, indirectly, the colonizers, as well as being a Jew in a Muslim-majority country where Jews were a subject minority. Thus, the novel takes aim at sacred cows in the Jewish, French, and Muslim communities of Tunisia. It won prestigious prizes. Memmi’s third book, consisting of two extended essays, The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957), was equally devastating and precise in its aim. The editors of this Reader rightly recognize these two texts as foundational in his work: The Colonizer and the Colonized “became an inspiration for the oppressed, was widely translated, and endures, with a worldwide readership, as a classic in colonial and postcolonial studies. Along with The Pillar of Salt, it forms the foundation of Memmi’s work and establishes a number of points essential to understanding his views on privilege, dependence, racism, the inherent tensions in decolonization, and the structures and strictures of oppression” (pp. 57-58). Jonathan Judaken, the editor responsible for the Introduction, is well-versed in existentialism and the ideological currents of Memmi’s early years, thus eminently qualified to present his philosophical views.

Despite its exemplary thoroughness in covering Memmi’s earlier texts, this book does not (perhaps, could not) present his later works after 1990 in the same detail. The organization is partially by specific book and partially by topic, thus, some of the later books do receive attention. For example, in the first, biographical section, a lengthy excerpt of a later work, The Stationary Nomad (2000) is included because Memmi is explaining many of his philosophical positions and how, in the course of his life, he reached them. His very recently published early diaries, Tunisian Diaries, 1955-56, edited by Guy Dugas, are excerpted in this biographical section. Thus, several sections follow their own, internal logic, independently of the rest of the book.

Several of Memmi’s very early writings, such as his war journal and his journal of the years of Tunisian independence, have recently been published for the first time. The war journal, Journal de guerre, covering the years 1939 to 1943 but not published until 2019 in an edition annotated by Guy Dugas, was begun at the age of sixteen. It does not seem to be included in this anthology. We reviewed it here.  Nor are a number of his later books, including his last two novels, and A contre-courants (1993), an alphabetical presentation of Memmi’s iconoclastic positions with his dry humor, documenting his opposition to all reifications of ideas, whether on the left or the right. Other works exhibiting Memmi’s customary perceptiveness and profundity including Le Juif et l’autre (1995); Le Buveur et l’amoureux: le prix de la dépendance (1998); and Penser à vif: de la décolonisation à la laïcité (2017) are not discussed. One would have welcomed similar presentations of these lesser-known later texts, but that would definitely have required another volume. Four interviews are included, from 1976, 2007, 2008, and 2012, and one of the most recently-dated writings is “Passport for a Hoped Immortality” from 2007. Memmi’s admonition here is “One must live, act, and think now, in this life, as if one were worthy of a hoped immortality. To be brief, find and communicate the truth, if possible. Beware of prejudice and utopias, of all dogmas, including those that are one’s own. Live without submission and without compromise. For me, this is the ethics of the thinker and the foundation of what I mean by philosophy.”

Thus this volume brings us many riches, some well-known and some less so, all greatly appreciated. The many new translations, done by Jane Teresa Kuntz, are excellent. As Jonathan Judaken states in his introduction, “on his centenary, we are ripe for a new Memmi moment: a rediscovery of his work and a renaissance in Memmi scholarship” (p. xv). That is exactly what is happening, through this book, and as we prepare for further publications and translations of Memmi’s work.

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¹ Judith Roumani is the editor of Sephardic Horizons; she has also published the monograph Albert Memmi (Philadelphia: CELFAN Editions, 1987) and is the translator of his fourth novel, The Desert (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2015) as well as a number of articles on his work. See additional writings by or about Memmi in Sephardic Horizons 2011, Vol. 1:3 and a special issue devoted solely to Memmi in 2015, containing previously unpublished writings , and new critical studies, Vol. 5:3-4.