A Conversation on Francophone Sephardic Fiction: Writing Migration, Diaspora, And Modernity
Lanham, Md: Lexington Books, 2022
By
Annette B. Fromm¹ and Judith Roumani²

ABF : I understand you don’t have a Sephardic background. Why would you be interested in all this? Can you explain?

JR : Your question reminds me of something that was written in a review of Nina Lichtenstein’s book on Sephardic Women Writers. The reviewer (Youness Abeddour of Ben Gurion University) was reading her book on a plane, and someone next to him smiled and made a knowing comment. Seeing the author’s name and the title, he said, “They don’t go together, she wouldn’t know!” This introduced the review, which demonstrated that she did in fact understand and know, and had actually written a very good study. This is the same dilemma that faces many scholars in ethnic studies: does one have to belong to that ethnic group? Can only Black scholars understand Afro-American literature, can only Latinos understand Latin American literature, etc. ? It’s a political question really, that is not all that relevant, in my view. Do you have to have come from a background of oppression in order to understand literature about racial oppression? What about Latin American scholars who come from quite wealthy, privileged families? Anyway, all I can say is that though my background is not Sephardic, I became interested because I married a Sephardi: my late husband was born in Tunisia and grew up in Libya. I was part of his family for 46 years of marriage, and more. I actually started in Sephardi Studies probably before it existed as a field, in the early seventies. What drew me to it was mainly empathy.

ABF : Why did you choose to write about novelists in French?

JR : It wasn’t planned, things just evolved like that. My original Fulbright research involved Sephardi writers in Italian and Spanish as well. The result of taking a very long time with a research project or a book is that the material keeps growing, more novels are written, more secondary literature is produced. Eventually, I realized that I had to focus on a particular group of writers, if I wanted to finish the book in this lifetime. It seemed to me that there was more coherence among the French writers, and they could also be linked to similar backgrounds and education, so the project took on more focus and a clearer story-line.

ABF : What do you mean when you say ‘Sephardic’ or ‘Sephardi’, or ‘Sephardim’?

JR : The meaning of the term Sephardi is endlessly debated. There are two approaches, the narrow one and the wider one. The narrow one defines Sephardim as those who can trace their descent from Jews who were expelled from Spain and Portugal in 1492; there are not many novelists who can do that. The broader one includes Jews who follow the Sephardi nusach, or order of service and melodies, Sephardi halakha, or religious laws, and Sephardi minhagim, or customs. This definition originated with Daniel Elazar, a sociologist and political scientist. He traces the origin of Sephardic culture back, before Iberia, to Babylon and the prestige of the Babylonian Talmud across The Middle East and North Africa. His book is The Other Jews: The Sephardim Today (1989) and this line is accepted by many scholars.

ABF : You talk a lot about disruption, trauma, tragedy, suffering, yet you also dwell on the humor of these writers. How do you reconcile these opposites?

JR : I don’t, they are both part of the incoherence of modernity and post-modernity. Claude Kayat’s novel’s title Mohammed Cohen tells us everything. This Tunisian novelist has a character born in the Tunisian provincial town of Sfax. His mother is a Muslim, married to a Jew. To pacify her father, she promises to call her son Mohammed. I don’t think such a thing has ever happened, and it is even less likely to happen today than in earlier decades. It was first published in 1981. This character embodies the insoluable dilemmas of a Jew born in a Muslim country, appreciating its culture, while wanting to express his Jewishness as well. In Tunisia his Arab friends make him uncomfortable, and after he makes Aliyah to Israel, his fellow Israelis do not accept him. He takes refuge in the French language in which he reads and writes, and eventually finds a neutral ground in Sweden, where we are given to understand that no eyebrows are ever raised. The novel is full of jokes and humor, the insoluable dilemmas are treated lightly but there is an underlying current of tragedy. A later novel, La Synagogue de Sfax (2006), though it begins with the same light tone, ends in tragedy as the synagogue is vandalized and the last Jew of Sfax dies.

ABF : At one point (p. 136) you say that study of Sephardic literature doesn’t involve the Mediterranean Sea, unlike e.g. Atlantic Studies. Dario Miccoli, who has just published a book called A Sephardi Sea,³ takes an opposite view . . .

JR : My answer: having read his book after mine was published, I probably wouldn’t write that statement so confidently now. . . I feel that Sephardim have stayed on one side or the other of the Mediterranean. They have not felt comfortable in between or bridging sides. In Dario Miccoli’s new book, there is a photograph of the late writer Lucette Lagnado and her father on a ferry, leaving Egypt when she was about ten, in 1963. Both look very downcast. They do not look as if they are envisaging continuing a rich Sephardic cultural life on the other side of the sea. Very few writers dwell on the actual journey. I can think of Didier Nebot, who devotes part of his novel to a flight across the Mediterranean from Spain, to either Morocco or Algeria, in 1492. In retrospect, it has become a Sephardi Sea. But I do accept that Sephardim now can view the Mediterranean as providing a home on both sides, especially through the rose-tinted lens of nostalgia, and by reading books and joining associations, and other ways of memorializing the past.

ABF : What in your view, or in your novelists’ views, was the main factor or cause leading to the end of Jewish life in Muslim lands?

JR : This has to be a very schematic answer, and scholars and historians have written many books about this. Of “the end when the end came,” to quote Andre Aciman, this phrase embodying the idea that the end was to be expected. Though indigenous, having been in Middle Eastern and North African countries longer than Arabs and Muslims (the Arabs were the invaders of the eighth century) Jews had played too much with the idea of new European cultures, especially the French. Compared with an oppressed dhimmi identity, a supposedly equal status under French or Italian colonialism was far preferable. This led to an undervaluing of their indigenous roots, if the fault at all lay with the Jews. During the war, European anti-Semitism undermined their security, with persecution, deprival of former rights, deportations and harsh internment camps. And in the immediate post-war period, Muslim nationalism, pogroms and exclusion forced them out. Michel Abitbol and other historians have written extensively about all this.

ABF : Could you give examples of who in your view is the most humorous novelist and who is the most tragic?

JR : For humor—all are humorous to a certain extent—Claude Kayat, again builds his novel Mohammed Cohen on humor. Albert Memmi, also a sociologist and philosopher, has self-deprecating humor in his novel Le Désert, Albert Bensoussan has a certain humor in his portrayal of his Algerian Jews aping the manners of the metropolitan French. If fantasy is close to humor, one can find tragedy lurking underneath all these lighthearted portraits. I think Albert Cohen, most influenced by European anti-Semitism, and despite his comic characters, has the most serious tone in his portrayal of a runaway adulterous couple who eventually commit suicide out of boredom and the impossibility of finding a place to socially fit. All this under the shadow of Hitler. This is in the novel Belle du seigneur, published in 1968. Edmond Jabès, expelled from Egypt, affected by postwar anti-Semitism, in his Book of Questions, Livre de Yukel (1964), portrays a couple immediately after the war, survivors of death camps, of whom one goes mad and dies and the other becomes suicidal. Equally if not more tragic than the novels by Albert Cohen. However, I think that despite the travails and uprooting, the earliest novels by Sephardim are more tragic, because they are influenced by a Naturalist aesthetic (late-nineteenth century realism as in Emile Zola). For example, some of the stories of Ryvel (Raphael Lévy), of Tunis, or Mazaltob, the 1930 novel by Blanche Bendahan of Tetouan, are definitely tragic. Later novels present their expulsion as tragicomic, relying on the contrast between tradition and modernity (e.g. Annie Fitoussi, La Mémoire folle de Mouchi Rabbinou, 1985, Annie Cohen, Le Marabout de Blida, 1996).

ABF : How does traditional storytelling relate to the techniques of modern novels?

JR : Techniques of traditional storytelling influence many modern novels. They help to create the cultural space of Sephardim, through spatial techniques. Spatial techniques (see scholars such as Jeffrey Smitten, Ann Daghistany, Joseph Frank, David Mickelson) avoid forward momentum in novels, by techniques undermining evolving plots, as in a traditional realist novel. In Ryvel’s stories of what he calls the ghetto, the hara of Tunis, different voices tell stories that present the neighborhood from different points of view. Thus we have an overall picture rather than a narrative that takes us somewhere. Albert Memmi’s novel Le Désert uses elements from traditional stories to present the world of a medieval nomadic Jewish prince in North Africa, totally at home in his surroundings. Characters’ names such as el-Kahin and el-Ghoul remind us of mythological or supernatural figures from superstition and tradition. Traditional stories include the tales of the Thousand and One Nights, with frame stories, and folktales told by men and those by women. Those of the men usually have moral endings, often ending in proverbs, and those of women are humorous. The tales of Djoha, the wise fool, can be told by either. Annie Fitoussi tells of the exodus of Jews from Tunisia in terms of stories: “Tunis, that summer, was bursting with stories . . .” once arrived in their places of refuge, the emigrants tell nostalgic stories: Ami Bouganim’s Moroccan Jews make Jerusalem jealous with their tales of Mogador, Marco Koskas’ narrators tell of the old days in Nabeul, and of the one left behind, “who remembers Victor, he must be a hundred if he’s a day . . .” Humor and nostalgia mix, the attitude of women’s tales prevailing.

ABF : And how do modernity and post-modernity affect traditional people?

JR : Modernity, and post-modernity, hit the emigrants at the same time. Older people, perhaps, were better able to cope, in my view. Younger people, who attended university, and had to forge modern professional identities for themselves, felt more perhaps like the Algerian-origin Jacques Derrida, “Je n’ai qu’une langue [French obviously] et ce n’est pas la mienne.” Others, like Helene Cisoux, reminisced about the multi-lingualism of the Algeria she remembered. The disruptions and incoherence of their lives perhaps pre-disposed many younger Sephardim to post-modernity, and in the study of literature to Derrida’s Deconstruction. Derrida himself was somewhat suspicious of Meaning, calling Thought “the illusory autonomy of a discourse or a consciousness to be deconstructed.” Displacement is one of the essential psychological and literary techniques of post-modernity, and we probably have the prime example in Edmond Jabès and his post-Holocaust rabbinical discourse.

ABF : What do you mean by the terms cultural space, and portable homeland?

JR : This question really follows on from the one about spatial form. I think one can extend the idea of spatial form into one of cultural space. A cultural homeland of the heart. Not a physical place. For example, one chapter in my book is about the cultural space of Tunisian Jews, and it juxtaposes a writer from the 1920s and 30s, Ryvel, with the contemporary Marco Koskas and his novel about the small town of Nabeul in Tunisia, before the exodus, Balace Bounel. The voices of those now in France recreate a whole universe of smalltown types, with humor and nostalgia, a cultural space where Jews lived according to tradition, but treated it lightheartedly, something between Chelm and Buczcazch, in Shai Agnon’s terms. In any case it lives on, somewhat transformed no doubt, in this novel. A similar idea is described by Albert Memmi as his “petite patrie portative--Portable Homeland.” Memmi would keep a small portable collection of things from Tunisia- amber, spices, leather, and so forth, that would bring Tunisia via the senses, and inspire him to write. I don’t think he invented the term portable homeland, but he did make it his own, in practice. Nine Moati also had a Tunisian decor that would inspire her.

ABF : Can you explain the interesting relationship between Albert Memmi of Tunisia and France and Naïm Kattan of Iraq and Canada?

JR : They were contemporaries, both wrote in French, and each was aware of the other’s writing. Memmi called Kattan “mon semblable, mon frère,” “my likeness, my brother.” And they even published with the same publisher. Both grew up speaking their respective Judeo-Arabic and were proud of that, even emphasizing their Jewish accents. But above all, in their writing they focused on embarrassing moments, cultural incongruities, the uncomfortable position of Jews steeped in Arabic culture who also identified with European culture. Memmi turned it into a philosophy, while Kattan didn’t . They have both passed away recently, but have both been an inspiration to younger writers.

ABF : Why do you consider the year 1992 to be so important?

JR : 1992 was the year of the Quincentenary of the expulsion from Spain. A number of books came out on 1492, for example Didier Nebot’s historical novel. Conferences and symposia were held. But most importantly, Sephardim began to draw parallels with recent expulsions from Arab lands, in their own time and experience, for example in the case of Algeria thirty years previously. After 1992, and over the next decade or so, more historical novels came out than previously, at least that is my impression.

ABF : Is the trend continuing? Who are the up-and-coming novelists?

JR : Perhaps my favorites are:

Haim Sabato, who writes about Syrian Jews who were sent to a refugee camp near Jerusalem (he writes in Hebrew, and he’s called the Sephardic Agnon).

Mois Benarroch, who writes in Spanish and Hebrew, about Spanish-speaking Jews from Tetouan, which is a Spanish enclave on the coast of North Africa.

Patrick Modiano (but he is already a Nobel prize winner). He explores his family situation (which was very dysfunctional), and he focusses on signs of identity and how identity was obfuscated during the Holocaust (he himself was born in 1945) , the doubtful and concealed stories of collaborators, the grey zone of those who collaborated with the Nazis in Occupied Paris in order to survive. He shows us how deliberate amnesia covers this up. My favorite novel of his is La Rue des boutiques obscures (1978). Modiano shows us how forgetting is also a form of remembering.

Andre Aciman (Out of Egypt, 1994), who writes in a Proustian style in English about his family, remembering (quote-unquote) how his grandmothers met in Alexandria and engineered the marriage of his parents.

Ami Bouganim, of Morocco and Israel: Bouganim is a Zionist, but a critical one. Le Cri de l’arbre (The tree’s cry, 1983), shows how once uprooted, a group of Moroccan Jews from Essaouira or Mogador (its French name) are forever mobilized, in a lyrical and humorous novel. He is also a philosopher and theorist of education. His fiction has become increasingly a stream of consciousness linking the past with the present. His latest book, Le Livre violet, sees his Moroccan hometown through violet spectacles.

Colette Fellous (Avenue de Paris, 2001) takes us back to more than a century ago, to when her grandfather, as a young man, made the decision that French was the language of the future, making that decision not only for himself but for all his descendants. The consequence: her brother, visiting from France for a summer vacation, is hauled into a police station in Tunis for some peccadillo. Because he can’t speak Arabic, he is deprived forever of the right to renew his Tunisian passport, thus definitively cutting him off from his roots.

Didier Nebot, who has a novel about La Kahena (1998), the Jewish-Berber queen who led the resistance against the Arab-Muslim invaders, another about leaving Spain (Chemin de l’exil, 1992) and has founded a beautiful website for the organization MORIAL for Jews of Algerian origin.

ABF : Why are there fewer women novelists in your book than men?

JR : I think it has been harder for a woman than a man, to write fiction, and be taken seriously, and of course to find a publisher. Here are some of the women novelists:

Elisa Rhaïs (born either 1876 or 1892) was the divorced rabbi’s wife, who soon caught the eye of a French publisher, Plon , and then moved to France. There she assumed an oriental/exotic personality as a Muslim woman and rode to popularity in literary salons. It has even been alleged that she was actually illiterate and her nephew wrote her novels.

Blanche Bendahan, born in 1903, stemmed from a family of Moroccan origin, She was born in Oran, and the family moved to France when she was a child. Her first novel was published when she was 27. I don’t want to make any generalizations, but women novelists seem to have usually had another profession, such as journalist or lawyer, or both, as well as writing novels.

Clarisse Nicoidski is a favorite of mine, her novel Couvre-feu (Curfew, 1981) depicts the Nazi-imposed curfews of Lyons , through the mind of a little Jewish girl in hiding during the war.

Nine Moati is another favorite, her novel Les Belles de Tunis, (1983) about the Gorni or Livorno Jews (European Jewish community in Tunis) has been published in Tunis and is having an Arabic translation, among its many editions.

Chochana Boukhobza writes about a Sephardic young woman who takes her family to Jerusalem, then she herself returns to France.

Annie Fitoussi (La Memoire folle de Mouchi Rabbinou, 1985), Annie Cohen, (Le Marabout de Blida, 1996), have a surrealistic rabbi and a marabout respectively who surface in Europe to remind Sephardim of their North African roots.

Colette Fellous, in Avenue de France (2001),has a wonderful way of bringing history to life, using the cry of a half-mad woman in Paris to evoke the pain of separation from North Africa, and start memory rolling. Her narrator goes back a century in time and meets her grandfather as a young man, at the very moment when he decides that the French language is his future.

Gisele Halimi presents the brave and cruel Jewish-Berber queen, La Kahina (2006).

Miriam Bar was a communist and writer who fought for Algerian independence, and deserves much greater literary recognition.

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1 Associate editor and review editor of Sephardic Horizons.

2 Editor of Sephardic Horizons. This interview was introduced by Professor Ronnie Perelis, chair of Sephardic studies at Yeshiva University, and by Drora Arussi of the American Sephardi Federation, as part of their “New Works” series.

3 Dario Miccoli, A Sephardi Sea (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022). See the review in this issue of Sephardic Horizons.