Judith Roumani
FRANCOPHONE SEPHARDIC FICTION: WRITING MIGRATION, DIASPORA, AND MODERNITY
Lanham: Lexington Books, 2022. ISBN: 1793620091
Reviewed by Jessica Carr1
Where loss of place and practice have disrupted Sephardi life over and over, Judith Roumani argues in this new volume, Sephardic literature has itself become the anti-territorial homeland. Roumani is clear to begin that “Sephardi” for her is a cultural marker, not genetic or geographic, “just as Ashkenazim do not need to have originated from Germany, but rather from a particular cultural world… Sephardim, in this view, can be fully Sephardic without their ancestors coming from Spain” (p. 5). This means that “Sephardi” can include communities from West Asia and North Africa, and areas both west and east of the Ottoman Empire. This conception is not without controversy, but it girds her sense of what writing and interpretive communities are relevant to her subject with a broad and inclusive perspective (pp. 5-6). Most importantly to Roumani, this intervenes in the positioning of Sephardim from Spain/Sepharad as somehow superior to “Mizrahim” or Oriental Jews, and in general, “it certainly obviates the need for so many adjectives.” In other words, her reading strategy compares literatures with an eye to pluralities and the fluidities of ethos and ethnicity (p. 7). What makes the question of Sephardic literature so compelling in the first place is that very issue: “the loss of identity, the search for identity, the rejection of identity, the preservation of identity, the creation of a new identity” (p. 10).
Each chapter tracks tropes, genres, and uses of distinct languages. Although her book title delimits her work to Francophone Sephardic Fiction, the ritualized incursions of Ladino, Hebrew, Arabic, and other languages work with specific purposes that can be lost or manipulated into English translation in particular. She pays close attention to bilingualism, trilingualism, and diglossia, both “‘differential diglossia’ (where one language is used for one purpose) and the rarer ‘integral diglossia’ (where authors would attempt to furnish all their work in two different languages).” These linguistic issues, she indicates, help develop how exile is pictured, confronted, and repaired (pp. 13-14). For example, Roumani dissects how A. B. Yehoshua “evokes orality” in his classic novel Mr. Mani by offering a conversation in Hebrew that is interspersed with Ladino (pp. 31-32).
Chapter Two focuses on “the portable homeland,” a cultural space or spatial form that is central to Roumani’s argument. The concept comes from Tunisian Jewish novelist Albert Memmi, and Roumani argues that “three generations of twentieth century Judeo-Tunisian writers have responded to similar issues…seeking to bring together a fragmented cultural personality through fiction” (p. 47). The chapter analyzes Ryvel (pseudonym of Raphaël Lévy) and Marco Koskas, examining the desires and contradictions of Jewish, Arab, and French educations, philosophies, and identities. “Ryvel, one of the earliest Tunisian Jews writing in French attempts to consolidate a homeland to carry forth into colonial society in the face of impending change, while the contemporary novelist Marco Koskas rescues a legacy to carry across the sea to the Jews’ new home in France” (p.5). Both authors explore the paradox of using French literature to preserve a cultural ethos that French colonialism undermined. They show that North African Jews reacted to the changes of the twentieth century with many different viewpoints, and Roumani states that the “many-sided view” of “the” Jewish response to those changes may be more important than an in-depth analysis.
The literature shows that Tunisian Jews may have responded to the development of Tunisian nationalism in complex ways that other contemporary North Africans may not have retained in collective memory, such as in Ryvel’s Balace Bounel (1979). He depicts the Jewish Tunisian society having “no use for Zionism” and that “the Hebrew language is meaningless to them and they send to Israel only the unhealthy people that the community wants to be rid of” (p. 59). Roumani notes that Ryvel’s description of the Tunisian Jewish hara or ghetto can become Eurocentric, romanticized, and mocking, preserving too much distance between himself and the imagined homeland of tradition. However, she seems even to agree with him (and Koskas) to some extent: “They show ways of life that appeared eternal to those living them, but in fact were doomed by history to disappear within a short time” (ibid.). Even so, their literature also opens up new spaces for engaging the diversity and disunity of Jewish histories and literatures to enter conversations about Jewish memory or memory of Jews, amongst Jewish scholars and amongst scholars of North Africa, whether of Jews or Arabs, Muslims, and others.
Questions of memory pervade how Roumani forms questions and makes connections amongst Sephardic literatures. In Chapter Three, she connects SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa), Tunisia and Iraq in particular, across the Mediterranean with Italy by examining how the rupture of the expulsion from Spain prefigured the Holocaust. This includes whether and how Jews saw themselves as part of the “nations” emerging in Europe and SWANA. Characteristically, both the ruptures from Spain and the Holocaust were un-looked for (pp. 68-69). Therefore, if Chapter Two pursues the questions of why Jews wished to stay in or join Arab nations, Chapter Three “underlines perhaps the most basic of all the reasons why a Jew would leave an Arab country: to leave behind the relationship of dhimmitude and all the emotions and behaviors it entailed: inferiority, dissembling, and above all fear” (p. 71).
Roumani’s analysis in Chapter Four shows whether and how some traditional forms or stereotypical tropes leave their influence on Sephardic literature. Historically, men have told “stories of Jewish saints, which they [Jewish men] call ‘legends,’ and novellas of subtlety and deceit” with a strong didactic emphasis, while Jewish women have told “fairy tales” with little didactic purpose. However, the orality of the latter and vivid imagery have “had the more obvious repercussions” (p. 39). The Orientalist “magic carpet” makes no appearance in the “Migratory Writing” of Sephardic Jews. Instead Jewish authors emphasize that mobility is not new, exile is. Therefore, no matter how Jews master French, at the center of Roumani’s analysis, language is not enough to reconcile Francophone Sephardic Jews’ identities, nor may “to truly belong, to become French” be something “they necessarily want” (p. 81). Analysis itself becomes the answer for Albert Memmi, over resolution, a continual process and a claiming at once of difference and participation (p. 84). Dipping into the ironies presented in and represented by the works of Albert Bensoussan, Claude Kayat, and Ami Bouganim, Roumani uses Bensoussan’s theory of “the décalage,” the gap, to analyze these most recent chapters of exile. This gap is “between past and present, East and West (or South and North), tradition and modernity, the child and the adult” (p. 87). Roumani argues that “without wishing to compromise their present authentically modern voices, they [these three authors] nevertheless assert that their identity has a unique dimension not shared by others in the East or in the West” (p. 84).
The last two chapters consider two inverse literary responses to the late twentieth century. Chapter Five gives a lengthy discussion of Jacques Derrida’s (b. Algeria) theory of displacement vis-à-vis the fiction of Edmond Jabès (b. Egypt) and his theory of exile. Returning to the issue of how to write after the Holocaust discussed in Chapter Three and a sense of “the book as the author’s only dwelling place or homeland” from Chapter Two, Roumani sees Jabès subvert meaning with language and find realism insufficient to depict trauma (pp. 102-103). For Deconstructionists such as Derrida and Hélène Cixous, Roumani argues that punning and di- or triglossia become elevated tools to create “idiosyncratic, personal multilingualism,” a mark of the post-modern and a process and practice that also happens to connect them to Muslim Maghrebian writers, who use it to reveal “a tearing, a schism within their identity” (pp. 104-105). Roumani also compares Francophone Sephardic multilingualism to other languages. In Spanish, Ladino diglossia does not create the same strangeness as it may be more intelligible, for example, in Rosa Nissán’s Mexican literature. However, the English translation of Rosa Nissán’s Novia que te vea by Dick Gerdes omits any Ladino, which would not have been clear unless the reader spoke the language, even as Roumani laments that “a little exoticism might also have been welcome to the English-language reader, who is not reading only for the plot” (p. 107).
Chapter Six briefly discusses historical or “historiosophic” fiction, that with a sense that history is inescapable. Roumani notes that several authors have turned to this approach, including the inimitable Yehoshua, yet there is a sense that for now it may be dissatisfactory. Maybe it is because Roumani argues that as a genre, it “is often the purpose of a historical novel: to amend and improve on the tragic chaos of history” (p. 124).
Chapter Five strangely opens by conceptualizing the modern as outlook, and Roumani argues that “Sephardim have always been the most modern of Jews in their outlook” (p. 99), whereas most of the book has presented what or who is “modern” less as a state of mind toward religion (or anything else) and, more convincingly, as a set of political conditions and conundrums. To me, it seems that what Roumani’s book truly highlights is that the shared experiences of exile and displacement between Sephardim and Ashkenazim are more important. In a powerful conclusion, of SWANA, Europe, and Israel, Roumani asserts, “All these motherlands have been problematic in one way or another, and perhaps the ideal of ‘Sepharad,’ a non-geographical homeland of the heart, has been the least problematic only because it has been the least material one” (p. 139).
1 Jessica Carr is Berman Scholar of Jewish Studies and Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. They published their first book The Hebrew Orient: Palestine in Jewish American Imagination, 1901-1938 with SUNY Press in 2020. They are currently working on a manuscript tentatively titled Black and Jewish Graphic Novels: Recovery, Loss, and Sense of Self.