Albert Memmi, edited and annotated by Guy Dugas
Journal de guerre 1939-1943
Paris: CNRS, 2019, ISBN-13: 978-2271094216
Reviewed by Judith Roumani1
Albert Memmi, to whose work Sephardic Horizons has dedicated a previous issue2 and a portion of another3, and who has inspired many with his courageous positions, continues to challenge us. This highly original writing predates his earliest publications such as the 1953 novel La Statue de sel (Pillar of Salt) by a decade. All of his writings, because of their honesty, are based on his personal experiences growing up Jewish in Tunisia, a country soon to be in the throes of independence, which was achieved in 1956. This work shows him a decade earlier when Tunisia was under Vichy rule, and then occupied by both Italians and Germans. Memmi, a young philosopher avid for the truth by connecting with other human beings though he could have remained in a desk job working for the Jewish community in Tunis, volunteered to join the Jewish forced labor digging trenches and levelling roads for the Axis forces on the front while the Allies were attacking.
As an educated young man from a poor family, Memmi could have remained one of the administrators striving desperately to meet the German demands for forced labor. Many of the potential conscripts from wealthy families managed to avoid conscription, His conscience and idealism, however, led him to share the lot of the Jewish masses.
Recent publications, such as The Holocaust and North Africa, edited by Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevaya Stein (reviewed by Lucia Admiraal in this issue), bring home the extent to which the Holocaust also touched North African countries and the fact that North African Jews seriously suffered. It is believed that the Germans were making plans to annihilate North African Jews and were prevented only by their timely defeat and withdrawal from North Africa. Tunisia was their last stand in Africa, and Jewish labor was requisitioned for this purpose.
Journal de guerre is one of the only two major texts I am aware of that actually take us into the terrible conditions of the labor camps in North Africa (the other is Max Aub’s Spanish poetry written in a Vichy camp in Algeria). Food was almost at starvation levels, clothes worn out, living conditions in tents extremely harsh. The Italians and the Germans mostly pitiless. Through all this, the Allies bombed and strafed. Memmi’s eye for the occasional humanity of the persecutors and the class divisions and petty subterfuges of the prisoners along with the moral debates he has with himself make for fascinating readings. Some of it is tragic, as when he tells how he along with other prisoners are arrested and taken on a forced march, marched so far that some prisoners fall and are shot. They are made to sleep in the open in freezing cold without adequate clothing, and then the next day simply marched back to Tunis. This inhumane treatment had simply been an exercise or a warning. He sees the Nazis as a giant cat, playing with a hapless and helpless mouse, the Jews of Tunis. Other scenes come across almost as black comedy, as when their Fascist guards decide they would like to hear some singing and crowd into the prisoners’ tent, forcing them to sing into the small hours. Rather than an occasion for camaraderie the threat of violence is ever present. Eventually, the Italians decide to leave, but one drunken soldier refuses to obey orders. A fight between Italians breaks out inside the prisoners’ tent, which from the outside would have cinematically presented the sight of dents and bulges appearing and disappearing. In the end, the tentpole breaks and the tent crashes down. The Italians leave, still fighting, and the poor prisoners are left to deal with the chaos and patch their tent and belongings back together. Memmi frequently emphasizes the boredom and the insanitary conditions, the stink, the lice, which were the side effects of semi-starvation, long hours of overwork, and freezing ditch water in which the exhausted and demoralized prisoners have no desire to wash. These situations dull their humanity, their intelligence and ability to resist, even more.
Some of the book is fragmentary, since it is a handwritten diary in three volumes much of which was never intended for publication. The editor has done a wonderful job of reading the manuscript(s), but occasional gaps where words were illegible remain. Guy Dugas, perhaps the most expert scholar on Memmi’s work, certainly the one who has worked most closely with Memmi himself, has combined the “Journal de guerre” with fragments from other autobiographical texts, including “Journal d’un travailleur forcé.” There is some overlap between these. Perhaps the second volume was a preparatory draft of something that Memmi did intend to publish, as Guy Dugas tells us in his preface. What did see the light of publication was his celebrated 1953 autobiographical novel, La statue de sel. Memmi shocked several establishments with his uncompromising depictions of the French colonial regime, the Jewish community of Tunis, De Gaulle’s Free French Army, and even the movement for Tunisian independence, revealing hypocrisy, bourgeois smugness, and anti-Semitism.
Memmi’s 1953 novel draws on his wartime diaries, but it is instructive to glimpse how his art reworks the material to turn it into a novel.4 Even in the diary itself, Memmi is occasionally thinking aloud about how to rewrite the material. Should he introduce the Boy Scouts, his friends, who were among the prisoners? What style to use? How to convey the utter anguish, he uses a term derived from Hebrew, the ‘ghassra,’ of these prisoner workers? He recommends to himself a style similar to Hemingway’s in For Whom the Bell Tolls (p. 182).
One does not find a particularly Hemingwayesque style in the relevant chapters of La Statue de sel (Pillar of Salt), however. The novel’s style is more dramatic than the diary. For example, time is compressed, but the staccato quality of Hemingway is missing. His self-aware, introverted style in the diary is rendered more dramatic but less profound in his first novel. Several horrific incidents are highlighted. For example, in the diary a prisoner who had been trying to escape was caught and the punishment discussed was to tie him half naked to a tank overnight. The soldiers are dissuaded from this. In the novel this punishment actually happens. The lack of effective doctors is often referred to in the diaries. In the novel a particularly harrowing scene is that of a prisoner having an attack of appendicitis and the helplessness of the others in the face of his pain. Memmi does, indeed, bring in the Boy Scouts, with whom he shares a tent in the novel. In the diary, he seems to have shared the lot of the lower class Jewish workers to a greater extent than in the fiction. He describes the stench of the workers’ tents, compared with the relative emphasis on cleanliness among the more educated Boy Scouts. Memmi writes in the diary that as a Zionist and an intellectual, he becomes something of a spiritual leader by introducing the simple singing of Hatikva on Shabbat afternoons. In the novel, this contribution to morale is magnified by extending it to an entire Shabbat service, from which he personally recoils, followed by Hatikva. In both diary and novel, we perceive that Memmi feels that although he is poor and originated with the workers, his education sets him irrevocably apart from them, a fact felt on both sides. The workers respect him, but do not treat him as one of them, despite his sharing their lot. Nevertheless many conversations and interactions are recounted. The most dramatic part of the diary, Memmi’s account of the group’s safe return to Tunis through a battle zone, largely under his leadership, is somewhat downplayed in the novel, shortened to a very brief account. Of course it is only one incident in the coming of age novel, whereas the entire diary in his Journal de guerre deals, obviously, with war, anti-Semitism, and the effect of this testing period on his psyche.
The Journal de guerre should form part of the library of any self-respecting Memmi scholar or aficionado, as well as that of students of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in North Africa. As the author nears his own hundred years, we are grateful for this insight Memmi and his collaborator Guy Dugas provide into the beginnings of the career of a courageous, prolific and original thinker.
1 Judith Roumani is the editor of Sephardic Horizons, translator of some of Albert Memmi’s poetry, author of a monograph Albert Memmi (Philadelphia: CELFAN Editions, 1987), and translator of his novel The Desert: Or, the Life and Adventures of Jubair Wali al-Mammi (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2015).
2 https://www.sephardichorizons.org/Volume5/Issue3-4/EditorsNote.html
3 https://www.sephardichorizons.org/Volume1/Issue3/AlbertMemmi.html
4 Lia Brozgal has written an excellent study of Memmi’s artfulness hidden behind apparent candor, Against Autobiography: Albert Memmi and the Production of Theory (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2013 ), cautioning against the fallacy of confusing biography and fiction in Memmi’s work.