Aimée Israel-Pelletier
ON THE MEDITERRANEAN AND THE NILE: THE JEWS OF EGYPT
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018
Reviewed by Judith Roumani1
The title of this book, part of the Indiana Series in Sephardi and Mizrahi Studies, is something of a misnomer. This is not another ‘story of the Jews of Egypt’ as we have seen several in recent years. Nor is it a family memoir of someone born in and exiled from Egypt. It is a series of analyses, profound and reaching across disciplines, yet well-rooted in its own field, of the work of five key fiction writers from the last two generations of Egyptian Jews. The author is a professor of French, author of a study of Rimbaud’s poetics, and thus brings literary tools to a group of novelists who express the deep-felt anguish of the uprooted Jews of Egypt: not as in biblical times exiting with song and gratitude to God, but expelled unwillingly from the land that they deeply identified with, even loved.
To be sure, one cannot study such writers, born in the early to mid-twentieth century in Egypt, and expelled or fleeing mostly in the second half of the 1950s, the latest in 1965, without discussing the recent history of Egypt and the place, or lack of a place, of the Jews in it. In modern times, as in earlier epochs, Egypt has been the center of secular Arab culture, one of the powers of the Middle East in many senses. The cosmopolitan and European-oriented Egypt of the early part of the twentieth century, which had attracted Jews from other parts of the Mediterranean and the Middle East to join its ancient and illustrious indigenous Jewish community, gave way after the war and especially after 1948 to Nasserism, nationalism, and official anti-Semitism. Israel-Pelletier provides an excellent historical introduction, showing how even before the twentieth-century Egyptian Jews had contributed to the country’s prosperity, which eventually attracted thousands of foreigners including Jews there. She rejects the scholarly dichotomy between indigenous and newcomer Jews, and maintains that, more important than bringing foreign tastes, the late nineteenth-century Jewish newcomers integrated into Egyptian culture and became loyal Egyptians. They never were allowed to obtain Egyptian passports, though, so had a variety of nationalities, many French, Italian, Turkish, or Syrian. By the nineteen-fifties, for nationalistic, anti-Zionist, pan-Arabist and religious reasons they were subjected to harsh persecutions: random violence, accusations of spying, imprisonment, stripping of their assets, and expulsion. Many were French-educated, and this book examines a series of mostly French-language writers who chronicled, reflected on, and transformed into fiction the painful processes they had suffered. Several fled to France, where their idealization of French culture met with a harsh postwar reality of indifference or hostility.
Perhaps the most prominent is Edmond Jabès, whose encounters with anti-Semitism in France, after the trauma of being stripped of all family assets and expelled from Egypt, led him to produce poetic novels in which his personal suffering is subsumed into the Jewish condition or destiny. By transference, the Holocaust becomes a major focus for this Egyptian Jew while, as Israel-Pelletier writes, he does not cease to engage with the suffering of his own people in modern Egypt. Previous scholars of Jabès have neglected to see the depth and extent of Jabès’s references to Egypt in the Book of Questions.
The first chapter, devoted to Jacques Hassoun, a psychoanalyst in France, analyzes the work of another Jewish Francophone writer of Egyptian origin; Hassoun’s work (and life) includes a return to Egypt, but he finds his Egypt irretrievable. Politically active at the age of seventeen with an organization whose goal was to liberate Egypt from British control, Hassoun was imprisoned in Egypt, kept in solitary confinement then suddenly expelled from the country in 1954 when he was eighteen. In France, he brought immigrant and exiled groups such as the Egyptian Jews to the forefront of French consciences, but himself was opposed to ethnic identity according to Israel-Pelletier. Between 1977 and 1997, he returned to Egypt several times, with groups of Egyptian Jews. In the devastation of cemeteries, removal of Jewish names from streets, erasing of names from gravestones, he saw the obliteration of Jewish history in Egypt. Edmond Jabès and other intellectuals never would go back. Those who did, such as Hassoun, found it excruciatingly painful. Though he has made his mark primarily as a psychoanalyst Israel-Pelletier finds Hassoun’s novels, such as Alexandries (1985), sensitive and moving.
Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff’s fiction is probably better known, at least in the English-speaking world.2 Like her names (French, Hebrew, and Ashkenazi respectively) she was an amalgam of cultures, an Israeli writer in English whose inspiration came less from her 1950s surroundings than from the Egypt from which she stemmed. Her positive Levantinism or multiculturalism was not in harmony with the cultures of any of the countries in which she lived at that time, especially with the new state of Israel. Nevertheless, she found appreciative editors there, and almost all her work was published in Hebrew translation. She authored one magisterial novel, Jacob’s Ladder (1951) but did not live to complete her second. The young Jewish girl in her novel, scion of a family from Baghdad and another from Tunis, represents Egypt itself. She repels British influence in the form of an overbearing nanny, befriends Muslim and Christian girls, and achieves self-confidence and maturity. The novel contains “exquisite” descriptions of the Nile, which flows below her windows. All the family members achieve a transformation, even the patriarch Jacob. While the father David speaks Arabic fluently, the mother Alice disdains Arabic. Israel-Pelletier tells us that Alice is exemplary of Alliance Israélite Universelle education and does not blame this character for her pro-European, anti-Egyptian campaign. After all, she has a civilizing mission for her child. However, as Israel-Pelletier describes, it is Levantine culture, the amalgam, that has the most vitality. She picks out a street market scene when all religions were about to celebrate their festivals at the same time one year, and a pilgrimage to a site near the Nile venerated by women of all religions. Such scenes celebrate the strength of women and the liveliness and flexibility of Levantine culture. Israel-Pelletier points out that Kahanoff’s Afterword, entitled “From East the Sun,” advocates more Levantinism for Israel3.
Paula Jacques is the subject of another chapter, in which Israel-Pelletier discusses this more recent, prolific French-language writer’s ten novels. Jacques, like the others, deals with the period of the 1950s, the crucial time of suffering in Egypt, when Jews were leaving and emigrating to France or Israel. In France, Egyptian Jews deal with the hardships of immigrants everywhere but as Israel-Pelletier tells us, “with the added twist . . . that they expected to be well received but they were not” (p. 140). The keynote of Paula Jacques’ writing is the celebration of resistance as Israel-Pelletier maintains, “whether it succeeds or not.” Like other writers, she does not advocate return to Egypt, but rather the incorporation of the memory of the Jewish presence into present-day Egyptian consciousness. Perpetual displacement and wandering replace the hope of a home in A Kiss as Cold as the Moon (1983) one of the novels discussed here in detail. Several of Jacques’ novels deal with immigration to Israel. In the earlier works, “Israel in the eyes of the urbane and cosmopolitan Egyptians is not a livable environment” (p.166) for civilized Egyptian Jews, bathed in European culture. One character, Israel-Pelletier tells us, an Israeli of Egyptian origin, says that Egyptian Jews are self-absorbed and oblivious to anti-Semitism. He has seen Jews come to Israel from everywhere except Egypt. Some characters recognize this and admit their limitations. They could not adjust to the country’s first fifty years including the pioneering kibbutz . Paula Jacques’ last novel, At least it’s not Raining (2015), envisages the positive potential of Israel, and the ability of Egyptian Jews to serve as a bridge between Ashkenazim and Sephardim, and even Palestinians. Only one of her novels exists in English (Lumière de l’oeil, 1980, trans. as Light of My Eye, 2009). Israel-Pelletier advocates translation of more of her novels which confront several crucial issues in new ways.
The last novelist Israel-Pelletier discusses is André Aciman, quite well known as he is a New York writer and academic producing in English today. I heard Aciman as a key speaker at the Egypt event, entitled “Out of Egypt” like his book, held at Congregation Shearith Israel in May, 2019. Israel-Pelletier’s insights are crucial to understanding Aciman. She tells us that he deliberately obfuscates the line between fiction and autobiography and that his fiction actually consists in this blurring. Egypt for Aciman is a distorting grid into which new experiences must be fitted. It is one of those “fact that won’t go away” (p. 178). The family’s last Passover Seder night in Egypt is fraught through and through with paradoxes. The fourteen-year-old Aciman takes a walk through Alexandria after the Seder, and “on the nighttime walk he describes the feeling of the city slipping away as of a death that takes too long to end and may never end” (ibid.). A number of pages of detailed description of this skillful memoir ensue. Aciman, like other Egyptian Jewish writers, but more so, declares “I am elsewhere . . . . Some people have an identity, I have an alibi . . . ” (p. 177). Israel-Pelletier maintains that:
“something about the Mediterranean as elsewhere is the best he can come up with to describe how it feels for an Egyptian Jew to have an identity and a place . . . . This is a far cry from Jacqueline Kahanoff’s sense of rootedness in the Nile valley and Edmond Jabès’s sense of the Mediterranean and the desert as home of his ancestors. The Mediterranean is not home for Aciman . . . . The Mediterranean, metaphorically speaking, is this place that collects Aciman’s scattered selves, like the dabs of paint in the Impressionist paintings he admires. His picture of Egypt as loss can be made out best from a distance” (p. 189).
Of course there is no substitute for reading a novel oneself, but Israel-Pelletier’s close readings, her vivid descriptions of characters and predicaments, her analyses of writer’s positions and intentions, bring us invaluable glimpses into Egyptian Jewish writers’ creative impulses.
1 Judith Roumani is the editor of Sephardic Horizons.
2 A fairly recent anthology of her fiction edited by Sasson Somekh and Deborah Starr, Mongrels or Marvels: The Levantine Writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff (2011) was reviewed in-depth in Sephardic Horizons 2:1 (Winter 2012) by Yael Halevi-Wise. This work makes available in Kahanoff’s original English many or her writings (other than her novel) that had been published in Hebrew.
3 “Kahanoff calls on Israel to rethink Levantinism as the robust social practice that she knows it to be” (p. 95). In fact, a cultural organization in Israel today with that very name (derived from a psalm) organizes events animated by the same spirit of Levantinism and Mizrahi culture. See Yael Halevi-Wise’s review, and also the essay on Kahanoff’s novel by Joyce Zonana, “She would rather be a Gaon than a Gaul: Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff’s Affirmation of Arab Jewish Identity in Jacob’s Ladder,” in Sephardic Horizons 6:3-4 (Summer-Fall 2016).