We present here a different—yet not so different—aspect of Jewish life in North Africa than that reported on elsewhere in this same issue by Hal Lehrman. This is a chapter from an autobiographical first novel that caused something of a sensation in Parisian literary circles when it appeared in its original French several years ago. It has just been published in this country (by Criterion Books), in a translation by Edouard Roditi (who is known to our readers).

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At long last we removed the iron bars and came out of our barricaded houses. The streets were somnolent after our sleepless nights, the air tasted of ash, and a weird yellow light flashed through purple clouds and lit up our tired faces. A few useless and indifferent patrols of Negro soldiers ambled around. Occasionally, the police also showed up—when everything was over. Our main thirst was easily quenched as uncertain and contradictory bits of news poured in. Bissor was among the dead. About the corpses there could be no doubt. There was no possible mistake: Bissor was dead, and all his family had been murdered, except the prostitute sister who had been lucky enough to be away in Marseille. I am sure that Bissor had fought back wildly with his big hard fists. As for the rest, will we ever be able to understand? It was said that the Moslem infantry had been called to the front and that, before being shipped off to slaughter, they had felt, as warriors for whom all is right, that they could get away with anything. Tradition admitted that they could rob, rape, or kill as they pleased. Of course, they chose to descend on the Jewish quarter. Others maintained that the pogrom had been fomented by the government, as a trick to divert attention from its political difficulties, and that all the Jewish soldiers had received orders to remain in their barracks. The coincidence indeed seemed incredible. Perhaps the disaster, after all, had started in some silly way, with a quarrel between a Jewish shopkeeper and an Arab customer in a town of the South; it had then led to a fight between the Moslems of the neighborhood and any passing Jews, and had spread from there to neighboring towns, finally setting the whole country ablaze.

Without knowing why, the city had been simmering for several days. We avoided leaving our own street, and all intercourse was reduced to a cautious politeness. Each little group kept to itself. At home, we were worried, but we insisted on believing that times had changed as we repeated old tales—not so old after all—about Jews having their throats cut by nearby wells, being walled up alive by princely creditors, or sadistically raped. Little by little, in spite of ourselves, we regressed into the historical darkness of bygone ages, of blind brutality. When the storm broke out we were already certain of our inevitable fate.

At eleven in the morning, my father rushed home in spite of his asthma, carrying an armful of provisions, including meats and sugar. Usually, he lunched in his store, but it was said that fights had already started not far from the ghetto. My mother ran to the grocer’s just as the store was closing down. Then we barricaded our doors and windows, the front door with two bars of wrought iron. After that, we sat and listened for any unusual sounds. But we were far from the ghetto and could only study the deathly silence of our own neighborhood, periodically broken by the rattling noise of empty streetcars. My father had an occupation for such stay-in periods: he then made heavy canvas feed-bags for horses. From time to time, he dropped his work and rushed to the window. As he grew paler, I recognized on his face the marks of the terror which he had transmitted to me in my earliest childhood. Will I ever be able to rid myself of that cold clamminess at the back of my neck, and of the absurd feeling of being paralyzed and disarmed in the face of a humiliating death?

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It was in, high school that I discovered how painful it is to be a Jew. Until then, the world had been alien to me, hostile of course, but no more so than anything unknown. I was not the cause of my own suffering, I did not feel alien to myself as I do today. Can I make myself more clear? Anti-Semitism seemed to be a characteristic of the others, much as they might have a way of speaking or of dressing. They were not Jews, as I was, so they were anti-Semites. Naturally, it was not very pleasant, but no less so than the brutality of Sicilians or the prerogatives of the French. It did not fit any particular characteristic of my own, for I did not feel Jewish in any way that might provoke anti-Semitism. In short, I felt neither accused nor guilty.

In high school, I began to suffer because they forced me to ask myself what I was. This problem never could have arisen at the Alliance [Israelite] school where we had all been Jews, all but a tiny minority which had soon been reduced to discretion. But in high school a constant flow of remarks made me ponder the problem of the ideal Jew and forced me to study myself in order to discover in me the typical characteristics. Such introspection calls up ghosts, and through sheer rebelliousness, I defended my own ghosts and thus assured them an existence of their own. I, an artisan’s son and poor, defended merchants and financiers in the presence of non-Jews, trying to explain historically why some Jews went into trade as though I had personally been responsible for Jewish trade and believed that non-Jewish trades were indeed more acceptable. As I condemned Jewish trade, I attacked it in the face of Jews, too, but far more virulently than the anti-Semites did and more openly.

This insidious and argumentative form of racial prejudice, disguised as objectivity, was tolerated by my upper-middle-class Jewish classmates. It is true that they were spared certain humiliations. They were assured that such criticism did not apply to them. Anyway, doesn’t every human community have its faults? Apparently, I was too touchy and saw anti-Semitism everywhere. But the point was that my classmates did not suffer enough from it in material terms. There were, of course, little annoyances sometimes in the street. On a peaceful day, for instance, a drunkard might shout: “Death to the Jews!” Or the ticket-collector, harassed by the crowd, might say: “These Jews are all alike.” Or inscriptions might be scrawled every once in a while on the walls of the old cemetery: “Down with the Jews!” Or again, uncomplimentary references might appear in the press, and one would then have to face smiling and unexpected remarks such as: “Really, you must admit that . . . .” But as, in the long run, the families of my classmates were allowed to go about their own business, they were convinced they were on the winning side. They did not even seem to experience any spiritual anxiety. They were of European culture, going back at least one generation, and the nearness of Europe and the apparent solidarity of the modern world comforted them; several times a year they went abroad, pampered their digestive systems in various spas, and did most of their business with European firms. . . .

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I was neither as polite nor as secure as my middle-class brethren. I was impulsive and badly behaved, and allowed neither jokes nor mealy-mouthed insinuations to be made. I am willing to admit that my anxiety often increased my suspicion, and I frequently suspected people of meaning more than they said; but what they said was quite unbearable enough for any ordinary pride, and I had the greatest contempt for my Jewish classmates, for their tolerance and so-called fair play, as if fair play did not imply equality for both players.

One day, and I recall it with terror, my exasperation almost made me lose my head. We were climbing the steps to the new science wing in our school. Behind me, I could hear a political discussion between Dunand, one of the few French Socialists in our class, and Papachino, a French boy of Italian origin. Those whose naturalization is recent or whose family background is vague are always more involved in race prejudice and more nationalistic than others. I detested Papachino, with his head that leaned over on one shoulder, and his yellow face full of a snarling craftiness. Although the discussion was violent, I was not paying much attention to it, until suddenly the word Jew struck my ear. I might be anywhere in the world, surrounded by respect and confidence and enjoying every honor, but the slippery sound of the word would still make me prick up my ears and listen. Papachino’s bitter, whining voice concluded:

It is they who are ruining France.

In a second, I had whipped around and grabbed him by the neck with my tense fingers. I was two steps above him, and my rigid fist forced him to look up as I strangled him in his own shirt collar:

Repeat that! Repeat it, and I’ll throw you over the railing.

He hesitated, wondering whether to take it as a joke or to be angry.

“Say it again,” I repeated, furious.

Around us, everything had stopped. The look on my face could not have been very reassuring. From above, I could see Papachino’s eyes rolling in his motionless face as he tried to measure the fall in the stairwell. He must also have felt the trembling of my hand around his neck, as I could too, and he muttered:

You’re mad . . . you’re mad . . . .

I let go, suddenly afraid myself; my fear was greater than my anger. Dunand had said nothing during all this scene. I only noticed the color come back to his cheeks as he smiled and said, at last:

Chicken shit!

Papachino was stammering, trying to explain what he had meant and what he had not. I turned my back on him and went on up the stairs, without quite understanding my sudden exasperation.

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But, I could not be continually defending myself against the constant hostility and slyness, the very atmosphere of the place. Every time a native, whether Jewish or Moslem, said something silly, our mathematics teacher, a fat and placid Alsatian, would declare in a radio announcer’s voice: “This is the Voice of Africa calling!” He thought he was funny, and the Europeans laughed noisily while the others smiled to show their willingness to play the game. We would then stare at each other and swallow our pride.

The history teacher, a retired lieutenant with a wooden left leg which thumped on the floor with a martial sound, would slyly imply: “The destruction of French hierarchy and of its traditional values.” I did not even quite know what he meant, but he managed to make us Africans loathe all hierarchies and their values. Every morning he would force us to stand at attention and to say: “His Majesty the King of England,” or “His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales,” which made me link race prejudice with authority in my aversions. . . .

The fact that the same contempt was felt for Mohammedans made me feel a sense of community with them. Anxiously, my eyes would sometimes scan the class for allies and would catch the gaze of a young Moslem bourgeois by the name of Ben Smaan. But I felt that such a gulf separated us Jewish boys from our Moslem classmates, and that the impetus that bore me toward the West was so strong, that these encounters could be but accidents. I believed, firmly but not very clearly, that our future lay with Europe. Two inconceivable acts of treachery on the part of the West were necessary before I ceased to associate my life too closely with it. By then, however, I had already broken with the East too.

Life in school slowly taught me my exact position, making the picture clearer each year. Our Alsatian teacher was an example of ordinary anti-Semitism arising from incompatibility. As a man of the North, he disliked living on the Mediterranean, and he reproached us with liking all the things he detested such as speaking loud, or living on the streets, or being sunburnt, whereas his complexion was milky-white. . . . Another historian also tried to give race prejudice a scientific basis. What complexes drove him to devote his doctoral dissertation and many years of his life to nonsensical gossip? He forced himself to demonstrate his theories calmly, without ever raising his voice. Years later, he was to betray his secret violence when, with unexpected audacity in such a silent man, soft and almost an invalid, he became a leader in Franco-Nazi collaboration.

But his classes were carefully prepared and intelligent, so that they did me more harm than any stupid or aggressive jokes. I respected all that seemed scientifically accurate, and because I found no immediate reply to his arguments, they troubled me and made me feel guilty. To combat this, I threw myself into studies of Judaism and became intellectually aware of our own Hebrew spiritual tradition. For a few years I enthusiastically attended any lecture or meeting which could help me in these investigations; then firmly entrenched within my new knowledge, I tried to undermine as best I could the teachings of this doctrinaire racial theorist in the minds of my school-fellows. But they all laughed at my discoveries, much as they also derided what our teacher said. So I resorted to my usual vengeance. As he had at least the tact to allow us to express contrary views, whether he liked it or not, I was his best pupil, and I remember well writing angry sixteen-page compositions for him.

But this was impossible with Murat, whom we nicknamed the sprinkler because he constantly spat as he spoke. He was an old crank who was a good example of the kind of anti-Semitism that is bred of stupidity. His mere physical appearance repelled me, with his rotting and uneven yellow teeth, the deposit of thick foaming saliva in the corners of his mouth, his colorless and lifeless hair, and the eternal moist cigarette stub which made him blink with its smoke. He allowed no discussion and, being mean and grumpy, took petty revenge on any obstinate contradictors, that is on the few pupils who thought at all. The others laughed at him and teased him with excessive humility, and this seemed to flatter him. When he was exasperated he would relieve himself by insulting them grossly. On the whole, however, they got on well together. On days when his temper was good he would leave his desk and, putting his left foot up on a bench, would rest his chin on his hand and his elbow on his knee; it was time for a more intimate exchange of views. As he spat over the more unfortunate pupils who sat in the front row, he would ask seemingly innocent questions which were intended to make us reveal our most secret faults. Why was it that, in this country, the Jews always mentioned the profession of the deceased in death notices? He pretended not to know the reason, but he smiled knowingly: simply because Jews make the most-even of death—to advertise! But his stupidity went hand in hand with his greed, and my comrades learned to play the dirty trick of giving him presents. He was so grateful, it seemed, that he would even go so far as to hint at the subject of our next composition, without compromising himself, of course, but with much winking and subtle smiling:

You would do well to work on Louis XIV. Most important, Louis XIV, most important! . . .

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Murat used the same tactics against the Moslems, and my year in his class really brought me together with Ben Smaan. Murat maintained that Moslems had a particular smell of their own, and he explained it by saying that it came from the sweat caused by eating too much rancid mutton fat. Then he would direct the discussion toward the second statement which, he hoped, would make us forget the first. He was so clever! And the same pupils laughed, and the same ones were angry, all behaving like good sports. Every dog had his day, fair and fair enough. The day Ben Smaan asked if it was true that the Chinese thought that Europeans stank, I seconded him.

Politically, Murat was naturally a legitimist Royalist. It is odd how many [French] history teachers are Royalists, as though their studies commit them to a past world. Being a Royalist seemed to me to be the height of anachronistic absurdity. Ben Smaan was the son of a merchant who had been accidentally killed by a bullet in one of the periodic riots which upset our country, yet he was one of the few Moslems to attend Socialist youth meetings. In his composition on the consequences of the Revolution of 1789, he had dared to approve the Revolution itself. Murat gave him D, and in his report on it later in front of a silent class, told him his essay had been full of as much nonsense as its author. Ben Smaan was a fat boy who moved awkwardly, and he proceeded to take this very badly and to interrupt the solemn routine of this session by protesting that his grade was unjustified and that he had not written nonsense; if he had, it would interest him to hear more specifically what was wrong. The class was always on the lookout for a row and now began to shout: “The nonsense! The nonsense!” to the popular tune of “To the Lamppost!”

Murat became irritated, fussed through the essay, and at last found what had made him angry enough to grade it so low. Ben Smaan had written of the “admirable” Robespierre and the “Age of the Enlightenment” when the one was branded in our class as the most bloodthirsty of tyrants and the other as the darkest period in the history of France. This quarrel did not concern me personally, but Murat’s injustice and the solidarity that I wished to express toward Ben Smaan as well as the huge admiration I felt for the French Revolution, perhaps also the expectation that I too would get an unfair grade, made me intervene impulsively and brutally, as always when justice seemed to me in danger.

“A gang of degenerate bandits, and the most shameful period in the history of France,” Murat repeated firmly.

“The most generous and the most honorable!” I shouted.

My voice came from the back of the classroom and was veiled with emotion in spite of myself.

“Who shouted?” he asked, surprised and angry.

“I did!” I replied in the same passionate tone that revealed that I was ready for anything. My intention to provoke him was obviously insolent. Usually, the pupils took advantage of the slightest chance to laugh and imitate animal cries. Murat would then treat them as idiots and pretend to be angry while the class laughed all the more at his tenderness toward his pupils. This time, however, they all felt that something uncommon had occurred and, in their surprise, were silent. Murat, for once, was up against a real show of fervor and no longer knew what to answer. He merely muttered:

All right, all right, shut up!

He then quickly went on to criticize the next composition.

Ben Smaan smiled at me and waved his plump hand. I realized I had been fortunate. Murat had not insisted. Had he not retreated, I would never have been able to control myself.

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During the recess, Ben Smaan joined me and said he wished to talk with me alone. I said I was prepared to listen, but he frowned with his eyes almost closed in his broad face and said mysteriously that he would rather we went somewhere out of the way. So we made a date to meet in town. He then told me he was the local secretary of a political youth movement composed only of native Africans and asked me to join it. I was delighted but a little embarrassed. Of course, I suffered from my growing awareness that I was alien in the eyes of Europeans, but it had not yet occurred to me to make a move toward the Moslems, for I thought of this road as closed.

“Precisely,” said Ben Smaan. “That is something new in our program: we would like to have some Jews too, so as to express the aspirations of the whole Tunisian nation.”

“But are we a part of the nation?”

“Of course you are! Where was your father born? And your grandfather? Have you ever had any other nationality in the last few centuries? No! There you are!”

“It’s true,” I said, “that I was born here, like my father and all my ancestors, and I’ve never been out of this country since my birth. You consider that we belong to the same nation, but what about the others, Ben Smaan, what about the others? I’m afraid that, to them, we may still be foreigners.”

“Maybe the times have changed. But there’s a job for those of us who know how to speak and explain and convince. We must promote unity among all the native sons of the country and make them act according to their own conscience. Why should we do without the help of the Jews, who are an important part of the population and a particularly active, clever, and powerful one?”

The last part of this sentence did not please me. What could he mean by “clever and powerful”? I preferred to think that his words had been tactlessly chosen.

“I can only agree, but I must admit that I am a pessimist. One cannot force oneself to be accepted as a relative or even a neighbor. That is the opinion of many Jews for whom the only solution is Zionism.”

He stopped me with both hands and a scornful expression on his mouth that was as small as his eyes; he curled his lips to express his indignation and disagreement.

“Zionism! Leave that alone! It’s a Utopia and one that will arouse the whole Arab world. What could a handful of madmen do against the whole Arab world? No, let us put aside what would split us apart and look only to what can bring us together.”

I did not know then what to think of Zionism, but such a rapid condemnation hurt me, and the implied threat particularly shocked me. Nevertheless, I felt that Ben Smaan’s advances and generosity were sincere. His contact with the Socialist youth movement had given him a broad-minded humanism and the idea of the necessity of a social as well as a political liberation. He realized that the local middle class had exactly the same appetites as all others of its kind and that there would come a day when it would have to be fought too. He had left the Socialists now that he saw that the local groups of the European parties could find neither response nor roots in the native population. The people of Tunisia needed their own party to fight for them and to express their own aspirations. Ben Smaan spoke with a confident faith in his mission that I envied. He knew the sufferings of his people and was working to alleviate them. He seemed to be in the right and his task was obvious. But what was my people? And what did it want? My violence in the discussion and my resistance melted to indecision and a feeling of not belonging anywhere when it came to action.

“You know what you are and what you want. You’re lucky. If you were asked point-blank what your main political aim is, you would say the withdrawal of the European colonials or at any rate their neutralization. But I have to stop and think. You very much want a return to the culture and language of the Arabs, but I now belong to Western culture and would be incapable of writing or expressing myself satisfactorily in Arabic. Still, the injustices and refusals of the West . . . .”

“But that only makes our task more urgent,” Ben Smaan insisted. “The more time we let pass, the more unlike ourselves we become. We must pull ourselves together and clearly define our program.”

I was too shy to add that Moslem hostility would have to be dispelled and that there was also the hostility of the Jews who had been driven behind thick walls by centuries of fear. This reminded me of my never concluded argument with my father:

They don’t like us, he would say bitterly.

And do you like them?

Why should I like people who hate me?

Well, someone has to start . . . .

My father would shrug his shoulders. . . .

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But one had to forget and act. Only action could deliver both sides from their mutual isolation.

It was then only a few weeks before our school certificate examinations, and soon we would be distracted from these problems by reviewing. Ben Smaan was again on duty with me as a boarding-school prefect. I decided to go with him. . . .

There were not many of us at these secret meetings, and we felt strongly even if we had no very definite ideas. But I always left this Arab house filled with warmth and a feeling of generosity. The communion which ten of us could achieve was of good augury for the rest of the city. I smiled at the little street vendors and was amiable to the ticket-collector in the streetcar; when two women began to argue, I sided with the Moslem one. But the vendors did not understand my smiles, the ticket-collector hardly returned my politeness, and the Moslem women formed such a solid bloc in their opposition to the Jewess that I ended up by feeling sorry for her as the victim. Perhaps, I thought, if they only knew that I had just left an Arab home in the middle of the Halfaouine section, with a fig tree growing in the middle of the patio, and that I had just drunk tea there with Ben Smaan and the others, if only they knew that I was working for them, who I was and what I thought. . . . But I had to overcome the hostility of the ticket-collector and teach the shopkeepers not to insult Jewish housewives by calling them bitches, and I had to send Jewish and Moslem girls to the same schools. Our success depended on our work and patience and on time. . . .

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After the pogrom, however, as soon as it was again possible to move around, Ben Smaan came to see me. We went for a long walk all around the old ramparts, with me slowing my impatient gait to keep pace with his small unsteady steps. He talked a lot, perhaps to hide his own embarrassment and emotion, and I said almost nothing, not knowing what to say. He had worried about my personal safety but, even more, he admitted, about what I might think, and he now apologized for his doubts. He was sure that I had realized that it had all been cooked up. Yes, I had. It must be explained to all in our respective religious communities. Yes, certainly. (Would mine believe me, I wondered?) It was more than ever necessary to be united. Yes, it was. (I was sick of those nightmarish nights!) He was preparing a petition. Yes, I would sign it.

Bissor was dead: what was I to do about this death? Whether it was a miserable European diversionary move or a spontaneous and blind mob action, no amount of research into responsibilities would ever bring him back to life. Ben Smaan was right: one had to educate the mob, unmask those who fooled it, and draw attention to the real problems. But I was tired and the results were too far off. For the moment I stood between two walls: how was I to choose between repulsive hypocritical anti-Semitism, which had probably been the instigator of the massacre, and these murderous explosions which, like letting blood, periodically relieved the pressure of so much accumulated hatred?

How vain and futile are all theoretical and philosophical constructions of the mind when compared to the brutal realities of the world of men! The European philosophers build the most rigorous and virtuous moral codes, and their politicians, brought up by these teachers, foment murders as a means of government. After how bitter a struggle had I chosen the West and not the East! And now I was beginning to listen to the reasonings of Jewish nationalists when the war came to fill up our lives and postpone any solution to these problems.

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