Reflections on an Old Truth
Portrait of a Jew.
by Albert Memmi.
Orion Press. 326 pp. $4.95.
Portrait of a Jew deals with my life as a Jew. I wrote it because I want to understand who I am—as a Jew—and what the fact of being a Jew has meant in my life. Since this demanded a ruthless honesty with myself, I had to analyze all aspects of my being. But my being embraces that of so many other people, the portrait becomes no longer only my own. There exists, I now believe, a universal Jewish fate. More than my story, this is the story of all Jews. I have tried to sum up my—our—position, without apology, without caution, without niceties; I wanted to tell everything.
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It is with these words that Mr. Memmi summarizes his intentions in this essay. From the jacket, and from the references to his career within the book, we learn that Mr. Memmi was born of a poor, Orthodox family in Tunis, and grew up there; in his early manhood, during the Second World War, he was arrested and interned in a forced labor camp, from which he subsequently managed to escape. He was educated at the University of Algiers and at the Sorbonne; he now lives in Paris and devotes himself to teaching and writing. As a boy Mr. Memmi was a devoted Zionist, and intended to settle in Palestine; after he had left home, his Zionism gave way to a belief in universal freedom, socialism, and progress, which made any special preoccupation with Jewishness seem petty and parochial. Inevitably, the war disillusioned him; nevertheless, after the war he returned to Tunisia, helped his Moslem fellow citizens in their struggle for independence—and then, that independence having been attained, found himself confronted once again with his own separateness, with the Jewishness he had put aside (or had imagined he had put aside) so many years before.
From this outline, it can be seen that Mr. Memmi has lived through a series of events or experiences which are central to our understanding of the modern world: he has observed, at the closest quarters, the disruption of the religious, sequestered life of the ghetto; the exile (and worse) of the war years; the postwar fervor of nationalism among the former colonial peoples; the politics of France and Europe during its latest phase. He has necessarily, inevitably, through the accidents of his birth and upbringing, been a man of many worlds, each of which impinges directly upon our own. His personal story could have been a remarkable one.
Unfortunately, instead of keeping his promise and attempting to articulate a general or universal experience through a recital of what has happened to him as an individual, Mr. Memmi far more frequently tries to approach the particular through the universal. And his “universal” is as often as not simply a repetitive, diffuse kind of rhetoric which I cannot help dismissing summarily (and not altogether unjustly, I feel) as “French.” When he talks about the “difference” of the Jews, for instance—and I am choosing my example pretty much at random—Mr. Memmi writes:
Difference, in short, seems to me to have been just another stage. To know its nature we should have to hear the accusation and discuss it. Difference, derived from the accusation, is fluid and complex like the latter; born and bred in confrontation, it is also constantly disrupted by it. Separation, on the contrary, is connected with an obscure hostility, with what one might call the Kafkaian stage of the accusation. As it is not directly derived from the substance of the accusation, it is considered an important but relatively simple fact and of an important nature.
I should add that the context fails to make this passage any clearer than it is out of context; and that anyone who rereads the last sentence must surely agree that no context could possibly make it comprehensible. How much of the confusion is due to an inept translation, I cannot say; but I have little doubt that a large share of the responsibility must be borne by Mr. Memmi.
The curious thing about the book, considering the turgidity and impenetrability of so much of the writing, is that in fact Mr. Memmi’s main thesis is a fairly simple one. It is that the Jews are an oppressed people, and that it is a misfortune to be born a Jew. As it happens, this is a view with which I have great sympathy, though I have no doubt that many Jews would regard it as repugnant and insulting. But in view of what has happened to the Jews within my own lifetime, it seems to me that to speak of the Jewish fate as a misfortune is both more truthful and more dignified than, let us say, some of the cheerier things written in COMMENTARY’s symposium, “Jewishness and the Younger Intellectuals” (April 1961). Toward the end of the book, Mr. Memmi insists that he is fully aware of the positive aspects of Jewish existence—of Jewish solidarity and family feeling, of the tenacity of Jewish religious practices, of the unparalleled length in time of Jewish survival—and is deeply appreciative of them; but his stress falls heavily and repeatedly on “that painful grimace . . . that distinguishes [the Jew] from other men.” Can anyone who has read Jewish history really feel this stress to be misplaced?
Mr. Memmi does not, however, only have the murder and spoliation of the Jews in mind when he speaks of them as an oppressed people; what he tries to do is to make explicit all the subtler economic, religious, cultural, and political forms of the oppression; even those of which some Jews may manage to remain unaware. He tries to analyze every force which alienates the Jew from the society around him, which constricts him in the choices he is able to make, which distorts his own image of himself and inhibits his response to the outside world. He constantly compares the inwardness of the Jewish fate with that of other oppressed peoples and groups: in particular, with that of people who have undergone colonialization, like the Moslems in North Africa, with that of proletarians in a capitalist society, with American Negroes in a white society, with women in a male-dominated world. But the effect of these various comparisons is ultimately self-defeating. For in the end all one is left with is this large, vague, ever-expanding term “oppression”: the only faintly hopeful prospect for the future which Mr. Memmi holds out is that at some time one may be able to exchange it for an even larger, vaguer term: “liberation.” What form this liberation may take is left entirely unexplored. In this particular connection, I find it characteristic of the book that though Mr. Memmi’s references to the State of Israel, which has radically changed everyone’s conception of the Jewish fate, are warm and admiring in tone, it isn’t at all clear whether or not he has ever actually visited the country. Details of that sort don’t seem to interest him.
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The best single passage in the book is that in which Mr. Memmi describes how he feels, as a Jew, in a country like France, whose history cannot begin to be understood without some degree of participation in its Christian past; a country where holidays and place-names, buildings, ceremonies of state, and the language itself all celebrate the permanence and dominance of Christianity. (And he makes it clear how different is the “detachment” from that past of the non-believing Christian compared with that of the non-believing Jew.) In this passage one does hear a directly personal, individual voice; and it does go some way toward persuading one that to describe accurately and unsparingly the forms of an oppression or unease is in a measure to free oneself from it. Had all the book been of that quality I would certainly not have found it “negative” or “unconstructive,” despite Mr. Memmi’s pessimism and somberness of tone: the telling of truth is always a positive and constructive act, no matter how unpalatable that truth might be. But, just because he has nothing but “insight” to offer—no political programs, no religious belief, no new view of Jewish history or the Jewish future—Mr. Memmi’s uncertain grasp of the factuality of his own experience everywhere else in the book is all the more damaging to it. “It’s hard to be a Jew”—that phrase has been in use for a very long time. Mr. Memmi’s gloss adds disappointingly little to it.
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