Surgent nationalism in French North Africa has been almost entirely Arab, and amid the turmoil one is likely to lose sight of the native Jews in that area, whose position between the contending parties has today become more problematical than ever. Seldom has any member of this Jewry talked directly in literature for himself and his fellow Sephardim. Alfred Memmi’s novel, La Statue de Set (Statue of Salt), is the first such expression, and constitutes something of an occasion in the Jewish culture of our day. Here Edouard Roditi tells us about the book, the circumstances of its writing and the reception it got in Paris, where it was published by Editions Correa in 1953 and got a literary prize. (Criterion Books plans to bring it out in this country in the spring of this year.)
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Whether Arab or Berber, Mohammedan or Jewish, many of the intellectuals of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia seem to be doomed, in their political activities as in their literary efforts, to a peculiar kind of frustration. No longer content with the traditional culture of the Islamic world, already disappointed by much that the West once offered them, they must yet borrow from 19th-century French liberalism the ideas that now inspire their nationalist campaigns against French colonial policies. Whether in fiction or philosophy, in poetry or political thought, they no longer find their native Arabic an adequate linguistic vehicle for their autonomous thoughts and emotions. They must resort to French, the language of their secondary schools and of all their higher education.
In a recently published autobiographical novel, La Statue de Sel (“The Statue of Salt”), a young Jewish writer from Tunis, Albert Memmi, describes some of the inner conflicts that this characteristic ambivalence entails. To Western Jews, the cultural conflict that Memmi examines in the context of his own life and experiences will seem not altogether new, but it is unique in one respect—the painful trichotomy of Jewish, French, and Islamic cultures has imposed a third horn, so to speak, unknown to the literature of the dualism of American Jewish life, from Ludwig Lewisohn’s The Island Within to Saul Bellow’s Augie March. Thus Memmi’s predicament is more complex than that of most of the Westernized North African writers of his generation who are now meeting with such success in the Paris literary world.
One thinks particularly of the number of outstanding Algerian novelists who have dramatized the conflict of French and Islamic culture. Mainly of Berber Kabyle extraction, among them are Mohammed Dib, Mouloud Feraoun, and Mouloud Mammeri.
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As a matter of fact, French North Africa, Egypt, and the Levant had already, before 1939, contributed occasional new talents to the increasingly kaleidoscopic pattern of contemporary French literature: the Christian Berber poet and critic Jean Armouche, the Levantine Christian novelist Albert Cosseri from Egypt, the Lebanese Christian poet Georges Schéhadé, and the Jewish novelists Ades and Josipovici, and Elian Finbert, also a Jew, from Egypt. But North African literary work dealing with the cultural conflict actually arose only after 1945, when Albert Camus and Emmanuel Robles, both of them Frenchmen from Algeria, began to prove themselves unusually generous and humane friends and patrons to all deserving young writers from across the Mediterranean. Among these, the best known are Mammeri and Feraoun, young Berber intellectuals from the Kabyle area of Algeria; Dib, an Algerian Arab with a name that is very frequent among the Coptic Christians of Egypt, concerns himself, like Cosseri, with the problems of the underprivileged Arab, the “poor white” of an Islamic economy that recognizes a difference between Arab and Berber.
Like these fellow Algerians, Albert Memmi writes in French rather than in his native tongue, which is a colloquial Berber-Arabic patois that has no literary tradition and can serve the purposes, at best, of local journalism. Like Dib, Mammeri, and Feraoun again, Memmi is a graduate of the French school system in which he now works as a teacher.
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In his autobiographic novel, Memmi tells us repeatedly that his hero, Alexandre Mordekhai Benillouche, acquired his knowledge of French only at school, that Judeo-Arabic and Berber-Arabic were the native tongues of his childhood, and that his accent and intonation, when he now speaks French, still reveal his North African origin. Memmi also identifies his hero and the latter’s family repeatedly as Orientals and Africans, even as Berbers or Bedouins, rather than as Europeans. His hero’s family name, Benillouche, meaning “son of the lamb,” is of Berber-Arabic origin; Benillouche refers to his own Jewish mother affectionately as “cette Bedouine” and stresses her Berber profile and the lean Bedouin appearance of her brothers; and the author refers, with some pride, to his hero’s “pure” accent when he speaks Arabic, without the nasal twang and the drawl of most North African Jews of the more populous urban ghettos. La Statue de Sel is moreover full of folklore and superstitions, especially phallic beliefs and fears of the evil eye, that are common to Memmi’s own Jewish background and to the Mohammedans, mainly of Berber stock, among whom the Jews of North Africa have long lived. Memmi even attaches more importance to his hero’s flirtation with an idealistic Néo-Destour socialist group of young Mohammedan intellectuals who sought to enlist him as a Jewish “native son” in their “Africa for the Africans” movement, than to any Zionist aspirations that he may, from time to time, have entertained.
But Memmi’s loyalty to his native Barbary Coast is not wholehearted. On the one hand, he rejects with horror every specific feature of his immediate cultural background, which is the bastardized commercial city of Tunis and its crowded ghetto. On the other hand, he repeatedly refers to some deeper and almost irrational heritage that transcends all recent history, including the French, Turkish, and Arab occupations of Tunisia, and seeks its roots in the land’s legendary Berber past. The Kahena, the mythical Jewish queen of the Berbers who led them in their last successful revolt against the Arab invaders, seems to be Memmi’s symbol of his attachment to his Berber ancestry.
This attachment, up to a point, means an affirmative response to a French cultural policy that tries to divide and assimilate, to detach racial, religious, and cultural minorities from the rigid Arab hierarchies in which they had become imprisoned. In Algeria, the Jews had thus been granted full French citizenship by a series of legislative measures that began as early as 1847; in Tunisia, the Maltese and other Christian settlers, and many Jews, were encouraged to adopt French citizenship in the years that preceded the Second World War; in Morocco, a Berber political movement to depose the Arab Sultan was successfully backed by the French in 1953; in Algeria, the Berbers of Kabylia have constantly been encouraged to adopt European culture and detach themselves from Islam and the Arab culture that had been forced upon them by the Mohammedan conquest of North Africa. Confused perhaps by the conflicts that this political and cultural policy can engender, Memmi seems to reject some of the realities of North Africa and to claim to be a native son of an idealized Barbary Coast that he has never known.
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La Statue de Sel begins by describing the timeless world of the hero’s childhood, spent in a quiet alley of the slummy old Moslem city of Tunis, later in the heart of its even slummier ghetto. Alexandre Mordekhai Benillouche is born into a world of poverty, hunger, dirt, violence, disease, and fear. Only the family can protect the child against the outside world, a treacherous, and unpredictable human ocean that rages in the street, where its storms can easily degenerate into pogroms. In the second section of the novel, Alexandre Mordekhai gradually acquires a consciousness of himself as an individual, increasingly detached, even alienated, from his family and social background. At the same time, he feels himself drawn even more strongly towards the world of the Occident that he discovers by attending French schools. His whole education is a hard struggle: to obtain scholarships, he must study at home in an overcrowded tenement, must deprive his family of the income that he might already be providing if he had been content to earn a modest living sooner as an apprentice to some artisan; he must also suffer countless humiliations outside the home when he tutors, for pocket money, the children of wealthier families.
Benillouche had hoped, at first, to become a physician, but the druggist benefactor who supplies the funds for his secondary-school studies advises him to be a pharmacist. Finally, abandoned by his benefactor, Benillouche chooses philosophy, planning to become a teacher in the French secondary-school system.
In the third section of the novel Benillouche sees, in his conflicts with the world and with contemporary history, all his brave illusions shattered. In the 1939 Tunis pogrom, he loses all hope for the integration of the native Jews as Tunisian citizens within a liberal and independent Moslem state: it might yet take centuries to educate the ignorant and degraded Mohammedan masses of the Oriental slums to the point where, no longer needing a scapegoat for their resentments, they might be ready to tolerate at all times the religious minorities that share their poverty. The behavior of the French upper class under the Nazi occupation of Tunis, and immediately after liberation, then deprives Benillouche of his faith in French citizenship and in the civilization of the Western democracies as solutions to the political and cultural problems of the North African ghetto. Finally, the stagnation of the ghetto itself and the opportunism of those Jewish leaders who manage to escape from it undermine Benillouche’s faith in any spiritual or moral resources that might yet revive the parched vine of North African Jewry.
In German-occupied Tunis, in the forced-labor camps of the torrid South, in the black-market economy of liberated Tunis, Benillouche encounters, among Jews, only selfishness, pettiness, corruption, cynicism, ignorance. After liberation he tries indeed to join the French fighting forces, but is rejected because of his status as a native Jew, a subject of the “neutral” Protectorate—though he would probably have been rejected, in any case, on account of his tuberculosis. In protest against the Vichy anti-Semitic laws, Benillouche had previously resigned from the teaching profession instead of waiting to be fired; now, this resignation remains effective and he can no longer be reinstated when a new law reappoints all those who had been fired as a consequence of the earlier law. He can still, of course, resume his studies to become a high-school philosophy instructor. This he does but, when he at last takes his exams, Benillouche experiences a kind of blackout: instead of writing an academic discussion of the influence of Condillac on John Stuart Mill, he realizes that all his frustrated ambitions have ceased to mean anything to him. He is interested henceforth in only one philosophical problem, that of solving his own intimate difficulties, of knowing and understanding himself as a Jew of the ghetto who has ceased to be what he was and has failed to become what he set out to be.
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In the end, Benillouche no longer sees any salvation for himself as an individual in any group or community, and decides to emigrate, of all places, to Argentina, a land of brash promises that offers only material advantages and can therefore disappoint less bitterly than other lands that promise more. Actually, Memmi himself, the author of the novel, subsequently completed his studies in Algiers and in Paris, then returned to Tunis, where he now teaches philosophy, happily married to a teacher of German whom he met in Paris. But he has deliberately confused himself, as author, with the hero of his autobiographical novel, and many Paris critics were fooled by this, and puzzled or shocked by Memmi’s grotesque choice of the Argentine as his ultimate haven.
The relation of Alexandre Mordekhai Benillouche to Memmi himself is indeed of the same order as that of the “I” of Proust’s autobiographical masterpiece to its author, and the relation of Benillouche’s idealized Argentine to any real country is that of Proust’s Albertine to the “rough-trade” taxi driver who, in real life, inspired this great love. Only once—on page 100—does Memmi reveal his own true identity: “son of a Jew of Italian origin and a Berber woman.” Otherwise, throughout this book which is barely fictional, he presents himself always as Alexandre Mordekhai Benillouche, a young North African of strictly native Jewish extraction.
In its structure too, like Remembrance of Things Past, La Statue de Sel begins where it ends, with the hero setting out to write his own autobiography. In analyzing the problems that beset a young Tunisian Jewish intellectual in his painful evolution from the obsolete culture of the ghetto towards an elusive goal that he avoids ever defining too clearly, Memmi indicates that this goal, in spite of all its apparent promises of integration within Islamic or Western culture, must finally reveal itself as merely the Socratic “Know thyself.” Memmi disassociates himself indeed as consciously from the Jewish past of the North African ghetto as from the Jewish future proposed by the Zionists, or from the mirages offered by the Western world or the Mohammedan liberals. In the end, as a kind of philosophical anarchist, he seeks only to understand his own self. It is significant that La Statue de Sel has been published in Paris in the same specialized series as the French translations of Henry Miller’s The World of Sex, Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow’s Really the Blues, and Malcolm Lowry’s Underneath the Volcano.
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As one closes Memmi’s novel, one understands the significance of its title. Like Lot’s wife fleeing Sodom in its hour of destruction, Memmi’s hero turned back to view once more his own past. For having disregarded the divine warning to look only ahead, he has now been turned to a pillar of salt, as if petrified by the tears of his own grief, a monument already isolated from the rejected past, but excluded, too, from the promised future. He has turned his back on Islam, on Judaism, and also on the almost agnostic “Gentile” culture that France offers indiscriminately to Christian, Mohammedan, and Jew.
In zionism, like many a young Sephardic Jew from the Islamic world, Benillouche saw only a romantic Ashkenazic passion for an Orient that he himself knew too well, and hated and feared: Israel may become but a bigger and better ghetto, surrounded by even more hostile and powerful Arabs than is the Hara of Tunis. Is it surprising that Benillouche then decides to emigrate to this legendary Argentine of which he knows only that it is “rich”? He had already rejected all other lands that might propose themselves as havens, whether the United States or Soviet Russia, whether Paris or the new Jerusalem. In one of his concluding chapters, Memmi describes, as lucidly as Scott Fitzgerald, some of the more disturbing symptoms of his spiritual and cultural “crack-up”: “I am no longer able to forget myself, no longer capable of thinking of anything but myself. I can no longer abstract myself from this essential search: any other consideration would be a luxury.”
“My destiny,” Memmi affirms in the end, “is eternally to break away. . . . I did not encounter my misfortune by chance, on my way, and I cannot forget it by hastening ahead. The more I discover myself, the better I recognize my own misfortune; to put an end to it would mean putting an end to myself, in death or madness.” A dispassionate reader might think Memmi’s book insane or suicidal in its conclusions and, according to the standards of “mental hygiene,” hysterical and politically immature. But let him try living, before passing judgment, in a North African ghetto, in a hara of Tunisia or a mellah of Morocco: in his excellent sociological and historical survey of North African Jewry, Les Juifs d’Afrique du Nord, (Paris, 1952), André Chouraqui has described with indisputable authority the living conditions in some of these real concentration camps, the world in which tens of thousands of young Jews now learn, in their schools, about the wonders of democracy, progress, science. The hideous contrast between what they learn and what they experience each day is enough to confuse and embitter their whole lives.
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Neurotic symptoms of all sorts abound in Memmi’s book. But have they all been expressed unintentionally, and are we justified in attributing them to the author himself? The book’s title alone might indicate that he views his hero’s neurotic problems very objectively: as a philosopher, Memmi has specialized in the study of psychological problems and is well aware of the implications of Freudian theory. The rigor mortis of the pillar of salt may indeed symbolize the suicide of a fictional character who, no longer willing to face, as the author has done, the intolerable present, has turned back towards the past, preferring to exist, if at all, only as a memory among memories, a stone turned to stone by the Medusa-stare of stones, an advanced schizophrenic in a statuesque catatonic pose.
For all its lack of artful expression and poetic imagery and diction, La Statue de Sel exemplifies a kind of unity of structure that is strictly poetic and can be found only in great myths and in profound individual experiences. It is, to the serious Jewish reader, a document of as great historical or human significance as the autobiographical Exemplar Humanae Vitae of Spinoza’s forerunner, the Portuguese Jewish suicide, Uriel Acosta. Reverting from Catholicism, imposed upon his family by the Portuguese Inquisition, to the Jewish faith of his ancestors that he hoped to practice freely in Holland, Acosta had found, in his exile, only intolerance. Breaking away from the stagnation of the Orient, Benillouche is similarly disappointed by the merely opportunistic freedom that the Western world seems to offer him. It is perhaps the destiny of a certain type of Sephardic intellectual, less of a “joiner” than Jews from Northeastern Europe, eternally to break away, to find himself again and again by losing himself.
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But Memmi has refused to abstract his personal problem from that of the Tunisian Jewish ghetto as a whole, the problem of the ghetto from that of North African Jewry as a whole, and the problem of North African Jewry from that of North Africa as a whole in its relations with France and the Western world. Memmi understands that there is no longer a single North African problem that can be solved neatly by some bright braintruster, no North African Jewish problem that can be solved by merely Jewish means, by sending in some social workers who have graduated from the best American schools. Even in Israel, we have seen immigrants from the mellahs of Morocco and the haras of Tunisia bring in their trail a North African problem similar to the one now created, in Paris, by the presence of so many immigrant Mohammedan laborers.
Like the problem of the South in the United States, the North African problem, as its solution is delayed, begins to proliferate and to breed new problems: the problem Of the immigrant North African laborer, who in metropolitan France settles in slums that are similar to those of the Mexican “men without women” in some American cities; the problem of a vastly increased population in North Africa deprived of the necessary agricultural or industrial outlets for its energies and of proper schooling or skills to absorb its unemployed in a modern economy; the problem of the hundreds of thousands of European colonists in the protectorates of Tunisia and Morocco, now that these areas are demanding a national independence that might no longer tolerate the presence of such privileged minorities; the problem of peaceful integration and “co-citizenship” in Algeria, where Jew, Christian colonist, and Mohammedan are expected gradually to merge politically in a melting pot where all will enjoy, in the long run, equal rights, duties, and opportunities.
Within each one of these problems, there is also a Jewish problem. In recent years, for instance, the Paris Jewish community has observed that there are more and more North African Jews among the immigrant laborers from Algeria who flock to France to find work in the automobile plants of the Paris area. Not only is unemployment now affecting the Jewish artisans of Algeria almost as severely as their agricultural Mohammedan neighbors, but the latter also seem to attract to Paris, in their train, a host of North African Jewish moneylenders and old-clothes dealers, restaurateurs, and interpreters, who cater in France to their specialized needs just as in Oran or Constantine, and act also as intermediaries between the Arabic-speaking slum-dwellers of Menilmontant and Gennevilliers and the French-speaking world of employers and officialdom, of police courts and social services.
Islam has indeed marked its Jews as indelibly as the Christian world has marked its own. The Jew of Tunis, with his Turkish coffee and his boukha (fig liquor), bis boutargue (sun-dried mullet roes) and his cous-cous, is now as native to North Africa as the Russian Jew with his tea and his borsht, his gefilte fish and his kasha, was to Eastern Europe. To ignore such differences of fare and folklore, habits and beliefs, would indeed be foolish, and the Ashkenazic Jews who so idealistically promoted, a few years ago, the emigration of Tunisian, Moroccan, and Iraqi Jews to Israel are often as ill at ease today with these exotic shvarze neighbors as they once were with the Palestinian Arabs. The Tunisian Jewish tailor, on the other hand, is certainly less ill at ease with the Mohammedan cobbler who works beside him in the covered bazaar of Djerba than with an American or German social worker who tries to explain to him that there is little use in trying to cure an epileptic child by “protecting” it against the evil eye with blue porcelain beads.
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It is no accident that French readers have long been so passionately devoted to the “existentialist” South that they discover in the novels of Faulkner, Caldwell, and Eudora Welty; nor is it an accident that Albert Camus, Frenchman from Algiers, should have chosen Faulkner as one of his masters. North African life, with its violence and its contrasts, can already inspire the same kind of literature as our Deep South, the same sense of the doom and the sheer beauty of being, of its tragedy and its lyrical poetry. So far this sense of tragedy has expressed itself mainly in the writing of Frenchmen such as Camus and Emmanuel Robles, the “whites” of France’s new South, and the poetry of North African life in the more lyrical and elegiac writings of Dib, Mammeri, and Feraoun, its Mohammedan “blacks.” In Memmi’s autobiographical novel we now discover the anguish of those who, in this struggle for power, no longer have much to expect from either side and share neither the guilt-feelings of the French nor the nostalgia or national aspirations of the Mohammedans.
Though sometimes artlessly or even clumsily written, La Statue de Sel is thus an important document: for the first time in the century and more since the French landed in Algiers and began to assume the responsibility of emancipating the Jews of North Africa, a native North African Jew has now managed to find an audience, in metropolitan France, for a fictional work about an individual’s successful but frustrating escape from the ghetto. After centuries of silence, Chouraqui’s sociological report, Les Juifs d’Afrique du Nord, and Memmi’s novel are North African Jewry’s first outstanding contributions to Western literature.
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