For the Love of the Father
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
chochana boukhobza for the love of the father original title: pour l’amour du pÈre Translated by Nina B. lichtenstein Cover art: “Femmes Ghardaia” by Jules Lellouche Book design: Zanefa Walsh Published with the support of: Dr. Phyllis Hammer The Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, Waltham, Massachusetts, USA 2016 About the Author Born in Sfax, Tunisia in 1959, speaking Arabic and Hebrew as a child, Chochana Boukhobza immigrated to France in 1964 with her family as most of the Tunisian Jewish community was uprooted. She moved to Israel as a teen to study mathematics and physics in Jerusalem, a period that has greatly influenced her writing. Upon her return to France she worked in radio, television and press as a journalist, and she has written several screenplays. Speaking of how her writing is influenced by memories of her childhood in Tunisia and its abrupt end, Boukhobza has said: “I don’t know how to tell you about that. I can’t. It’s erased…I don’t know if I write in order to remember, or if I write to create my own memories.”1 Her many novels are critically acclaimed, and although none of her books are announced as autobiographic, they include autobiographical elements that engender searching and a coming to terms with loss, exile and survival in narratives that question the effects of memory in family relations and identity. Several of her novels present mysteries that bring the characters 1 In Une enfance juive en Méditerranée musulmane, ed. L. Sebbar, Saint- Pourçain-sur-Sioule, 2012, 81. 3 on internal or actual journeys, as they search for answers to questions left behind or raised by enigmatic figures. Boukhobza has alluded to her inclination for invoking searches for sources and answers as perhaps stemming from the fact that her grandfather, a rabbi, shohet (ritual slaughterer) and scribe in Tunisia, was the author of several manuscripts stored away somewhere unknown in Israel. In her family’s heritage there is thus a hidden and forgotten voice to which she has no access but which represents a literal witness to the link of her family’s Jewish past in the North Africa About her North African Jewish heritage and identity, Boukhobza has said: “Strange people, really, my people, torn between a lost homeland, a country in which to live, get married and work; and a promised land. Strange people squeezed between the past, the present, and prophesy.”2 A prolific writer she is the author of many novels. The first, Un Été à Jérusalem (1986) received the prestigious Prix Méditerranée, and the second, Le Cri (1987) was a finalist for the Prix Fémina. Her other works are Les Herbes amères (1989), Bel Canto (1991), Pour l’Amour du père (1996), which is now translated into English, Sous les Etoiles (2002), Quand le Bible rêve (2005) an illustrated children’s book, Le Troisième Jour (2010), which received the Prix Wizo, and is translated to English and Italian. Fureur (2012) received the Prix Landerneau Découvertes, Métal (2013) and HK (2015). She has also written and directed two documentaries: Un billet aller-retour (2005) about the connections of French Jews to Israel, and most recently Les petits héros du ghetto de Varsovie (2013) about the Jewish children who survived the war in the Warsaw ghetto selling cigarettes and trinkets to Poles and Germans by sneaking through to the Aryan side. 2 Ibid., 85. 4 Introduction For the Love of the Father is about the effect of exile on a Jewish family from Tunisia as they immigrate to Paris, France. It is a gripping novel that tells a story at once intimate and universal. It is universal in that it narrates the traumatic experience of displacement and of the challenges of resettlement in a new country, shared historically by many people, and in postcolonial times especially. In Boukhobza’s novel, the Saada clan represents but one family of the nearly 500,000 Jews who were uprooted from their native countries of Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco in the 1950’s and 60’s; many of these families had roots there going back to before the Arab conquest in the 7th century. As many as 235,000 settled in France in this period; and with their identities and stories deeply anchored in their North African and Judeo-Arabic cultural heritage, a unique character and flavor was added to the multicultural immigrant narratives to flourish in France in the late 1900’s. The Jewish immigrants from North Africa brought with them a joie de vivre that altered the face of French Jewry, since they did not come from a culture that had historically devalued their Jewishness the way many Ashkenazi Jews had experienced through the centuries in Europe. Also, less devastated by the horrors of the Holocaust, they infused the French Jewish scene with a new and much needed vitality. It is through the eyes of Alice, the youngest of five siblings, now a 38-year old single woman and successful defense lawyer in Paris, that we are given a close look into a family ravaged by loss: first that of their mother Chachïa, who dies just months before their dramatic departure from Tunisia, when Alice is only 8 years old; followed by the loss of their native country, and finally the loss of Sassou, the sister who as a young woman runs away 5 from home. However, the most crucial loss endured by all the Saadas is perhaps that of each other, since they spiral deeper into silence, estrangement and loneliness as they try to grapple with the many challenges of their life in France. Looming over the family conscience is the fear and compulsion of finding out what has happened to Sassou, and Alice has to decide if she can liberate herself from her family’s painful past and recover her traumatic childhood memory, without renouncing the love of her father. We follow this independent and strong, yet vulnerable woman as she seeks to understand herself and her own fears, while confronting as well as consoling and seeking consolation and answers from her lovers, friends and family. Today, France is home to the largest Jewish and Muslim populations living side by side outside of Israel, with approximately 4-6 million Muslims and 5-600,000 Jews. Sometimes they have co-existed quite well in various neighborhoods, within schools, shops, restaurants and cafes; other times it has been tense, complicated and, as we know too well, violent. This waxing and waning has been deeply affected by a complex set of catalysts: among them the baggage from the colonial era, the arduous process of decolonization, social inequality in France, and of course by events in the Middle East as they radiate out into the world and are adopted as personal battles by disenfranchised Muslim youth as well as by French Jews in their support of Israel as a Jewish homeland. In light of the current tensions among Jews and Muslims in France specifically, and in the Middle East and worldwide generally, the fact that many French Jews, like those depicted in Boukhobza’s novel, share significant life experiences with their Muslim compatriots only lends further weight to the timeliness and relevance of such literary manifestations. In the works of Jewish writers like Boukhobza, we see how the Arab-Jewish relations are not easily severed. In this novel one of Alice’s lovers is an Arab, and in an intimate moment it’s Arabic, the 6 language she grew up with, that slips from her mouth. Boukhobza and her contemporaries help shape current debates about French national and cultural identity, and about what is specifically Jewish as well. Works like hers invite discussions about the shared history and culture of people otherwise depicted as carriers of mutually exclusive and divergent histories. Scholar, critic and translator Ammiel Alkalay has said that the texts of Jewish writers from North Africa and the Middle East are like messages in a bottle, waiting to be discovered and understood. It was during my doctoral research that many such bottles – filled with beautiful stories written by francophone Jewish women born in North Africa – drifted onto my shore. These authors contribute to a reimagining, a redefining of what it means, not only to be French and a French writer, but also a French Jewish woman writer of North African origins. With the translation of Boukhobza’s moving novel, I hope English language readers will realize the gems to be mined in the vast body of Sephardic/Mizrahi Jewish literature yet to be translated. This translation was made possible by a generous grant from the Hadassah Brandeis Institute, and I am most grateful to the HBI for their continued support and inspiration. Nina B. Lichtenstein January 2016 Pictured: Nina B. Lichtenstein (l) with Chochana Boukhobza (r) 7 Contents About the Author ................................................................................3 Introduction ........................................................................................5 Chapter 1 ..............................................................................................9 Chapter 2 ............................................................................................18 Chapter 3 ...........................................................................................22 Chapter 4 ...........................................................................................30 Chapter 5 ...........................................................................................36 Chapter 6 ...........................................................................................39 Chapter 7 ...........................................................................................43