CITIES OF ORIGIN, CITIES OF EXILE MAGHREBI JEWISH DIASPORIC LIFE-WRITING IN FRENCH, 1985-2011 By Robert J. Watson Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in French August 2012 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Professor Tracy Sharpley-Whiting Professor Robert Barsky Professor Nathalie Debrauwere-Miller Professor Julia Cohen To my grandparents, Marjorie Anne Sanders and Ira Adolph Budwig, May their memory be a blessing ii ACKOWLEDGEMENTS I have been fortunate enough in my dissertation project to be surrounded by great friends and colleagues with equally outstanding ideas and intellectual pursuits. They have helped me enormously by asking questions and making give an account of what I am trying to do. First and foremost, the director of my committee, Tracy Sharpley-Whiting, who took on a project very different from her own work and has been particularly generous in giving me time to think things through. Nathalie Debrauwere-Miller, Robert Barsky, and Julia Cohen have all been excellent advisors and mentors over the years, giving me leads on the things I needed to read and generous feedback on my work. In the Department of French and Italian more generally, Lynn Ramey and Virginia Scott have been terrific chairs and mentors in turn. Thanks also to Véronique Homer who has been the best Administrative Assistant one could ever hope for, always willing to take time to help me navigate through all the paperasse that comes with being a graduate student. My fellow graduate students in French have been great colleagues and friends. Special thanks to Rachel Nisselson, Annette Quarcoopome, and Daniel Ridge. The Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities was my home for the dissertation writing year and was of incomparable value to the project and to my development as a scholar. Mona Frederick, Ed Friedman, Kate Rattner and Allison Thompson all deserve more thanks than I can express here for making the Center such a special place. My fellows, Diana Bellonby, William Bishop, Matthew Duquès, Matthew Eatough, Anna-Lisa Halling, Joanna Mazurska, Tara Plunkett, and Allison Suen gave me great feedback on my chapters, and enriched me with their projects. iii To all those who granted me interviews, including Catherine Dana, Gilles-Jacob Lellouche, Simon Lévy (z’’l), and Rachel Muyal, un grand merci. Thanks to my writing partner, Katherine Fusco who faithfully met with me once a week for the last year of my Ph.D. and made the writing experience more pleasant with her company. My gratitude to F. Clark Williams and JoEl Logiudice for making me part of two wonderful co-curricular film programs: Faculty-Led Interactive Cinametic eXplorations and the International Lens Film Series. These two initiatives gave me a great deal of practice in discussing film with a mixed audience of academic specialists and cinephiles. Thanks also to Heath Hunley, owner/barista at Dose Coffee and Tea, who kept me sufficiently caffeinated to keep writing. Last but not least to my family, my mother Sandra, my father Bob, and my sisters Laura and Wendy, even if you weren’t always sure what it was exactly that I was doing. To my nieces and nephews, Ella, Leah, Caleb Anna, and James, you have brought such joy to my life over the past five years. I look forward to one day being able to tell you about what I was doing all this time. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page DEDICATION………………………………………………………………………….. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ……………………………………………………………. iii Chapter I. INTRODUCTION................................................................................................ vii A Triple Identity: Jews, Maghrebi, French........................................................ vii Cities of Origin: Why Casablanca and Tunis?.................................................. viii Cities of Exile: Why Paris and Montreal? ........................................................ xiv Why First-Person Plural Life-Writing? ........................................................... xvii Between “Littérature” and “Témoignage,” Between Memory and History .......xx Between Exile and Diaspora.......................................................................... xxvii Why did Jews leave Morocco and Tunisia? ................................................. xxviii What kind of return? ..................................................................................... xxxiii The Corpus and the Authors ......................................................................... xxxiv Overview of Chapters .......................................................................................... li II. WRITING MAGHREBI JEWISH SPEECH IN THE FRENCH AUTOBIOGRAPHY: PARATEXTUAL POLYPHONY AND PLURILINGUALISM .............................................................................................1 The Paratext: Political Implications of a Literary Construct...............................7 French: A Not So Native Language ..................................................................12 Linguist Inferiority and Acculturation ..............................................................15 Using Chilhood to Deconstruct Linguistic Categories......................................18 “Mais quelle langue parlions-nous?”: Recovering Judeo-Maghrebi French.....22 Treasure or curse? Judeo-Arabic’s Afterlife in Life-Writing............................26 After independence: The Failure of Re-Arabization.........................................33 And if it hadn’t been France? Counterfactual speculations ..............................40 Name of the Author, Name of the Other...........................................................45 III. COSMOPOLITANISM FROM BELOW IN TUNIS AND CASABLANCA: LOCATING THE SELF THROUGH THE OTHER Part I: Everday Practices of Cosmopolitanism ..................................................52 Jewish Identity in the Context of Mediterranean Foodways .............................59 Street Vendors as Agents of Cosmopolitanism .................................................64 “La fête”: Sumptuary Meals, Openings to the Other.........................................65 v Music and Dance, or Jews as Africans?.............................................................70 Part II: Maghrebi Socialism and Communism: Political Cosmopolitanism......75 The Strange Case of Abraham Serfaty...............................................................77 Women’s Place in the (Cosmo)polis: Gisele Halimi’s Struggle........................80 Disillusioned Dissidence: Gilbert Naccache......................................................82 When the Political Undoes the Everyday ..........................................................84 From Grief to Critical Reflection: Remebering Maghrebi Cosmopolitanism ...86 IV. THE WRITER BEFORE THE LAW: DECOLONIZATION AND QUESTIONS OF CITIZENSHIP Transforming Jews into Candidates French Citizenship ...................................99 “Diviser pour mieux régner”: Citizenship as a Weapon..................................105 The Violence of Postcolonial Nation Building................................................108 Moroccan Independence and the Impossible Choice.......................................113 Naturalization and its Discontents ...................................................................116 Reconstituting the Community in Montréal ....................................................119 Silent Refugees or Diasporic Citizens?............................................................124 V. SECOND-HAND MEMORIES: WRITING / RETURN / HOME Returning to Tunis-la-Juive .............................................................................144 We’ll Always Have Casablanca: Affirming Memory through Return ............146 The Returning Writer as Therapist and Patient................................................148 The Past as Palace of Childhood or as Cemetery ............................................152 Interminable Return(s).....................................................................................159 VI. DECALAGES D’EXIL: SCREENING AND STAGING JEWISH-ARAB NOSTALGIA Shifting Histories and Interdependent Memories ...........................................169 From Consumers to Producers, Spectators to Creators ..................................171 Performing for Multiple Publics: Elie Kakou and Gad Elmaleh ....................176 Historical Melodramas and the Jewish-Muslim Postcolonial Family Romance ........................................................................................................................192 Stereotyped and Schematized Representations of Difference ........................199 It’s Always Summer in La Goulette ...............................................................202 Where did the Jews go? Where is Morocco Going?.......................................213 VII. CONCLUSION The “Arab Spring” and Maghrebi Jewish Diaspora .......................................227 Writing Diasporic History Online...................................................................232 Future Lines of Inquiry ...................................................................................234 vi BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................................236 vii INTRODUCTION During the height of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, large crowds of rioters ransacked Jewish shops and the Grande Synagogue in Tunis, across the street from where seventeen