Chair: Good evening everyone and welcome to the session on ‘Resisting Exile’. We are presenting this session tonight in association with the B’nai B’rith Leo Baeck London Lodges.
Resisting Exile is about Jews from Arab Lands: their experiences living side by side with Moslems. It is a subject that has often been overlooked but which has recently gained increased attention, partly for political reasons. Post September 11, with the war with Iraq and in the context of a difficult Middle East peace process, these exiled Jews are becoming a topic of renewed interest and curiosity. But our panellists tonight had written about their experience in a personal manner long before that.
André Aciman, on my right, was born in Alexandria in 1951. He now lives in New York. His book Out of Egypt is a richly coloured memoir of his life growing up as a boy in Alexandria. Filled with nostalgia, it touches on the subjects of exile and memory, something which he explores in his book False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory. André Aciman teaches at the graduate centre of the City University of New York. He is also a contributor to the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and Commentary. His book Out of Egypt will be available at the end of the session for those who want it signed.
Naїm Kattan was born in Baghdad in 1928. He emigrated first to Paris and then to Montreal where he worked at the Canadian Arts Council, rising to become a champion of Canadian literature both in English and French. He is a well-known novelist, essayist and critic. His book Farewell, Babylon was published more than thirty years ago. It was recently reprinted in France and is a reminder that Baghdad was not always synonymous with war and dictatorship.
Before I open the floor to our panellists I felt that in the post-Enron world where we demand transparency, I should declare a potential conflict of interest. Naїm Kattan, on my left, happens to be my father-in-law! Having said that, I will make every attempt to chair this session fairly and impartially.
So, I shall begin with André. I want you to start by giving us a sense of your experience of life growing up as a boy in Alexandria: your anecdotes; what was it like?
André Aciman: You’re lucky that you don’t have my mother-in-law! Then you’d have another issue: I would certainly have a problem!
Before I answer that question, let me just toss out some ideas which will not be unfamiliar to anyone but which need to be repeated. When you think back, take the typical example of the situation of the Jews of Germany. When you read about what happened, say between 1848 up to 1929, what was the life of Jews in Germany? Well, there were some problems but it kept getting increasingly better: more emancipation, more wealth, more freedom, sometimes conversions for convenience sake. But by and large these people lived very prosperous, upper middle-class lives.
And when you read the accounts that they have left of their lives in the earlier part of the 20th century, the question always comes up: Didn’t they know where this was going to lead? But it is not the question that is the issue but the fact that the question arises that is the issue. Can we think of 1920s Jews in Germany and not think of the Holocaust? That is really the one big issue that has been staring at me whenever I think about nostalgia. Is it possible, for example, to think back of a day when I walked with my mother or my grandmother, or went for a wonderful ride in the car with my father and everything was fantastic. We went fishing. Then we ate the fish in a restaurant that cooked it for us. Then, because I wasn’t sleepy, my father took me to the movies at three o’clock in the afternoon. And that evening we had another wonderful dinner and it was probably the happiest day of my life. I’m making all this up!
But, as I am saying this, of course you know, you have to know. But how can I feel all this and not bring up the other part of the equation, which is, and the word is extremely important to me, it is: How delusional could we have been because it was a great day but in retrospect it is totally delusional. And that is the part that I find totally disturbing and I’m going to take three or four minutes just to read a page of my book Out of Egypt so that you get a sense of what I am talking about. Then you will understand what is the context of this thing that we call ‘nostalgia’. This is at my grandmother’s house.
“Often a neighbour, friends, Aunt Flora or others would sit on the balcony outside of my grandmother’s dining-room and everyone would talk … …
… … … having been spared both the shame and the indignity of dying.”
Now this is, I think, the most beautiful afternoon that I could ever evoke and can remember. Of course, to those of you who know the story, my grandmother had a terrible, terrible death. In Paris she got lost. She was found naked at the Sacrè Coeur, who knows how she had got there? She had lost her mind. She died starving herself to death.
So I think that when you over-dramatise it, you see what I’m trying to get to: it’s not often that the past illuminates the future. It’s the future, as I like to say, that sheds colour on the past. It is because of what happened after, that you begin to remember in a certain way. This is all about nostalgia. My book is a nostalgic account, written from the point of view of someone who now knows better and sometimes we’re not sure that he does. But wait for the moment when it is going to hurt the most and then sort of let you know what happens later.
For me this is only half the equation because the other half is: What do you do with all this pain? What do you do with all this sort of delusional way about having lived when you realise? My whole childhood and my father’s entire life and my grandparents’ lives were delusional. The future discoloured it totally. And how do you write about that and how do you remember your past without letting this interference come from the future?
One of the things to do is to get angry. But for those of you who write, you know that writing out of anger is a failed exercise. It doesn’t go anywhere and of course nobody wants to read it. So how do you transform this degree of rage that we have when we’ve been hurt and sort of suffered indignities that are unworthy of human beings? How do you live with that and how do you write it? Sometimes what I have to do is that I sort of look at it nostalgically and sort of go back into the past to relive the beauty of the past, and then of course, at the very end of every chapter, to say: But this is really what happened to these people. And that’s what it is.
Chair: Well that’s great. And in a way you’ve already taken us ahead. You almost seem to be unable to describe that past without relating it to nostalgia and to the future, which will probably be something that sets you apart from Naїm who is less nostalgic, I think, in his approach to that past. So I will now give you the chance to see.
Naim Kattan: First of all I have no conflict of interest with my daughter-in-law and I have to declare here that I find her wonderful and I am very happy that my son found her!
This being said I will go back to the subject. When Iraq was recently liberated from Saddam Hussein by the United States and Britain, a Canadian film company came to me and said that it was time for them to take me back to where I was born and I would tell them the story not only of Iraq but of the Jewish community of Iraq.
The Jewish community of Iraq happens to be maybe the oldest Jewish community in the world. It used to be, because it is no longer in Iraq. So we started to discuss the film that we would make. They asked where I wanted to go. I said that the first place that I would want to go is Ur in the Chaldees where Abraham was born. Then we would go to Babylon, where the Jews were taken as prisoners. Then we would go to Baghdad and to Kifel where the prophet Ezekiel is buried, and so on and so forth. There are a lot of things which are really very Jewish in Iraq.
But once this has been said, they asked what I personally would want to do and see. I said that I would go to Baghdad and the first thing that I would do would be to swim across the River Tigris. I used to do that with my older brother every morning in the summer when the heat was terrible and we would go there before sunrise and we would swim across the river and back again. At that time the Tigris was very much polluted and I was inoculated against a lot of sicknesses that would be possible during that adventure. Now it would be even more polluted. But still the dream is there.
And the dream is also about the community that maybe constituted about a quarter to a third of the population of Baghdad. It was a very important community, not only in numbers but in everything else. The Jews were in business; they were teachers; they were intellectuals. Specially also, a lot of them were high-up civil servants. The director of the railways, director of the post office: a lot of them were also Jewish. And also, a lot of them had family all over the world, from Manchester to Shanghai to Calcutta. All over the world there were Iraqi Jews who went to these places in the 19th century.
So we were in the middle of the country and we felt that we were in the middle of the world. We had, in a certain way, a difficult but also a great life: a great life because we were a community and we were part of the country. If any Moslem or any Christian would say, “You, the Jews” our reply would be, “We were there before you.” We were in Babylon before there was Christianity and before there was Islam. So we were the first. So there is no problem that we were immigrants or that we came from anywhere else.
But, we were a minority. And, as many other minorities, we were in conflict with the majority. But there was not a great majority because there were the Kurds, the Armenians, the Christians, the Sunnis, the Shiites, and there were all sorts of groups. But the Moslems were the majority. Whether they were Kurds or Arabs, they were still Moslems. And we felt at that time that we had to live with them and we did live with them.
There were sometimes some difficulties and sometimes it went quite well because what happened also was that the Jewish community of Iraq took care of itself. We had our own schools and we had more schools than there were official schools in the country because every Jewish father would say that if he died he would want his son to be able to recite kaddish for him. So he sent him to school. So the Jewish schools were opened for religious reasons but we were also part of the world. And we were helped in our schools by the Alliance Israelite Universelle who opened schools in Baghdad in the 19th century and by the Jewish communities of Manchester and London who helped the Jewish school of Shamash to have a matriculation examination in London.
So we were part of Europe and, at the same time, we were still part of that country. Our language was Arabic. I started being a writer in Arabic. I wrote my first works in Arabic and I was thrilled when an Egyptian periodical said that I was one of the hopefuls of the young Iraqi literature. I said that it was as if I was out somewhere in a small city and a newspaper in Paris would say that I was a hopeful. For us, Cairo was the metropolis. So we were part of the cultural part of the country.
But, little by little we found out that the difficulties that other communities had among themselves were coming to us. Some people said that it started with Israel. It did not start with Israel. It started before the Second World War when nationalism started to grow and when Germany became Nazi they infiltrated the army a lot and there was an ambassador, Herr Gruber, who did a lot to introduce Nazism into the military and into the nationalist groups.
So we started to feel that we were threatened and the threat was real in 1941. In 1941 there was a pro-Nazi government in Iraq. Rashid Ali Al Gaylani took over and it was pro-Nazi. The Germans didn’t come to help him because they were starting to go to the Soviet Union. It was at the same time that they were going to the Soviet Union so they didn’t come to Iraq. And Britain had a fight: it was the great victory of Britain in 1941, and maybe the only one, against Nazi forces which were in Iraq at that time. Germany was going ahead but the Nazis in Iraq were stopped by Britain.
But before the British Army entered and when the Iraqi government left, there were three or four days without government and the Jews were the victims. This we called the farhoud and it was a terrible pogrom. We felt at that time that there was a line that was crossed, a frontier that was crossed: that the trauma was not only the conflict between one community and another but that the Jews were the victims of a kind of Nazism and that they were never going to be safe any more. And the Jews started to go and to leave.
But until the establishment of the State of Israel we were still there for ten years. In 1951 the Iraqi government told the Jews: “If you want to leave, you leave everything and you go.” So the Jews did leave. So there were two dates, 1941 and 1951, when we heard the sound of danger coming and then we left. In 1951, the Jews left and it was the end of that great Jewish community. I am so proud to be a part of it. I always said that we were the ones who wrote the Talmud. We were the ones who established synagogues and so on and so forth, not only in the past but in many countries of the world.
Now when Britain and the United States entered Baghdad, there were less than thirty Jews left from a community that was so important. So when I want to go to Baghdad, I would want also to go there and go to the tomb of Ezekiel and say kaddish for the community that he wanted to bring back to Israel and that went to Israel later anyway.
Chair: Thank you for that. We speak about that experience, and I want to bring it back to you, André, and the personal circumstances under which you left Alexandria. When I read your book, what was striking for me was that your father seemed to be in denial about the necessity to leave. Everything around him was changing but perhaps precisely because that life seemed to be that disillusion of life, he didn’t want to end it? You were still staying there so perhaps you can talk about that?
André Aciman: Well, it’s very hard because we lost everything in Egypt. About a year before we were expelled, we lost everything: we lost everything. They took all our assets and our money and nothing belonged to us any longer except the furniture and the rugs and the cars, although my father had to share the cars with government officials. The question that came to my mind was, and I was 13 years old and I say: Yes! That means we are going to go to Europe! Because I was very excited. Who wanted to spend the rest of his life in Egypt? It was a horrible place. I had no friends, certainly no Jewish friends except for one. There was nothing left for us to do except to go to the movies. It was clear that we were going to end up growing up in Europe: I am here talking about my brother and me. It was going to happen and I was very happy.
My father, on the other hand, on the same day that he lost everything took us all to a restaurant and we had dinner. First we would go to a movie. This was the pattern. We’d go to a movie and then you’d go to the restaurant. This time there was an added bonus. We went to the midnight show, the nine to midnight show, which I was never allowed to go to because it was too late. And after it, at midnight, we went and had dinner, which was like a treat. And suddenly I saw, and I don’t think it was intentional, but I saw a bit of what fun life can be when you have money. Basically, you can do all these things. You can do them whenever you please. And little by little I began to realise that my father really was living a very privileged life, as did my mother. But my father really knew what he wanted in life and he made sure he got it and he wasn’t going to let go of it.
At some point my father ended up having to sell his whole collection of gold coins, just to make ends meet and stay in Egypt and go out to restaurants and go to the cabarets. When that was gone, then he found other things to sell: a whole cutlery set; you know, they all went. Basically, you gave away, down to the last diamond, in order to stay in this wonderful Hollywood existence that he was leading. And I can understand. He would go to cabarets. There were wonderful women. He had friends. He would treat everyone. And as long as he could have that, I think he would have stayed in Egypt until today. The only thing that happened that made him change his mind (I’m exaggerating) is that he was kicked out of the country. They made a decision for him. But essentially this was my father’s vision. The reason why he was so rich is because everybody else had left so he really had no educated competition to deal with. And he bribed the right people periodically so that nobody annoyed him. But he should have known! We all knew. And he knew, because he would say, “One day, when all this is gone, you will see.” But I think he was saying it just to make sure, as if to fend off bad luck as opposed to just telling us that he was, after all, lucid and level headed and that he knew this was going to end. It was a dream and he lived it very well.
Chair: I think, whereas in André’s case, I mean they were kicked out, I think from your personal experience, you didn’t believe necessarily because you had to, and you left because you were a young, aspiring writer. We saw that the future wasn’t bright in Baghdad, if I’m not mistaken?
Naim Kattan: Yes. I had the privilege, as did a lot of other Jewish boys, to go to the Alliance Israelite school where I could read books in French and in English. We had four languages in that school. Arabic was the first language, then French and English and Hebrew. So I could read books at the library in French and English. And I was astounded how great life could be in Paris through the books: that a man, a boy of my age (which was 13 or 14 years old) could speak with a girl without being afraid. It was forbidden for me. I couldn’t do it. So this was the ultimate freedom, to be able to speak to a woman. Also, to go to a theatre: to go to a concert hall and to live the life that I could read of in books. But, at the same time, I had the experience of others in my family. For example, my uncle left when he was 16. He went to Persia and made a fortune and so on and afterwards went to the United States. A lot of Iraqi Jews did leave, not because they were persecuted, and I had great difficulty in explaining why. And I think they had a great dynamism but also they were born in a country of nomads and their nomadism was part of their being Jewish all over the world: feeling that they could be anywhere and still build synagogues and have schools and so on and remain who they were.
So I had this feeling that I could leave. And, fortunately for me, I got a scholarship from the French government. I was the first one after the Second World War to go and study literature at the Sorbonne. I remember, during the war, the Frenchman who came to examine me came with a group of examiners. He came to examine me and I quoted Malreaux and Gide at that time and he said that he was teaching literature in Beirut. I said, “Oh, I want to come and study with you!” This was the first Frenchman that I had met in my life. And he said, “No, no. Don’t study with me. You are going to study in Paris.” And I said, “Paris is under German rule. I am a Jew and I have no money. How would I go to Paris?” He said, “Paris will be liberated.” He was working at that time for de Gaulle. And he said, “Paris will be liberated and you will have a scholarship from the French government to study.” And it happened. This is how it happened and it changed my life.
When I went to Paris I started to see that the city was greater than whatever I had dreamed of. But at the same time I was astounded to see that some of the people who were educated, who had university degrees, were racist and were prejudiced. And I said that a Bedouin who is illiterate could be more sensitive than people who were racist and had university degrees. This was the disappointment that I had with the West at the beginning. But at the same time there were so many other great things. Also, when I started to write my language was Arabic. But then I started to write in French also. In Baghdad I used to write articles about Kafka, James Joyce, Malreaux or Gide but they asked me for articles about Iraqi poets, Egyptian writers, the Arab woman: and this is what I wrote. Things that seemed to me very commonplace were what was needed. So the relationship between East and West was not nostalgia but was an exchange of cultures, but also to speak about my culture was to say where I came from.
When I published my novel about my childhood in Baghdad, Farewell Babylon, I wrote it in French and it came out in Montreal. And they asked me: “You are now in Montreal and you live here and you are on television and radio and so on. Why do you speak about Baghdad?” I said that it was because I wanted to tell everybody that I am a Jew from Baghdad. This is the first thing that I said. I said it all the time, even until now. Even when I was the director of the Canada Council, I used to say that I am a Jew from Baghdad. But once this has been said, it opens the door for everything else, for me. I feel free, to be Canadian, to be a Montrealer, to deal with Canadian literature, to defend Canada, to defend my culture and my country which is Canada, and to go to France and be published and to defend the French culture and so on, because I start by saying where I come from. And I know that where I come from, as has happened to so many other Iraqi Jews, is a bond not only to memory but to history and to the past, and also to present day life.
When I came to Montreal I worked for the Canadian Jewish Congress. I published the first Jewish periodical in French. I did that to make a living. Now they do doctoral theses on that periodical because it was the first non-Catholic periodical in French in Canada. But I did because, as all the Iraqi Jews, I had the feeling that we were there and that we had the right to be there.
So the feeling of nostalgia comes for something that was lost. What is lost for me is not my own life in Baghdad. What was lost for me is a great Jewish community that could have made of Iraq another country right now. That was lost. That community is not there. But, we survived! I go to Israel and I come to London and I find schoolmates of mine and I am happy that they are doing well and that they have children and grandchildren. I find them in Israel and in Montreal.
So I said that the best thing that happened to us was that we were able to leave in due time. Maybe the nostalgia that I have is for my own childhood, for a community that is not any more there. Recently, I listened to a record that was recorded in London of Iraqi songs, an amateur record. It was by people who were singing in their mishpachot [families] on Friday evening before Shabbat. I listened to it and I remembered that my father used to do that on Shabbat evening, on Friday evening. At that time I used to find this so banal: when there is great music in the world, why listen to that? And when I listened to it now, I found it so great. I had tears in my eyes and I said that for the first time I had the feeling that this is gone: it is completely gone.
But fortunately, the Jews who sang that, the children who are still Jews and who are still singing, maybe they sing the same songs in another way. But they are still there.
Chair: I want to go back to this question of nostalgia because I think you are the master of nostalgia in a way, of Jewish nostalgia. But before I do that, Naїm spoke about the fact that he wrote in Arabic and he was part of the Arabic literary circle in Baghdad. In your novel, we get a completely different sense of this relationship with the Arabic language and there are wonderful scenes where you describe your failed attempts at learning poems in Arabic, very often poems vilifying Jews that you have to learn in order to do what you’re supposed to do at school. I was wondering if you could talk about that?
André Aciman: Well, the one thing that many reviewers have forgotten and have not paid attention to is that my family came from Turkey and they came from Turkey with this kind of lopsided notion that, as Ottomans, they were the occupiers or the ex-occupiers of the Arab world. And, therefore, that they were still the masters although this had been sort of no longer the practice. Basically, they were still the bosses and, as bosses, they looked down upon the Syrians in a particular way; upon the Egyptian Jews in another way. And the Egyptian Jews as well as the Syrian Jews. My mother is a Syrian Jew and you can imagine the battles between my father’s family from Turkish origins and my mother. Poor woman!
The point is that there was never, ever any love between me and the Arab culture and the Arab world and the Arab language, which I made a point of not learning. I tried for eight years not to learn the language that I had to write every day. And I sort of make fun of it in my book because it reached sort of psychologically absurd levels that were just baffling. And here is the funny thing: my father would say, “You have to study this poem. I don’t care how you learn it or who teaches it to you. Tomorrow morning you have to know it by heart.” And …it was my father who had taught me that anything Egyptian is really not to be considered in the house.
So, here I am, and I’ll mention nostalgia in a minute, here I am basically in a situation where I have to learn a language I don’t like and, moreover, learn a poem in which me, a Jew, is being totally, totally vilified. These poems, by the way, I am sure they have made them ‘disappear’, but these poems usually came illustrated and you had a caricature of an Englishman, a caricature of a Frenchman and a caricature of a Jew. I don’t need to tell you what the Jew looked like, but he had a knife, a sort of an Egyptian-Arab scimitar, always thrust into his belt. That was typical. And I had to learn this by heart. And you couldn’t not learn it: you had to.
But the point that interests me is because I am fascinated by nostalgia as well. I am not really nostalgic about Egypt because I went back knowing I would hate it. I hated it. I couldn’t wait to leave and I left as soon as there was another flight. So, the scenario plays itself out many, many times in my life. But the point is that you inherit other people’s nostalgias. And you inherit other people’s dreams. Willy-nilly, you get it. I have absorbed my father’s nostalgia for the good life that he led in Egypt. I didn’t see that good life really. I was a child and by the time I was old enough to maybe take a dab at it, I was really gone already. So I never saw the good life. But I heard enough about it and it has become part of my sort of patrimony of ideas and images that you live with. And, therefore, when I write about Egypt, although I write about my childhood mostly, invariably this other strain comes in and takes over and I know whose voice it is and I respond to it and I let it come in because it is my father’s nostalgia speaking through me.
If it happened unconsciously, I would be I think a very, very bad writer. But it is all sort of done in a way where you can say: This is going to happen for this reason. Because nostalgia is not just this kind of pining for, yearning for something lost, the lost gardens of whatever. That’s not me really. Ok? It is looking back from the future that we always knew was going to come. I mean my book ends with the little boy thinking: Next year when I’m in Italy I’m going to think back on tonight… I already anticipate looking back because that is the only way I can close the circle. Most Jews don’t know where they really come from: which also means that partly they don’t know who they really are. When you are displaced and, furthermore, dispossessed, you try to grapple for somewhere, latching onto ‘time’. Maybe in ‘time’ you can exist. But of course time is always fugitive so what you try to do is that you create these acrobatics. You foresee yourself in the future looking back and that is a way of sort of grasping onto something called identity.
But it is very fugitive and it is never always there and you always lose it, which is why people have said that I have re-written the same essay many, many times because after writing it once it’s ok. I have finally realised what I wanted to do. I understand my problem. Two days later, the problem is back there. So I have to re-write the whole thing again from a different point of view. In other words, it is really a sickness!
Chair: I will just push you on that point. At the end of the book you say,
“I caught myself longing for a city I never knew I loved.”
So you have that moment when you haven’t left yet and, as you say, you already realise that you are going to miss it. But isn’t the danger there that you have the accusation that through that nostalgia, you are romanticising this life which, in reality, was never there? It’s a dream. It’s a fiction in your head. But the life that you think your father led and that’s how you relay it to others. But you can see how the accusation of the reality of using Arab language was perhaps not like their memory of it?
André Aciman: No, and I have good answers to them. “Moses” is one of them! He sort of wrote everything from memory mind you. Of course it was dictated, I realise! The point is that I don’t like the word ‘romanticise’. You sort of move things around in order to give a narrative of your life and the only way you can give a narrative of your life is by seeming to miss the past. Because if you don’t miss the past, why are you writing about it? I mean that’s the fact that looks at you straight back. If you didn’t care for it, why are you writing?
Now here’s the catch. You caught it in one sentence and that is a sentence that all reviewers, almost all reviewers, have quoted. And it goes something like this: I looked over to the beach and the sea and da-de-da-de and I suddenly felt this fierce sense that never in my life have I realised how much I loved Alexandria.
Well, I wrote that sentence but the editor removed one word. I initially said how much I never loved Alexandria! And my editor who was a genius of a woman said, “André, you’ve written this book. Sort of it’s a paean to life in Alexandria. It’s evocative. It’s all these smells and these songs and all this stuff, and now you want me to think that you hated it?”
I said, “But it’s true. I never liked it!” So she said, “Well, you’re going to have to do something.” I said, “What do you want me to do?” So she said, “Well, you may take off that word.” I said, “Fine.”
It doesn’t matter because in point of fact it doesn’t change anything, whether I liked it or whether I hated it. You know, it doesn’t change: I’m still playing the same song.
Chair: Well, that’s great. …
Naim Kattan: Yes. By the way, I write in French. Two years ago I wrote a book called Les Villes de Naissance, The Cities of Birth and I say that I have three cities in which I was born: the first one was Baghdad; the second one was Paris; and the third one is Montreal. And Montreal is my city which comprises all the other cities now. I feel that it is my city. I am proud of it. I am part of it and my friends are there. My life is there and Paris is the same thing. Now also London of course where I thank God that I was with my children this afternoon and they came back from the Hebrew school and I said: Well, so we are still there. We are fine. Everything is fine. The Jewish community of Iraq is still there!
But besides that, when I go to Israel and I see some of my schoolmates, some of my friends, like Shmuel Moreh or Sasson Soumere [?] or Shimon Balad [?]: they are all heads of Arabic departments in Israeli universities. They write and they are the ones who preserve Arabic for Israel and for the Arab world. This is great: but they are Israelis and they are Jewish and they are free to speak. For example, Shmuel Moreh, who is at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, recently wrote a book in which he said that the Christian writers in Arabic, like Gibran Khalil Gibran and so on, did change the prosody of Arabic. It isn’t the same as the Arabic that is inherited from the Koran. It is different. And it is so obvious when you read the poetry of Gibran that it is influenced by the Christian literature. Then he was criticised in the Arab world, saying that he wanted to create differences between Christians and Moslems, that he wanted to create conflict. It is something that has nothing to do with that and it is fortunate that he could do that, that he could write his books and his teachings in Israel where he was free to do it.
When I was a child I was so proud to be very good in Arabic grammar. I was so happy to write in Arabic and among Iraqi Jews there were a lot of very good writers who wrote in Arabic in newspapers and so on. This was our language and we were very proud of it. But once we had to change, and a lot of us had to change. My schoolmate Elie Kedourie came to London and he wrote in English and he wrote about the Arabic world. I wrote in French and others write in Hebrew. But what we preserve of the Arab world is ours and I still write articles about Arab writers in Montreal Le Devoir and in Le Compagnie Litteraire in Paris and in other periodicals in France and in Canada. I still am interested in Arabic culture and Arabic literature but I am at a distance from it.
Two of my books are Farewell, Babylon about the Jews of Baghdad, and Reality and Theatre which was another book in which I say what happened to somebody who changes his language, his culture, his country and what happens to somebody like that. It was published in France and is translated also into English. It was translated into Arabic. So I read these two books in the language I have written, in my mother tongue. I was translated into my mother tongue. I read that and I said: I had a city of birth which was Baghdad and this is the language in which I could write. I don’t write it any more. I can write letters; I can speak it and so on. But I can’t write literature in it. I write literature in French.
When I saw it I said that what I knew of Arabic is still there. It is preserved, even if it is preserved in another language. Somebody made a study of the way I write and he said that I have a relationship to time which cannot change: the time in which I live is Semite. That means it is biblical and it is Koranic also. What is different from any western language is that it is the present that is overwhelming and the past and the future are always set in the present. I always write, unconsciously, things that are as at the present even if they were in the past.
So the past survives in me and I entitled one of my books of essays Entre La Mémoire Et La Promesse, The Memory and the Promise and I say that every day is a promise and the future is a promise. But that cannot be there if there is not memory. And the memory is not just a testimony: it is something that survives in us at the present. This comes maybe from my Semite origin, which I am very happy to have had.
Chair: You write of your personal experiences. Do you think they have anything to teach us in the present political context? Do these personal contributions, this personal testimony: do you think they can teach us anything?
André Aciman: No! But that’s disingenuous. I think that most people like simple answers and simple answers are conveyable. They can be bandied about, passed around and believed much easier. Difficult answers presuppose a kind of querulous temperament which I have and which basically is more speculative than practical and therefore to be dismissed. There is one thing I certainly have in my writing and it is in all the pieces. Some of them are written about Bethlehem and Jerusalem. Some are about Passover and being Jewish in Egypt and so on. So there is a sense of immediate reference. But what I have to teach, and that is certainly the thing I teach my children, is to preserve as long as you do anything that has any ramifications, depth, is to preserve a sense of irony. Not self-irony, but an ability to perceive that in every single situation there are two, if not more, voices to be listened to and there for a start, there are no easy answers.
And irony is also my only way of holding myself together. I mean I can’t be like you. I can’t say: “I loved my childhood and I loved the place where I grew up: this is my culture.” I can’t say that. I can’t say I loved my people. I cannot say I loved my country. I cannot say that I loved the city where I have decided, in part, to live. Nor can I say that I wish it were Paris, because every time that I go to Paris I am supremely disappointed and can’t wait to leave.
So, I mean, this is all I bring. It’s really not a gift. But it’s what I bring. At least I’m aware of it. It’s not that I’m unaware of it. But it’s a sense that you want me to make a decision about what? About this and that? I don’t know because this is how I see things. As a writer, I think it is an obligation never, never to see the one side, or the side that is going to be passed on easier. I don’t think I have passed on anything to my children. I don’t give them knowledge. Yes, I taught them about the Pelopponesian War and I teach them this and that and little factoids here and there. But ultimately what I want to pass on (and I think this means something to us as Jews) is a vision. Again, I’m not in agreement with you because I don’t think we can be in the present. I have no way of being in the present. I don’t know how to do that.
I drift, either in the past or, my favourite mood, is the conditional because there things are never going to happen anyway so I might as well fantasise as much as I want. I use in my prose (it’s insufferable!), I use the word ‘would’ all the time. I never say ‘has’ or ‘has been’. It’s ‘would have been’. It sounds wonderful but it means nothing. But this is my contribution. It’s to pass on maybe a warped consciousness but it’s a profoundly ironic consciousness that says: I’m sorry, I cannot be in one place. I cannot be in one time zone. I don’t want to be an affiliate of anything because I’ll stab you in the back tomorrow. I’m not a good citizen.
I was never barmitzvah. My father asked me, “Do you want a barmitzvah?” I said, “No.” He said, “Ok.” My mother grumbled because she couldn’t do anything. When it came time for my son to be barmitzvah, my wife said he should have a barmitzvah. I said to him, “Do you want a barmitzvah?” He said, “No.” I said, “Well, I think your mother wants you to have one.”
And I have to say that this has probably marked him because he was not able to prepare his speech the way he should have done it by himself and at least produce one that was ready a week beforehand. It was right to the finishing line because I never taught him that you are definitely going to have one: which is really bad. I mean you can see how this has deleterious effects on children. But it is what I am and it’s the thing that I have inherited. History has made me that way and I am not going to say that I cannot change it, but actually I don’t want to be different. I don’t want to have ‘a point of view’ or ‘a frame of reference’. I like to quarrel with God. He listens. But I like the fact that there are no certainties, because I don’t believe in certainties. I believe in good old-fashioned, you know, Cartesian Doubt. But more like Franz Kahn who said that you never in one place wish that you were. I wish I were in one place.
Chair: And that is the final question, but I think in your case, when you saw the imagery of the beginning of the war in Iraq perhaps you didn’t have the luxury of being able not to relate that experience to reality. Maybe you can tell us something about how you felt as you saw these images and how you think the strange experience of multiculturalism, which you write about in your book which is part of your memory, maybe can have some bearing for the future?
Naim Kattan: When the war started in Iraq I used to get calls from radio, television and the press in Canada and in France almost daily to recount my story and to give my opinion. I always said no, that I left Iraq over fifty years ago. I have nothing anymore to say about the present political situation. I don’t know the country and I don’t want to be the specialist of a country which I have left so long ago. But I can speak about life fifty years ago and the Jewish community in which I was born. The newspaper in Toronto, The Globe and Mail, did interview me for a long article on that and then in Paris Liberation did interview me about the Jews of Iraq fifty years ago and so on.
But, besides that, Iraq as an experience is something so present in many of my books that a lot of my books, and I have written 35 books up till now, a lot of them are about Canada, about the United States, about literature and so on. But what is specifically about Iraq that is sometimes for me very astounding, is the kind of reaction I have. I will tell you two stories about that.
Recently, one of my novels, Farida, which is about a Jewish singer from Baghdad who strove all her life to become free, free as a woman, free as a Jew and free as an artist, which was very difficult in that situation. The novel was recently translated into Serb and I was invited to go to Belgrade and it was the year where Canada was the country of honour and I opened the Book Fair of Belgrade a few months ago. I was fortunately with somebody who is now Canadian too, Albahari who is also a Jewish writer from Serbia. I was interviewed a lot in Belgrade, in Novi Sad, in Serbia and I gave lectures and so on.
I said: What can interest people in Serbia about a Jewish singer in Baghdad fifty years ago? And I found out a lot of things about that, very interesting things. And it is an idea of what literature is all about also. People started to tell me that they didn’t know people who were of Bosnian origin or Albanian origin. They didn’t know that the Moslems were a majority because in Yugoslavia before Serbia became a country of its own they were used to Moslems being a minority. They didn’t know that Moslems could be a majority and act as a majority.
The second thing was: How can a woman be free? The whole thing was about that. The third thing was: What are the relationships between groups of people? They had the same difficulties between Croatians and Macedonians and Bosnians and so on and they found that I was telling about the relationships between Christians, Jews, Armenians, Kurds. They said that the same mechanism could be found in many countries at different periods of history.
So I didn’t try to teach anything. I just described the situation and I tried to describe it as it is, without being exotic. I tried in all my books not to be exotic. It would have been very interesting for me when I arrived in Paris to say: Ah! Sindbad le marin, Sinbad the Sailor! El Ala Din [= Aladdin]. All the Thousand and One Nights would come out. But I said that no, Baghdad is not the city of Thousand and One Nights. It’s not a beautiful city. It’s very hot in the summer and so on and so forth. So it wasn’t at all exotic and so I didn’t write anything exotic.
But I found out that reality which is reality goes beyond exoticism and survives. Even this novel that I wrote maybe twenty years ago about a Jewish singer in Baghdad has some meaning in Serbia now. And I end up by saying that one of the nicest letters I have received when my novel Farewell, Babylon came out was a letter from a Czech writer who lived in Toronto, Josef Skvorecky, for me one of the best Czech writers. He wrote me a wonderful letter. He said, “I felt that I was reading about my childhood in Prague”, and this was about my childhood in Baghdad. And, in a way, when you speak about your childhood as it is, maybe you can reach other people, wherever they are, in whatever country they are, in the same way.
Chair: We are going to open the floor for questions now.
Questioner 1: For Naim Kattan. It’s been fifteen years since I read Farewell, Babylon with great interest. Two questions: one about the farhoud is that in investigating Sharon’s responsibility in Sabra and Shatila, the government report made a point of saying that the British had deliberately withheld their forces from Baghdad to let the farhoud take its course and when it died down they would go in and so forth. I don’t know to what extent this is true or what your views are on that, if you can enlighten us?
Secondly, there was an incident about a Jewish schoolgirl to whom somebody I think had passed a little note during the class and you related how rumour, and what really we would call lashon hara, institutionalised an obsession with proprieties, and had made her unmarriageable and she ended up in a situation of shame and disgrace. It destroyed her life. May I take it that you are not nostalgic for that aspect of Jewish life in Baghdad? And can you reassure us that the Baghdadi Jewish community outside Iraq has become weaned away from those attitudes?
A third bite at the cherry: Is there any hope under the American administration of Iraqi Jews getting reparations?
Naim Kattan: Well I had to give a whole lecture about that, but I will answer as briefly as I can. I think that the Jewish life that we have known in Iraq is no more there because when I go to Israel I don’t recognise the Jewish women that I would have met in Baghdad. My daughter-in-law gives the example of what an Iraqi Jewish girl could be now. It is not what I have experienced in Baghdad. And it is great and it’s fortunate.
About the farhoud: the way I went through that. I don’t know if I can connect it with Sharon or with Sabra and Shatila. But I described how I lived it. I was twelve years old and I suddenly felt that I was going to be killed. We were sitting on the roof and then we tried to hide and listening to firearms coming closer and closer. Fortunately, in our house we were safe. They didn’t reach us. And all that my father could do to protect us, the only thing that he had to protect us, was to recite the psalms. He spent all the night praying and reciting psalms. Fortunately he knew a lot of psalms by heart. But at that time I was twelve years old and, as I said, I hadn’t had any life yet. Is that the only thing that my father can give me as a security?
André Aciman: It worked!
Naim Kattan: I don’t know if his singing worked, but anyway. Maybe. But I am there and a lot of Jews are still there. But I don’t know how to analyse that. I think Elie Kedourie (my schoolmate who died in London some years ago) did research about what happened about the farhoud, which was published in London.
The third question, about reparations. You know, there was a group which was instituted twenty or thirty years by Iraqi Jews in Israel, called WOJAC, asking for reparations. Up till now, in Israel and elsewhere, there was no interest in what we asked for. My parents didn’t have a lot of properties when they left. My father was a civil servant. My uncle was a civil servant. They lost their pensions and have since died so it’s gone. But a lot of properties were taken away and maybe one day the Jews of Iraq will get reparations.
André Aciman: Can I say something about reparations? – just a minute. Chances are that any Jew from an Arab country will never see a cent. That’s a given. But there’s a site online where you can at least list what it is that your family lost. I think it is the Jewish Federation in the United States: I don’t know what it is in England. It is something that the State of Israel really needs to have because it gives them some ammunition to fight the other reparation claims, at least to equalise them. And they need it, so if you haven’t done it, please do that.
Chair: Any other questions?
Questioner 2: Just a comment. I found this leaflet here at Jewish Book Week. It’s announcing a film called The Silent Exodus which says: ‘900,000 Middle East refugees expelled and forgotten. Jewish refugees from Arab countries: the real story.’ And this is showing at The Screen on the Hill on the 14th March.
Naim Kattan: I just wanted to say something about the refugees. I have participated in many conferences about this question, in Paris and in Montreal. In Paris, the World Jewish Congress had a meeting about the Jewish refugees and the Ambassador of Israel, Bar-Navi, said that when Jews go to Israel they are not refugees. Well, they go there and it’s their country and they go there. But, my parents were refugees when they went to Israel.
Questioner 3: A lot has been said about exile, eloquently, and for me anyway in the most fascinating way tonight. But there is a lot that hasn’t been said. I know more about Alexandria than Iraq. My Mum was from Alexandria. Certainly she and her peers are terribly charming and have great social grace. So I am going to address my question to André if I may.
André, would it be impudent to suggest that with all your licence for different views, and with your eloquence and your books (which we’ll all read, I’m sure), what you are actually doing is crying quietly, maybe with your head down so as not to wake something or someone up?
André Aciman: Yes, I think that’s very well said. There’s a myth about that writers write in order to bring things out. That’s only half the formula. The other half is that we try to … [? unclear]. We want to hide it. We don’t want to see it and if I can paint it in honeydew I will do so. I mean I will do anything in order to make my life better and not see the horrors that I’ve experienced and cannot live with. So if I can write one beautiful sentence and to make peace with some things, I’ll do it. And if I have to take a word out in order to make the whole thing gel, I’ll do that too. Do you know what I mean? There’s no end to what I will do in order to stay alive writing. So it’s really that we haven’t talked about what writing means, but it’s a way of sort of re-creating oneself in a better life. The way I say it is that I re-create myself so that someone else can see me as I would like to see myself. And if they believe it, I’ll believe it too.
Questioner 4: It was very interesting to listen to the different nostalgia because I think this is what we are talking about today, and not the political sense. Where one thing touched me very much is the reading of the tehillim which was part of an education, a part of a sense of belonging here. But when you talk about not liking your city of birth and yet it is fundamental to the Arab culture, then once you have drunk the water of the local river you always come and never forget it. Now, from your upbringing it looks to me, if you will excuse the expression, that your father was a flâneur?
André Aciman: Absolutely!
Questioner 4: Well, then you cannot compare that to the normal life. And when you say that people want a very quick answer, is it in relation to where you live now in New York where a quick word is the norm whereas in the Arab culture, the longer the explanation, the better and clearer.
André Aciman: Well, yes. I don’t quarrel with this. The fact that my father is who he is and that I have appropriated a lot of it is part of life. That’s what was given to me. That’s the card that I was dealt and I have played it as best as I can, and made it meaningful. I mean, that’s the other thing. I may not believe in what he said, but I have made it meaningful to me. In the end I think it’s how we deal with suffering and that is all that it’s a question of.
I have drunk from the Nile. I don’t like having drunk from the Nile. I remember the Nile. I probably love the Nile. But I don’t want to accept that because it makes things easier for me to believe that I’m done with the Nile! But I don’t. I know I haven’t. And that’s why I’m here. That’s why I write what I write. But there is another impulse, totally countervailing, that says: Move on; there’s other things that you want; maybe you have to live with this contradiction. But it doesn’t give me the sense of closure that other people need. And I don’t have closure. I’m sorry.
Questioner 5: Thank you. I have not drunk from the Nile but I’ve drunk from the Mahmoudi canal in Alexandria. Now, over the past ten years there has been an explosion of books about nostalgia from Egypt. Yours, Gina Alhadeff, Robert Soller, and about the Syrian communities, etc. What, in your view, is so special about Egypt that those books have in fact an acclaim and a distribution way beyond the people who have actually come from Egypt or ever lived in Egypt?
André Aciman: And way beyond the talent of the writers! I mean: Alexandria is not Baghdad and Baghdad is not Alexandria. But Alexandria is hot. Ok, it is ‘hot’ in the sense that this kind of magical appeal that is the product of the western imagination from, you know, before Christ. It’s a myth. It’s a beguiling something that a writer would have to be blind not to incorporate it, not to deal with it, not to maybe attack it but it’s there. And a reader who sees the word ‘Alexandria’ on the title knows exactly what they’re getting. They’re getting this land which is fraught with mysticism, sexual things that we don’t know the names for, positions that we can’t even think of and other things. It’s filled with that and it’s filled also with this brand of aestheticism that is not highly regarded but that basically appeals. And the men who are most responsible for this are Cavafy and Durrell. They both have basically manufactured an Alexandria which may have been real for them (I don’t think so), but it is manufactured, it is propagated, and I as a writer had to respond to it. It was there. I couldn’t pretend that I was indifferent that Lawrence Durrell had written The Quartet. I don’t like The Quartet. But it’s there.
Chair: We’ll have three more questions.
Questioner 6: Hello. I also do not like The Quartet of Durrell. However, I still think Alexandria’s mystical dream did exist and I was wondering: perhaps it’s the fact that you left Egypt at the age of 13 and that there is a difference between perhaps yourself and me in the understanding and the life of Alexandria like the one that I have lived which gave me this love, this true love. This is why I’m a little bit in disagreement with you and perhaps you did not perceive, or did not catch that little bug because of the fact that you were born in 1951, which is only five years before the Suez Canal crisis. Which is only a few years before the departure, of the exodus, of the majority of the people who left Egypt and then it was nasty. The few people who left, such as yourself, later, of course they didn’t have a good time. Of course there was the Six Day War and all the other things where loads of friends of mine were interned, were suffering and life wasn’t [good]. However, there are lots of us here who have and who say: Perhaps your feelings do not reflect the feeling of the majority of those who have experienced the life in Alexandria. I am definitely one of them who has extreme nostalgia for Alexandria in the heyday and perhaps this is what is lacking: the fact that you were only five or six and I was already 14 or 15 and I was already enjoying life.
André Aciman: That’s absolutely true. You probably left around 1956 or 1957?
Questioner 6: That’s right.
André Aciman: In 1956 and 1957 you are dealing with a totally different world. My world was basically totally arabised but when I left nobody spoke French any longer. So you are talking about two different worlds.
Questioner 6: That’s exactly it. However, tell me please as I still have the microphone, I remember in Alexandria a family called Ajiman, with a ‘j’, and you seem to be Aciman with a ‘c’. Are you part of the ‘j’ or were you a special ‘c’ whom I never heard of before?!
André Aciman: Well, if it is just a ‘j’ then I am not related to them. If it was ‘dj’ then I am definitely related to them! And the reason is very simple. As you know, in Turkish the letter ‘c’ is pronounced ‘j’ and so there are some Ajimans that were in Egypt for God knows how many years: we were not related to them. The ones that I know just came directly from Turkey.
Questioner 6: Pity that we haven’t got too much time: I would have loved to talk about Uncle Villy!
Questioner 7: Thank you very much. I’d like to ask a rather uncomfortable question. I hope that I don’t spoil the atmosphere. I find an enormous difference between the two speakers. The gentleman from Iraq: he was there, or his ancestors were there a thousand years before the coming of the Arabs. Arabic was his language. He wrote in Arabic. He loves Arabic, I am sure. Now Mr Aciman, on the other hand, he came from Egypt. He was not an Egyptian. Members of my family were Egyptian Jews. They were not expelled. They were treated not much worse than their Moslem fellow countrymen. You didn’t. Your family came to take advantage of the boom in Egypt, to make money. You didn’t learn Arabic. You didn’t like Arabic. You took no part in Egyptian life. You have this marvellous cosmopolitan … existence. What I would like to ask you is: Did you never feel any guilt for living in a country, despising its language, and not becoming citizens….. Does this feeling play any part in your make-up?
André Aciman: No.
Chair: Well, that was a brief answer! I think there is a question at the front here.
Questioner 8: Jews have been exiled from many lands and yet whenever they’ve gone they’ve always left fellow Jews who have been members of big families. Does this make such a difference in exile? Are we different from any other nation?
Naim Kattan: To whom is that question addressed?
Chair: You take it!
Naim Kattan: The Jews have this kind of difference: it is that they have a Book. Wherever they go they can refer to a Book. And this is something that maybe differentiates them from any other exile anywhere. They live by that Book and I hope they will continue to do so. One of the last things I have done in my career is that I gave a course at the University of Quebec in Montreal about the great biblical figures in the Bible and the Koran, because they are the same figures: Abraham, Joseph, Moses and so on. And I know the two languages and I tried to find the differences. While the Bible is what the Jews have and one of the great books on the Bible was by a Canadian writer, Northrop Frye, called The Great Code. I think it was published maybe in Britain too. He said that maybe the Jews didn’t have an empire because the empire was the Book.
Questioner 9: I have a very short question for Mr Aciman. You made a statement which I totally disagree with, and I don’t mean geographically, because you said that most Jews do not know where they come from. Can you explain to me why you made that statement?
André Aciman: Of course initially they all come from the land of Ur, or we would like to think that. But the point that I am trying to make is that if you ask a Jew where he is from and he will say that, as you are speaking to him right now in London, he will say, yes, but my grandparents came from such-and-such. And it would be an incomplete tale because before that there is another such-and-such. There’s always another elsewhere somewhere. And in fact, I think, for those of you who know Hebrew, and I don’t, the word ‘Hebrew’ itself means the person who is from ‘the other side’. So I think that the idea, sort of intellectually speaking, the whole concept of place is rather immaterial because I think the place is the Book actually and that is the capital. It’s the Book itself. Place seems to be constantly alleging a previous place and I think that is also the beauty of the way Jews think of time because it is not just time before but there’s an antecedent to that time before, and before that as well. And it goes on to the point where we don’t know where the origins are. I don’t know where my ancestors come from. I know they come from Spain, but that’s where the story begins. But how about before? And I am certain that before there were many places they had come from and going back and so on. So that is why I said what I did.
Chair: Well thank you. Thank you very much. I think we are going to bring this evening to an end. I would like to thank both of you, André and Naїm, for this wonderful evening.
[End]
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