In recent years, there has been an encouraging increase in publications about the modern history and cultural production of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews. Aimée Israel-Pelletier's new book On the Mediterranean and the Nile: The Jews of Egypt provides a much-needed addition to this burgeoning field. Israel-Pelletier examines writings—poetry, prose, and essays—by five authors who were raised in the Francophone culture of the Egyptian Jewish bourgeoisie and elites: Jacques Hassoun, Jacqueline Kahanoff, Edmond Jabès, Paula Jacques, and André Aciman. The works Israel-Pelletier discusses were all composed following the writers’ departures from Egypt and the dispersal of the Egyptian Jewish community in the mid-twentieth century.
To date, little serious scholarly attention had been paid to the literature produced by Francophone Egyptian Jews as a unique corpus. Egyptian Jewish literature does not fit comfortably in the postcolonial paradigm of Francophone studies, dominated as it is by the Caribbean, North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa. Further confounding classification, two of the writers—Kahanoff and Aciman—ultimately made careers writing in English. In the context of Jewish studies, paradoxically, while French served as the lingua franca of middle- and upper-class Egyptian Jews (and other foreign minorities, as well as the Egyptian elites), little scholarship has been published in English about the Francophone literary production of Egyptian Jews. Israel-Pelletier's book fills this gap.
Do not be misled by the blurb on the back cover that tries to market the book as a work of “political and cultural history.” While, as the blurb claims, the book indeed “confronts issues of identity, exile, language, immigration, Arab nationalism, European colonialism, and discourse on the Holocaust,” it is an important work of literary criticism by an accomplished scholar of French and Francophone literature. On the Mediterranean and the Nile would have been stronger if it had fully embraced its scholarly contribution to the discipline of literary studies. In addition to the blurb on the back, the choice of title and the vaguely historical introduction together serve to obscure the disciplinary orientation of the book. This choice does the author, the reader, and the discipline of literary studies a disservice. The author's voice is strongest and her arguments most compelling when she engages in textual analysis.
Chapter 1 establishes the writing of Jacques Hassoun as a critical framework for the analysis of the texts to follow. Hassoun, trained as a psychoanalyst, devotes himself both as a clinician and as a public intellectual to treating and writing about the traumas of forced migration. Israel-Pelletier weaves together two strands of Hassoun's writing: his fascination with the concept of “the stranger” and societies’ “compulsion to exclude,” and his efforts to articulate Egyptian Jewish history and heritage. I found Israel-Pelletier's synthesis and analysis of Hassoun's writings particularly compelling at this cultural moment when we are yet again witnessing the rise of populism and nativism in the West. Reading Israel-Pelletier's book makes me want to dive into Hassoun's The Stranger's Crossing (1995).
The second chapter is devoted to Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff's 1951 novel, Jacob's Ladder. Kahanoff was educated in French schools in Cairo, where she began her writing career in French. After leaving Egypt, Kahanoff first studied in the United States, then moved to Paris, before settling in Israel in the mid-1950s. Throughout her career, Kahanoff mostly wrote in English—although her most influential writings were published in Israel in Hebrew translation. I have long been partial to Kahanoff's work as an essayist. Israel-Pelletier's refreshing analysis of the novel gives me new appreciation for Kahanoff's artistry as a fiction writer.
In the strongest chapter of the book, Israel-Pelletier offers a lyrical analysis of Edmond Jabès's The Book of Questions. Unlike the other writers she discusses, Jabès is a central figure in modern French letters. His monumental work The Book of Questions has received a great deal of critical attention. Israel-Pelletier's analysis seeks to draw out the place of Egypt in Jabès's work, both in its particular and universal formulations. This chapter explores how “Jabès has intertwined two strands of contemporary Jewish experience; namely the Holocaust and Egyptian exile” (131).
On the Mediterranean and the Nile is organized chronologically, or perhaps, generationally. Kahanoff and Jabès, friends from their youth in Cairo, were both born in the second decade of the twentieth century. The final two chapters address works by authors who were born into the rapidly changing environment of mid-twentieth-century Egypt, as the country became increasingly inhospitable to Jews, Greeks, and other foreign-minority residents. Paula Jacques and André Aciman both left Egypt in their youth, an experience that shapes their characterization of the Egyptian Jewish past. Jacques is a prolific French novelist. Reading across several of Jacques's novels, Israel-Pelletier argues that her oeuvre seeks to situate the Egyptian Jewish diaspora within France. Aciman, like Kahanoff, writes both masterful personal narrative essays and fictionalized autobiography (marketed as memoir). Aciman has been taken to task by other scholars for liberties he has taken with his personal history. Israel-Pelletier rather points to Aciman's own words, in which he alerts the reader that as a memoirist he utilizes “the conventions not of history but of fiction” (178). But, Israel-Pelletier also draws deserved attention to Aciman's evident bias against Arabs. She argues that Aciman's finely wrought nostalgia and his reflections on the Egyptian Jewish experience are situated in an imagined time and place: in Israel-Pelletier's words “an Egypt whose culture is Mediterranean, Hellenistic, open, diverse, outward looking, and hospitable” (198).
The title of the book refers to two constructs Israel-Pelletier identifies in Egyptian discourses of national identity: the Nile and the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean, as illustrated by Aciman's writing, is fluid and characterized by intercultural contact. The Nile symbolizes a situated sense of nation that traces its mythical origins to a Pharaonic—and for Jews a biblical—past. Israel-Pelletier argues that these Egyptian Jewish writers, like other modern Egyptians, articulate their sense of belonging—and nostalgia—along a continuum between these two poles. In sum, On the Mediterranean and the Nile makes an important contribution to the scholarship on Egyptian Jewish cultural production.
