A Semite: A Memoir of Algeria

By Denis Guénoun and Judith Butler

Denis Guénoun's father was an Algerian Jew who inherited French citizenship and revered the principles of the French Revolution. He taught science in a French lycée in Oran and belonged to the French Communist Party. He rarely fought on a winning side, but his belief in the common interests of Arabs and Jews, Europe and a liberated North Africa, call out to us from the ruins.

In World War II, he was drafted to defend Vichy France's colonies in the Middle East. At the same time, Vichy barred him and his wife from teaching school because they were Jewish. When the British conquered Syria he was sent home to Oran. In 1943, after the Allies captured Algeria, he joined the Free French Army and fought in Europe. After the war, both parents went back to teaching, doing their best to reconcile militant unionism and clandestine party activity with the demands of teaching and family. The Guénouns had little interest in Israel. They considered themselves at home in Algeria. From 1958 onward, Guénoun supported Algerian independence, outraging his French neighbors. Expelled from Algeria by the French paramilitary Organisation Armée Secrète, he spent his last years in Marseille.

This book movingly recreates the efforts of a grown-up son, Denis Guénoun, to understand what happened in his childhood. Gracefully weaving together youthful memories with research into his father's life and times, this memoir confounds the distinctions -- ethnic, national, and political -- that might otherwise explain or justify conflict. Who belongs where? Who is one's natural enemy? Radically hostile to any sort of racism, Guénoun's father believed Jews and Arabs were bound by an authentic fraternity and could only realize a free future together. He called himself a Semite, a word that united Jewish and Arab worlds and best reflected a shared origin.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: May 6, 2014
• ISBN: 9780231537247

Book preview

DECEMBER 1, 1940

1

On December 1, 1940, my father was in prison in Damascus, Syria. It was his birthday. He wrote to his mother. Twenty-eight years old, Mama. You like to recall how the midwife who brought me into the world one Sunday at noon read my character: this boy, she said, born on a Sunday at noon, he’s here to stroll the boulevards. Did she also picture your son in jail in Asia at twenty-eight, maybe for five years? What a fate, Mama.

I found this letter in a little box, a crude, threadbare chest among some limp filing folders that my brother put away after our parents died. Everything is at his house, in Marseille. When I was asked to write a few lines about my father, I went to Marseille, to my brother’s house to open the boxes and look at the letters. I read everything.

His mother was a strong, ample woman. Erect. Daughter of a theologian who had had five girls and two boys that died too young. The five girls remained—tall women, with solid hips and wide feet. I knew her in her old age, still planting the same weighty step upon the earth. She said to me: do you know why Arab women go barefoot? (Not her. Arab was not the word used to speak of us.) So that the force in the earth—you know, the force that makes the trees grow: if trees grow upward, there has to be a force in the earth pushing them—it’s so this force can pass from the earth into their feet and rise up into them through their legs.

My father’s mother went all out, powered from her hips to her neck to her gaze by the energy that her times set free: she was completely attached to the archaic world—through her body, if you will—but also stretched taut, like a bow, toward the New. She was a schoolteacher. How can I convey what that meant? Her father spoke mainly Arabic; it may have been his only language. He dressed in the Arab style: blousy trousers, turban, embroidered shirt, white beard. For ages I saw his portrait, at her house, looming over family meals. She was utterly forthright in her devotion to his memory. It was said he was a sage, a rustic saint. We descended straight from him, buoyed by our intelligence, and above all by that uncompromising, unsparing moral standard that was our trademark. Only later did I learn, and even then I didn’t entirely take it in, that as a young girl she had clashed with him in all the violence of their combined fury, that he had cursed her, that she had fled him, outraged, screaming. Nothing of this wild, buried violence showed through the imperturbable veneration she bore the ancestor who presided over holiday meals.

Schoolteacher meant: cloaked in the illustrious language of France. The village pioneer. She had her high school diploma. Thus: a woman—an Arab woman, judging by her legs and neck, her idioms, aphorisms, singing, her yoo-yoos at joyful moments; feline, a princess of the desert. And a primary schoolteacher (in training), a foundation stone of public education, reading Hugo, declaiming Corneille, intoxicated with alexandrines, featured attraction of the beaches and the wide blue sea. I have her notebooks, her lesson plans—insects (figure 12, roots, seeds, stamens, different species of birds, the common rabbit and the lop-eared rabbit, the common pigeon and the peacock pigeon), the course on moral values (keeping something you found is stealing, family unity, a mother’s courage—a burning house—a six-year-old rescuer), the beginning science lesson (bubbles; breathe into water with a straw, a whistle, a bicycle pump, don’t you see the air rise through the water in the form of bubbles?)—everything is in the boxes in Marseille.

In 1915 my father was three: his mother was in the village, his father at war. She wrote him every day. The letters lie sleeping in Marseille (not all of them, some have been destroyed). She said: I am your worshiper, your love slave. I am nothing without my husband, without you my angel, my lighthouse in the night. I want you, I love you. Remember the dark splendor of our nights. I am nothing, woman is nothing without the man who obsesses her. Come, I’m waiting for you. Why are you still at war? Get sick. Hurt yourself, and come home. Look at the others: they know how to get what they want. Cheat. You don’t love me enough, you can live with the war, and with being gone. You’ve gotten used to it. If you wanted me as much as I want you, you wouldn’t give them a moment’s peace until they let you go. You’re a coward, you put war over your