Summary
Ada Aharoni (b. Andrée Yadid, 1933), a Cairo-born poet and scholar who emigrated to Israel in 1950, was expelled from Kibutz ‘Ein-Shemer in the Sneh affair, and became a pioneer of the post-1977 revival of Egyptian Jewish memory in Israel, presented in The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry as fully associated with the dominant Zionist narrative while asserting her community’s distinct bridge mission (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2336-2407, 3519-3620).
Details
- Born in Cairo and educated at the Alvernia English School for Girls in Zamalek, she began writing poetry in English as a child; her family spoke French at home and held French citizenship, and left Egypt for France in 1949 after her father’s business license was revoked; in 1950 she left her family, went to Israel and joined the ha-Shomer ha-Tza’ir gar’in at Kibutz ‘Ein-Shemer; she and her husband Haim Aharoni were among the twenty-two Egyptians expelled from the kibutz in 1953 for their stand in the Sneh affair (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3577-3620).
- She obtained a doctorate in English literature from the Hebrew University in 1975 and writes in English and Hebrew, her early English work translated into Hebrew by others and her later work translated and revised by herself (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3577-3620).
- At the Yad Tabenkin roundtable on “Illegal Immigration and Defense in Egypt,” she confirmed the official Zionist paradigm while disputing its Eurocentric version: “Zionism was not imported into Egypt [by emissaries from Palestine]. It was there” — a conclusion she drew from research for her novel The Second Exodus, a romance set in the milieu of Egypt’s Zionist youth movements (Chapter 8, note 14) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3519-3545).
- From the 1973 war her career was identified with promoting Arab-Israeli peace: she represented Israel at the 1975 Middle East Peace Poetry Forum in Boston, founded The Bridge: Jewish and Arab Women for Peace in the Middle East in 1975, and presided over the Thirteenth World Congress of Poets in Haifa in 1992, receiving the Shin Shalom Peace Poetry Prize (Chapter 8, note 30) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3577-3620).
- Her April 1993 questionnaire of Egyptian Jews in Israel found 80 percent prepared to accept Israeli evacuation from substantial portions of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and a Palestinian-Jordanian federation or a Palestinian state there, against 35 percent of all Jewish Israelis in comparable polls (Chapter 8, note 31) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3577-3620).
- She holds that the Jews of Egypt form “a unique type of Judeo-Mediterranean community bridging East and West” and that its literary representatives, who “cherish warm memories of the Egyptian people and of their own life in Egypt,” are “messengers of goodwill built on understanding, realism, and a shared past” (Chapter 8, note 32); she moved from MAPAM to the Labor Party (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3577-3620).
- Her poem “Ha-Shalom ve-ha-sfinks” (Peace and the Sphinx, c. 1975) defines peace through Cairo memories — embracing her school friend Kadreya, the house where she was born in Freedom Square, checking “if I am as tall as a Pyramid stone / And as wise as the Sphinx”; the longer English version, “What Is Peace to Me?”, adds that she was “born, and evicted” from the house in Midan Ismaileya (Chapter 8, notes 33–34). The chapter’s judgment: “just as Israel’s governments have been unwilling to examine critically the sources of the conflict, Aharoni does not ask why she was expelled from Egypt” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3577-3620).
- Her “Letter to Kadreya: From Haifa to Cairo with Love” (ha-Aretz, Chapter 8, note 35) answers her co-editor school friend’s “Why are you leaving Egypt? You were born here, this is your country!” with a childhood proof text — the “frail girl of six” (seven in the Hebrew version) taken by the maid Muhsena through the Bab al-Luq market, accosted as “ifrangiyya” (foreigner), and told by a confectioner it meant only a European, “not an Arab like us” — concluding, “Israel just had to exist for rootless people like me” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3577-3620).
- Chapter 8’s conclusion reads the “Letter” as a completely uncontextualized morality tale whose unanswered questions point to her family’s class privilege, European identification and distance from indigenous Egyptians; her own assessment is contradictory — the memory “has left a sore spot in my mind even after all this while,” yet it happened to a person “so remote from me today that I can only recall her in the third person” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3621-3650).
- The scene is retold and embellished in her first novel, The Second Exodus (Chapter 8, note 36): the confectioner ‘Ali, brother of the maid Muhsena, attempts to rape Inbar Mosseri and fails only because he ejaculates before penetrating her; Inbar’s brother Gaby had previously had intercourse with Muhsena, and her father the judge had refused to intervene for ‘Ali and Muhsena’s father, imprisoned for theft, who died in prison; Inbar concludes, “Through the attempted rape, [‘Ali] was getting back not only at my father and brother but at all the Jews” (note 38). Raoul Lipsky supplies the interpretation — “To sleep with the maid was a widespread affair, even in Europe. They were paid well for it, too!”; “Isn’t it clear to you now that he tried to rape you mainly because you’re Jewish [emphasis added]?” (note 39). The chapter holds it cannot simply be assumed Aharoni survived an attempted rape, although that would explain the memory’s power; the novel’s own explanation for silence: “if a girl is raped, she, as the victim, is usually considered the main culprit” (note 40) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3621-3650).
- The novel’s forward [as printed] states that “Inbar and Raoul represent two aspects of the Jewish people: the Oriental-Sephardi Jews from Arab countries—and the Ashkenazi Jews who experienced the Nazi Holocaust. Together they symbolize the unified Jewish people in Israel” (note 41) — Aharoni thus legitimated the Egyptian Jewish voice by representing its history as a mirror image of Ashkenazi experience, a unity that “depends on accepting mass murder as the central experience of Jewish history” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3621-3650).
- She sent the “Letter to Kadreya” and “From Haifa to Near Faraway Cairo” to Jihan al-Sadat “to extend a hand in Salam-Shalom to you, Kadreya, and the women of Egypt whom I remember with warmth” (note 43); the novel drew ‘Ali Shalash’s lengthy hostile review, in seven installments in al-Majalla and republished as the first section of al-Yahud wa’l-masun fi misr (note 44) — a counternarrative that correctly points out many flaws while mirroring her errors and framing Jews and Masons as, by implication, not “real Egyptians” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3621-3650).
Related pages
The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, Kibutz ‘Ein-Shemer, Sneh affair, Shlomo Kohen-Tzidon, Sami ‘Atiyah