Summary
Anda Harel-Dagan (b. Andrée Wahba, 1934), an Egyptian-born Hebrew poet of Kibutz Hatzor and younger sister of David Harel, whose Po’ema qahirit (A Cairo poem), written after her 1980 return to Egypt, reclaimed her Egyptian identity in hybrid Hebrew-Egyptian verse, in The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3651-3701).
Details
- A ha-Shomer ha-Tza’ir member brought to Israel in early 1949, via Marseilles, so her brother David Harel could continue his underground ‘Aliyah Organization work; an emissary in Marseilles changed Andrée to Anda “because he felt she should have a real Israeli name” — she noted sarcastically in 1993 that Anda is in fact a Polish name, and resented that her French-Egyptian name was deemed unacceptably foreign (Chapter 8, note 45). The family name Wahba, common to Muslims, Christians and Jews in Egypt, was relinquished for Harel, the name of a Palmah brigade (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3651-3701).
- Placed in Youth ‘Aliyah at Kibutz Mishmar ha-‘Emek, she later joined Kibutz Nirim and, from 1965, Kibutz Hatzor; her two early-1970s poetry volumes contain only one explicit Egypt reference, “Avi haya” in Avraham haya, a memorial to her father, who died in Cairo in 1944 — his hand “wide as a mosque on a holiday,” the children walking “in a sea of sugar dolls” (Chapter 8, note 46) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3651-3701).
- Her 1980 return to Egypt after thirty-one years — she left her tour group to find the family home in ‘Abbasiyya — inspired Po’ema qahirit; she found she still spoke colloquial Egyptian Arabic well enough to be taken for a native (bint al-balad), inscribed both her names in Arabic on the title-page verso, and said: “I could not publish these poems until there was peace and I could return and verify if things were the way I remembered or not” (Chapter 8, note 48) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3651-3701).
- The volume’s poems complicate the mob-violence memory with individual Muslim rescuers and intimates — Sa’id the concierge, who lifted her from a crowd shouting “nitbakh al-yahud,” and her classmate Jihantab ‘Abd Allah, addressed “ya ukhti, ya ‘albi” (My sister, my heart) (Chapter 8, note 50) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3651-3701).
- MAPAM’s Sifriat ha-Po’alim, publisher of her first book, declined Po’ema qahirit — not because its subject was Egypt (the same press published Rahel Maccabi’s Mitzrayim sheli) but because its style was alien to the narrow tzabar sensibility of the kibutz-born writers’ leadership (Chapter 8, note 51) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3651-3701).
Related pages
The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, Ada Aharoni, Levantinism, Post-Zionism