Summary
Paula Jacques, an Egyptian Jewish novelist who resettled in France, presented in The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry as, with Edmond Jabès, perhaps the best-known Egyptian Jew in France — and as a figure Egyptian Jews in France themselves dislike, because they take her novels for nonfiction depictions of their community (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 4606-4740).
Details
- Jacques was born in Cairo in 1949 and left Egypt with her family in 1957. She is the author of four novels that depict the Egyptian Jewish community in Cairo and France (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 4606-4740). The book’s Bibliography lists the four: Lumière de l’oeil (Paris: Mercure de France, 1980), Un Baiser froid comme la lune (Paris: Mercure de France, 1983), L’Héritage de tante Carlotta (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), and Déborah et les anges dissipés (Paris: Mercure de France, 1991) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 4741-5066).
- Jacques Hassoun, interviewed at the book’s close, says Jacques “became famous late, very late” — her first book, Lumière de l’oeil, was published in 1980 — and that despite the very high quality he assigns her book, Egyptian Jews in France do not like her: “The Egyptian Jews think that she tells nonfiction stories even though she writes novels. These stories present Egyptian Jewry as ridiculous, composed of crooks, the impoverished, etcetera. The Egyptian Jews don’t want to identify with this depiction” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 4606-4740).
- Hassoun states that Jacques could not have published her book without the work of the Nahar Misraïm journal and the ASPCJE association: “We introduced her to the characters she used in her first novel… we cleared the path for her” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 4606-4740).
- For the French public, on Hassoun’s account, the setting of Jacques’s novels “amuses them. They find it very funny,” a bizarre and extravagant diaspora to readers who know only the Eastern European or North African diasporas; like Jabès, she is known in France as a French Jew rather than as an Egyptian Jew (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 4606-4740).
Related pages
The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, Jacques Hassoun, Edmond Jabès, ASPCJE