Summary
Ronit Matalon, an Israeli novelist born to Egyptian Jewish parents, whose Zeh ‘im ha-panim eleynu (The one facing us, 1995) revalorized Levantinism nearly two decades after Jacqueline Kahanoff, reproducing two of Kahanoff’s essays verbatim as chapters, in The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3718-3789).
Details
- Each chapter of the novel is built around an introductory photograph from the narrator’s family album — some of Matalon’s actual family, some random shots with fictionalized captions, some “missing” — and the style is nonlinear and fragmented, sprinkling French, Arabic and occasional English over refined Hebrew; the novel was highly praised by daily-press critics and literary scholars (Chapter 8, notes 57–59) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3718-3768).
- Its family embodies contradictory positions with no ideologically coherent solution: Uncle Jako Cicurel, who rejects Zionism and remains in Douala; Uncle Moise, who introduced Zionism (“ha-Shomer ha-Tza’ir, Le Mouvement, Marcelle Ninio, and all that”) and left the kibutz disillusioned but unrenouncing; Robert, Esther’s father, a pan-Arab nationalist who ran for city council on “discrimination against Sephardim” and told the investigator Armando, “No Holocaust, no camp, mister Armando, understand? EGYPT, you know Egypt? Good life, good people, good country, no Holocaust”; and Ines, who closes an interview with “A person does not need roots, he needs a home” (Chapter 8, notes 60–72) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3718-3768).
- In a Davar interview she endorsed the Levantine reading: “the Levantine option of live and let live, which in my opinion is the opposite of Zionism, very much attracted me” (Chapter 8, note 73). Chapter 8 places the novel, published after the 1993 Declaration of Principles, on the terrain of an emergent Post-Zionism (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3769-3789).
Related pages
The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, Levantinism, Post-Zionism, Jacqueline Kahanoff