PARIS LETTER
99
since the Cremieux decree at the end of the last century, they are the
objects of a double antisemitism, on the part of both the Algerian
French and the Moslems. It must be added that the French version,
particularly at present, is much more virulent than the other. Yet a man
like Jean Daniel, a Blidah Jew of Berber origin, in a novel like
L'
erreur,
feels no need to account for his J udeo-Algerian status. He writes a
French novel concerned with problems unconnected with what has
been, until his arrival in Paris just after the war, his situation as an
Algerian Jew. In fact, once he reaches the soil of metropolitan France,
the Algerian Jew loses his ambiguous status, becoming a Jew like any
other; and if antisemitism persists in certain areas of the French middle
class and even in certain professions, it is neither widespread nor violent
enough to keep a French Jew from feeling as genuinely French as
anyone else. The double cultural and national assimilation is so com–
plete that an Algerian Jewish intellectual like Daniel is nothing more
than a French intellectual who has written a novel in which he has
put a great deal of himself, but himself purely as an individual.
This is not the case with Albert Memmi, who describes in
The
Statue of Salt
the childhood and youth of a Tunisian Jew. This novel,
manifestly autobiographical, can be compared with books by Moslem
writers in the sense that it is French in language, mentality, and culturej
but it remains essentially the work of a Tunisian Jew who deals with
himself as such.
What is henceforth certain is that beyond or above political dis–
sension and even the bloodiest battles, a French-speaking North African
literature exists, and that it too bears a double witness. For it expresses
the testimony of those who speak and offers evidence in and of itself.
What it proves is that France has brought the peoples on the southern
shore of the Mediterranean a culture they will certainly retain even if
they reject the forms and ordinances which have been forced upon
them. But from this point of view, more than the Maghrib is con–
cerned.
It
is enough to have read or listened to a man like Taha Hussein
to understand what French culture means to Egypt. And the situation
is the same in Syria and Lebanon. The question today is whether the
stupidity and obstinacy of politicians clinging to ephemeral political
forms will ultimately destroy an influence that might profit eVieryone.
The
presence
fran~aise,
in North Africa as in Egypt, in Syria, or in
Lebanon, is much more Mohammed Dib, nationalist and communist as
he is, or Mouloud Ferraoun, both of whom testify to its existence more
than certain colonels and parachute troops.
Jean Bloch·Michei
(TrlJnsW.d from th, French
by
Richard Howard)
