Lucille Cairns. Francophone Jewish Writers: Imagining Israel. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2015 (original) (raw)
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French Cultural Studies, 2018
Éliette Abécassis, one of the principal flagbearers of a nascent contemporary Jewish-French literature, has written a novel entitled Alyah, which engages in a series of reflections on the future of Jewish life in France. Among other themes, Abécassis tackles the memory of Jewish life in North Africa, especially in Morocco, the relationship between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, the affective value of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for Jews and Muslims in France, and 'la nouvelle judéophobie'. In this article, I read Alyah in its socio-political context in order to suggest that, while Abécassis highlights at times the potential for Jewish-Muslim solidarity, the novel ends up reproducing an oppositional, conflictual binary of Jews versus Muslims -something that Maud Mandel has termed a 'narrative of polarisation'.
Editorial: The Middle Eastern francosphère
2017
Increasing critical attention has been given to cultural production, literature, theatre, and cinema expressed in French from the Middle East and its diaspora, including examinations of how the deep inequalities in the Occupied Palestinian Territories play out in the Metropolitan banlieues and the former French colonial states of the Maghreb. 1 In exploring the 'francosphère' of this region, it is possible to map new lines of communication, solidarity, and capital flows across and beyond what are, for some, arbitrary borders. The aim of this special issue is to showcase some of these. Indeed, a regional survey such as this poses issues about scope and reach, where boundaries can and should be drawn, and how in the Middle East-or Eastern Mediterranean, Levant, Ottoman even-these become acute. Geopolitical borders in the region were determined by Sykes and Picot, decisions which still cast a long shadow over a region which has for so long been culturally identified according to European orientalizing definitions. Vexed questions of identity are discussed in Amin Maalouf's essay Les identités meurtrières (1998), which draws on the catastrophic rendering of these affiliations during the Lebanese civil wars. Within his corpus of fiction, novels such as Origines (2004) or Les Désorientées (2012) explore Lebanese identity and how, while there are those who stay, emigration to the US, Australia, Brazil, France, and Quebec has created a global diaspora. 2 These questions underscore much of the work of Lebanese-Quebecois playwright Wajdi Mouawad, notably Incendies (2003). 3 Jihane Chouaib's Pays rêvé, a
Returning to Exile?: The Retrieving and Rejecting of Jewishness in French Shoah Narrative
2009
This thesis explores the intertwining (and often competing) identities of Jew and Frenchman that play out across the landscape of Shoah (Holocaust) literature in France. The study seeks to tease out aspects of individual identity and to explore the nature of Jewishness in the context of trauma. This is achieved through a reading of survivor narratives written in French and (primarily) for a French audience.Because the narratives studied are all first-hand accounts, the portrait that is analyzed is that which the author chooses to present to his audience (for better and worse). The texts which will inform this study are Charlotte Delbo's trilogy Auschwitz et apres, David Rousset's l'Univers concentrationnaire, Paul Steinberg's Chroniques d'ailleurs, and Joseph Joffo's Un sac de billes. By reading a diverse group of French authors, both Jewish and non-Jewish, this project attempts to study the relationship between one's Jewishness and their environment, bot...
This paper explores the image of the Jew as Oriental in French Jewish literature and political discourse in the fin-de-siècle and inter-war years. During the nineteenth century, French Jews sought to distance themselves from their alleged ‘Oriental’ origins in order to facilitate their integration into the larger society. Beginning in the early twentieth century, by contrast, certain French Jews began to describe their imagined connection to the Orient as an aspect of the Jewish personality of which to be proud. This reinvention of the Jew as Oriental, however, was often linked to feelings of loss and alienation, a theme which many Jewish authors emphasised in their novels, plays and poetry. For many of these same figures, embracing Zionism provided a way to overcome this sense of alienation. By linking Zionism to the kind of ‘humanist orientalism’ prominent in French progressive circles during this period, they were able to give validity to their sense of ‘feeling different’ while at the same time expressing their complete devotion to France and to a universalist world perspective.