Les Clés retrouvées: Une enfance juive à Constantine, by Benjamin Stora, Paris, Éditions Stock, 2015, 152 pp., €17 (paperback), ISBN 978-2-234-
in THE JOURNAL OF NORTH AFRICAN STUDIES 533
Downloaded by [Sami Everett] at 20 April 2016
The book under review (henceforth, Les Clés) is the latest instalment in Benjamin Stora’s semi-autobiographical/semi-historical series that began with La dernière génération d’octobre (2003) – which traces the political engagement of his youth – followed by Les Trois exils: Juifs d’Algérie (2006) – a history of Algeria’s Jews – then Les Guerres sans fin (2008) – his adult years and the passage from activist to academic – and, more recently, Voyages en postcolonies (2012), which covers the latter stages of his professional career. The central difference here is that Stora allows the process of remembering a freer rein in the text, and – a novelty for him – directly uses the adjective ‘Jewish’. The flitting, skewed, and filtered nature of childhood memory naturally preoccupies Stora (9) as a professional historian of Algeria, who is sometimes referred to – such is his relative fame in France – as ‘Monsieur Algérie’. Les Clés pinpoints Stora’s Algerian years (to age 12) as of central importance in his life: the experiences of a Jewish family living in the Arab quarter Kar Charrah (13) in Constantine during the war of independence.
As readable as his books invariably are, this one is more of a personal tale than rigorous piece of scholarship; it comprises no index and is structured only loosely by chronology and theme, working along the multiple and non-linear level of memory. Though the central theses of Les Trois exils (2006) – where Jews were separated from Arab/Berber, and then French, society, and then from Algeria altogether– are maintained (47, 67, 83, 89), Stora has given his text a more conciliatory tone. And less stark are his previous divergences from the field of Algerian Jewish studies in France. Such a shift can be inferred in his citation of André Chouraqui as a source on the status of the Algerian Jewish dhimmi (16) and Shmuel Trigano on the identity of Algerian Jews (143) – the theses of both authors being contested by other specialists. For example, Stora uses personal discussions with the intellectual Tassadit Yacine (45) as a way of opening critical aspects of Algerian history. It is via this medium that the author touches on, among other things, the place of Jews in indigenous (Algerian Muslim) society, Muslim–Jewish relations, inter-community prejudice, Arab nationalism, republicanism, and the complexity of the Algerian Jewish relationship to language: Hebrew, French, and Arabic (60).
In chapters one and two Stora offers an overall picture of life in 1950s Constantine, the ‘imbrication’ of Jewish life in the Arab quarter (31), and the importance of French and other western cultures for Jewish children – and particularly for himself, through cinema, contemporary music, and his childhood comic-book hero Blek le Roc. The author describes the religious traditionalism of Constantine, a life led by the rhythm of ritual and the closed geography of the city (21), its Roman origins, and impressive physiognomy perched on cliffs overlooking a deep ravine. Chapters three and four give a broad political context, introducing the reader to a Jewish Algerian positioning vis-à-vis the notion of ‘Orient’ (39– 41) via the ambivalence of Stora’s family towards autochthony and modernity in relation to gendered household roles. Importantly, Stora elaborates on a time immemorial prejudice of Muslims towards Jews. In a telling passage Stora thanks Mohamed Harbi (a colleague and periodic co-author) for his intellectual honesty in regard to Muslim stereotypes in this regard (36), recounting, in case of point, the everyday denigrating of Jews even by highly erudite Muslim Algerians (37). Lending nuance to this discussion, he relates the parallel invisibility of the indigenous masses among non-Muslims; as a child he would have to step over ‘little Arab’ (38) sleeping children at the entrance of his home before going to school; he remembers doing this regularly without considering their misery, of the sheer inhumanity of their condition.
The internal politics of the home and the increasing ideologisation of the conflict on the outside, in particular from 1954, are discussed in chapters five to six. Reflections on the onomastic of the name Stora – a key to the longevity of
Jewish existence in Algeria – are counterbalanced with his generation’s deeprooted sense of insecurity at simultaneously being, and not really being, French (75–76). Algerian Jewish political involvement is approached through the description of his father’s early historical consciousness of colonial subjectivity in relation to his experience as cannon fodder, saved by tirailleurs sénégalais, during the Second World War (53). Stora posits the political possibilities of a Jewish Algerian position vis-à-vis the envisioning of a new Algerian state in the mid- to late 1950s through the theses of the Comité Juif Algérien d’Études Sociales (CJAES) – of Henri Aboulker, Jacques Lazarus, and William Sportisse in particular (86) – that aligned with the French communist party – wary of French colonial policy but desirous of a cosmopolitan Algerian nation. These desiderata were, however, never integrated into the final push for autonomy as the independence movement found more momentum in crystallising around an Arab-Islamic identity and rejecting wholesale the West, including Israel (91).
The end of the war and departure to France make up the central themes of chapters seven, eight and nine. As many others before him, Stora attributes the cold-blooded assassination, on 22 June 1961, of the great Andalusi singer-composer Cheikh Raymond Leyris, a secular and beloved member of Constantine’s Jewish community, as the point of no return for the vast majority of Jews there. The chilling scene is recounted through the eyes of the young Stora who was in the marketplace at the time of the singer’s murder (97). The proximity of violence to the everyday had finally become too unbearable. Nineteen-sixty-one was thus the year when the realisation dawned on Constantine’s Jews that departure was the only viable option. From here on, matters of transnational interest to Parisian and Constantinois Judaism become more prominent in the text. Stora explains, for example, the pro-independence engagement of the Union of French Jewish Students (UEJF) during the war (108) – that Constantine’s Jews found incomprehensible – on the one hand and, on the other, the material misery of his family’s arrival in France (123) in parallel with the fear of dispersion (117) that would lead to the establishment of a Constantinois synagogue on Paris’ Rue des Tournelles (120).
Beyond the re-investment of Jewish institutions, Stora chronicles throughout the book his mother’s experience as a series of attempts to re-enact life in Constantine, allowing the reader a degree of intimacy with the author. Some of the anecdotes he relays in the book relate to particular familial Constantinois expressions such as ‘aller “à la viande”’ to the La Villette or Saint Paul market (29, 120) in Paris, which translates the same ritualistic meat-buying for Jewish festivities, occasions on which, as a child, he would accompany his mother to the food market in Constantine. Another expression, the heartbreaking, ‘pas une seule tête connue dans la rue’ (117) signifies his mother’s solitude – she could not recognise a single face – when she would step out of her door in the Paris banlieue of Sartrouville, an experience that, as one who had lived her entire life in the buzzing heart of the Jewish community in Constantine, was totally alien to her. Through this reading of postcolonial melancholy and transnational transposition of one place onto another, Stora guides the reader towards a better understanding of the establishment of Jewish Algerian networks both prior to and after the mass departures and then, after 1967, the transposition of a sense of belonging onto Israel (122). Turning towards the future, the final chapter recapitulates the underlying republicanism that took the vast majority of Algerian Jews to France and to identify as Pied-Noir Jews (134), while leaving the door open to a more multicultural reinterpretation for those of the second and third generation in France who have struggled to make sense (136) of what it means to have a profound link to Algeria.
Building on the success of Les trois exiles this book allows the Stora reader to become aware of how Constantine bled through into his young life in Paris. As a piece of distinctly (though never entirely) autobiographical writing, it centres
on his own story more than in his previous works and in so doing, explains Stora-the-man through the eyes of Stora-the-boy. Unlike in his other writings, Stora’s Jewishness is more freely discussed, thanks, perhaps, to the recourse of childhood memory; ‘gare aux fessées’ he says of his mother reminding him to pray and of his conception of Jerusalem as a celestial figure (134). In weaving together History with his personal familial stories, Stora’s choice of literature is, at times, slightly restrictive, perhaps even a little community oriented; here Stora may be reaching out towards other scholars who have remained focused on Jews from Algeria and their relationship with French society. Without becoming beholden to it, Les Clés brings Stora closer to what one might call a Jewish Algerian community of scholars in Paris through the realisation that their intellectual conservatism has sought to transmit something which can, like the keys sometimes kept by those Arab Jews and Muslims of Cordoba, Constantine, and Jaffa sometimes open (metaphorical) doors.
Sami Everett
Woolf Institute, Cambridge & EPHE, Parist
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© 2016 Sami Everett
