My name is Benillouche, Alexandre Mordekhai.
How galling the smiles of my classmates! In our alley, and at the Alliance school, I hadn’t known how ridiculous, how revealing, my name could be.1 But at the French lycée I became aware of this at once. From then on, the mere sound of my own name humiliated me and made my pulse beat faster.
Alexandre: brassy, glorious, a name given to me by my parents in recognition of the wonderful West and because it seemed to them to express their idea of Europe. [ . . . ]
Mordekhai (colloquially, I was called Mridakh) signified my share in the Jewish tradition. It had been the formidable name of a glorious Maccabee and also of my grandfather, a feeble old man who never forgot the terrors of the ghetto. [ . . . ] But in this country, Mridakh is as obstinately revealing as if one shouted out: “I’m a Jew!” More precisely: “My home is in the ghetto,” “my legal status is native African,” “I come from an Oriental background,” “I’m poor.” But I had learned to reject these four classifications. It would be easy to reproach me for this, and I have not failed to blame myself. But how is it possible not to be ashamed of one’s condition when one has experienced scorn, mockery, or sympathy for it since childhood? I had learned to interpret smiles, to understand whispers, to read the thoughts of others in their eyes, to reconstruct the reasoning behind a casual phrase or a chance word. [ . . . ]
At the lycée, I very quickly got into the habit of dropping “Mordekhai” from my lesson headings, and before long I forgot the name as if I had shed it like an old skin. Yet it dragged on behind me, holding fast. It was brought back to my attention by all official notices and summonses, by everything that came from beyond the narrow frame of daily routine. [ . . . ]
Alexandre, Mordekhai, Benillouche. Benillouche or, in Berber-Arabic dialect, the son of the lamb. From what mountain tribe did my ancestors descend? Who am I, after all?
I sought—in everything from official documents to my own sharply defined features—some thread which might lead me to the knowledge of who I am. For a while, I believed my forebears had been a family of Berber princes converted to Judaism by Kahena, the warrior-queen and founder of a Jewish kingdom in the middle of the Atlas Mountains. It pleased me to think that I came from the very heart of the country. But then, another time, I found I was descended from an Italian Renaissance painter. [ . . . ] Could I be descended from a Berber tribe when the Berbers themselves failed to recognize me as one of their own? I was Jewish, not Moslem; a townsman, not a highlander. And even if I had borne the painter’s name, I would not have been acknowledged by the Italians. No, I’m African, not European. In the long run, I would always be forced to return to Alexandre Mordekhai Benillouche, a native in a colonial country, a Jew in an anti-Semitic universe, an African in a world dominated by Europe.
We lived at the bottom of the Impasse Tarfoune, in a little room where I was born one year after my sister Kalla. With the Barouch family we shared the ground floor of a shapeless old building, a sort of two-room apartment. [ . . . ] We took turns with the Barouch family to go into the kitchen to the only washbasin with its single faucet. [ . . . ] My mother would remove the two iron bars that protected our front door against thieves and pogroms.
At first, I wanted to write a whole book about the even tenor of happiness of my earliest years, but in spite of my nostalgia for this period, I have barely managed to scribble these few pages about it [ . . . ] Still, I would like to add something now about our Friday nights and our Saturday mornings, so wonderfully joyful and peacefully holy.
Friday was always born in an excited dawn, and it blossomed majestically into a triumphant Sabbath that made us stiff and solemn in our holiday attire, all lit up by the solemn candles. [ . . . ] They had to set out, all over the rooms, the meals for two whole days. [ . . . ]
For the Sabbath, even the light seemed unusual. Scrubbed in warm water, combed and dressed in our best, we waited for Father to come home earlier than usual. But on his way he had stopped at the barber’s so that when he appeared he was well shaven and combed, already Sabbatical in spite of his working clothes. [ . . . ]
One after another, our Friday evening friends then began to arrive: Didakh the cobbler, Hmaïnou the watchmaker, sometimes Joule, the landlady’s son who felt happier with us than with his own mother. [ . . . ] The men would then drink their little glasses of araki as they ate force-meat balls, chick-peas, and strongly seasoned pickled carrots and squash. As for me, I greedily accepted the little drop of alcohol that they often offered me [ . . . ] I cannot remember ever having gone to bed on a Friday night [ . . . ]
Sleep, when one has no worries, tastes like honey [ . . . ] a morning filled with an unusual happiness.
We had long given up going to the synagogue on Saturdays and visited our suppliers instead, but Saturday was still a holy day. [ . . . ]
I was not born in the ghetto. Our alley was at the frontier of the Jewish quarter of Tunis, but this was enough to satisfy my father’s pride. [ . . . ] My father [ . . . ] liked to contrast the dreamy silence of our alley, cool from having recently been watered, with the offensive stink of the ghetto alleys. [ . . . ] We might well have but one room, but we were only two families to share our kitchen and our toilet. [ . . . ] Meanwhile, I was being spared the extreme poverty of the ghetto. [ . . . ] But I believed in some social distinction between its inhabitants and ourselves, since we lived a good 500 m from the nearest Jewish home. Besides, my father owned a store and was an employer. Once the crops have been harvested the Bedouin has a little cash on hand and comes down to the city to buy a new halter for his horse, and this makes him feel important. [ . . . ] Ours was the dignity of an entirely different sort, superior indeed to that of the street hucksters who are always being told by the cops to move on [ . . . ]
Created in the city’s image, the French lycée was peopled so variously that I immediately felt lost. I had French, Tunisian, Italian, Russian, Maltese, even Jewish classmates—but the latter were from a background so different from mine that they were as foreign to me as the others. They were rich Jews and of the second generation of Western culture; like all the others, they too made fun of the nasal ghetto accent which they imitated by confusing the French word savon (for soap) and savant (for scientist). [ . . . ] They rolled the impossible r that Paris has imposed on the rest of France. [ . . . ]
I tried desperately to speak this language which wasn’t mine, which perhaps will never be entirely mine, but without which I would never be able to achieve self-realization. Our local dialect was only just able to satisfy the daily needs of eating and drinking. [ . . . ]
My classmates smiled, were confident, smelled of eau de Cologne and of good toilet soaps. [ . . . ] They washed from top to toe every morning. [ . . . ]
Most frustrating of all, I was completely excluded from their community. [ . . . ] They all belonged to one and the same civilization which remained merely theoretical in my eyes as long as I myself had no share in it. [ . . . ]
Social distinctions are as profound as religious differences, and I was not a member of their class. [ . . . ]
I forced myself to listen to operas, to follow plays, to note the lives of their authors and information about the works themselves. [ . . . ]
I saw clearly that my cutting myself off entirely from my own original background did not necessarily allow me to enter any other group. Just as I sat on the fence between two civilizations, so would I now find myself between two classes; [ . . . ] in trying to sit on several chairs, one generally lands on the floor.
It was then that I discovered a terrible and marvelous secret which might perhaps make my loneliness bearable. [ . . . ] I began to put everything on paper, and that is how I began to write and to experience the wonderful pleasure of mastering a whole life by recreating it. [ . . . ] To describe people, I had to be an outsider and I could no longer be a part of the world I contemplated. Just as one ceases to live while one watches a play, so did I cease to live and now merely wrote. [ . . . ] My new loneliness became deeper too because I was more conscious of it and accepted it. [ . . . ]
Thus began my hand-to-hand struggle with language [ . . . ] Dimly, I felt that I would penetrate into the soul of this civilization by mastering its language. [ . . . ]
I would never be as adept at the language as my companions whom birth had endowed with an almost perfect linguistic equipment. [ . . . ]
The compliments of my teacher for all my work were a compensation. [ . . . ] I worked like a brute [ . . . ] I struggled so relentlessly for prizes and honors. [ . . . ] What I wanted was more than their processed schoolbook learning. [ . . . ]
I read tons of printed paper [ . . . ]
One day I asked for permission to give a report on the poet Alfred de Vigny and it was granted to me.2 I admired Vigny’s disillusioned but haughty manliness, his noncompliance. [ . . . ] I began to speak [ . . . ] without any notes [ . . . ] My irreverence carried me away, as always, so that I soon slipped into slang. [ . . . ]
“Your report has been most odd. I can add very little to what you’ve said about Vigny. But, in order to speak without notes, which in itself should merit approval, you’ve allowed yourself to slip into the language of a street urchin.”
I could take it as I pleased. But I saw that the class was satisfied with the insult; they looked at one another, sneered, and repeated: “the language of a street urchin.” [ . . . ]
The language I spoke was an amalgam, a dreadful mixture of literary or even precious expressions and of idioms translated word for word from our dialect, of schoolboy slang and of my own more or less successful inventions. [ . . . ]
Sometimes, at night, in bed, I would weep with joy when, as I read Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for instance, I felt that I could recognize, in his passion and his humble background, his rejection of his own surroundings, my own ambitions and my own future. [ . . . ]
But would I ever be strong enough to survive this split in my being? [ . . . ] I made up my mind to choose one of them. Between the East and the West, between African superstitions and philosophy, between our dialect and the French language, I now had to choose. [ . . . ]
I did not want to be Alexandre Mordekhai Benillouche, I wanted to escape from myself and go out toward the others. I was not going to remain a Jew, an Oriental, a pauper; I belonged neither to my family nor to my religious community; I was a new being, utterly transparent, ready to be completely remade into a philosophy instructor. [ . . . ]
I filed an application for a job as supervisor of studies in a high-school dormitory for resident students. [ . . . ] Within a week, I received my appointment. I then wrote a letter to the Head of the Philosophy Department in Algiers, which was the nearest university, asking him in all simplicity for some assistance. [ . . . ]
I had really taken myself in hand, achieved financial independence and managed to study a subject that I had picked out for myself. [ . . . ]
For a while I even thought I would be able to build myself, in the spirit philosophy, a sort of private garden, fenced off with little columns on which would be placed the busts of Aristotle and Plato, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel.
It was in high school that I discovered how painful it is to be a Jew. [ . . . ] I did not feel alien to myself as I do today [ . . . ] Anti-Semitism seemed to be a characteristic of the others, much as they might have a way of speaking or of dressing. They were not Jews, as I was, so they were anti-Semites. [ . . . ] I did not feel Jewish in any way that might provoke anti-Semitism. In short, I felt neither accused nor guilty.
In high school, I began to suffer because they forced me to ask myself what I was. [ . . . ]
Apparently, I was too touchy and saw antiSemitism everywhere. But the point was that my classmates did not suffer enough from it in material terms. There were, [ . . . ] little annoyances [ . . . ] a drunkard might shout: “Death to the Jews!” Or the ticket-collector, harassed by the crowd, might say: “These Jews are all alike.” Or inscriptions might be scrawled every once in a while on the walls of the old cemetery: “Down with the Jews!” Or again, uncomplimentary references might appear in the press [ . . . ]
Several of my history instructors were at the same time anti-Semitic, anti-Arab, and politically reactionary, so that I learned to identify anti-Semitism with prejudice and with reactionary political opinions. [ . . . ] The fact that the same contempt was felt for Mohammedans made me feel a sense of community with them. [ . . . ] Our Alsatian teacher was an example of ordinary anti-Semitism [ . . . ] he disliked living on the Mediterranean, and he reproached us with liking all the things he detested, such as speaking loud, or living on the streets, or being sunburnt, whereas his complexion was milky-white. Then there was the traditional and stupid race prejudice of Naud, the retired lieutenant with the missing leg who taught us history. Another historian also tried to give race prejudice a scientific basis. [ . . . ] He became a leader in Franco-Nazi collaboration. [ . . . ]
I found no immediate reply to his arguments, they troubled me and made me feel guilty. To combat this, I threw myself into studies of Judaism and became intellectually aware of our own Hebrew spiritual tradition. [ . . . ] Then firmly entrenched within my new knowledge, I tried to undermine as best I could the teachings of this doctrinaire racial theorist in the minds of my school-fellows. [ . . . ]
Ben Smaan [and I . . .] made a date to meet in town. He then told me he was the local secretary of a political youth movement composed only of native Africans and asked me to join it. I was delighted but a little embarrassed. Of course, I suffered from my growing awareness that I was alien in the eyes of Europeans, but it had not yet occurred to me to make a move toward the Moslems for I thought of this road as closed. [ . . . ]
[Ben Smaan said,] “We would like to have some Jews too, so as to express the aspirations of the whole Tunisian nation.”
“But are we a part of the nation?”
“Of course you are! Where was your father born? And your grandfather? Have you ever had any other nationality in the last few centuries? No! There you are!” [ . . . ]
“We must promote unity among all the native sons of the country and make them act according to their own conscience. Why should we do without the help of the Jews who are an important part of the population and a particularly active, clever, and powerful one?”
The last part of this sentence did not please me. What could he mean by “clever and powerful”? I preferred to think that his words had been tactlessly chosen.
“I can only agree, but I must admit that I am a pessimist. One cannot force oneself to be accepted as a relative or even a neighbor. That is the opinion of many Jews for whom the only solution is Zionism.”
“Zionism! Leave that alone! It’s a utopia and one that will arouse the whole Arab world. What could a handful of madmen do against the whole Arab world?” [ . . . ]
I did not know then what to think of Zionism, but such a rapid condemnation hurt me, and the implied threat particularly shocked me. [ . . . ] The people of Tunisia needed their own party to fight for them and to express their own aspirations. [ . . . ] What was my people? And what did it want? My violence in the discussion and my resistance melted to indecision and a feeling of not belonging anywhere when it came to actions. [ . . . ]
“If you were asked point-blank what your main political aim is, you would say the withdrawal of the European colonials or at any rate their neutralization. But I have to stop and think. You very much want a return to the culture and language of the Arabs, but I now belong to Western culture.” [ . . . ]
I was too shy to add that Moslem hostility would have to be dispelled and that there was also the hostility of the Jews who had been driven behind thick walls by centuries of fear. [ . . . ]
How vain and futile are all theoretical and philosophical constructions of the mind when compared to the brutal realities of the world of men! The European philosophers build the most rigorous and virtuous moral codes, and their politicians, brought up by these teachers, foment murders as a means of government. After how bitter a struggle had I chosen the West and not the East! And now I was beginning to listen to the reasonings of Jewish nationalists when the war came to fill up our lives and postpone any solution to these problems. [ . . . ]
Suddenly, the world flooded my life and dragged me in its wake with so much violence that I hardly knew what was happening to me. [ . . . ]
In the first days after the declaration of war, a few Italian planes flew so high above the city that they could not be seen, and they dropped some light bombs at random on the countryside. [ . . . ] Not since any man or community could remember had we ever been involved in an armed conflict; those were European games and disasters, and we bore the consequences of them because our fate was linked with that of Europe, but neither our minds nor our hearts were preoccupied. When the Italians finally stopped their timid flying expeditions, the war ceased to have anything to do with our everyday life. [ . . . ]
And then, all of a sudden, one day we found ourselves right in the middle of the tragedy. [ . . . ]
The big Junker planes of the Nazis started landing on El-Aouina Airfield. I did not see the aircraft, and nobody told me about it. [ . . . ]
I understood so little that I was convinced that, between the Jews, the Germans, and the French, it was all a matter of pride. When Pétain came to power in France, the new anti-Semitic laws were applied to us but with some delay. When the decrees were published, I was not so much struck by the material side of the catastrophe as disappointed and angry. It was the painful and astounding treason [ . . . ]
Instantly I wrote a letter of resignation which I handed to the principal of the school. [ . . . ]
He accepted my letter [ . . . ] and I left his office feeling quits with the persecutors of Vichy. I had hit back, blow for blow. Of course, I had lost my job. But my reputation, both as a serious pupil and as a student, assured me many requests for private lessons. [ . . . ] Even when the universities were closed to Jews I was not alarmed. Having no money, I could not attend them anyway. [ . . . ]
Immediately, with the arrival of the Germans, came disaster. [ . . . ] We were hurled into such a whirlwind that we only started breathing again after they left. Disaster certainly makes one less lucid. The first morning after that sinister evening when the German authorities settled in the dark city, the Kommandatur took its first anti-Jewish steps. Armed with well-prepared lists and accompanied, as was fitting, by their French colleagues the German police went out to collect several hundred hostages. It was announced that, at the slightest opposition, they would all be shot. Then came requisitions and exactions and murders. Now that we have news from the rest of the world, I know that we did not reach the bottom of the abyss. We had no gas chambers or crematoria. Those of us who were deported to Germany probably went through all that, but we did not know about it at the time. [ . . . ] We certainly had our share of misery, however meager compared to that of others. [ . . . ]
We also had our victims, executed for fun or as punishment or by mistake, our women raped and our homes plundered. [ . . . ] German lorries would draw up in front of a building occupied by Jews; soldiers would get out and, blocking the exits, summon all the inhabitants to leave immediately. [ . . . ] We only heard about rapes indirectly [ . . . ] The impression of being wide-awake in a nightmare was reinforced by the more and more violent bombings, day and night, ever more frequent and terrifying, which upset all our sense of time. [ . . . ]
The Moslems did not wish to take sides in a war between Europeans. [ . . . ] It was a miracle [ . . . ] the whole Moslem population did not go over to the Nazis. Nothing had been neglected: promises of complete independence, Arab broadcasts from Berlin, and reminders of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Islamic sympathies.
The Italians, undermined by Fascist propaganda, by free distributions of black shirts and magnificent balls, thought they were living in the Golden Age of ancient Rome or of a Greater Italy. [ . . . ] Any sort of resistance was inconceivable. The least move would have caused a huge massacre [ . . . ] On the eighth day, after they had taken all their precautions, the Germans ordered all Jewish men between the ages of eighteen and forty to assemble to be sent off to forced-labor camps. Our immediate reaction was to ask the French Residency for its protection. To our amazement, our delegates were thrown out.
“Gentlemen,” was the reply of the Resident General, “I too must carry out the orders of the Germans.”
For the first time our community had been failed when it turned to our French trustee for protection. [ . . . ]
Like a tracked animal, I thought first of saving my own skin. I relied on what connections I had among the French and on my admiration for France. It is not easy to believe in the betrayal of a myth. [ . . . ] I put my papers in order and hid some vaguely political writings in the laundry-room; then I piously buried in Henry’s garden a number of poems that were almost finished and many more drafts. I’m not quite sure what it was I most feared, whether the bombings, the inquisitive hands of the children, or German police-raids. [ . . . ]
The raiders carried off all men indiscriminately, the old and the young, the healthy and the sick. [ . . . ] Those who protest today are the ones who found refuge in homes in the European quarters, but could one hope to hide the whole ghetto? The little hucksters, saddlers, tailors, bakers, and cobblers had no connections. Something had to be done. The Germans agreed to stop the raids and to allow us to organize a medical service that would exempt the sick and the aged from labor camps. In exchange, the leaders had to supply a given contingent of workers. At last we thought we would be able to leave our anguished seclusion. I must admit that, at the time, we found this arrangement preferable to the day-to-day terror of random police raids. [ . . . ]
Reports from the camps were very bad. [ . . . ] My brethren—all city-dwellers, artisans, office-workers, salesmen, and petty traders, with a skin that was too white and flabby stomach muscles—lost all appearance of being human after only a few days of camp life. They neither washed nor shaved any more, were covered with lice, and just gave up [ . . . ] The Germans [ . . . ] shot the stragglers and the sick. They multiplied their demands and became increasingly difficult to satisfy. After they had taken all the men younger than thirty-five years of age, they demanded those aged forty, and then those aged forty-five. We began to realize that if the German occupation were to last much longer we would be completely lost [ . . . ]
In the offices I learned that the middle class had assumed these responsibilities to save themselves and their children. Rich men’s sons were everywhere in the auxiliary offices: food supplies, ambulances, transport and medical services. But they had also decided that certain categories of men were to be spared, for instance the intellectuals. [ . . . ] It was because I was a student, not because of my lungs, that I had been saved. [ . . . ] “We wanted to save the elite of the community,” explained one of our leaders without even smiling. [ . . . ]
Most of the intellectuals were of the middle class. So the intellectual and the economic elites were confused. It seemed to the middle class only fair, since they had to pay the heavy cost of the camps, that their own sons should be exempted. But I could not forget that I was poor, nor accept this ambiguous situation.
How was it possible to stay in the offices while all those young Jews were being beaten, humiliated, and killed in the camps? [ . . . ] I asked to be allowed to join the camp workers. [ . . . ] Painfully but definitely, I was discovering that others really existed, and moreover that I would never be content merely with my own happiness. [ . . . ] I would go to the camps to help the others live. I believe that, in the midst of the despair of those days, my move was optimistic. [ . . . ]
After I had been back for a week, I noticed that I was running a fever, low, but regular and persistent. [ . . . ]
The worst part of being sick, I found, was this concentration on one’s self and the tyranny of the self. [ . . . ] For those who tend to be introspective, sickness is stark solitude, the worst of all possible conditions. [ . . . ]
Before, it had been metaphysical and impersonal, scrutinizing the world passionately to understand it. Now I became the only center of my own preoccupations. Who was I? What were the results of my long struggle ever since my childhood? [ . . . ]
The war had taught us our real place in the mind of the West. Each time we had needed the West it had ignored us. The news that now reached us from the rest of the world confirmed this selfishness of the West: the desperate appeals of the Warsaw ghetto, the silence of the West’s religious authorities, and its abandonment of most of the Jewish minorities to the Germans. As soon as the Germans left Tunis, our ghetto decided for itself that the war was over. For me, it could not be so simple. Once I had overcome my rage against Vichy, the numerus clausus, and the Fascist Legion, I began to doubt the treason of France. To accept it would indeed have been unbearable. All my ambitions, my studies, and my life were founded on this choice. [ . . . ]
I stood before myself as before a deforming mirror; something strange had slipped into the core of my life. [ . . . ]
When the Gaullists3 opened their first recruiting office in a tailor’s shop, I went there with Henry, who was sarcastic but always willing to follow me. A Free French lieutenant with a blue cap and red lapels awaited his clients behind a huge counter. He rose exuberantly [ . . . ]
I carefully wrote down my name, address, age, nationality, and profession. [ . . . ] “Reasons for which you are not already in the army.” I wrote: not subject to conscription. [ . . . ]
“Please give details” [ . . . ]
“Foreign,” I said. “Well, not exactly; native African Jew.” [ . . . ]
Would you mind enlisting under another name? [ . . . ]
“We are very happy to have you; it’s just to avoid . . . you know, politics . . .” he stammered. [ . . . ]
“You don’t want any Jews?”
“Oh, not us. You know, we already have lots. They’re good fighters and good comrades at arms. That’s why General Giraud’s men say that the Gaullists are mostly Jews, which isn’t true and does us a great deal of harm” [ . . . ]
“The important thing is to fight, isn’t it? I mean the pleasure of smashing the Krauts!” [ . . . ]
He must have known that I too wanted to fight my own war, and not just any war. War is either a personal affair or a swindle. [ . . . ]
“Look, leave your name and just add ‘Mohammed.’ There is no difficulty for Moslems.” [ . . . ]
I could only be a victim of this war; never would I be accepted as one of the victors. [ . . . ] A member of the Chamber of Deputies demanded the mobilization of native Africans, but the Algerian Assembly refused. [ . . . ] The heads of our community then proposed, of their own accord, that the Jews be conscripted. That too was refused. Such a collective measure would evidently have meant extending the rights and advantages of servicemen to their families, and that was out of the question. [ . . . ] For the second time, the West had rejected and betrayed us. [ . . . ]
I would never be a Westerner. I rejected the West. [ . . . ] I had rejected the East and had been rejected by the West. [ . . . ]