The writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff (1917–1979) offer a refreshing reassessment of Arab-Jewish relations in the Middle East. A member of the bourgeois Jewish community in Cairo, Kahanoff grew up in a time of coexistence. She spent the years of World War II in New York City, where she launched her writing career with publications in prominent American journals. Kahanoff later settled in Israel, where she became a noted cultural and literary critic.
Mongrels or Marvels offers Kahanoff's most influential and engaging writings, selected from essays and works of fiction that anticipate contemporary concerns about cultural integration in immigrant societies. Confronted with the breakdown of cosmopolitan Egyptian society, and the stereotypes she encountered as a Jew from the Arab world, she developed a social model, Levantinism, that embraces the idea of a pluralist, multicultural society and counters the prevailing attitudes and identity politics in the Middle East with the possibility of mutual respect and acceptance.
The writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff (1917–1979) offer a refreshing reassessment of Arab-Jewish relations in the Middle East. A member of the bourgeois Jewish community in Cairo, Kahanoff grew up in a time of coexistence. She spent the years of World War II in New York City, where she launched her writing career with publications in prominent American journals. Kahanoff later settled in Israel, where she became a noted cultural and literary critic.
Mongrels or Marvels offers Kahanoff's most influential and engaging writings, selected from essays and works of fiction that anticipate contemporary concerns about cultural integration in immigrant societies. Confronted with the breakdown of cosmopolitan Egyptian society, and the stereotypes she encountered as a Jew from the Arab world, she developed a social model, Levantinism, that embraces the idea of a pluralist, multicultural society and counters the prevailing attitudes and identity politics in the Middle East with the possibility of mutual respect and acceptance.
Mongrels or Marvels: The Levantine Writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff
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Overview
The writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff (1917–1979) offer a refreshing reassessment of Arab-Jewish relations in the Middle East. A member of the bourgeois Jewish community in Cairo, Kahanoff grew up in a time of coexistence. She spent the years of World War II in New York City, where she launched her writing career with publications in prominent American journals. Kahanoff later settled in Israel, where she became a noted cultural and literary critic.
Mongrels or Marvels offers Kahanoff's most influential and engaging writings, selected from essays and works of fiction that anticipate contemporary concerns about cultural integration in immigrant societies. Confronted with the breakdown of cosmopolitan Egyptian society, and the stereotypes she encountered as a Jew from the Arab world, she developed a social model, Levantinism, that embraces the idea of a pluralist, multicultural society and counters the prevailing attitudes and identity politics in the Middle East with the possibility of mutual respect and acceptance.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804777889 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/17/2011 |
| Series: | Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 552 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Mongrels or Marvels
The Levantine Writings of Jacqueline Shohet KahanoffSTANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2011 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6953-2
Chapter One
Childhood in Egypt
This essay, first published in 1959, represents the colorful debut installment of Jacqueline Kahanoff's "Generation of Levantines" cycle. Out of her sense of alienation from the traditions of the East and exclusion from European modernity, Kahanoff forges a hybrid "Levantine" identity that she hopes will be imbued with the power to effect change. For Kahanoff, this identity is an expression of her cosmopolitan aspirations for her generation "to become free citizens of the universe."
When I was a small child, it seemed natural that people understood each other although they spoke different languages, and were called by different names—Greek, Moslem, Syrian, Jewish, Christian, Arab, Italian, Tunisian, Armenian. I was aware that Arabs were more numerous than other people, and poorer: they were servants, peddlers, and beggars who showed arms without hands, legs without feet, eyes without sight, and called out to Allah to send them a meager piaster. The children scavenged in garbage pails for something to eat. Rich Arabs were pashas, but then many of them were Turks, and the Turkish ladies were princesses. One only caught a glimpse of them when they passed in their carriages. They wore a little bit of white veil around their heads and chins, while the Arab women were all wrapped up in black.
Moslems prayed kneeling on small rugs when the muezzin called them to prayer from the top of a minaret; it was a sad, beautiful song that filled the sky when the sun fell and disappeared. But in the morning, it returned to shine on everything, and that was why one prayed to God: to thank him for the Light.
It was a friendly world, with something exciting always going on. Crowds milled about in their brightest clothes for Bairam, after the Ramadan fast, and peddlers sold them magnificent sugar dolls in bright tinseled paper clothes, with little bells jingling on their heads. There were processions when the Holy Carpet returned from Mecca, or when the King opened Parliament; then all the streets were covered with orange sand and decorated with banners and festoons of light bulbs that shone brightly at night. At Easter time some shops sold chocolate eggs. Later, the Greek grocery stores sold eggs dyed in the most beautiful dark shades of purple, orange, and green. There was one holiday, Shamm al-Nissim, the Feast of the Sun, when absolutely everybody celebrated the spring by having a picnic by the Nile.
Mother said that before going to sleep, it was good to remember all the nice things that happened that day, and there were lots of them, even on ordinary days. Sometimes camels came into town, carrying bundles of fresh-smelling greens in the rope bats flung across their humps, and it was funny the way they twisted their mouths, always chewing on something. Often my uncle Nono would invite me to see the new toys they had received at the store, and he said I could choose anything I wanted, although Mother scolded him for spoiling me too much. Or there were uncles and aunts who came from Paris or Manchester for weddings or business affairs. There were days, late in summer, when Nono and Uncle David distributed among their married children the good things they had received from Tunis—olive oil, and delicious big green olives, dates, and muscat grapes that were so good, that when we had a party to eat them together, everybody, even the children, were tipsy.
On Sundays, old Maria, our maid, sometimes took me with her to early mass in St. Joseph's Cathedral, where fat little angels floated among the pink clouds painted inside the domed blue ceiling. Father said I could go because God was everywhere, but that I must never, never dip my fingers in Holy Water or make the sign of the Cross, because I was Jewish. Every people had its religion, he said, just as every bird had its song, and God loved and understood them all. Our religion, he said, was to await the coming of the Messiah, who would bring the day when people could love one another almost as God loved them all. I hoped that the Messiah would come quickly so that everybody could enjoy everything about other people's religions, as well as their own.
Our religion was also a mysterious language of prayers, called Hebrew, which only the men recited and understood. But, what was being Jewish most of all was to visit my father's parents, far, far away in the Abbassiyah quarter, where they lived in a little house surrounded by jasmine and honeysuckle. My grandfather Jacob, who came from Baghdad, sat in a long robe, with a turban on his head. He intimidated me because of his white beard and the prayer books which lay on a table at his side. My father gave me a little push, and I knelt before this old grandfather, who was also like a priest, to kiss his hand as my father had done, and received his blessing. When Grandfather Jacob's hand rested on my head, I felt that this blessing was something ancient and precious, a treasure, which the grandfathers of our grandfathers had received from God. Because of this blessing, I was in God's safekeeping and belonged to the people of the stories in the old prayer books.
There were no real pictures in this grandfather's house; that was forbidden, but there were two frames containing writing on the plain white-washed wall, which I always saw as I lifted my head after the blessing. Father explained that one was the Ten Commandments in Hebrew, which God had given to Moses when they waited in the desert before entering the Promised Land, and these commandments told people what was right and what was wrong. The other was the Balfour Declaration, in English, and it said that the time was soon to come when we would return to our Promised Land. This land was called Erets Yisrael, Father said, but now it is called Palestine, for we had lost our Promised Land. But we should remember that the Lord God of Israel had promised it to the sons of Jacob.
"To the daughters too?" I asked, and, smiling, my father said yes, to the daughters too, for Israel honored its women, the daughters of Rachel and Sarah. I thought how beautiful it was that the people in my family had the same names as those in the stories.
My grandmother sat on a couch in another room, draped in gray silk, her legs crossed under her. She was religious, and wore over her black wig a kerchief decorated with many crocheted flowers which dangled on her forehead with each of her movements, and which made her look young. Although I was told she was not beautiful, to me, this ancient Jewish queen, who never shouted and before whom people lowered their voices, was more than beautiful. I wanted the years to fly quickly, till I became an old grandmother just like her. My father's parents were the only people I knew who were in total harmony with themselves, inwardly and outwardly, who accepted themselves as they were and did not want to be other than they were.
I remember one summer we were in a hotel in Alexandria, by the sea. It was full of English officers and their wives, and one lady asked me what I was. I did not know what to answer. I knew I was not Egyptian like the Arabs, and that it was shameful not to know what one was. And so, thinking of my grandparents, I replied that I was Jewish and Persian, believing that Baghdad, the city they came from, was in the country from which all beautiful rugs came. Later, my mother chided me for not telling the truth, and said that when people asked me such a question, I should say I was European. I suffered because I knew this was not the truth either, and I burned with shame when the English ladies who had been nice to me laughed about "the little girl who wanted to be Persian."
I knew that my father suffered too, but I could do nothing about it. The image of his parents became something precious and secret I kept locked in my heart. They were the pillars that supported the frail bridge which tied me to my past, and without which there could be no future.
Whenever we passed the Qasr al-Nil bridge, where the English barracks were, I thought of the desert far away where the past slept under the sand. This was the treasure I must find when I would be grown up and free, so that the past could come alive and become the future. Sometimes the bridge opened to let white-sailed feluccas pass on their way to or from the mysterious place where the river and the world began. I thought that if once I stood at the edge of the bridge, just when it opened in the middle, I would fall into a felucca and be carried to that beginning, or to that end, where the river flowed into God, which was like a beginning. But perhaps I would miss the boat, and drown, sucked in by the whirlpools. I was safe only when I stood on the bridge. I knew that the feluccas traveled between Aswan and the Delta, carrying onions and watermelons, but the mythical river was my real world, where no harm would befall me.
We moved to a different house, where the river flowed by my window, and beyond it the three triangles of the pyramids spoke mysteriously of the time when everything called history started, long, long before English tutors taught us to read Alice in Wonderland and French schoolteachers made us memorize all kinds of nonsense about our ancestors the Gauls. The Wonderland was here, where our ancestors had created what the books called "ancient civilizations" at a time when the Gauls were savages clad in the skins of wild beasts, whose flesh they ate raw.
We played by the river where Pharaoh's daughter had found Moses, and where He, who would be the Messiah, was perhaps already born, a little child sleeping amidst the reeds. The Messiah would surely usher in a time when there would be no Christians, no Moslems, and no Jews, no white, black, brown, or pink people, and no princes who rushed by in their big red cars, so hardened by the thick crust of their wealth that they could not see, hear, or smell the poor who crouched by the gates of the Qasr al-'Aini hospital, where the air was foul from the stench of their sores. Barefooted, the princes would then approach them, and the crippled, the sick, and the poor would rise, forgive them, and be whole again.
My friend Marie, a Catholic, said that the Messiah had already come, and that he was Jesus. I could not bear to think the Messiah had come, and failed, without God giving men another chance, as he had done so often since the time of the Great Flood. Perhaps, I thought, many false Messiahs had to come, to suffer and to die before every person could open his heart to Him who would come last. Jews were people who knew that another Messiah had yet to come, and that was why they waited. No matter what happened they would wait. That was their faith, their hope, their belief, that the Kingdom of Heaven would and could be on earth, in every man.
Marie spoke constantly of charity but accepted poverty as something to be compensated for in heaven. She was a Syrian, and like me, was half-native Levantine. She, too, was humiliated by our embittered British spinster teachers, but she never dreamt of revenge. She spoke of turning the other cheek, of meek resignation, of enduring one's sufferings for the love of Christ. I admired Marie; she also troubled and infuriated me. Marie never got angry. She told me I sinned through pride, and that people were not able to tell good from evil without the guidance of the Church. She pleaded with me and prayed for my conversion; she loved me and did not want me to burn in Hell because the Jews had killed Christ. I would retort, "When my Messiah comes, He will save everyone, even those who do not believe in him. And if he doesn't come, I don't want to be saved while other people burn in Hell. It's too unjust."
I racked my brain to find these arguments. I had had no formal religious instruction and had fitted together, as best I could, the notions I had gleaned from books, from the English translation of the Haggadah my father had given me for Passover and from what he told me of my religion. I was grateful for his trying. But one thing would often remind him of another, just like when people told stories in Arabic, so that I didn't know exactly where a story began or ended, and what was important and what was not.
When I passed by the English barracks, I would remember Gulliver, a sleeping giant, pinned down to earth by thousands of threads nailed to the ground by thousands of little people. It occurred to me that perhaps our thoughts were like those threads. If we kept winding them between our heads and our hearts every day for years on end, like an invisible spider spinning a web around the barracks, then one day, all of us could pull together, and the slumbering giant would awake. But alas, too late. The barracks would crack open, like the Philistines' Temple, and an avalanche of stones and pink-faced soldiers would be hurled into the Nile when its waters were high, and disappear forever, sucked in by the whirlpools. Then, when the English soldiers were gone, we would lock up our nannies and Misses in chicken coops, and parade them in the streets, lined with orange sand, like when the King opened Parliament, so that everyone on our street would have a good laugh before we shipped them back to His Majesty King George.
I wondered if other children had such thoughts, and feared that perhaps I was mad. I tried to reason with myself. The Messiah who would come would most certainly forgive even the British soldiers and the English Misses, so before He came perhaps I should forgive them myself, and if I did, perhaps they would just go away. But I couldn't forgive. I didn't really want to. The truth was that I loved hating them more than loving them, because it excited and thrilled me, while love was something tranquil and restful, like sleep. But, if people loved to hate, then there was no difference between the black, the brown, the white, and it did not matter whether or not the barracks were destroyed, because the Messiah who would come would fail, as Jesus had failed, as Moses had failed, and nothing would change, and if nothing could change, there was no sense even in being Jewish and waiting for the Messiah to come.
This riddle was in the Haggadah, which I loved because it taught me that we were the people who would be given the Promised Land. God himself had not been able to soften Pharaoh's heart, nor make him give up his wicked power over another people. God had had to force Pharaoh by threatening him with the Ten Plagues, and He hoped that after each one Pharaoh's heart would be filled with pity. But Pharaoh loved his power and his wealth, and rather than give them up, he let the crops which fed his own people be devoured by locusts, and the river which fed their fields be turned to blood, and the first-born die in the little mud huts which were like those of the fellahin.
After all that Moses had sacrificed for them, even his own people had worshipped the Golden Calf, which was very much like Tutankhamen's mummy case in the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities. Moses, who was the son of an Egyptian princess, died of sorrow, thinking of those who had perished en route and were refused entry to the Promised Land. We, his people, had not been worthy of the Promised Land, and would weep in exile until we learned to know what we had been chosen for. Then we would return to the Promised Land once more, the Messiah would come, and all would be peace and harmony. Everything would be different. We and the Egyptians would be free together, and no one would set us against each other.
To make this happy end possible, I had to find out why things had turned out so badly in Pharaoh's time. I could do this only by elaborating fantasies around symbols, because I did not know the words needed to express my thoughts. True, I was very young, but I also felt that none of the languages we spoke could express our thoughts, because none was our own. We were a people without a tongue and could speak only through signs and symbols. Our elders spoke of ordinary, everyday things, or about religion. Their religion was to say maktub, inshallah, "amen", "Our Father who art in Heaven," and to pray and fast sometimes; but it did not say anything about the things that were so difficult for us in life. Whether, for instance, it was right to want the British to go, and wrong to hate them, right to learn so many things from them and from their schools, but wrong not to want to be like the British and French, or our parents, or the Arabs. We were searching for something within ourselves which we had yet to find. Religion seemed to have nothing to do with how people lived, and this did not seem to worry them, although they said that religion explained life and told them what they must do.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Mongrels or Marvels Copyright © 2011 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments....................ixEditors' Introduction: Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff—A Cosmopolitan Levantine....................xi
1. Childhood in Egypt....................1
2. Passover in Egypt....................14
3. Such Is Rachel....................20
4. Journey to a Better Land....................32
5. A Line in the Sand....................38
6. Ma'adi....................54
7. Alexandria....................74
8. Cairo Wedding....................89
9. Europe from Afar....................100
10. A Culture Stillborn....................114
11. To Live and Die a Copt....................128
12. Wake of the Waves....................136
13. Reunion in Beersheba....................153
14. A Letter from Mama Camouna....................164
15. Rebel, My Brother....................177
16. Israel: Ambivalent Levantine....................193
17. To Remember Alexandria....................213
18. My Brother Ishmael: On the Visit of Anwar Sadat....................232
19. Welcome, Sadat....................239
Afterword: From East the Sun....................243
Glossary....................261
Index....................263