From the bookshelf: The making of an Egyptian Jew By Fayza Hassan I had been looking for the novels of Paula Jacques in Cairo after seeing a review of one of her books on French television. I found none in the main libraries but one day in Paris I went to the FNAC in search of her Lumière de l'Oeil (Light of the Eye or Nour el Ein). Jacques was born in Egypt in 1949 and was expelled (or left the country) with her family in 1957 after the Suez War. She grew up in Israel and later settled in France where she worked in radio, organized cultural events, wrote for newspapers and in 1980 became a successful author, writing about the life of Egypt's Jews before the Suez war. I asked the lady at the FNAC information desk for a reference number for Paula Jacques adding that she was "an Egyptian Jew." I was rewarded with a look that could have frozen the desert over. "Paula Jacques is French, Madame and her religion is none of our business," she informed me through clenched teeth, and then said no more. I did not want to prolong the exchange though I felt strangely conflicted. How dare she appropriate an author who wrote about my country and therefore belonged to us? Finally I found what I was looking for in the section of Middle Eastern Authors. Leaving the FNAC I remembered an interview given in 1995 by Jacques Hassoun another renowned Egyptian Jew, to a journalist in Palo Alto and which was cited later in Joel Benin's The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry (1998). Here Hassoun talks about the Jews who left Egypt to settle in France, and among them, discusses Jacques: "The Egyptian Jews think that she tells nonfiction stories even though she writes novels. These stories present Egyptian Jewry as ridiculous, composed of crooks, the impoverished, etc. The Egyptian Jews don't want to identify with this depiction. They don't like her." Joel Benin sheds light on who these (French) Egyptian Jews who shun Paula Jacques are: "The organization of Egyptian Jewish collective memory...most active and successful initiative was based in France. In December 1978 the topic of Egyptian Jews was introduced to a public meeting of about 400 people at the Centre Rachi in Paris...This event inspired the formation of the Association pour la sauveguarde du patrimoine des juifs d'Egypte [ASPCJE] in September 1979. During the early 1980s the ASPCJE held monthly events in Paris; and from 1980 to 1986 it published 25 issues of a quarterly journal Nahar Misraim (the Nile River). The ASPCJE was in some way connected with nearly every organized activity of Egyptian Jews and every publication about them during the 1980s." Paula Jacques was apparently inspired by these activities to revisit Egypt for the first time since 1957 then reported on her trip on France Culture radio programme. The year before (1980) she had published her novel Lumière de L'oeil which benefited from the publicity. "But," said Hassoun "even Paula Jacques knows that she could not have published her book without the work that we did in the Journal Nahar Misraim and in the association. We introduced her to the characters she used in her first novel. I am sure and I told her this and I say it publicly that she would not have existed if we had not done this work. She would have written something else she would have written in another way. But we cleared the path for her." Surprisingly, Paula Jacques is not known in Egypt yet the francophone public would have enjoyed the portraits of the Jewish Egyptian middle class that is so similar to that of other communities of the period such as the Syro-Lebanese, with their Franco-Arab idiom and their dietary excesses, who basked in their privileges, oblivious of the country they lived in and were only interested in food, jewellery and money. In Lumière de L'�il, Jacques describes the life of Jews in Cairo from 1952 to 1957. These are quiet days filled with frivolities for the women and petty business deals for the men. They are not only an apolitical bunch they are downright ignorant. Their children on the other hand are more aware, but often confuse Communism with Zionism. They want to act, to help the poor, to bring justice to the world, but end up concentrating on their parents' servants whom they attempt to indoctrinate (unsuccessfully). The work of Jacques has the particularity of recounting the tribulation of a number of similar Jewish families, but it always includes, as a parallel narrative, that of the life of a downtrodden woman servant, maybe one that worked for the family and of whom she was particularly close. In these passages she displays a great comprehension and compassion for the situation of the poor, a trait that is bound to endear her today to her Egyptian readers. Jacques, who often uses the voice of a little girl to tell her tales, stresses the ineptness of her Jewish protagonists: on the morning of the burning of Cairo the Castro family is preparing to go to Tanta for a few days of holiday. Their servant warns them that there is trouble in streets of Cairo. They climb to the roof of the building to observe the events which mildly disturb them ("They are going to once more destroy Jewish property," observes Mr Mizrahi quietly) but still they decided to convey a family council to see what can be done to save their wellbeing in case of an attack directed against the Jews. The Castro family in formal pyjamas is playing host to the reunion. As soon as the family members begin to arrive they sit around the table for their evening feast (Spicy salads, chicken with lemon sauce, stuffed vine leaves, meat balls with cumin, rice and yogurt) Jacques Castro breaks the bread uttering the traditional "Next year in Jerusalem." "What Jerusalem?" asks his sister Fortunée laughing nervously, "which next year? Let me die and don't speak of calamity even if the situation here is shaky," she wails. This is the only serious moment of the council. The Castros fight, joke, tease each other, stuff themselves and the spectacle of Groppi burning is quite forgotten and so is Jerusalem. "How does the French public feel about the setting of Paula Jacques novels," the interviewer asked Hassoun. "It amuses them. They find it very funny. They think it is a bizarre Diaspora because they know only the Diaspora of Eastern Europe or the North African Diaspora. They find it extravagant and a little strange but nothing else." These readers however know little about Egyptian society in these days. Whether Jacques was helped by the work of the ASPCJE to rise to fame is almost irrelevant. For Egyptian readers, her talent resides in her capturing the idiosyncrasies of one on the numerous foreign communities in Egypt which earned it in those days its reputation of cosmopolitanism.
