The Heart of a Stranger

by André Naffis-Sahely

  It was in Algiers that I grew up. I shared the life of my exiled elders, targeted for all manner of problems reserved for outsiders and driven by just one hope: of returning to Spain once Franco had been overthrown. Of itself, this obsession of theirs explains their stand-offishness as a cultural group; they kept out of the events that were to shape Algerian history. But there were ideological grounds too for this undeniable remoteness (on the part of the libertarians at any rate) from a land that they regarded, right up until the end, as simply a place of transit, and from its inhabitants. In fact, when the colonized rose in violent revolt against their colonizers in November 1954, a ferocious seven-year war ensued. During which terrorism and a trail of bereavement, hatred and thirst for vengeance would become standard practice. The libertarian “Spanish refugees” would take no part in the conflict, although right from the start they were sympathetic to the fact that the oppressed had finally rebelled against their colonial masters. But they could not see how their own struggle could be squared with a fight for national independence and the creation of an Algerian state. During rare contacts with the local leadership of the National Liberation Front (FLN), the comrades tried to persuade them that all their people would be doing would be exchanging one master for another, an Algerian exploiter for a French one. They also criticized the complacency with which the Movement played along with the Muslim religion. And they disapproved of the rebels’ tactics of using terrorist outrages as a fighting method, something that was to lead to their murdering more than one of our comrades on the grounds that he was a “roumi”, a European like all the rest. This reflected a sordidly racist, inhuman behaviour like the one that drove their colonialist opponents. In short, the Spanish libertarians could not see anything in that struggle around which to mobilize. In Spain, they had fought for an end to capitalist society and to install a regime of exemplary justice for all the peoples of the earth.

  Besides, had they, in spite of everything, thrown their weight somehow behind the uprising, they were still Spaniards, i.e. foreigners, utterly forbidden to interfere with French government domestic policy. Breaching that ban amounted to illegal interference and that would have jeopardized their special residency status which entitled them to go on living in Algeria, or in France. Finally, the last but undeniable factor preventing engagement with the insurgent movement was the aforementioned obsession they had with some day returning to Spain. After twenty years in exile, this still-vivid dream impelled them to devote all of their efforts to making a reality of that dream. All of which explains of course why no history of the Algerian war, so far as I am aware, ever mentions the presence of Spanish refugees or tackles their stance on events in Algeria. Does that not mean that they should be lumped together with the masses of “Algerian French”? That is hard to say, they being “refugee Spaniards”. Nor can they be lumped with the pieds noirs. For the reasons set out, the libertarians never backed the cause of an Algerian Algeria, but it is equally true that they did actively oppose the criminal activity of the OAS, some at the risk of their lives, as in the case of comrade Suria who used to sell anarchist newspapers in the bars of Bab-el-Oued; he was murdered by OAS thugs and his remains dumped in a sack labelled “So perish all traitors”. But then again, as far as the libertarians were concerned, opposing the OAS, which had secured support from Spain, boiled down to fighting Francoism rather than participating in the Algerian people’s national liberation struggle. Even though it is a fact that on the whole they had always been openly hostile to the colonial population, which they held to be reactionary in political terms, their stance was a non-interventionist one. This fight was not their fight. They were neither for a French Algeria nor for an Algerian Algeria.

  After the declaration of independence (and the Evian Treaty of 1962) the vast majority of the “Spanish refugees in Algeria” opted for exile in metropolitan France. In my own case, having taken French nationality and become a teacher, I stayed on in Algeria to help out. This enabled me to witness the birth of the Algerian state and to see confirmation of the analysis earlier offered by libertarian comrades. The fellagha populace of the Mitidja, workers from Belcourt or Bab-el-Oued still worshipped Allah and found themselves under new masters. The only change was that they and the masters were now citizens of a now Algerian Algeria.

  Translated from French by Paul Sharkey

  MARTHA NASIBÚ

  from Memories of an Ethiopian Princess

  It sometimes seemed that Fascist officials decided our fate, using us like pawns on a chessboard. After a long period of calm, two carabinieri knocked at our door and informed us that we had to leave Naples. They would come and take us away the next day. Evidently, our travails hadn’t ended. At daybreak one day in May 1938, the eleven of us hastily boarded a ship that was going to the island of Rhodes, in the Aegean Sea. Mother entrusted our kind neighbours to inform the schools of our absence sine die.

  When we got to the island we were sent to a villa with a sprawling garden. The kids were quick to notice a wonderful swing hooked to the highest branch of a soaring walnut tree. It was our consolation, and the fulcrum of our games. The first thing we did was divide parts of the tree between us. Fassil, the only one who could venture up to the topmost branches, took over that section. Those of us who were smaller acquired the more modest lower branches. Upon awakening each morning, we made our way to the gigantic tree and climbed exultant on our own branch and began daydreaming.

  So many adventures took place on that venerable tree! We used the swing to see who could launch themselves the highest into the air and who, from that height, could jump the farthest onto the ground. There were so many thrills, and so much laughter that leavened our days! At any rate, nature, as the saying goes, is generous with those who live peacefully with her. The tree rewarded us for lavishing it with attention and distracting it from its loneliness by bearing fruit in abundance. We made huge feasts out of its exquisite walnuts. But Mother was the bulwark that put our hearts at ease. Her inner strength flowed from the faith she had in a divine plan, which was always the fount of her inspiration. Atzede continued believing that the impossible could become real with God’s help.

  Mother, who tirelessly advocated for the usefulness of our studies despite the constant movements that rudely interrupted them, enrolled us in new schools wherever we went. This time, however, in Rhodes, she didn’t find religious schools willing to take us in, and so we had to remain at home. “God will provide, don’t be afraid.” She comforted us and never stopped hoping for better days, when we would finally be able to live normal lives. The military surveillance was very discreet in Rhodes. Wherever we went, we never saw them. “Look! They’re hiding in the bushes!” Fassil shouted to get under our skin when we least expected it. Or, “Watch out for our shadows behind those plants!”, and so on. It was torture. Always the prankster, he never hesitated to joke to make us laugh. But when Mother happened to hear him being a smart-aleck, she always cautioned him. “Careful, Fassil, these people don’t play around!”

  We could roam around Rhodes feeling something quite like freedom. I have a wonderful recollection of the island, bright and bursting with greenery, where the intense blue of the sea and the white houses mirroring one another created a suggestive contrast, and the streets were paved with natural-coloured mosaics — ochre, burnt sienna, evergreen, grey, black and white — that left magnificent arabesques on the pavement. The islanders were obliging and jocular. Guided by friends from the area, we could admire art and architecture and visit the botteghe of consummate goldsmiths who fashioned ornate, filigreed objects, mostly Maltese crosses, the symbol of the Knights Hospitaller. Our coerced stay, however, lasted only three months. On October 2nd, 1938 we were yet again put on a steamer that brought us back to Naples, where we stayed until July 1939.

  It was as if the Fascists were trying to hide us from encroaching spirits. It’s impossible to give a sensible explanation for such paranoid frenzy. We had become cumbersome merchandise and could no longe
r make sense of our movements. In Italy, however, word was going around that Mussolini no longer wanted “these Abyssinian negroes” in Italian territory. Whether or not that was true, on 19th July 1939 we were once more cast out to sea and making our way to Tripoli. The more I think of it, calendars no longer had any use in our nomadic lives. Only the shifts in climate told us that spring or winter had arrived. We changed schools, teachers, and friends with each move from one country to another, and this went on for who knows how long. We attended a school just in time to learn some geography, the formation of clouds and their names: cumulus, cirrus, cumulonimbus, cirrus stratus, etc… Or the history of Rome: Romulus and Remus, the she-wolf, Numa Pompilius and the other kings. Just when we smiled at one of our classmates, in the hope of finally finding a little friend, we were forced to embark towards a new destination.

  Translated from Italian by Aaron Robertson

  ELENA SHVARTS

  Why, Let the Stricken Deer Go Weep

  QUEEN: If it be, why seems it so particular with thee?

  HAMLET: ‘Seems’, madam – nay, it is, I know not ‘seems’.

  I.

  In February 1942 the Leningrad Theatre Institute, or at least, what was left of it, was evacuated from besieged Leningrad to Pyatigorsk, together with the Philharmonic and Radlov’s Theatre Company. They had barely settled or begun recovering a little from their starvation, when the Germans began a sudden and unexpected offensive in the Caucasus and reached Pyatigorsk with unimaginable speed. The soldiers and the town’s administration all fled south to Tbilisi. Almost everyone in the Theatre Institute set off in their wake, the students walking, some hitching lifts on the last military lorries going in that direction. Initially my mother and her friend had the luck to be offered a ride, but then the soldiers began harassing them, and finally, angered by their aloofness, they threw them back out onto the road. Not everyone left. One Jewish girl wouldn’t believe that the Germans were annihilating the Jews. “They are a cultured nation,” she insisted. Another girl, a friend of the first, said nothing, and stayed on too. When the Germans arrived, a Russian family looked after the Jewish girl. One day she went to the market and met her old friend there. The friend was keen to find out where she was living, and when she returned home, a German firing squad was waiting for her. The family who had sheltered her had already been shot. In the few hours between the arrival of the Germans and the departure of the town’s administration, Radlov and his theatre company had a meeting to decide whether to stay or to leave. Many of them decided to remain in the town, however Boris Smirnov, the handsome young lead, refused to stay and, together with his wife, who was still breastfeeding their child, fled by foot on the road through the Caucasus.

  Radlov’s Theatre subsequently toured its production of Hamlet all around Germany, with Nikolai Kriukov in the role of Prince Hamlet. There were rumours that Hitler had seen the production. It seems likely that for Radlov the hidden meaning of the performance was that it was about “life in thrall to a villain”. But was it worth exchanging one villain for another? In the end Radlov’s Theatre met a tragic fate. The French handed them over to the Soviet Union and the Radlovs themselves were arrested in the airport upon arrival, although the actors were spared for some unknown reason. But that is another story altogether. I am writing here about Hamlet, which was performed in a translation by Anna Radlova, the wife of Sergei Radlov and a famous poet in her own right who later died in a camp. Kriukov was also imprisoned, and after his release became a film actor — I remember him in the film The Last Inch. You could just about work out what sort of Hamlet he might have made: a rather cold, rational Hamlet. (How many faces Hamlet has — is there no end to the different ways of being Hamlet? Every generation sees him anew, every generation sees in him the true man of the age. He’s sometimes played as an old man, or a freak, or then again “one of the boys” — and he’s been played by women, and six people all at once, just like the many-headed Hydra…) My mother, Dina Shvarts, saw Radlov’s Hamlet twenty-five times whilst she was still at school. She always said that Radlova’s translation was the best of all of them, at least in theatrical terms. But what would you expect — after all, Radlova was translating it for her own theatre, her own director. Everything in it is easy to say, workable, theatrical, even if Pasternak’s translation is more profound and poetically brilliant.

  II.

  After my mother died I began reading Hamlet feverishly, in all its different translations, picking it up in various different places — end, beginning, middle. I was drawn to it, as a sick animal is drawn to the herb that will cure it. For a long time I couldn’t work out where this obsession came from, I merely drank it down, like the dark, bitter drug it was. Then I realised something apparently quite obvious about the tragedy, something which has until now gone unnoticed, and it is this: Hamlet is about being orphaned, about being completely orphaned. At the very beginning we learn about the murder of two fathers. Most of the characters (all of the main characters!) are the children of murdered parents: Hamlet, Ophelia, Laertes and Fortinbras. Hamlet Senior kills Fortinbras Junior, and Hamlet Junior kills his potential father-in-law. Shakespeare circles around the slaying of fathers with extraordinary relentlessness, as if compelled to do so. Perhaps the Shakespeare authorship problem might be solved by addressing this compulsion. The author of Hamlet was not of course Shakespeare, the son of a butcher, who came to theatre accidentally, watching over the horses left in the theatre courtyard, and not, of course a group of aristocrats, as Yury Liubimov recently proclaimed. Marlowe? Rutland? The feelings associated with the death of a parent are so strong in this play I think the author is someone who lost a father in about 1600…

  And for all of them, apart from Fortinbras, the death of a parent leads to their own death. If the play is all about coming to terms with the death of a loved one, then no one manages it — Ophelia goes mad (and certainly not out of love for Hamlet), Laertes lets himself be killed, and Hamlet too, both apparently moved by the idea of revenge. But is it really revenge that guides them? “The time is out of joint” (is translated beautifully but approximately by Pasternak as “the thread that strings the days is torn”; Radlova’s version cleaves much closer to the text — “the age is dislocated”). This is exactly the feeling you have when you lose a much-loved parent, the one who carried in themselves the conceiving of your own time. Since my mother died the days have dragged like years, or flown past like moments, and what happened yesterday is buried in the memory, in the sands and lost corners of shadowy death. This loss is inevitable for almost all of us, and this orphan of a play is about all of us. The meaning of this rather lightly worn piece of prose is that Hamlet is a play about orphans, a play about the orphans lost in the world, who have nothing to revenge themselves upon, except perhaps death itself. In no other play by Shakespeare is there such a circling of thought around a single axis — death: the mysteries of death, its meaning and meaninglessness, Yorick, poor Yorick and the gravediggers, and the leaping into the grave. And it moves all the characters like a puppeteer — there it is, not love, nor ambition, but pitiless, incomprehensible death.

  Translated from Russian by Sasha Dugdale

  ELIAS KHOURY

  from My Name Is Adam

  When I saw Claude Lanzmann’s movie “Shoah”, I was struck dumb. It was in 1991, at the house of an American Jewish doctor called Sam Horovitz who had decided to return to the Promised Land and had taken up residence in Ramat Aviv. The guy was a model of courtesy and good nature. He called me up to discuss an article of mine about Umm Kulsoum’s song “Ahl al-Hawa” that had been published in Kol Ha’ir. Sam and his wife Kate were lovers of Arabic music and regularly attended video-screenings of Egyptian movies. He called me and we met more than once. He declared his admiration for my articles, with their openness towards Arab culture, and said he’d never met another Jew so open to the culture of the region.

  He asked me to explain oriental musical modes and the concept of the quarter-tone,
and I was astonished by his love of Arabic culture. He said he’d read Diary of a Country Prosecutor by the Egyptian writer Tawfiq al-Hakim, translated into English by Aba Eban (sometime Israeli minister of foreign affairs), and had fallen under the spell of that writer, who had managed to present the social issues of the poverty-stricken Egyptian countryside in the form of a detective novel. He had daring ideas on the necessity of Israel’s integration into the Arab region and showed sympathy for the cause of the Palestinian refugees living in wretched camps. Once, after a long discussion over coffee, I told him I wanted to ask him a question but was hesitant to do so and afraid of upsetting him.

  I asked him why he had gone there. “You love Arabic culture but Israel is a project with a Western bent that despises the culture of the country’s original inhabitants, so why did you come here?”

  He answered me that he’d come because of Claude Lanzmann and spoke at length about the genius of that great leftist man of culture, friend of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. He said Lanzmann’s movie “Shoah” had changed his life and was one of the reasons for his adoption of his Jewish identity and his decision to return to the Promised Land.

  “Lanzmann was the portal to my identity. Umm Kulsoum, though, is the magic of the East that captivated my heart when I came here.

  “Have you seen the movie?” he asked me.

  “No. I’ve heard of it, but the hype here in Israel made me reluctant to go and see it. I don’t like blockbusters.”

  “This time, you’re wrong,” he said, and he invited me to his house, where I spent six hours transfixed in front of the small screen witnessing savagery in its most extreme manifestations.