Another Beautiful Rose In The Arab World.

Note: This posting is about an Egyptian cultural monthly which sounds beautiful. It has recently published a prize winning short story from Israel. This sort of cross cultural movement is a good and healthy sign that the future can actually be positive if enough effort is made by all persons of good will.

Read and be encouraged...

Devil or ally?

By Sasson Somekh

"I was very hesitant when approaching the translation of the story 'Ana min al-yahud' into Arabic. The story is beautiful and interesting, and in my opinion very important because of the possibility inherent in it for understanding contemporary Israeli reality; moreover the story won the prize for the best short story in 2005 from Haaretz, the foremost Israeli publication, a newspaper whose annual prizes are esteemed by the Israeli cultural elite. I hesitated - despite the fact that the writer of the Hebrew story gave it a title in the Arabic language, 'Ana min hayahud' ["I Am From the Jews"], achieved a collective recognition in Israel and he overnight became a star on the cultural front there, and is now one of the outstanding writers published in Haaretz, a newspaper in which many wish to publish, but only talented writers are given the opportunity to do so."



Thus Muhammed Abboud, a researcher of Israel and its culture in Cairo, begins the extensive analysis he devoted to Almog Behar's story in the June issue of the well-known Cairene monthly Al-Hilal ("The Crescent"). Abboud indeed translated the story in full and published it along with an analytical article, and the monthly printed the story and analysis on special yellow paper and devoted the cover of the issue to this subject (the cover shows an ultra-Orthodox yeshiva student reading as he walks). Thus, Almog Behar, a young Jerusalemite poet and storyteller, a student at Hebrew University, has been given an honor the likes of which few Israelis have earned in the past.



The veteran al-Hilal, which has been coming out in Cairo since 1892, is one of the most popular cultural monthlies in Egypt and the Arab world, and many millions in the Middle East have expanded their cultural horizons thanks to its contents. It should be noted that this is not a literary publication, but rather a panoramic one that has tried, since the day it first went to press, to expand the reader's horizons and knowledge, and to endow him with information and criticism about what is happening in the world of culture everywhere, with a certain emphasis on what is happening in Egypt and its neighboring countries. It was founded by an energetic Lebanese immigrant, Jurjy Zeidan, who was a prolific writer and founded, inter alia, a literary monthly that remained in existence for 115 years, while most of the activities of the other Lebanese immigrants, who came to Egypt during the last quarter of the 19th century, sank into oblivion (apart from the daily newspaper Al-Ahram, which was also founded by a Lebanese immigrant at about the same time and continues to appear to this day).



Al-Hilal has preserved its original mission - that is, to expand the reader's cultural horizons - throughout the years, even if during the days of Gamal Abdel Nasser's regime, it was nationalized, together with all the rest of the publications, and for quite a few years it had editors forced upon it who had nationalist and "socialist" ideological tendencies. Fundamentally, however, al-Hilal never relinquished a number of its first intentions.





Spinoza and Einstein

When I was a high-school student in Baghdad, during the late 1940s, I would run to the newsstand in our neighborhood at a regular time each month to buy the new issue of Al-Hilal. Once I bought it I could not wait until I got home, and from reading the table of contents I would rejoice in the feeling that fascinating hours of reading awaited me. I will admit without embarrassment: Much of my knowledge of our contemporary world came to me from the issues of al-Hilal.



I must note that the issue of June 2006, presents, even in these "crazy" times, a secular cultural world whose existence one has difficulty believing, because of the atmosphere of return to orthodoxy in the Arab world in recent years - signs of which are also very evident in daily newspapers and journals that have no connection with the radical religious stream. In this issue, for example, there are articles on the following subjects: "Spinoza and Einstein: The philosopher and the scientist;" "Secularism in Egypt" (this article is written by prominent philosopher Murad Wahba, a leader of the secular stream in Cairo); "The roots of philosophy in Coptic Egypt;" an article by Butrous Butrous Ghali; and many other subjects 1,000 leagues apart from Islamic religious topics.



The article that Abboud has written about Behar's story is called "An outcry against cultural oppression." The aim of his analysis is to illuminate the theme in the folds of the story, which in Abboud's opinion is: I am an Arab Jew and I am oppressed and downtrodden because of the hegemony of the Ashkenazim (Jews of European origin). Abboud's article itself is very deserving of extensive analysis, on the one hand, in order to illustrate the vast knowledge the man has acquired concerning society and culture in Israel and, on the other hand, the mistakes that to a large extent derive from the fact that he has never visited Israel, and from his keenness to prove his own view of the contents of the story. My analysis will, I hope, appear in due course elsewhere.



Tenable interpretation

This interpretation of the text of the story is tenable to some extent, and it is possible to quote sentences and paragraphs of the story that will support such an interpretation. However, anyone who read Almog's story noticed that there is not a trace of protest in it against social or political protest by the Ashkenazim of Jews that came from the countries of the East (that is, not oppression or discrimination in the material sense). The plot of the story is "linguistic,"} above all. The narrator in the story suddenly loses his ability to speak Israeli Hebrew, and thus policemen and passersby suspect him of being an Arab or an Arab terrorist. Now he speaks with the glottal 'ayyin, the guttural het and the Arab tzadi, which is more in the direction of "s" with the tongue raised at the back than the sound "tz," the way his Iraqi grandfather used to speak. In the end, the protagonist infects his wife, who is not of Iraqi origin, and thus the linguistic "disease" spreads in all directions, and even Ashkenazim come down with it.



This summary of the plot does not, of course, do justice to its experiential contents, but it is clear that the protest is against a different injustice: against the coercion of speech (and perhaps also culture) that Mizrahi Israelis (Jews with origins in the Arab countries) did not want, and in the shaping of which they did not participate.



If the story is a protest story, we are dealing with spiritual oppression whose thrust is an attempt to eradicate the Arab-Mizrahi element in the experience of the Jews of the Middle East, and in any case not to include their universe and their memories in the central cultural norm. Anyone who wants to, can talk about hegemonism or even "racism" in the sense of a scornful attitude toward the other's culture and past, but this topic, as noted, deserves a more thorough discussion.



And indeed, the author of the article in al-Hilal was aware (although not to a sufficient extent, in my opinion) of the dangers of imposing a simplistic, one-way, black-and-white interpretation on a story as complex as Behar's. And this is what Abboud writes, after the paragraphs I translated at the start of this article: "My discomfort increased with respect to the question of whether this story - which deals with the problematics of the identity of the Jews who 'immigrated' to Israel from Arab countries - can enlighten us from the perspective of 'Is he for us or against us?' as the story contains the nuclei of many and varied interpretations. Simplistic superficial logic is liable to turn the Hebrew writer into the Devil's incarnation or, alternatively, a friend and ally to Arab culture, and all this because it deals with the oppression that exists in the State of Israel. These two approaches are far from being correct approaches."



However, despite this self-warning, Abboud adds that he, like many of his fellow scholars of Hebrew in Cairo (and they are many!), relates to the literary works that are written in Israel as raw materials from which it is possible to learn and to draw unambiguous conclusions about the "situation" in Israel and its culture. Relating to the artistic text as an aesthetic exhibit with multiple meanings is absent, in the end, from Abboud's fine article.

The translation of the story into Arabic is generally faithful to the original, and it is definitely readable, while Abboud's discussion, even if it is somewhat programmatic, testifies to impressive familiarity with everyday life and the linguistic aspects of the Israeli reality of today. Translation errors are to be found here and there, particularly in the transliteration and translation of the names of places and streets. The Jerusalemite names "Katamon" and "Talbieh," which apparently were incorrectly transliterated, whereas Yordei Hasira Street (literally, "those who came off the boat," referring to the illegal immigrants who came in by ship) is translated into something like "The Jumpers off the Ship."



And finally: In the cover picture in al-Hilal, as mentioned, there is a yeshiva boy with curly earlocks, who is reading a book as he walks (or stands to pray). It is possible to point to an error in identification, as the narrator in our story is explicitly a person from the Eastern Jewish communities who has Iraqi roots; there is no way he is Ashkenazi (or Yemenite). Although we learn that the protagonist of the story is growing a beard, he is definitely not an ultra-Orthodox person with earlocks. However, this mistaken identity should apparently not be attributed to Abboud, but rather to the designer of the issue who sought a clearly Jewish scene, supposedly, and also a Jerusalem scene in order to exemplify the backdrop of the plot of Behar's story.



Sasson Somekh is professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University. His memoir "Baghdad, Yesterday" (Hebrew, 2004) is to be published in English translation by Ibis.



http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/735651.html



Comment: If Australia had a government which had the slightest clue about handling the Muslim Question in Australia it would ensure that the Australia Council published a fortnightly magazine in Arabic which drew articles from very high quality secular magazines in the Middle East and paid for this magazine to be distributed as a supplement in the Arabic language newspapers.

But, of course, why spend money like that when it can be spent on more armour for SWAT teams?

Stupidity, thy name is Australia.