“Memory is a Mechanism for Forgetting”:

Reflections on the Nostalgia of Exile.

By Lyn Julius.

Laurie Darmon is the French grand-daughter of a Jewish refugee from Egypt. A few years ago,  she picked up her family’s photo albums and asked her grandmother to tell her the stories behind them.

A Paris-based songwriter, Darmon understood that an entire generation of Jews born in Arab countries would take their memories to the grave. ‘”The culture suffused my family, the smells, the spices, the human warmth – I loved it all and it is so much a part of me,” she says. 

In 2017, Laurie Darmon wrote L’Exil, her Alexandrian grandmother had scoffed that people would be deaf and blind to the song. A few months later, her grandmother was dead. But L’exil has gained a worldwide following and about half-a million views on Youtube.

In the video of the song, the granddaughter is seen wandering through her grandmother’s empty apartment. “The question lodged inside me and never left me,” Laurie Darmon comments. “The opening verse of my song is: ‘What Middle East is she talking about?... A pretty lady who spent her youth in the old port of Alexandria...She remembers it all, the scents, the colours, time has not faded her memories...and suddenly there is silence...Exile.’”

Darmon admitted to feeling  uncomfortable sharing such an intimate song about her  family, but she appreciated only too well the global appeal of a song about exile. “So many people have been through the experience [of displacement] and many were  still going through it,” she was quoted as saying.

Exile is universal, but it is also particularly Jewish. Few other peoples have survived  for millennia outside their ancestral homeland. But even when they are “home” in Israel, Mizrahim say things like: “I left Iraq (or Egypt, or Morocco) but it never left me.”

The irony is that Jews who were brutally uprooted can also be inconsolably nostalgic about the place which threw them out. Few displacements were more brutal than that from Egypt, when Jews like Darmon’s grandmother were often given 24 hours, or a few days, to leave in 1956.

Judaism warns against nostalgia: “Don’t look back.  Rebuild your life.” Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt when she succumbed to the temptation. It’s a lesson for us all. Yet the religion has equipped us with the tools to survive in exile for 2,000 years.

Much of  Albert Bensoussan’s writings evoke his country of birth, Algeria, which disgorged its Jews in 1962 after a murderous civil war. “Nostalgia has a bad name,” he reflects, “because it is said that it is futile to look back, that it hinders action, paralyses you, impede the flow of time, slows down or stops history which, as we know, steamrollers ahead.” 

No doubt, nostalgia afflicts the ex-refugee when he or she has more time to ruminate about the past. The singer Georges Moustaki, who died aged 79 and spent most of his life in France, wanted to be buried in his native (judenrein) Alexandria. In the end, he wasn’t — the practical difficulties were too great. But the actor Roger Hanin, 89, who had not lived in Algeria for forty years, got his last wish and was buried in Algiers, a city also devoid of Jews.

Albert Bensoussan recognises that nostalgia is an old person’s prerogative. “When we reach the end of the race, when we are out of breath, when we are about to be born into the next life, then what we call nostalgia floods into one’s whole being, rolls it in its waves, flips it in its waves.”

Why  do Jews forced to leave Arab countries have positive memories? They are often the preserve of the middle or upper classes, who during the colonial era were socially insulated from violence and threats in their comfortable villas. The great writer Albert Memmi, a child of the impoverished Tunis ghetto, writes: “If the pogrom never reached the plush neighbourhoods with their mixed Jewish, Muslim and Christian homes, the huge ghetto... was under permanent threat of death.”

Another explanation is that exiled Jews were children at the time, and children were often shielded from the vicissitudes of the real world by their parents.

On the other hand, it is also an observable fact that the Jewish psyche suppresses unpleasant memories. According to the historian Georges Bensoussan (no relation to Albert), “memory is a mechanism for forgetting.”

Robert Satloff, who interviewed North African Jews who survived World War II,  was stunned to discover a phenomenon he termed “Jewish denial.” Satloff even met a Jew who claimed to have nice memories of the Nazis. “Generally,” he writes in Among the Righteous, “when I ask Jews in Morocco and Tunisia  about their own and their families’ experiences during the war, the usual refrain was ‘it wasn’t so bad.’ It was only after several of these conversations did it occur to me that this sort of denial among Jews from Arab lands is part of their overall strategy for survival.”

Satloff adds: “As the last remnant of a people who had mastered the art of living as a tolerated community, sometimes protected, often abused, always second class - over 1,400 years of Muslim rule, these Jews had long also made peace with their lot. Their silence about the persecution they suffered at the hands of the Nazis and their Vichy and Fascist allies is just the latest in a string of silences.”

For centuries, Jews were a subjugated “dhimmi” minority under Islamic rule. The researcher Bat Ye’or identifies  a type of “dhimmi” syndrome in which unpleasant memories are erased. The dhimmi perceives himself as a devalued human being. Fourteen centuries of degradation and humiliation are not easily overcome after living for two generations in the free world.

This tendency to gloss over unpleasant experiences means that history is being distorted in order to whitewash Arab antisemitism.

Arab states have never recognised, much less apologised for violating Jewish human rights and for causing the mass displacement of 99 percent of their loyal Jewish population. Arab regimes have never offered them compensation or redress. To the contrary, history is being re-written to exonerate Arab regimes.

Some of these revisionists are Jews. For instance, the historian Avi Shlaim absolves the Iraqi government from responsibility for the mass exodus of Jews from that country in the 1950s. He glosses over any persecution they experienced in order to blame the Zionists.

Jews who fancy themselves as bridge-builders with the Arab world may also have a tendency to whitewash Arab and Muslim antisemitism. Reluctance to dwell on the points of division, while exalting cultural and religious points of connection, is hampering any Jewish attempt to fight for justice. Jews from Arab countries do not want to be seen as the obstacle to peace initiatives or campaigns for interfaith harmony.

This syndrome is not helped by Israel’s failure to implement a coherent strategy to advocate for Mizrahi rights. For decades, Mizrahi Jews in Israel echoed the official line that Jews were Zionists returning to their ancestral homeland. In reality, they were concealing the fact that they had arrived in Israel as humiliated refugees. They sometimes even kept the real reason for their flight from their own families.

For instance, it was only by accident that Sivan Vizman found out why her grandfather left Marrakesh:

“I never knew that he left as a result of pogroms in Morocco. I naively thought that he came to Israel out of Zionist motivation only. His brothers always told us about his luxury apartment in Marrakesh, compared to the great poverty in which he lived since coming to Israel. I did not know that my aunt Rachel was blinded because she did not receive medical treatment. He never complained as he very Zionist and patriotic; he never accepted charity and claimed the best thing he had ever done was going to live in Israel. Only when I started researching the topic, I found out that although they had a beautiful apartment with servants, the servants turned from friends to foes overnight. I learnt that Molotov cocktails were thrown at the apartment and that his eldest children were picked on and harassed.”

Jewish memory has an important role to play: it affirms that Jews once lived in Arab and Muslim countries, a millennial history that is continuously being erased or denied. Some of the refugees’ grandchildren, like Laurie Darmon, are rediscovering those roots. But that existence must not be romanticised or distorted at the expense of truth. ◦

The daughter of Jewish refugees from Iraq, Lyn Julius is a journalist, blogger and speaker. She is the founder of Harif, the UK Association of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa (www.harif.org) and the author of Uprooted: How 3,000 Years of Jewish Civilisation in the Arab World Vanished Overnight.