ALBERT MEMMI AND THE MOMENT I HEARD ABOUT THIS FRENCH INTELLECTUAL

 

Albert Memmi, a leading mid-20th century French intellectual and writer best known for nonfiction books and novels that unraveled his anomalous identity as an ardent anti-imperialist, an unapologetic Zionist and a self-described “Jewish Arab,” died on May 22 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris. He was 99.

 

 

Only today, 6th September 2020 in Miami, did I hear about it. Sadness and Nostalgia.

Where did I hear of Albert Memmi? I am a jewish boy from South Caulfield, Melbourne, how could I have known about Albert Memmi?

I was a postgraduate student in Anthropology at London. I was in Paris, the first of many fateful visits to that city of light and love, and was having dinner with two postgraduate law students, both graduates from Sciences-Po.

Elizabeth was Jewish and Tunisian and M was a Bretonne. Both were brilliant. I had just tried to digest Michael Bakhtin's analysis of Rabelais and I was comparing the banality of Carnival of Rio to the sophistication of a Venetian carnaval..

You are confusing the centuries, I clearly remember Elizabeth reprimanding me.

Was it Elizabeth who told me about Albert Memmi? 

and that i should read the growing up jewish story of a Tunisian Jew? 

I remember the pleasure of reading it, adding it up to the collection of growing up jewish in far away places..

Albert Cohen  Book of my mother.   from Crete.

 A kaddish for Albert Memmi..

In The Jewish Review of Books, Daniel Gordon wrote in 2018 that Mr. Memmi “has combined, perhaps more than any other writer since World War II, the compassion needed to articulate the suffering of oppressed groups with the forthrightness needed to censure them for their own acts of oppression.”

Mr. Memmi said of his writings: “All of my work has been in sum an inventory of my attachments; all of my work has been, it should be understood, a constant revolt against my attachments.”

“I was a sort of half-breed of colonization,” he once said, “understanding everyone because I belonged completely to no one.”

I never saw Elizabeth after that one meeting. Hope she is running some department or another in a French Ministry. 

I have yet another Tunisian connection (there may be more, if I think about it)

Many years later, in an elegant apartment in Vedado along the avenue of the Presidents, I met the first ever Cuban Ambassador to Tunisia. He said he was sent there, with his wife as his help to open the first embassy of Cuba in Tunis. He was received by. Habib Bourguiba the then president of Tunisia..he enchanted me with stories of north Africa of those days..

We cannot manage to meet the wonderful millions who inhabit this earth but we can meet some people who would take us to other places in our imagination 

dedicated to MMD for whom I have special tenderness today.