Final Solutions?

Abstract

The German occupation brought to French Jews a fresh realization of the profound anguish of the Jewish condition — and also to those Jews in North Africa who had been emancipated by the presence of France, and who had adopted French as their literary language. Albert Memmi is the most articulate of these writing today, and his new book, La Libération du Juif (Paris, Gallimard, 1966, 15 Fs, the second volume of his Portrait du Juif) proposes what is for him the only possible solution to that condition. M. Memmi himself is a very interesting phenomenon, a Tunisian Jew who has described the life of the North African ghetto in Statue de Sel and has since analysed the psychology of colonialism in Portrait du Colonisateur. The fact that he was a member of an oppressed minority within an oppressed majority under French colonial rule made his situation rather special. The French language liberated him from the ghetto, but separated him from the Arab majority who, at the same time, were trying to free themselves from the French. The young Memmi obviously sympathized with their aspirations, whilst realizing that once they were achieved his own people would be far worse off than they had been under the French. And this in fact is precisely what has happened: the life of the North African Jewish communities has been made intolerable by the new independent Arab governments, whether monarchical or democratic-socialist, and another exodus has begun from what were once flourishing communities.