A New Novel Captures Life in Los Angeles and Beirut

Reviewed By Jordan Elgrably

Do you remember the early ‘90s in Los Angeles? Between the riots, the Northridge earthquake, OJ Simpson and the Malibu mudslides, it became an apocalyptic landscape, at once horrific, beautiful, and unforgettable.

Not unlike Beirut during its civil war, 1975-1990.

This Angelic Land:, a novel by Aris Janigian (West of West Books, 2012)

This Angelic Land:, a novel by Aris Janigian (West of West Books, 2012)

This Angelic Land is a novel set in Los Angeles during the 1992 Rodney King riots—the largest, most destructive civil uprising in American history. Adam Derderian, the central protagonist, is a 27-year-old Lebanese Armenian bar owner. The narrative shifts back and forth from his perspective to that of his brother, a New York-based artist five years his senior. The backdrop is their youth during the Lebanese civil war in Beirut—one of the longest civil wars in modern history.

The novel frames the riots "as a historically conditioned collision of dispossessed tribes on a patch of contested ground," thus conjuring an intriguing comparison between Los Angeles and Beirut, two cities not often juxtaposed, though perhaps they should be in view of the fact that Beirut for the longest time was a cosmopolitan, multicultural, Levantine environment, home to seventeen different religious communities and countless ethnic neighborhoods. (Thanks to the machinations of two L.A. councilmen, Dennis Zine and Eric Garcetti, today Los Angeles and Beirut are sister cities.) 

Rodney King died this year, drowning in his swimming pool under circumstances that remain murky, yet the beginning of his story (and ours) these twenty years later comes into stark relief: "In black and white, the monochrome color of the plainest of dreams, several police, batons cocked, surrounded a man prone on the ground with his head vaguely raised. Then the man rose, and a policeman struck him, and the man went down, and then rose again and the policeman struck him again, and again...Suddenly, the man, like some cornered and wounded buffalo, lunged, and at the vile sight of his unlikely power they lunged back, his buffalo-sized body absorbing blow after baton blow."

Novelist Aris Janigian (Photo: Lisa Persky)

Novelist Aris Janigian (Photo: Lisa Persky)

Fortunately for the reader, Aris Janigian writes with the muscular prose of an old-school fiction junkie, and so between the action and the characters' reflections, this novel is a page-turner. Raised before the advent of our screen culture (throughly dominated today by smart phones and texting), Janigian is a longtime L.A. resident and former humanities professor at SCI-Arc whose two previous novels are Bloodvine and Riverbig. He also co-authored Something for Nothing, a book on digital design, with April Greiman. 

Janigian packs the description of riots in L.A. and life in Beirut with pithy observations and gritty realism. He also offers up two particularly memorable characters in "the Kurd" and "the Wizard," the latter a gay aging college professor and reclusive intellectual who befriends Adam during one of the darkest periods of his young life. The Kurd, meanwhile, is sui generis, offering some of the most curmudgeonly moments in the story. Though he is a Muslim from northern Iraq, the Kurd comes off as a wry critic of Islam:

"I tell you, this country and its hypocrisy is reminding me more and more of Islam," said the Kurd. "Where everything is paved over with religion and morality you will find in the tiniest cracks the most extreme hypocrisy and decadence. Look at these shahs and princes and whatever, these wicked little Muslim god-trembling playboys from Dubai and The Emirates and Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, all these disgusting oil slicks; they buy girls from around the world and do to them things the American Cup of Joe can't even imagine. I tell you, America is turning this way, too."

Lest one suspect the author of a little bit of Islamophobia, he has the Kurd voice criticism of the other People of the Book as well:

"Look at the Jews, a people who never looked to anyone for a shekel, the way they have become crybabies. Every third millionaire is a Jew and half the nations on earth are shoving billions to cover their loss and he acts like some poor orphan still stuck in the ghetto, whining and pounding fists and jumping up and down, making the world believe that behind every corner a giant waits to stomp him to death when in fact there is nothing more than a neurotic little midget..."

If the Kurd appears now and then for some comic relief, the Wizard seems to embody the author's attempt to engage in psychological introspection about his characters, and perhaps himself.

Make no mistake, This Angelic Land (the title is taken from a poem by William Blake) is an all-American novel, yet it bares its Middle Eastern soul. Its characters may have left Beirut during the civil war to emigrate to America, but their roots are firmly planted in the Levant. "Back in New York," the brother of his protagonist (Janigian's alter ego?), reflects, "the friends I'd collected, a kind of second family, understood what I was feeling all too well: a Palestinian poet, a Persian museum curator, an Iraqi composer, a Syrian stand-up comedian, and others, all of us exiles from historically rich cultures that were in tatters. We would meet three nights a week for kebobs, and hummus, and taboule, pounding our fists in outrage at the latest caricature of the Middle East. Every week we watched the cradle of civilization wheeled into the psych-ward. They showed our wars, internal strife, corrupt leaders and terrorists and jihadists and self-immolating pilgrims, but they never once let it be known that our birthplace was also the birthplace of agriculture, writing, and the fucking wheel!"

What makes this novel unique, finally, is the way in which it almost organically spins east and west together, interweaving Middle Eastern and American characters and identities as if they are inextricably part of one another's past, present, future. Says the Kurd:

"I loved to watch this Star Trek when I first came to America: Kirk and Scotty and Zulu and Chkov and Orooroo and McCoy, zipping to galaxies in the blink of an eye, light speed warp speed, I don't know what speed, reading minds and healing with a wand, but with their simple humanity shining bright.

"For me, the starship Enterprise was like a giant lantern these brave men and women carried through the darkest of dark ignorance galaxies. The essence of America, what the future was supposed to bring, but with each step forward in technology our simply humanity has taken ten steps back..."

Ultimately This Angelic Land is about the tragedies of the macrocosm contrasted with a personal tragedy in the microcosm that was at least as likely to have occurred in Beirut as in Los Angeles. Readers are left wishing they could encounter Janigian's cast of characters in his protagonist's bar and continue the conversation.

A New Novel Captures Life in Los Angeles and Beirut

This Angelic Land, a novel by Aris Janigian, West of West Books, 2012

21 Nov., 2012 | Levantine Review | Reviewed By Jordan Elgrably

Do you remember the early ‘90s in Los Angeles? Between the riots, the Northridge earthquake, OJ Simpson and the Malibu mudslides, it became an apocalyptic landscape, at once horrific, beautiful, and unforgettable.

Not unlike Beirut during its civil war, 1975-1990.

A novel by Aris Janigian.

A novel by Aris Janigian.

This Angelic Land is a novel set in Los Angeles during the 1992 Rodney King riots—the largest, most destructive civil uprising in American history. Adam Derderian, the central protagonist, is a 27-year-old Lebanese Armenian bar owner. The narrative shifts back and forth from his perspective to that of his brother, a New York-based artist five years his senior. The backdrop is their youth during the Lebanese civil war in Beirut—the longest civil war in modern history.

The novel frames the riots "as a historically conditioned collision of dispossessed tribes on a patch of contested ground," thus conjuring an intriguing comparison between Los Angeles and Beirut, two cities not often juxtaposed, though perhaps they should be in view of the fact that Beirut for the longest time was a cosmopolitan, multicultural, Levantine environment, home to seventeen different religious communities and countless ethnic neighborhoods. (Thanks to the machinations of two L.A. councilmen, Dennis Zine and Eric Garcetti, today Los Angeles and Beirut are sister cities.)

Rodney King died this year, drowning in his swimming pool under circumstances that remain murky, yet the beginning of his story (and ours) these twenty years later comes into stark relief: "In black and white, the monochrome color of the plainest of dreams, several police, batons cocked, surrounded a man prone on the ground with his head vaguely raised. Then the man rose, and a policeman struck him, and the man went down, and then rose again and the policeman struck him again, and again...Suddenly, the man, like some cornered and wounded buffalo, lunged, and at the vile sight of his unlikely power they lunged back, his buffalo-sized body absorbing blow after baton blow."

Fortunately for the reader, Aris Janigian writes with the muscular prose of an old-school fiction junkie, and so between the action and the characters' reflections, this novel is a page-turner. Raised before the advent of our screen culture (throughly dominated today by smart phones and texting), Janigian is a longtime L.A. resident and former humanities professor at SCI-Arc whose two previous novels are Bloodvine and Riverbig. He also co-authored Something for Nothing, a book on digital design, with April Greiman.

Janigian packs the description of riots in L.A. and life in Beirut with pithy observations and gritty realism. He also offers up two particularly memorable characters in "the Kurd" and "the Wizard," the latter a gay aging college professor and reclusive intellectual who befriends Adam during one of the darkest periods of his young life. The Kurd, meanwhile, is sui generis, offering some of the most curmudgeonly moments in the story. Though he is a Muslim from northern Iraq, the Kurd comes off as a wry critic of Islam:

Novelist Aris Janigian (Photo: Lisa Persky)

Novelist Aris Janigian (Photo: Lisa Persky)

"I tell you, this country and its hypocrisy is reminding me more and more of Islam," said the Kurd. "Where everything is paved over with religion and morality you will find in the tiniest cracks the most extreme hypocrisy and decadence. Look at these shahs and princes and whatever, these wicked little Muslim god-trembling playboys from Dubai and The Emirates and Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, all these disgusting oil slicks; they buy girls from around the world and do to them things the American Cup of Joe can't even imagine. I tell you, America is turning this way, too."

Lest one suspect the author of a little bit of Islamophobia, he has the Kurd voice criticism of the other People of the Book as well:

"Look at the Jews, a people who never looked to anyone for a shekel, the way they have become crybabies. Every third millionaire is a Jew and half the nations on earth are shoving billions to cover their loss and he acts like some poor orphan still stuck in the ghetto, whining and pounding fists and jumping up and down, making the world believe that behind every corner a giant waits to stomp him to death when in fact there is nothing more than a neurotic little midget..."

If the Kurd appears now and then for some comic relief, the Wizard seems to embody the author's attempt to engage in psychological introspection about his characters, and perhaps himself.

Make no mistake, This Angelic Land (the title is taken from a poem by William Blake) is an all-American novel, yet it bares its Middle Eastern soul. Its characters may have left Beirut during the civil war to emigrate to America, but their roots are firmly planted in the Levant. "Back in New York," the brother of his protagonist (Janigian's alter ego?), reflects, "the friends I'd collected, a kind of second family, understood what I was feeling all too well: a Palestinian poet, a Persian museum curator, an Iraqi composer, a Syrian stand-up comedian, and others, all of us exiles from historically rich cultures that were in tatters. We would meet three nights a week for kebobs, and hummus, and taboule, pounding our fists in outrage at the latest caricature of the Middle East. Every week we watched the cradle of civilization wheeled into the psych-ward. They showed our wars, internal strife, corrupt leaders and terrorists and jihadists and self-immolating pilgrims, but they never once let it be known that our birthplace was also the birthplace of agriculture, writing, and the fucking wheel!"

What makes this novel unique, finally, is the way in which it almost organically spins east and west together, interweaving Middle Eastern and American characters and identities as if they are inextricably part of one another's past, present, future. Says the Kurd:

"I loved to watch this Star Trek when I first came to America: Kirk and Scotty and Zulu and Chkov and Orooroo and McCoy, zipping to galaxies in the blink of an eye, light speed warp speed, I don't know what speed, reading minds and healing with a wand, but with their simple humanity shining bright.

"For me, the starship Enterprise was like a giant lantern these brave men and women carried through the darkest of dark ignorance galaxies. The essence of America, what the future was supposed to bring, but with each step forward in technology our simply humanity has taken ten steps back..."

Ultimately This Angelic Land is about the tragedies of the macrocosm contrasted with a personal tragedy in the microcosm that was at least as likely to have occurred in Beirut as in Los Angeles. Readers are left wishing they could encounter Janigian's cast of characters in his protagonist's bar and continue the conversation.

Underdogs, Ahmadinejad Vie for Supremacy in New Sports Doc

The Iran Job challenges our expectations about a hated nation

31 May, 2012 | Levantine Review | Jordan Elgrably

Kevin Sheppard, a flashy point guard who once played for Jacksonville University, makes his living playing overseas in countries such as Brazil, Spain, Venezuela, China and Israel. He gets an unexpected job offer—a year-long contract to head up A.S. Shiraz, a new team competing in Iran's Super League. Thus begins his journey from a life of relative comfort and security into an uncertain new reality, playing professional basketball in Iran.

iran-job-bb-team.jpg

Hollywood has produced dozens of sports films about heroic underdogs fighting the odds (among them The Longest Yard, Bull Durham, Remember the Titans, The Blind Side, Moneyball), but few are as compelling and evocative as Till Schauder's low-budget indie. This 93-minute documentary follows its unlikely hero—an American basketball player from tiny St. Croix in the Virgin Islands—into the maw of Islamic doom, only to turn our expectations upside down and our emotions inside out. In The Iran Job, shot almost entirely on location in Shiraz and Tehran, the women are strong and outspoken, men are team players who push themselves to the limits, and almost everyone loves Americans—except perhaps the morality police and Ahmadinejad. The film is a winner.

Since the days of George W. Bush, the nation of Iran has found itself on the Axis of Evil list that includes North Korea and Saddam Hussein's Iraq. But American skepticism of Iran goes back to when Ayatollah Khomeini and a regime of clerics stole the student revolution out from college-age protesters in 1980, taking American diplomats hostage in Tehran under Jimmy Carter.

At first glance Iran isn't going to elicit our empathy. The filmmakers shoot several murals that raise our fears, "Down With America" and "We Will Make America Suffer a Severe Defeat" among them. Kevin Sheppard knows Iran is reputed to support Hezbollah terrorists and is suspected of developing a nuclear weapons program. His fiancée Leah thinks along the same lines, fearing the worst. And right around this period, Ahmadinejad calls for the destruction of Israel, America's ally in the Middle East.

Kevin Sheppard, team captain: surrounded by his Iranian players and Zoran the Serb

Kevin Sheppard, team captain: surrounded by his Iranian players and Zoran the Serb

Still, we are easily drawn into the film by Sheppard's gregarious sense of humor, and his willingness to face a new challenge. Taking the mostly-rookie A.S. Shiraz team to the next level won't be easy. The only other foreign player is a giant from Serbia, Zoran, who will be Sheppard's roommate. At first, the Iranian players seem to lack the courtside aggression we've come to expect from American teams. In his role as the new captain and a natural leader as the most experienced player on the team, Sheppard faces his share of frustration and disappointment. And if he doesn't take A.S. Shiraz to the finals, he's out of a job.

Shiraz's local sports celeb tours the sites with friends...

Shiraz's local sports celeb tours the sites with friends...

During his off-hours, Sheppard proves to be a devoted tourist, making friends easily wherever he goes, visiting the sites as Shiraz's new American celebrity sports figure. Most notable in The Iran Job are the three Iranian women, Elaheh, Hilda and Laleh, who become Sheppard's greatest fans. They are all in their 20s (as are most of the people in this film) and have plenty of opinions. Kareem Roustom provides the film's original music and scores many scenes with Iranian pop and hip hop that helps to bridge the cultural barrier, with some great beats performed by ZedBazi (check them out on iTunes). In fact, the whole vibe of the film is hip-hop edgy.

The filmmakers do a fine job of capturing Shiraz's beauty and its teeming city life with some deft camera work.

Till Schauder, a dual national German-American, directs and produces The Iran Job, with his Iranian American wife, Sara Nodjoumi, who previously worked on the documentary series I Call Myself Persian: Iranians in America. In the press notes, he explains, "I first became interested in the topic of American basketball players in Iran upon reading that some of the players faced severe fines from the U.S. State Department for allegedly breaking the embargo against Iran...I was inspired by these athletes, who arguably do more for dialogue between Iran and the West than any politician on either side." Reminded of Nixon-era ping-pong diplomacy with China, Schauder began following Kevin Sheppard to Iran, even without a budget in place (some of the completion funds for The Iran Job came later, from a Kickstarter campaign).

The director filmed Sheppard and the A.S. Shiraz team (most notable are Mehdi, Ali, Kami and Zoran) over several visits, "until on my last trip—in the run-up to Iran's 2009 election—I was informed that I had made it onto a ‘black list' (for reasons still not clear to us), and was put in detention in a kind of ‘hotel-prison' inside the glitzy new Tehran airport." The last half-hour of the film is the most rousing, as Iranians are going to the polls, and then pouring into the streets to protest what they asserted were falsified election results that maintained Ahmadinejad in power. Thus the A.S. Shiraz team and their destiny is looped into the fate of the Iranian people who in what became known as the Green Movement (a precursor to the Arab Spring) are calling for democracy, despite the despotic Islamic regime under which they endure.

Says Schauder, "Iran is often portrayed as a terrorist nation, a nuclear threat, and a charter member of the Axis of Evil bent on the destruction of Israel. But behind the headlines—and the aggressive rhetoric of Iran's hardliners—lies one of the most fascinating nations, as sensuous as it can be challenging, with a life-loving people."

And that's the point. The Iran Job is much less about governments than it is about people—both Iranians and Americans, who when we share our stories and our passions (basketball, music, religious freedom) cannot be fooled into killing each other.

The Iran Job had its world premiere in the LA Film Festival on June 15/16 and will open in limited U.S. release in September 2012. There is a special screening scheduled in the 5th Annual Noor Film Festival for Aug. 5, 2012.

We Are Not the Enemy

An Arab Jew argues for bridging East and West with peace and justice for all

13 February, 2012 | Al Jazeera | Jordan Elgrably

If I were in a position to deliver a message to the people of the Middle East, including Israelis, I would proudly declare myself an Arab Jew and remind everyone that Jews have been an integral part of the Middle East mosaic for millennia. We are not the enemy, and often we speak the same languages—Arabic, Farsi, Turkish etc. Our ancestors have lived in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Iran, Turkey and even Afghanistan for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years.

Palestinians living under Israeli rule have the same desire to recover their human and civil rights as others protesting against oppression across the region [GALLO/GETTY]

Palestinians living under Israeli rule have the same desire to recover their human and civil rights as others protesting against oppression across the region [GALLO/GETTY]

Today most Jews of Arab/Muslim lands live outside the region, or in Israel where we have experienced a history of discrimination from European-origin Jews who believe that their cultures are superior to ours.

I would tell the people of the Middle East that not all Jews support the occupation policies of Israel’s military and government; and I would insist that the historic expulsions of Palestinians from their homes, businesses and properties in 1948 and 1967 were illegal, inhumane and did not occur with our knowledge or blessing.

Yitzhak Rabin and other Israelis have admitted in Hebrew-language documents that there was a deliberate policy of expulsion or ethnic cleansing of Arabs from their homes. And the military policies of the state of Israel since 1967, combined with the extensive building of settlements, have undermined so-called peace processes where good faith efforts are required of all participating parties.

The peoples of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, not to mention Bahrain and Yemen, are indeed in a historic period. They are rising up against autocracy and repression, against oppression by the state, calling for new freedoms.

Palestinians under Israeli rule in the West Bank have the same desire to live freely, to escape the oppression of occupation and recover their human and civil rights. They have a right to enjoy their independence.

The original UN Partition Plan of 1947 proposed a state for Palestinians and a state for Jews. This is the time when all Arabs and all Arab Jews who support peace, justice and democracy should speak out and say 'enough' to state oppression. Stop building settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, end the siege of Gaza, apologise to the Palestinian people for the historic wrongs Israel inflicted during the 1948 Nakbah and let us enter a new era of peace as equals who take responsibility for our actions.

Israelis and Palestinians and all reasonable people around the world have understood that there is no military solution to the conflict. Violence will never solve anything.

As a country, Israel should be integrated into the mosaic of the Middle East. It is time to end the conflict that began with the belief that Arabs and Jews are historic enemies. This was never true, yet decades of brainwashing have many Jews believing that Arabs and Muslims hate Israel because we are Jews.

Instead, we should realise that Arabs/Muslims are like people everywhere, who want the same human rights that Americans enjoy. Those rights must extend to the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and to Israel's Arab citizens.

If Israel wants to preach peace, it should walk the walk—apologise for its wartime mistakes and missteps, compensate its victims and reform its military and occupation policies, as well as laws in Israel that discriminate against non-Jews.

In other words, let us help Israel get on the same page as Americans who could never live under the kind of oppression Palestinians experience on a daily basis.

vintage-typewriter-alhambra1.png

Where Do We Stand? Arabs/Muslims on the Eve of 9/11's 10th Anniversary

Shall we celebrate our progress or commiserate as public enemy number one?

2 Aug., 2011 | Levantine Review | By Jordan Elgrably

As we near the 10th anniversary of 9/11, there is both troubling and positive news for Arabs/Muslims living in western countries. The question is, how much progress have we made in our quest for equality and freedom from racial and religious profiling?

Flowers on the island near Oslo: for shooting victims of accused anti-Muslim shooter Anders Behring Breivik

Flowers on the island near Oslo: for shooting victims of accused anti-Muslim shooter Anders Behring Breivik

We have on the negative side of the spectrum the anti-Muslim motivations behind the grisly Norway massacre; Peter King's Muslim hearings on Capitol Hill; and a recent survey by U.S. academics that indicates Americans are more afraid of Muslims these days, after the death of Bin Laden, than they were in the years after the attacks on the World Trade Towers in New York.

On the positive side of the spectrum, it can be hip to be Arab/Muslim. Former attorney-cum-stand up comedian Dean Obeidallah, a secular Muslim, now not only tours the country with his various comedy shows, he's become a popular columnist with CNN online, opining on politics in Washington with his brand of subtle satire.

Attorney-cum-comedian Dean Obeidallah

Attorney-cum-comedian Dean Obeidallah

Obeidallah and partner Negin Farsad are about to embark on a new comedy experience and documentary project, "The Muslims Are Coming"—a free comedy tour that will travel through the Deep South and the Midwest. Why free? "Because the goal of this tour," Obeidallah says, "is to truly meet people who are not already on our side...we are going to areas in the country...where there are few, if any, Muslims and where polls show Islamophobia is at its worst." (See TheMuslimsAreComing.com.)

Poster for Rashid Ghazi's football documentary,

Poster for Rashid Ghazi's football documentary,

In September, meanwhile, director/producer Rashid Ghazi is releasing his documentary, Fordson in theatres. Winner of a special jury prize at the 2011 Slamdance Film Festival, Fordson profiles a Dearborn, Michigan high school's primarily Arab/Muslim football team. The film zeroes in on four talented players as they gear up for their big senior year rivalry game during the last ten days of Ramadan; the story begins on September 11, 2009 and concludes at the end of Ramadan ten days later. Ghazi's doc will screen in a dozen metropolitan regions across the U.S., including Orange County and Covina, California, premiering on September 9.

In November, the TLC cable network launches a new reality TV show that will explore the daily lives of five Muslim families in Dearborn. "All-American Muslim" according to TLC general manager Amy Winter, will provide an intimate look at their customs and celebrations, "as well as the misconceptions, conflicts and differences they face outside-and within-their own community." Muslims on American reality TV? We're a far cry from the controversial stereotypes that caused "24" showrunner Howard Gordon considerable grief, before he began dialoguing with Muslim activist Dalia Mogahed, and diversified the show's Muslim characters (now off the air, "24" endured from 2001 to 2010).

"All American Muslim," a new reality series, debuts on TLC.

"All American Muslim," a new reality series, debuts on TLC.


Also on the positive side, more Americans are watching Al Jazeera or reading/watching Al Jazeera English online than ever before, which indicates clearly that Arab/Muslim viewpoints are becoming more widespread than in the years prior to September 11, 2001. However, while the Doha-based news company just cut a deal with New York's Regional News Network and has become available in New York through local cable, AJ is still looking for an opportunity to broadcast in Southern California.

I would argue that the Arab/Muslim community has evolved significantly in the years since 9/11. There are now over a dozen Arab cultural centers around the country—not just the Arab American Museum in Dearborn (home to the nation's largest Arab community)—but in Boston, New York, Houston, Atlanta, San Francisco, Los Angeles and elsewhere. Moreover, the advocacy efforts of the Arab American Institute, the Council on American Islamic Relations and the Muslim Public Affairs Council have made all three of those organizations much more prominent on Capitol Hill. Likewise, Trita Parsi's Iranian advocacy group, the National Iranian American Council or NIAC, has grown exponentially—certainly the events of the 2009 "Green Movement" in Iran had a hand in such growth.

On the cultural front, the events of the Arab Spring led Robert De Niro's Tribeca Film Festival to feature several Arab movies this June. Middle Eastern screenwriters and directors have become a staple of the Sundance screenwriters lab each year, not to mention the consistent programming of the San Francisco Bay Area's Arab Film Festival. Of course, since the summer of 2001, the Levantine Cultural Center has been active in Southern California, offering hundreds of film, literary and performing arts programs that help shed light on the Middle East and North Africa, and our communities in diaspora.

Are we, then, taking three steps forward and one backward? Have the signposts of our progress as a diverse, educated community in the United States, been countered by the extreme actions of a few, and the bigotry of many?

The events of 9/11 horrified me as much as anyone, and I have been further dismayed by our wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. But as someone who perennially sees the glass as half-full, I believe that we are better off today than we were on September 10, 2001.

What do you think? Where do we stand, as Arab Americans, as Muslim Americans—as Americans period? Post your comments below

The Dictator's Son: A Familiar Figure Brought to Life by Dominic Cooper

International cast recreates the opulent years of a decadent regime

28 July, 2011 | Levantine Review | Reviewed by Jordan Elgrably

Click image to watch trailer.

Click image to watch trailer.

The international independent feature The Devil's Double comes off as a sort of glossy Middle Eastern gangster epic, replete with blazing guns and psychotic outbursts. The film offers a highly stylized yet emotional experience of the years when Saddam Hussein's evil empire was characterized by the long Iran-Iraq war, the invasion of Kuwait, the Gulf War, and the dastardly exploits of his spoiled and dangerous son Uday. It is without doubt one of the first feature films to deal with doppleganger identity themes set in the Middle East. Both Uday and Saddam have their look-alikes in this narrative, but the story focuses on the supposed real-life exploits of Latif Yahia, an Iraqi army lieutenant who bears an unfortunate resemblance to Uday and becomes his fiday (body double or "bullet catcher").

The Devil's Double opens with grainy documentary footage of the war between Iraq and Iran. New Zealand director Lee Tamahori—whose magnum opus is considered to be the 1994 feature Once Were Warriors—seems to want to instill some cinema verité before he dazzles the viewer with the opulence of late 1980s and early ‘90s Baghdad and the excesses of Iraq's ruling elite. The historical footage lends the subject the gravitas it requires, for otherwise what you have is a long narrative of utter depravity—why, after all, should we care about Uday Hussein, or relive some of his notorious horrors, from kidnapping teenage girls on the streets of Baghdad to gutting a surly general at a drunken party?

Sometime in the latter ‘80s, Latif is snatched from the scene of battle by two of Uday's closest henchman, who without explanation deliver him to a large palace. There yet another lackey named Munem (Raad Rawi) politely explains that he now belongs to Uday Hussein and he will never be able to go home again—he cannot even call his family (the single attempt he makes to steal away to see them is met with swift punishment). He will then undergo a number of operations and adjustments in order to fool as many Iraqis as possible. One thing that never changes about Latif is his muted personality; he's in there somewhere, but who is he, really?

Uday and his double, Latif

Uday and his double, Latif

British actor Dominic Cooper aquits himself well in his first lead performance as both Uday and Latif. In fact he's something of a revelation—if you don't mind transposing a European into the role of an Iraqi. The other non-Arab cast member of note is Gallic star Ludivine Sagnier, whom we last saw in the French gangster flick Mesrine and who plays Sarrab, the notorious concubine to Uday and forbidden love interest to Latif. But much of this interesting cast is made up of Middle Eastern character actors from Turkey, Morocco, Bahrain, Iran and even Iraq. Almost all of the film takes place in English, with Arabic used in some TV and radio broadcasts and signage. Speaking with a slight Arabic accent, Cooper manages to play Uday and Latif with enough shades of difference for you to believe you're watching two different people. As Uday he is frenetic when not utterly despotic; but as Latif he seems centered, as if some hidden force is holding him together in the middle of this madness.

The danger of another film about the Middle East made by someone from a western culture is that Arabs could be made to look backward, bloodthirsty or as if we are all religious fanatics. In The Devil's Double, though, Iraqis are mostly a strong, resilient people who somehow find ways to bear up under Saddam's self-destructive regime. Lest you think you're watching a biopic, however, Tamahori has insisted that his version of events does not attempt to adhere to the known facts, so it is not based on any of the three books Latif Yahia published about his experiences (the first being I Was Saddam's Son in 1997). Yahia did work as a consultant on location in Malta, and as a result the film brims with authentic detail, including a Baghdad outdoor market that becomes the scene of an assassination attempt on the life of Saddam's number-one son.

Explaining his interest in taking on this directing project, Tamahori told a Wall Street Journal reporter, "I've always been perversely fascinated by the rotten sons of dictators. Now you have Gaddafi and his ragtag brood in Libya. They always seem to breed these contemptuous children. They have unlimited funds and they can literally get away with murder."<

As I watched The Devil's Double I asked myself what this film could potentially teach us about history, U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, or the ways in which Orientalism continues to problematize Arabs in the west—from Islamophobia to the vilification of Arabs in Hollywood. Ultimately it is an entertainment that offers a portrait of an Arab autocracy that has become all too familiar, from Syria to Libya.

"Incendies" Searches for a Past in a Country Wracked by Civil War

Denis Villeneuve's latest west-meets-east film about war and identity bridges North Americans and the Arab world.

21 April, 2011 | AlterNet | By Jordan Elgrably

Rarely has a story about modern war and civil strife so powerfully traversed generations and continents as the Canadian-Arab feature Incendies.

Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Wajdi Mouawad's "Incendies"

Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Wajdi Mouawad's "Incendies"

Montreal-based director Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Wajdi Mouawad’s three-and-a-half-hour play opens in New York and Los Angeles theaters this weekend after clinching an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film earlier this year. The film took home eight Genie awards in Canada, including Best Actress for Lubna Azabal. Incendies features a little-known Canadian and Arab cast, yet tells a gut-wrenching tale that takes no prisoners.

“Incendies” refers to the fires of war that can consume a country, a family, and indeed an entire generation. While Mouawad emigrated to Canada as a child from war-torn Lebanon (where civil strife stretched from 1975-1990), he set his play in an unnamed Arab country. The film was shot in north Jordan and used many amateurs, including Iraqi refugees, yet for those familiar with Lebanon’s internecine conflicts between Muslims, Christians and Palestinian refugees—as well as Israeli invaders and Syrian interventionists—the scenes in Incendies strike close to home.

One of only two international Arab actresses familiar to western audiences (the other being Palestinian-French star Hiam Abbass), Belgian-Moroccan Lubna Azabal plays the central character of Nawal, a freedom-fighting and ultimately long-suffering woman who becomes a lover, a prisoner, a mother and an émigré.

Previously, Azabal left a powerful impression in Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now, in which she starred as a peace-loving, contrarian sister to a would-be suicide bomber. In the Israeli indie pic Strangers, she shone as Rana, a Paris-based Palestinian mother who unexpectedly falls in love with an Israeli during a visit to Berlin. Azabal has also co-starred, albeit less memorably, in Bodies of Lies and Exiles.

In Incendies, Azabal gives remarkable performances as both a young and middle-aged woman. An early axiom in the film is jarring and provides just the right note of foreshadowing: “Childhood is like a knife stuck at your throat.”

When notary Lebel (Rémy Girard) sits down with Jeanne and Simon Marwan (Mélissa Désormeaux Poulin, Maxim Gaudette) to read them their mother Nawal’s will, the twins are stunned to receive a pair of envelopes—one for the father they thought was dead and another for a brother they didn’t know existed.

In this enigmatic inheritance, Jeanne sees the key to Nawal’s retreat into unexplained silence during the final weeks of her life. The college-age daughter, who does not speak more than a few elementary words of Arabic, decides she must travel to the Middle East to dig into a family history of which she knows virtually nothing.

Incendies is as much about finding one’s past as it is about a country wracked by civil war. An Oedipal tale with surprising twists, we see Jeanne and Simon Marwan, the daughter and the son, retrace the same route traversed by their mother decades before.

Early in the film, devastated by the death of her Palestinian lover, Nawal flees her town and family for the big city, where she begins a new life as a college student. She contributes to the city’s muckracking newspaper, published by her roommate’s father, who insists that, “ideas will survive only if we are here to defend them." When things heat up in the streets between Muslims and Christians, citizens and foreigners, she finds herself, willy-nilly, an activist for her country’s sovereignty. Ominously, Israeli fighter jets fly over as hell breaks loose.

In Incendies one observes the residue of colonialism and how it bleeds into sectarian strife, Christians against Muslims, citizens against refugees. The structure at times reminds one of films like Memento or The Usual Suspects, particularly in scenes where the mother transitions to the daughter decades later and vice versa, often seamlessly, as if the daughter and the mother are the same person.

Denis Villeneuve, a soft-spoken filmmaker in his early ‘40s, explained during an interview that the film is a metaphor for the fact that children have to rid themselves of their parents’ anger. The character of Simon Marwan—the angry young man who has no desire to dig into his mother’s Arab past—could be the director’s alter ego. Said Villeneuve, “What is a Canadian who knows about snow doing making a film about war?”

But Villeneuve was transfixed when he first saw playwright Wajdi Mouawad’s 3.5-hour long Incendies in 2004. After several years and many rewrites of his adaptation, he says Mouawad saw the film four times and embraced it. Nawal’s long-suffering character was based on a historical figure, a woman named Souad Beshara, who attempted to murder a major Christian militia leader and spent 10 years in a southern Lebanon prison.

Incendies is an Arab story yet only one of myriad possible stories that Americans can discover about the Levant where it takes place. The film was shot in just 25 days on a modest budget yet it has the feel of a vast and sweeping epic. The storytelling is dense, the characters brooding and unforgettable. Villenueve has made a deeply personal and poetic film that stands as a testament to the will to survive and protect one’s family from the horrors of war.

"Miral": Why Julian Schnabel's Palestine Makes Some Pro-Israel Factions See Red

Unraveling the pathos behind the anger at Schnabel's latest film.

23 March, 2011  |  Al Jazeera  |  By Jordan Elgrably

&nbsp;Director Julian Schnabel's 'Miral' has brought the Israel-Palestine conflict into the mainstream [GALLO/GETTY]

 Director Julian Schnabel's 'Miral' has brought the Israel-Palestine conflict into the mainstream [GALLO/GETTY]

Miral, currently in theaters, portrays the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from an entirely Palestinian perspective. It’s nothing earth-shattering (a brief filmography at the end of this article offers other films that do this far more effectively) except that it was made by a Jewish filmmaker. Several Jewish organizations and the Israeli government have seen fit to protest the film. They say it doesn’t tell both sides of the story. But that is precisely the point. When director Julian Schnabel—previously lauded for his lavish features Basquiat, Before Night Falls and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly—decided to make this film, based on the book by Palestinian journalist Rula Jebreal, his intention was to tell the story Rula tells in Miral.

Schnabel is an Academy-Award nominated director, and his film has brought “the conflict” into the mainstream. The fact that he happens to be Jewish while representing the Palestinian perspective inflames some in the Jewish community, who consider his film an act of betrayal.

Jordan Elgrably with actor Javier Bardem.

Jordan Elgrably with actor Javier Bardem.

I saw the film earlier this week in a special screening hosted by Javier Bardem, who starred in Before Night Falls and wanted to support Schnabel’s “brave film.” The director was there with his daughter Stella, who appears in the film, and with his new wife—Rula Jebreal. I couldn’t help but wonder what the Jewish community thinks when a Jew marries a Palestinian.

More to the point, why are some Jews afraid of Jews who embrace narratives other than those officially sanctioned in the Jewish and Israeli community? Why do such narratives when told by Jews—including books by Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky, and Israeli revisionist historians such as Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappé and Tom Segev—cause such ire? I’m one of these contrarian Jews. Why do I strive to see things not only from the Jewish perspective but the Arab one? Because my father’s family lived for centuries in an Arab country, Morocco, and because long ago I recognized that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is about nothing else if not conflicting narratives.

Jews see 1948 as the year of Israel’s establishment and a glorious liberation from persecution with the benefit of an independent state for Jews who had no place to live in the Diaspora, or who wanted to join Zionists in their “return” to the Holy Land after nearly 2,000 years of Roman exile (see Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People for an alternative history that suggests the Romans never exiled Jews in 70 AD).

Palestinians experienced 1948 as the year of their defeat, a national catastrophe or Nakba. After centuries of dominance under the Ottoman Empire and then British occupation, Palestinians wanted their own freedom. In fact, the national Palestinian identity movement (as Rashid Khalidi explains in his book Palestinian Identity) was nearly the same age as the Zionist movement. Contrast that fact with the myths propagated for years by David Ben Gurion, Golda Meir and other early Zionists, who made a point of telling us that “there is no Palestinian people” and that Israel was “a land without a people for a people without a land.”

The Arab world began to wake from domination as the Ottoman Empire was crumbling in a renaissance movement known as al-Nahda. People in Palestine were active in their desire for independence from outside control and occupation. Little wonder that the 1947 U.N. Partition Agreement was almost universally rejected by the Arab world. Why would Palestinians want to lose half of Palestine after living for centuries under foreign rule—particularly when Jewish land ownership at the time was just a fraction of what the U.N. was awarding to the Jews (See <em>The Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1939</em>, by Kenneth W. Stein)? Why would Palestinian Arabs embrace Zionist Jews who were primarily European in origin and who trumpeted their culture as decidedly superior to Arab culture?

Filmography  of films on Palestinians/Palestine

Roadmap to Apartheid, Eron Davidson, Ana Nogeira
Chronicle of a Disappearance, director Elia Suleiman
Life in Occupied Palestine, director Anna Baltzer
Occupation 101 - Voices of the Silenced Majority, directors Abdallah and Sufyan Omeish
Paradise Now, director Hany Abu-Assad
The Time That Remains, director Elia Suleiman
Tragedy in the Holy Land: The Second Uprising, director Denis Mueller

Middle East Filmmakers Compete for Oscar Gold

Iraq strives mightily but only Algeria makes it to the final five

23 Feb., 2011 | Levantine Review | Jordan Elgrably

Ahmed in Mohammed Al-Daradji's Son of Babylon

Ahmed in Mohammed Al-Daradji's Son of Babylon

This year several Middle Eastern countries submitted feature films to compete for nominations in the category of Best Foreign Film Oscar, among them Algeria, Turkey, Iraq and Israel (a country that rarely misses a chance to compete in the annual Oscar lottery). Egypt had skin in the game with Daoud Abdel Sayed's Messages From the Sea, and there were films from Greece, Azerbaijan and Iran (Mehdi Naderi's Farewell Baghdad). Only one film has a chance on Sunday.

Recently I caught a special screening of the Iraqi entry, Mohammed Al-Daradji's Son of Babylon. A feature shot mostly in the northern Kurdish provinces and starring a cast of non-actors, the film was developed in the Sundance Film Lab, so in a sense the filmmaker and his country derived support from the United States.

But watching Son of Babylon I could not help but feel sadness at just how much the U.S. has taken from Iraq. We have contributed to the nation's ruin, every bit as much as did Saddam Hussein, if not more.

Set in 2003, the film begins on a desolate empty plain, as a hijabi grandmother and her pre-pubescent grandson wander along a quiet highway. Despite their apparent poverty Ahmed is a naturally sunny kid, gregarious to a fault like most kids, and he loves his "dada" (Kurdish for grandmamma). Umm-Ibrahim, however, has not seen her son, Ahmed's father, in several years; she will walk to the end of the earth to find him if she has to. A gentle Arab truck driver is importuned to give them a lift as far as Baghdad where they can catch a bus to Nasriya. Several years before, Umm-Ibrahim received a letter that Ibrahim, who had been forced into military service in 1991 during the first Gulf War, was locked up in a Nasriya prison. It is never explained why she did not travel there earlier to see him.

Ahmed has never seen his father that he can remember, but can't wait to get to Nasriya.

I won't reveal the rest of the story, except to say that as a symbol "the son" of Babylon in pre-pubescent Ahmed seems fitting. He's young, he'll have to start over entirely by the end of the film and his country is in chaos. However, one Iraqi American I spoke to who had seen a special advance screening of the film, and who had left Iraq himself to emigrate to the U.S. when he was about Ahmed's age, expressed disappointment with the film. He said it was just too bleak, the story seemed insufficient to the subject matter and it would not really give Americans the right picture of Iraq.

Paris-based Algerian director Rachid Bouchareb

Paris-based Algerian director Rachid Bouchareb

I disagree, for Son of Babylon is a film that is narrated entirely from Iraqi perspectives. Whatever quarrel you may have with its structure or its characters, or the dénouement, for American viewers this film is a must-see if for no other reason than to have that light turned on, to experience an "aha!" moment. We've never seen Iraq exclusively from an Iraqi viewpoint, and we need to. We should see five, ten, twenty films out of Iraq, and out of Afghanistan and Iran, for that matter, and films made by Palestinians and Syrians, and every other Middle Eastern country underrepresented in this global marketplace.

Turkey's entry, Bal, or Honey, reminded me of a minor Andrei Tarkovsky étude; it had moments of beauty, but never brilliance. Set in the Turkish countryside and directed by Semih Kaplanoglu, it too is about a boy, and a father who goes missing. But the filmmaker is in love with the camera and nature, far more than his characters. As a result the film becomes dreary and sad, without quite tugging at our heartstrings. Bal may be too enigmatic and too Turkish to transcend the limitations of cultural borders.

Rachid Bouchareb's Outside the Law is a much larger canvas, and will remind Academy voters of America's postcolonial experience in Vietnam; in some ways it is a Hollywood shoo-in, because the film is more a shoot 'em up than an arcane political thriller—more Eastwood than Costa-Gavras. Set in the post WWII world of French-occupied Algeria and France, we follow the distinct journeys of three Algerian brothers during the protracted struggle in which the French violently try to hang on to their colony, and the Algerians struggle for their independence. Partisan intrigue includes French spying for the Algerians, Algerians hurting their own people to help the French and many innocent victims caught in the middle.

Bouchareb is a filmmaker who favors the underdog, but does not paint his anti-heroes in two-dimensional tones. Whether you like them or not, as characters, all three of the brothers—the good, the bad and indeed, the war-scarred ugly—inspire empathy. (They also prompt some skepticism when it comes to the casting choices, because actors Jamel Debbouze, Roschdy Zem and Sami Bouajila look anything but related.) Having beaten all its Middle Eastern competitors for the nomination, Outside the Law would normally stand a chance among the five foreign films nominated, out of more than 50 submitted, but considering the enormous popularity of Spanish star Javier Bardem, it's unlikely Bouchareb's film will beat Alejandro González Iñárritu's Biutiful for the gold.*

* Both films lost in the end to Susanne Bier's In a Better World.

An Evening of Drama Cloaked in Sept. 11

December 22, 2001  |  DON SHIRLEY  |  TIMES THEATER WRITER

"A wave of despondency fell on artists" after the events of Sept. 11, said Felix Pire, a writer, actor and director. "A lot of them just wanted to vent their pent-up emotions. It created a reason to create art instantly."

Art can't be as instant as TV coverage, of course. But now, after more than three months, plays in direct response to Sept. 11 are beginning to emerge. An evening of readings at Beyond Baroque in Venice on Thursday, directed by Pire, was devoted to that subject.

"The New Millennium Project: Responses to September 11, 2001" was presented by Levantine Cultural Center, a fledgling organization that is trying to create a place where musicians, dancers, poets, filmmakers and other artists will specifically address Middle Eastern subjects. Part of the group's mission is to create a spirit of coexistence among the region's often clashing ethnicities.

However, the play reading also had roots in other organizations. It began with meetings at the Music Center Annex under the auspices of the Mark Taper Forum. And it was inspired by the New York-based Artists Network, which was spearheaded by Tony Kushner--the playwright whose own "Homebody/Kabul," set in Afghanistan in 1998, opened this week in New York.

Pire, a Cuban American who is best known to the L.A. theater community as the solo actor in Guillermo Reyes' "Men on the Verge of a His-Panic Breakdown," not only directed the readings but also was one of the primary actors in them.

The intense media coverage of the terrorist attacks and their aftermath didn't give any of the playwrights second thoughts about whether they had anything fresh to contribute, Pire said. "A lot of the work is in response to the media. The media is almost another character."

The name "New Millennium" arose from Pire's belief that "Sept. 11 is the mark of the new millennium. Dark as it may be, this really is the new age."

Shida Pegahia in a chador woven from small American flags, designed by Gita Kashabi.

Shida Pegahia in a chador woven from small American flags, designed by Gita Kashabi.

A few of the writers directly addressed the events at the World Trade Center. Shahid Nadeem, a Pakistani playwright and director who has been working recently in L.A., wrote "Trapped," about two men who are caught on the 23rd floor of one of the towers, unable to move. One of the men, who has a Middle Eastern name, borrows the other's cell phone to call his wife and uses up the battery in the process. As the scene ended Thursday, rescue still wasn't assured.

In "Twin Telepathy," Nzingha Clarke wrote about a woman who sees her twin sister in live footage from the World Trade Center. Padraic Duffy's "Shake a Tree to Shake a Tree" was a much more oblique look at an office worker who is inferred to be in one of the Twin Towers, while his wife works in the other.

Other writers' works were set in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks.

Al Austin's "Muslim" takes place in an L.A. health club, where one of the weightlifters wears a T-shirt that says "Muslim," to the consternation of the man who's spotting him as he works out. A Florida shopping mall, shortly after the attacks, is the setting for Marc Ostrick's "The Scene," involving a Jewish mother, her adult son and a fellow shopper who's a Sikh. David Lewison's "Peace" is a monologue set at least a decade in the future, when all cities have been either destroyed or simply dispersed so as to break up possible targets.

Another group of writers addressed Middle Eastern subjects in general, without particular references to Sept. 11.

Joshua Zide's "On Borders" depicts an Iraqi Jew who is stopped at the Tel Aviv airport. Barbara Genovese's "Toy Soldiers" is about a 10-year-old boy who's drafted into military duty. Two pieces by Heather Raffoare about Iraqi women, the Persian Gulf War and the subsequent sanctions against Iraq.

Although visual design was bare-bones throughout most of the evening, "Chador," the opening monologue by Gita Khashabi, featured Shida Pegahi wearing a chador woven from small American flags.

Comic relief was provided by Lory Tatoulian's appearance as an Armenian American "coffee cup fortuneteller" who works at Zankou Chicken.

Pire said he doubts many of the pieces will be further developed, but he hopes to put together another evening of similar material.

Interview with Ruba Nadda, director of "Cairo Time"

Canadian Syrian-Palestinian director is one in a small Coterie of Arab women filmmakers

7 Sept., 2010 | Levantine Review | Jordan Elgrably

Ruba Nadda's second feature co-stars Patricia Clarkson and Alexander Siddig.

Ruba Nadda's second feature co-stars Patricia Clarkson and Alexander Siddig.

We are happy to report that these days not all films that feature Arab characters or take place in an Arab country per force include explosions, violent bearded males, or helpless women covered from head to toe. Have these stereotypes worn out their welcome at long last? Cairo Time instead focuses its lens on Juliette, an American woman in Egypt, and Tareq, a very reasonable, logical and otherwise charming Arab who becomes her willy-nilly tour guide. Juliette has come to Cairo to meet up with her husband Mark, whom she still loves after decades of marriage; but Mark's work with the United Nations in nearby Gaza is holding him over there for days, perhaps weeks.

If you haven't seen the film, there is still time to catch it—Nadda's second feature is enjoying a good run at the American box office. (Cairo Time is better appreciated on the large screen, in my view, although I look forward to seeing it again on DVD a few months hence.)

When we conversed for this interview, Cairo Time was about to open in American theatres across the country. The advance buzz was glowing, and this would be only the second movie made by an Arab American woman with Arab characters to be released in U.S. theaters (the first having been Cherien Dabis' Amreeka last year). Nadda—a tall, slender, charismatic figure who practices a kind of thoughtful empathy in conversation with virtual strangers—was in an ebullient mood, understandably, after fourteen years in the trenches. She had worked full-time jobs and self-financed a whole battery of short films, with titles like Laila and Black September (both made in 2000) Unsettled (2001) and Aadan (2004), until she got her first feature financed with the help of her mentor, Canadian director Atom Egoyan. Sabah, released in 2005, told the story of a traditional Muslim woman living in Canada who falls in love with a non-Muslim Canadian man.

With her new film, Ruba Nadda wanted to create a portrait of the real Cairo, and share a sense of how people in the Middle East experience life and times. She'd seen enough war-torn stories, and thought that no one in recent memory had managed to capture Cairo's chaotic beauty.

Levantine Review: In Cairo Time, we see an intimate portrait of Cairo, but the Mukhabarat [secret police] and Hosni Mubarak are missing. Did you consciously want to avoid politicizing the story—even though Juliette's husband Mark works for the U.N., and is in Gaza throughout most of the film?

Ruba Nadda: The irony is, I've lived in Damascus, and the Mukhabarat are a lot more prevalent and scary, whereas in Cairo, I remember the first day being there for the movie, someone was slamming the Egyptian government, and my sister and I were like Oh my God, don't do that, you're going to get arrested. The person said, this is Cairo, we can complain about the government all we want.

Here's the thing. My mother is Palestinian, so I grew up feeling the heat of that, understanding that very well. I think with this movie I sort of kept my political opinions and views held back, because at the heart of it, this is a romance set in Cairo... The film itself is sort of a love letter to Cairo and the tone of it was light. My next movie, ramping up to start shooting in the new year, is a little more political because it's a thriller.

Levantine Review What was it like having to work with the Egyptian censors? What were the other obstacles while shooting in Cairo?

First of all, at least we were allowed to shoot in Cairo. The biggest obstacle was no North American film had ever shot there entirely, so our insurance bond, it was dicey for them, because they were worried about us physically pulling it off. What the censors are concerned about—they don't care if you've got a sex scene in the movie, what the censor is concerned about is how I portrayed Cairo to a North American audience, because for them it's all about tourism.

Levantine Review They didn't like The Yacoubian Building for that reason.

Ruba Nadda with her Cairo Time&nbsp;co-star, Alexander Siddig

Ruba Nadda with her Cairo Time co-star, Alexander Siddig

Right. At the same time, when we were shooting in Juliette's hotel room for example, I liked having her balcony doors open all the time, and the censor wanted us to close the doors and have the air-conditioning on, because you couldn't show the west that Egyptians don't have air-conditioning. So it was as silly as that. Cairo is beautiful but it has a lot of problems—child poverty, poverty in general, and garbage. It was very difficult trying to battle the censor; we had to be careful of how we shot it. We were shooting in June and July, it was so hot, and we didn't have any control over our locations because it's just so busy, it's like 18 million people, so we were never able to have physical complete control over any of our locations. We had to go with the flow, which was a nightmare for sound and the actors and the cameras. Luckily, because I'm fluent in Arabic, I could become like a non-Canadian and almost come off like a local, which was very helpful for me.

Levantine Review Are Egyptians going to see this movie?

Yes, it's been sold, we have a Middle Eastern distributor. It was shown at film festivals in Cairo and Doha, Qatar. At the festival in Doha, because of popular demand, we ended up closing the festival, showing the film outside in front of 3,000 people. It was terrific; it was a really magical experience.

Levantine Review So your impression is that Arab audiences like the movie?

Here's the thing, in North America (this is a Canadian film, after all, and even though I'm Arab, I'm Canadian at the same time), they are used to seeing Middle Eastern cities as these kind of war-torn places...This is the first time you see it as it is. We just pointed the camera and shot, we didn't really cheat anything. Arabs were very happy with that, and proud of that. Cairo is a beautiful city and it was portrayed that way, so Cairenes were happy with it. It's not a war picture, it's a romance.

Levantine Review When you were writing Cairo Time, was it always about creating a slow romance, something not completely western in style?

For me, having grown up in Canada, I was starting to feel that romance in North America was starting to be kind of dead, with all that immediate gratification, and I was yearning to make a movie that was about restraint. I'd been to Cairo about six times, and one of the things I noticed was that something happens to you when you enter that time zone. It's hot, it's kind of its own language, it forces you to slow down.

Levantine Review From reading about your other films, you seem to want to try to help Westerners better understand the Middle East. Is that true?

It's a 1,000 percent true. I came to have this obsession I think when I was 16. I adore my father, my father is very Arab, he looks very Arab, he's very macho, he's Syrian, yet he's like a teddy bear. He's such a good man. From a very young age I started seeing how people judged him based on his looks, based on his ethnicity, and it deeply hurt me. I remember thinking, I have to change the West's perception of how they view Arabs. I mean, even me, when people meet me, they say oh you can't be Arab, you don't look Arab, and that always insults me, because I'm like "what the hell do you think we look like?" And so that's why I think secretly that's my goal, to try to break down this horrible stereotype that's been glued to us, based on a few people who are despicable, that the rest of the Arabs have to suffer over.

Levantine Review I can relate and it's why we set up the Levantine Cultural Center in Los Angeles. It's pretty much what we do, 24/7, whether through films, or presenting writers, just to convey a different perspective to share with Americans. And I think there's a hunger for this—I think there are a lot more people who want to see Arabs and Muslims and people from the Middle East as people just like us.

Absolutely. Cairo Time, it's crazy, people want to see this movie. For me it's fascinating because when I did my first feature,<em> Sabah</em>, I remember the financiers were like who cares? Who wants to see Arabs on the screen? I was like look, it's an untapped culture, it is time that people saw a different point of view about us. It started off being an uphill battle, but now I feel there's just more interest in wanting to get to know these people and this culture, which is so exciting actually.

Levantine Review What do you hope North American audiences will take away from this film, and what do you hope Arab audiences will take away from it?

I wanted to make a love story that was set in Cairo and have it feel real, and be real, but also have that restraint, because everything was becoming about immediate gratification, and that was beginning to drive me crazy... I feel I portrayed an Arab man accurately, because I based Tareq off my father, and so it was nice to see a depiction of an Arab man, where there were no surprises at the end, there were no twists. He's a very ordinary, simple Arab man. With Arab audiences it's just nice to see a story that's based in the Middle East, in modern-time Cairo.

Levantine Review And there's no terrorism in it!

No! I remember there was this one financier who was like, you have to have a twist at the end. And I was like no, over my dead body.

Levantine Review...Tareq turns out to be a messenger for Al Qaeda?<

Exactly. Can you imagine? Oh god. In my first movie, Sabah, with Sabah's brother, I would get comments that he had to be the antagonist, he had to be evil, and so he has to kill her at the end, and I was like are you kidding me? That's bad storytelling actually.

Levantine Review That's true. There is some honor killing that goes on, of course, but...

Absolutely, but that's just not the movie I wanted to make. That's not the point of view I want to tell. As an Arab filmmaker, why do I need to concentrate on the negative? I try to make an effort to concentrate on the positive, to focus on the culture, because I find that the negative is what gets reported on, and not the positive.

Levantine Review Can you talk a bit about your natural progression as a filmmaker?

With my shorts I was literally working fulltime and then financing them. With Sabah I got this idea, and my mentor, Atom Egoyan, decided to help me by becoming my executive producer. That sort of validated me, because before then I'd been making these really gritty, guerrilla films, and I just needed some validation, which he immensely provided by becoming my executive producer. It was really great to go from these short films that were made with nothing (that did very well around the world) to then to make a real feature, with a real budget and cast—though it was low budget.

Levantine Review Your film isn't the typical American movie with a happy ending.

The thing about Cairo Time is that I think it's got a bittersweet ending. I am of the mind that you should please your audience, but not at all costs, and so I don't really think I have to have a happy ending. The story comes to me the way it does and I try to honor it that way. It's my disposition. Even though I was born in Canada, we lived in Damascus for a time when I was a child. My life could have turned out very differently had my parents decided to stay, just as a woman. I would have been married with children; there's no way I would have pursued my dream. There's no way this could have happened, had I been forced to live in Damascus for the rest of my life. And so I just personally feel very happy and grateful about how my life has turned out. I think it's my disposition to be a little more optimistic, and I think that optimism translates to my writing.

Home or the Loquat Tree

Spring 2008 | The Truth About the Fact | By Jordan Elgrably

The loquat tree in front of our house in Echo Park bore acridly sweet and juicy fruit, shaped like tiny hot-air balloons—fruit unlike any other. The flavor of a loquat is challenging to describe; sweet, yes, but there is also something slightly exotic, almost perfume-like about its white or yellow flesh. The rind of a loquat is a sunset orange and inside are three, four or five large brown seeds that taste bitter if you accidentally bite into one. To some people, eating a loquat may seem more trouble than it’s worth, because you discard more than half the fruit’s volume; but I gleefully gorged myself on loquats throughout my youth. The tree in our yard bore fruit, it seemed, several times a year.

I was thirteen years old before I realized that I was the son of an immigrant who was the son of an immigrant, and from that point on I never felt at home in Los Angeles.

You rarely see loquats offered at market in the United States. In fact I don’t recall ever buying loquats anywhere until I found them at a Paris fruit stand on the rue Etienne Marcel decades later, surprised at their expensive price tag. For me these small orange-colored fruits were so familiar, so much of a part of my youth, I could not imagine that people were willing to pay more for them than for a pound of strawberries or even kiwis. The first time I bought a half-peck basket of loquats I experienced a strange swelling of pride in my breast; as I headed back to my Paris flat, I felt happy that I would be tasting loquats for the first time since I was an American kid who climbed the loquat tree, the only one among the five members of my household to relish its fruit; I also felt connected through the fruit to the land of my father’s father.

Loquats are a fruit common to North Africa. The loquat tree was my direct link to the geography and climate of my ancestors. Growing up in Echo Park, I never felt like a true American, probably because as a boy my father seemed a mysterious figure, my parents having divorced when I was two (I grew up with my mother and stepfather and my half-sister and brother). I knew that my father was French, but he was also something else, and I would not hear anything about Morocco that I can remember until the summer of my thirteenth year, which I spent living in my father’s house in West Hollywood. That is where I first heard the story of how the Elgrablys migrated from Morocco to France, and my father told me about coming to America.

I was thirteen years old before I realized that I was the son of an immigrant who was the son of an immigrant, and from that point on I never felt at home in Los Angeles. From the age of thirteen until I finally moved to Paris when I was 21, I wondered what I would have been like had my father’s father, Avram Elgrably, never left his hometown and his country, to venture abroad. Moroccan Arabic, or Darija, would be my mother tongue, and I would speak French with an Arab accent, just like many of the North Africans whom I later befriended as an expatriate American in Paris. America would seem like a faraway fantasyland I knew only from watching big-screen movies or reading novels translated into Arabic or French.

It is unlikely that I would have ever visited the United States. Even today, there are not many Moroccans who make Los Angeles their home; the emigration of Moroccans to the United States is but a trickle, because available visas are few and the price tag is high. Had I been born in Morocco, in the small town where Avram grew up, or in the city of his wife Hassiba, it is unlikely I would have ever gotten a visa to come to America. Instead I would have been far more likely to migrate north to France or Spain, or east to the Levant, perhaps to Tunisia, Egypt, Israel/Palestine, Lebanon or even Turkey or Greece. English would not be my first language but perhaps my third or fourth after Arabic and French or Spanish—if I spoke it at all. Had Avram never left Morocco and I were the son of my father born in Casablanca or the provinces, I would be, perhaps, a traditional Arab Jew: mystical, superstitious, praying often, fluent in biblical Hebrew, but cursing colorfully in Arabic. I would be gruffer, but also more naïve. I would be a blue-collar worker, like several of my Moroccan relatives who still live there today; or I would be a doctor, like the famed Dr. Elgrably of Marrakesh whom every Moroccan mentions whenever they hear my last name and know either Marrakesh or Casablanca, where the good doctor had patients. Or I would be fabulously wealthy, like a few of my merchant cousins; like them, I would have a handsome villa with several Muslim servant women running my household, and a large-screen television capturing satellite channels in Arabic, French, English, Hebrew and Spanish, connecting me to communities of other Moroccans in Europe, the Middle East, the United States and Canada.

English was my father’s third language. His first was French, learned in school and in the streets in the city of Lyon where he was born; Arabic was spoken at home, so it was also his first language, which unlike French he never learned to read and write. His mother Hassiba and father Avram were salt of the earth, illiterate for the most part, though Avram could read the Torah in Hebrew and prayed in Hebrew and Arabic, like almost all Middle Eastern Jews. During the Second World War, when the Elgrablys fled Paris where they had been living, south to Marseille and traveled by boat to Morocco, my father learned English from the soldiers, the American GIs. He became their tour guide around the city for the next five years. The same year that Michael Curtiz was directing Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in the mythic movie about war-time Casablanca, shooting the casbah on studios back lots in Hollywood, my father was 11 years old and sharing a two-room walk-up flat in a Casablanca slum with his mother and sisters and brothers. Later, when I was a teenager getting to know my father, he scoffed at Casablanca the movie, insisting it was Hollywood hogwash—nothing like the real place, on which he felt himself an authority.

The southern Moroccan fortified town of Taroudant.

The southern Moroccan fortified town of Taroudant.

The ancient walls surrounding the town of Taroudant are a warm and dusty ochre, and the town itself is quite small, easily visited in a day’s wandering. Along its maze of streets and alleyways you find loquat, orange and banana trees, date palms, hibiscus, bougainvillea and jasmine; the town has many fountains and lush courtyards within its walls. In Avram’s youth Taroudant was still largely inhabited by the Amazigh (Berbers) or "free people"—the natives of North Africa—and Jews, while in more recent times other Moroccan Muslims of Arabic tribal descent and foreigners have populated the town. In Avram’s day Taroudant was a distant village between the sea and the mountains, thought of as an Amazigh enclave and “the grandmother of Marrakesh”—a quainter, more traditional version of that southern mecca of mystics, gnawa musicians and traders. My grandfather was both Amazigh and Jewish; the Amazigh side explained in part my blue-green eyes and lighter skin; other Moroccans and their children tended to be darker than me.

My grandfather was born around the turn of the last century. As a youth he would leave Taroudant and travel by mule or mule-drawn cart up and down the mountains to Marrakesh, a distance equivalent to the trip from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, but two days away; he and his brother were young merchants, buying and selling jewelry, precious metals, clothing and artifacts along the caravan route. Once he had saved enough money, Avram left Taroudant for good and migrated several hundred miles north, to the big city, Casablanca. This was while the First World War was raging and the French occupied the country. After the war there was a great need for cheap labor in France as it began to rebuild itself following years of destruction and privations. Avram got his papers in order; in 1919 he migrated north by boat and train to the city of Lyon, France’s second largest after Paris, and a major industrial hub. He left behind his young wife Hassiba and their three children; a few years later he would bring them to Lyon, where my grandmother would bear another ten children over the next fifteen years, including my father Jacques Isaac and his twin brother Elie. Several would die of disease and only nine were still alive in 1945.

In the only photo I have ever seen of my grandfather, he is strong-faced man standing about five feet seven, in a working-class suit and a tarbush, the flat-topped hat similar to a fez. He could be an Arab, a Turk, an Armenian; he looked like any one of a dozen ethnic groups from the region. He had fierceness about him in that old photograph; and at the same time, a domesticity, something familiar and traditional. His eyes seemed dark and he had a bushy mustache as did all men in those days; his hands seemed worn from manual labor. The expression on his face was neither a smile nor a frown; and it was the only hint of his spirit I would ever know, because I never met Avram; German soldiers in Paris killed him in 1942, many years before my birth in Los Angeles.

Everyone is looking for a place in the world that feels right, a place where the heart finds the measure of love, work, family, the tribe and where you embrace your own spirit. Most of us, though, live between worlds; we often find ourselves standing at the threshold between this place and the next, between this self and the next, between this life and the next. We are all, somehow, spiritual or geographical border crossers, whether of political necessity, economic expediency or sheer human will. Either we have lost our home and are looking for a new one, or we have a compelling desire for change, for self-challenge.

I have no doubt that this place in the world we’re seeking begins in the heart. As the exiled Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, wrote in a poem entitled “The Passport”: “The hearts of people are their nationality/Take away my passport.” But then we have to ask, what is the heart, really? Why are its inner workings so mysterious to us?

I would begin to answer this by looking at the life of one of the artists fleeing Hitler’s regime—Stefan Zweig, an Austrian Jew who prior to World War II was one of the most renowned authors in the world. Zweig and his wife Lotte took up exile in Brazil and there he finished his last work, a masterful memoir entitled Die Welt von GesternThe World of Yesterday. Shortly after completing these writings, in 1942—unable to live with the brutality of the day—Stefan and Lotte Zweig took their own lives. In The World of Yesterday Zweig wrote, “Before 1914 the earth had belonged to all. People went where they wished and stayed as long as they pleased. There were no permits, no visas, and it always gives me pleasure to astonish the young by telling them that before 1914 I traveled from Europe to India and to America without passport and without ever having seen one.”

Zweig was a loving traveler but he was far from homeless; a cosmopolitan intellectual, he made his home in Vienna but also had many ties to life in Paris, London and New York. Yet in the preface to The World of Yesterday he writes something with which most of us, I think, will disagree. “The homeless man becomes free in a new sense; and only he who has lost all ties need have no arrière-pensées.”

Can it be that some of us, who experience exile, or emigration, will have no second thoughts about the past, will feel “free in a new sense”? When I read Zweig’s lines knowing he chose suicide, I felt the pain of a man trapped between two worlds; unable to recover the past he loved, Zweig couldn’t bear to live in the present. Although he wrote that this state of homelessness, of losing all ties enabled people to have no second thoughts, I wonder if it wasn’t in fact those very second thoughts, his own arrière-pensées that killed him.

Another writer, who chose self-exile from the United States, because he felt he might be killed or find it necessary to kill someone in self-defense—or out of rage—was the African-American, James Baldwin. In 1948, at the age of 24, with $40 in his pocket, Baldwin went to Paris. He would spend many of the ensuing 40 years of his life living in France. When I met him there some years ago, I asked Baldwin if he loved America, despite the obvious internal and external conflicts he experienced. “I think that it is a spiritual disaster to pretend that one doesn’t love one’s country,” he told me. “You may disapprove of it, you may be forced to leave it, you may live your whole life as a battle, yet I don’t think you can escape it.”

The expatriate Czech author, Milan Kundera, spoke to these questions one afternoon in his Paris flat when he and I were talking about exile. “It is very interesting,“ he said, “to see just how rooted we are in the first half of our lives. We are fatally rooted in the first half of life, even if life’s second half is filled with intense and moving experiences.”

I asked Kundera if he longed to go home, despite the fact that France had been so very good to him. “You must choose,” he said. “Either you live looking over your shoulder, there where you are not, in your former country, with your old friends, or you make the effort to profit from the catastrophe, starting over at zero, beginning a new life right where you are. Without hesitation I choose the second solution...One emigration,” he added, “suffices for a lifetime.”

As the story of the loquat tree unfolds it reveals to me that my own story of self-exile and emigration begins with my grandfather, Avram. Had he never come down from the southern Moroccan mountain town of Taroudant and journeyed to Casablanca, early in the 20th century, to find work and a wife, I would not exist; I would not be a native Angeleno. Had my father not fallen in love with American culture as an adolescent, I would not be who I am. And likely had I not grown up in Echo Park and Silver Lake, I never would have known the loquat tree, as it is unfamiliar to many Americans.

If my story starts with Avram, then let me further explain that upon moving to Casablanca in 1916, he met and married Hassiba Amar, a rabbi’s daughter. With a third child on the way—my aunt Marcelle—this stocky young man, who was coffee-colored and strong of heart, left for France. In 1919, when he was 21 years old, he went to work for the venerable pharmaceutical firm Rhône-Poulenc, located in the Lyonnais working class quarter of Saint Fons, where many North Africans lived.

My father, Jacques Isaac Elgrably, was born in Lyon in 1931. He was seven years old when Avram and Hassiba, intent on improving their fortunes further, moved the large Elgrably clan to Paris, buying an apartment in the working-class quarter of the 11th arrondissement, on the Avenue Ledru Rollin. My father was nine when the Germans marched into Paris, parading triumphantly down the Champs-Elysées. He remembers trembling with fear at these men in tanks and on horseback, men marching with rifles; there was something monstrous in the eagle insignia of the Wehrmacht soldiers, and the double esses of the Nazi officers goose-stepping across the cobblestones, only a few feet away.

Not long after the Occupation began, Avram commanded Hassiba to take the younger children and return to Lyon, where she was to make sure their eldest children Rachel, Raymond and Marcelle were going to be all right, and then travel back to Morocco, where everyone would surely be safe from the war. Hassiba begged Avram to come too, but he was stubborn; he refused to abandon their modest flat and all their furniture and other belongings; he would stay on and join them later. Avram was still strong and determined; he professed no fear of anyone.

Before the Elgrablys could leave under Hassiba’s wing, the Nazis in tandem with the French Milice or special police, issued i.d. cards to all the Jews of Paris. So Hassiba Elgrably had her new i.d. card stamped Juive, Juden with a Star of David on it. She was, however, a large, dark-skinned woman with a kind of cherubic Moroccan face; like Avram she passed for an Arab or a Turk. The day Avram took her to the Gare de Lyon to catch the train, their band of excitable little kids trailing behind them, my father remembers being afraid he would never see his father again. Hassiba wept in her husband’s arms, which could hardly contain her girth, but he assured her everything would be all right. Soon enough, he promised, he would appear in Casablanca to find her.

By 1941 life for Jews and other undesirables in France had become uncertain and frightening. Hassiba knew, and most of her children were old enough to understand, just how dangerous this journey back to Lyon was going to be. She scolded them to keep quiet—“skthu! skthu!”—and warned that whenever Germans boarded the train, they were to  mind their business and pretend to be playing.

Hassiba Amar Elgrably was stopped by SS officers in Dijon, where they demanded she produce her papers—“Papieren!” My father remembers how she feigned ignorance of the new laws and regulations and spoke in broken French, her Moroccan Arabic accent heavy as she told a lie to save lives: “We live in Morocco, I went to Paris to bury my mother, I didn’t know I needed any special papers.” She kept her i.d. card stamped Juive, Juden hidden in her shoe. Neither my father nor his brothers Robert, Jacob, Elie, David nor his sisters Alice and Esther uttered a word. My father remembers they were all “white as sheets,” which isn’t easy to imagine when you think of brown-skinned Moroccan boys and girls.

Hassiba’s appearance, her Arab accent and her dark children stumped these fear-instilling Nazi officers. They had no idea they were dealing with Sephardic Jews. Because Hassiba and my father and the other kids were mistaken for Arabs, then, they made it to Lyon, went on to Marseille, found a boat leaving from La Ciotat that took them to Tangier, and caught a train from there to Casa. Today I feel blessed to be alive, because I know that if those clever Nazis had been such übermenschen, Hassiba and her kids would have been taken off that train in Dijon and eventually sent to a camp to die. I feel not enmity but empathy and kinship with Arabs and Berbers and others; I feel that this obvious case of mistaken ethnic identity saved almost the entire Elgrably family from certain death. I feel not a great deal of difference between Arabs and Jews, and I know just how fragile life is.

In July 1942 the Nazis decided to round up all the Jews in the 11th arrondissement and pack them off to the Vel d’Hiver, a stadium outside Paris. Most of the 5,000 people rounded up that day were later murdered in concentration camps in Poland and Germany. Avram happened to be away from their flat on the Avenue Ledru Rollin, however, and when he returned in the evening, he stopped at his usual café for a drink. This café happened to be right across the street from the Nazi line cordoning off the neighborhood. The bartender, a Frenchman who was his friend, whispered to Avram, “Don’t go home. They’ve come for everyone. They’ve taken all the Jews away.” Avram was frightened but enraged. He stormed outside and stared defiantly at the German soldiers as they marched past. He went back inside the café and drank some more. As family legend has it, he survived somehow for months, living a shadow life, perhaps passing himself off as an Arab, an Axis ally. But he finally came to a bad end. As the story goes, one afternoon a handful of SS came into the café to drink and Avram attacked two of them with his bare fists; the Germans did not shoot him but beat him near to death, then dragged him off. All we know is that Avram Elgrably was buried somewhere in or near Paris, in a mass grave. The details of his demise remain a mystery.

My aunt Marcelle, who had been born in Casablanca in 1920, six months after her father went to work for Rhône-Poulenc, was in love with a French mailman of the Christian faith. When war broke out in 1939, she was living with him in Lyon and they had a child, a baby girl named Nicole (my cousin), in 1941. Several of Marcelle’s neighbors knew she was Jewish but kept their mouths shut. Then Klaus Barbie “the Butcher” took control of Lyon and began a fierce campaign, with the Milice, to flush out the remaining French Jews. Rewards for information about Jews were dangled before the hungry, ration-addled populace. Finally, in 1943, one of Marcelle’s neighbors fingered her for Barbie’s informants. She was a poor, lonely old woman who received the paltry sum of 2,000 old francs—the equivalent of about forty dollars. They came for Marcelle unexpectedly and led her away while her common-law husband was out delivering the mail. Family friends, meanwhile, were caring for her baby Nicole in the countryside. Nicole survived—I met her on my first visit to Paris when I was 20—but her mother, my aunt Marcelle, was gassed in Auschwitz in September 1943. I’ve seen her name and the date on the Nazi list of Jewish victims, published in a book several years ago.

The war and the attempted destruction of the Jews drove a wedge into the Elgrably family. It’s hard to explain how and why this happened, but each member began to live only for him or herself; the Elgrably sisters and brothers did not continue the old way of living near extended family, but became more and more fragmented, and isolated. This occurred only gradually. In 1947 and 1948, there was still a sense of belonging, of closeness to each other and to the Jewish people; my father Jacques and his brothers Jacob, Elie and Raymond went off to Palestine to fight for the independent state of Israel. One day my father was hitchhiking somewhere in the desert, and a truck full of young soldiers stopped for him. They were Polish and German Jews about his own age. Between themselves they spoke Yiddish and called my father a shvartze—a “nigger.” They thought, being an Arab Jew, he was uneducated, yet my father spoke not only French and Arabic, but some English, German and Yiddish. He surprised them when he got angry and said, in German, “How you can talk like that, when we’re all one people? Haven’t we seen enough hatred already?” He cursed at them, calling them yekkes.

After Israel declared its independence, my father left; he went back to France, and a few years later, he became an émigré yet again, landing in San Francisco—one of the first Sephardic Jews to settle in the Bay Area after the war. He met and fell in love with my mother, Leah, the granddaughter of Lithuanian Jews who had immigrated to America before the turn of the century. Leah was a student in her last year at San Francisco State; she was soon to start her career as a schoolteacher back in L.A. When my mother brought Jacques home to meet her parents, her mother—who knew nothing about the larger Jewish experience, who didn’t realize that Jews also came from the Middle East and from Africa and Asia—looked at my father and said little, her eyes darting in judgment. Afterwards, she turned to her daughter and demanded to know why Leah was getting herself involved with a shvartze. To this day it is disheartening to me to allow that ethnic and racial prejudice exists in every quarter, but then, many people don’t see that our physical reality is largely an illusion, and that in spiritual terms we are all one. You know, it’s that idea that Walt Whitman expressed so eloquently when he wrote, “I am large: I contain multitudes.”

My father was an émigré, and he remained a man between worlds; a Jew, yes, but being from North Africa he wasn’t quite accepted by most American Jews; his darker features prevented that. Nor did he feel completely at ease among Arabs, though he could speak with many of them. Where was his true place, where might he find his heart?

Jacques Elgrably became an American citizen in 1974, the year I finished high school and started college. But I grew up with the schism of being both Ashkenazi and Sephardic, the son of Eastern European and North African emigrants. I, too, grew up between worlds. It wasn’t enough for me to be American, native to a country where nearly everyone tries to reinvent themselves. Something made me distrust life in Los Angeles, and impelled me to go abroad. I was in my early twenties when I emigrated to France. In a way I wanted to retrace my father’s experience. I eventually wound up in Morocco and Spain, looking for shards of the past. Shortly after establishing residency in Paris, meanwhile, I became a French citizen—this was my right as my father had been born in France and per the requirements had completed his military service. So my father emigrated and became an “American”; and I emigrated and became “French.”

I now had two passports. But I had had the luxury of choice—my exile was self-imposed, the exile, perhaps, of many who have yet to find the nationality of their hearts.

Here I was, then, many years later, still living between worlds. I wanted to find my place. Was I American, really, or French? Was I Ashkenazi or Sephardic? Was I more African or European because my grandfather Avram had been an African, a man from Taroudant in the south of Morocco, where it’s difficult to say who is this or that, Arab, Berber, African, or Jew? Maybe the Tunisian Jewish writer, Albert Memmi, was closest to the truth about me when he wrote in his novel, The Pillar of Salt, he felt he was “an African in a world dominated by Europe.”

I immigrated back to Los Angeles after fifteen years of wandering, of crossing many borders in the world. Strangely, it wasn’t till I settled down in L.A. again that I discovered that Jews once called themselves Ivrim, an Aramaic word first used by Avram. The word ivri rhymes with poetry, means Hebrew, but it also means border crosser or literally “he who crosses to the other side.” I realized then, clearly and passionately, that my people lived in most of the countries of the world—that Jews were and have almost always been “multicultural” and indeed “multiethnic.” And because Avram was a border crosser and founder of the first of the three large monotheisms—Judaism, Christianity and Islam—perhaps most people in the Middle East, Europe and the Americas have inherited this border-crossing, boundary-challenging condition, whether or not they act on it.

Indeed, when so many of us are picking up and going elsewhere, when the émigré experience isn’t only the domain of Jews and Gypsies but of most peoples in the world; when we are constantly negotiating between the longings of our minds, our hearts and our spirits, aren’t we are all, somehow, people without boundaries? Or, at least, people trying to transcend the kinds of boundaries that impress upon us emotional and spiritual limitations?

When I look back at the experience of exile and emigration I inherited from Avram and Jacques Elgrably, and from my mother’s side of the family (people who had to escape the pogroms and who came through Ellis Island), I think of how we are, all of us, looking for freedom and love, and sometimes we find it necessary or desirable to flee, to escape. In exile we look for comfort and safety, for a place where we won’t always stand out as the Other. Yet we must admit that this very state of movement, of emigration, separates us from the rootedness of those are not Other, who think they belong where they are. This causes me to wonder if identity can really be a matter of place alone. If you happen to be a border crosser, if your heart is your nationality, you may not have a land-based identity; if you’re an émigré, you will have to embrace a new state, a new place, with no guarantee of finding your heart there.

This condition of exiles and émigrés, of Jews and Gypsies and everyone who is between worlds, between the mind and the heart, swimming between body and spirit, between here and there, is at once ancient and postmodern; and this creates a context for intercultural, interethnic, interspiritual entente the likes of which we have never had before. This “new age” in which fixed identity has become outmoded, in which many of us have become hybrids of this and that; have become indeed multiple, affords a beautiful opportunity for each and every one of us to transcend all borders, to defy all boundaries, to cross every bridge and embrace the people on the other side. Because everyone is looking for a place in the world that feels right, a place where the heart finds the measure of love, and work, and family, and the tribe; a place where you embrace your own spirit and you know that we’re all one.

When you’re feeling caught between worlds, when your heart is heavy with ambivalence, it is good to remember that, as James Baldwin once said, “Your people are all people.”

Home remains for me an elusive dream, a place determined by the mysterious longings of my heart, the nature of my friendships, the proximity of family and the evolving state of my own creative work. It is striking to me that the loquat tree in Arabic is called “askadinya” which, literally translated, means “the best of all worlds.” Perhaps my early memories of growing up in Echo Park, sitting in the loquat tree while I gorged myself on its exotic fruit, point to the beginning of my desire to discover the meaning of home—the place where you experience the best of all worlds.

Jordan Elgrably’s interview with James Baldwin appeared in The Paris Review and his interview with Milan Kundera appeared in Salmagundi.

A Celebration of the Jews the World Forgot

Sephardic Jews Are in the Process of Rediscovering Their Language, Their Literature and Their Ties to Each Other

4 Nov., 1996 | Los Angeles Times | By Jordan Elgrably

As intermarriage and assimilation erode the already small numbers of Sephardic Jews in America, the struggle to preserve their ancient heritage is getting a boost from a modern trend: ethnic chic.

An upcoming anthology will bring new visibility to the 10% of America's Jews who are descended from those cast out of the Iberian Peninsula five centuries ago.

Spanish Jews joined or returned to existing communities...

Spanish Jews joined or returned to existing communities...

At the head of the movement to celebrate this heritage is the Sephardic Educational Center, founded here in 1980 by Dr. Jose Nessim, a Paraguayan gynecologist who practices in Beverly Hills. It now has 18 chapters throughout North and South America.

"The SEC's highest goal," Nessim says, "is to assure the future of the next generation."

Young Angelenos of Sephardic origin are coming back to their roots. Says Elanit Saati, 27, a Cal State Northridge graduate of Iraqi origin, "There is so much warmth, laughter and music during Sephardic holidays. Even if there's bickering, it's erased in those moments when I celebrate with my family and I hear them speaking Arabic. It makes me feel whole again."

At the eighth International Sephardic Youth Conference in L.A. last month, about 300 young Sephardic and Arab Jews gathered to celebrate their cultures. They danced to Judeo-Arabic music and lifted their spiritual leaders—Nessim and philanthropist Ray Mallel—high on chairs, shouting their appreciation.

Danielle Dahan, a young Sephardi whose family moved here from Morocco in the '70s, said the warm atmosphere of the conference reminded her of her childhood in Morocco. "We were so tight, you went next door to the neighbors like it was your own home. Here I feel like we've lost that sense of community."

Ladino singer Sarah Aroeste

Ladino singer Sarah Aroeste

One thing that sets Sephardim apart from other Jews is their spicy, exotic cuisines—the Ladino bourreka or meat pie, for instance, or the Iraqi t'bit, an aromatic dish of chicken, burnt rice and cardamom. And the various schools of Sephardic music all have a strong Near Eastern element that is at once lyrical and dissonant in the tradition of Arabic quarter tones.

More importantly, Sephardic Jews practice Judaism with their Minhag Sepharad, or Sephardic Rite, a series of liturgical customs that include an emphasis on poetry and song.

But Rabbi Daniel Bouskila, 32, who heads Temple Tifereth Israel, L.A.'s largest Sephardic synagogue, insists that what makes Sephardic Jews unique isn't merely a rich gastronomy from more than 20 countries, nor exotic liturgical tunes, but an abiding ideology in which they strive to be "ben-adam, or moral and ethical beings."

Nessim says one of the main differences between Sephardic Jews and their Ashkenazi counterparts—who originated in countries such as Germany, Poland and Russia—is that the Sephardic culture has mostly been created by secular people and not by rabbis.

"We teach Judaism with moderation and tolerance," he says. "And that's why we never had a need to split into sub-groups {such as Orthodox or Reform} as the Ashkenazim have. . . . Ironically, assimilation [into mainstream society] is proportionately much greater among Sephardim than among Ashkenazi Jews"—who make up 90% of America's Jewish population.

They came here from countries as far-flung as Brazil, Morocco, Turkey and Yemen—even, most recently, from India and Burma—to reinvent themselves once again as Americans.

These disparate emigres had one thing in common: their Sephardic heritage, carried through the generations following their persecution in Spain in the late 1300s and final expulsion in 1492.

As a result of the Inquisition, some 200,000 Jews from the Iberian Peninsula ("Sepharad" in ancient Hebrew) fanned out to settle in North Africa, Italy, Turkey and Greece, especially on the island of Rhodes. Some traveled to Persia—now, Iran—and points farther east, joining already established communities of Mizrahi (Oriental or Near Eastern) Jews, including the Babylonian Jews in Iraq. Sephardic Jews later came to the United States.<

Los Angeles is now the second-largest Sephardic-Mizrahi community in North America, after New York. The numbers are difficult to fix, but the consensus is that roughly 100,000 Jews of Sephardic and Middle Eastern origin make their home in Los Angeles, with Persians making up the majority.

Over the years, Nessim has sunk much of his personal fortune into the SEC. He founded the organization, he says, "in the knowledge that there wasn't a single world educational center with a Sephardic orientation. There was no place for leaders to be trained, there was no pooling place where people could communicate and be in touch. So, it was a rich culture without a central address and a phone number."

Nessim, whose family migrated from Spain to Palestine before settling in Paraguay, calls the Sephardic community "gypsies, because everybody is fending for himself. Up till now a Sephardic Jew cares about this: one, his family, and two, his work. There are many very successful Sephardim economically, but they never cared about their own community or about the people as a whole."

While Nessim at times comes across as a naysayer, he acknowledges a national movement in which Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews are gaining greater visibility, in part through the publication of such studies as Daniel J. Elazar's <em>The Other Jews: The Sephardim Today</em> (Basic Books, 1993) and Norman Stillman's <em>Sephardic Religious Responses to Modernity</em> (Gordon and Breach, 1995).

One of the few anthologies that has collected American Sephardic writings

One of the few anthologies that has collected American Sephardic writings

Most Americans are familiar with the canon of Jewish American literature that includes writers such as Saul Bellow, Isaac B. Singer and Philip Roth—Ashkenazi Jews all—but who can name a single Sephardic American writer?

An anthology due from Brandeis University Press in December will attempt for the first time to introduce writing from the smaller Sephardic canon. Entitled Sephardic American Voices: 200 Years of a Literary Legacy, it is edited by Diane Matza, a professor at Utica College in New York.

"The Sephardic intellectual class isn't huge, but it's growing and becoming more prominent," Matza says. "Politically the climate is right for attention to smaller [ethnic] groups that people haven't paid that much attention to."

The anthology includes writing by Emma Lazarus, whose poem is inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, as well as contemporary fiction, essays and poetry by Sephardim of national reputation such as Victor Perera and Ammiel Alcalay. Perera is the author of the recent memoir The Cross and the Pear Tree, while Alcalay's After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture, has shaken up academic circles by insisting that the history of Jewish literature and intellectual tradition is deeply indebted to the accomplishments of Sephardi and Arab Jews.

Essential reading from Ammiel Alcalay

Essential reading from Ammiel Alcalay

Speaking from his office at City University of New York in Queens, Alcalay says that there is a new willingness to examine and validate Sephardic-Mizrahi culture.

"The reception to my own work is some indication," Alcalay says. "I've gotten a kind of legitimacy in the last year or two that I haven't felt in many years. I think part of it has to do with the peace process [in the Middle East], which has opened up some possibilities to Jews from the Arab world."

Professor Lev Hakak, who coordinates the Jewish studies department at UCLA, is an Iraqi Jew and author of several scholarly works as well as books of poetry and fiction. He recognizes that a new generation of Sephardim are coming of age in the United States and beginning to make their mark.

"Basically," he points out, "the first thing immigrants do is try to make a living, to survive. Once they overcome that, then they deal with other issues, such as their image, their heritage, their traditions and so on."

Hakak publishes a newsletter addressed to L.A.'s community of approximately 5,000 Babylonian or Iraqi Jews, called Yosef Hayim, named after a major Iraqi thinker.

There is also the bimonthly Lashon, which addresses the community of Sephardim who speak Ladino, 15th century Spanish infused with elements of Hebrew, Italian, Turkish and Greek. They immigrated here from Turkey, Greece and Egypt. In his memoir, Perera describes Ladino as "a living archive of the wisdom and the prejudices as well as the fortunes and misfortunes of our tribe."

Albert M. Passy, a salty 75-year-old ex-Marine sergeant who lives in Venice, is the managing editor of Lashon and has published several editions of the Sephardic Folk Dictionary, a Ladino/English/Hebrew lexicon. Just as Ashkenazi Jews have struggled to keep Yiddish alive after the Holocaust, so are Passy and a handful of scholars hoping to pass knowledge of Ladino on to younger Sephardim.

A documentary film shot here last year, Island of Roses: The Jews of Rhodes in Los Angeles, records the local history of the Ladino-speaking community and in particular, the family of Rebecca Levy, whose I Remember Rhodes (Hermon Press, 1986) inspired her 26-year-old nephew, Gregori Viens, to take an interest in his heritage. Viens' film won the Silver Screen Award at the U.S. International Film and Video Festival in Chicago. In it, young Sephardi Leah Levy comments, "It's cool to be different nowadays and have your own heritage."

In the search for spiritual and cultural roots, real estate investment banker Henry Manoucheri, whose family came to L.A. from Iran after the Islamic Revolution, established the Halkeinu Foundation in 1995. Halkeinu holds a lecture series that has attracted about 4,000 people.

Manoucheri, 33, says Halkeinu addresses contemporary issues facing young professionals, but also encourages Sephardic singles to get to know each other and their culture. Some Persian Jews, he says, "are discovering that there's more to life than making money and having a good time. They want to go back to their roots. People are turning to their inner life now, more than at any other time."

The view that first-generation Americans of Sephardic or Mizrahi descent are exploring their roots is voiced by Juliana Maio, an entertainment lawyer and producing partner at Michael Phillips Productions in Beverly Hills.

Maio, who is of Sephardic background by way of Egypt, says, "Now that my generation is successful, we're coming into our own, and it's brand-new. We're starting to make a difference and take an interest in our own heritage. Some of us, like me, totally walked away from that and assimilated within the larger American culture. But now I think that people should know about us and realize that not everyone from countries like Egypt and Morocco is Arab. We are close to the Arabic culture in some ways," Maio amends, "but we really have our own traditions."

The most active Sephardic temple in the San Fernando Valley, Em Habanim, serves as an encounter point for Jews from Morocco, Turkey, Iraq, Yemen, Tunisia and even Libya. Headed by Rabbi Haim Louk, Minhag services at Em Habanim tend to be major vocal performances, as Louk is a gifted Hazzan (cantor) and a virtuoso of classical Andalusian music.

While social critics argue that today's emphasis on ethnic allegiance is undermining the idea of a shared American culture, Nessim and others interviewed for this story see it differently. Even as they worry that their heritage is in peril of dissolving in the American melting pot, the politics of multiculturalism may have granted Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews a new means of survival.

In Your Faith: Jews with Tattoos and Other Hebraic Aberrations

Many Jewish Gen Xers are Embracing Their Religion and Cultural Icons with Defiance and Bold Irony. But are the piercings and tattoos a fad or spiritual expression?

13 May, 1996 | Los Angeles Times | Jordan Elgrably

Marina Vainshtein (photo Justin Dawson)

Marina Vainshtein (photo Justin Dawson)

With her purple mohawk and pierced eyebrows, nose and lip, Marina Vainshtein is not, at first glance, your average young Jewish woman. But look further and you'll find evidence of Marina's obsession with the history of her people: a star of David tattooed on her inner left arm, a tattooed armband in Hebrew on her right wrist that reads, "And now we are the last of many." And these are only the first signs that Marina, a 22-year-old Los Angeles photographer, is defining her Judaism in unconventional ways.

Much of Marina's body is tattooed with vivid scenes of the Holocaust: a hovering angel of death in a gas mask; a row of naked bodies hanging from the gallows; and, on her left arm and shoulder, gruesome images of the Nazi medical experiments performed on children.

Jewish law, or halachah, bans tattoos as a desecration of the body; only Holocaust survivors are the exception to the rule that you cannot be buried in a Jewish cemetery if tattooed. But now there are members of a generation of young Jews in their 20s and 30s who, like Vainshtein, are observing their Judaism in unorthodox—not to say radical—ways.

Even as the Jewish community has seen a renewed interest in the exploration of Jewish spirituality, there is a discernible movement among some younger Jews to explore their Jewish identity with in-your-face defiance and bold irony. This smaller movement is claiming Jewish ethnicity and cultural icons much the way blacks, Latinos and Asians did before them.

An image from Art Spielgelman's "Maus"

An image from Art Spielgelman's "Maus"

Ironically, Art Spiegelman, considered by some the godfather of this movement for his unusual exploration of Jewish identity in the satirical comic book series Maus, expresses dismay at the idea that Jews are jumping on the multicultural bandwagon

"This is the problem with an America that has gone crazy, that's just gone into ethnic madness," Spiegelman says. "I think what you're seeing is a response to the Balkanization of America, where Jews who felt themselves too embraced in America's assimilationist arms have now started to desperately backpedal. It seems to me that America has entered into an age of competing victimhoods, and that the left has become sapped by the rise of multiculturalism. The energy that used to go into trying to create a generally more just society has been rerouted into competing claims of ethnic rights."

Still, young Jews like Vainshtein remain unapologetic. "I love tattoos," she says. "I think they're beautiful. If they're done right they can be art." Yet Vainshtein hasn't unveiled her tattoos to her parents. She's afraid they'll have a conniption.

When Vainshtein was in high school, a woman who had survived seven concentration camps gave a lecture to her history class. The seeds of Marina's Jewish identity were already planted, she recalls, "but her talk was the nourishment. She taught me that I could be a survivor too, no matter if it's one day or 80 years."

A new alternative Jewish quarterly called Davka (Hebrew slang for "in your face") hopes to appeal to just such a generation of unaffiliated young Jews, many of whom remain alienated by traditional forms of observance. Launched in February in San Francisco, Davka expects a national readership of 40,000 for its second issue. The magazine's intended audience, says Editor in Chief Alan Kaufman, may not go to synagogue or keep all Jewish holidays, "but we are seeing a Jewish cultural revolution, which is the activity of Jews facing a new millennium."

(While Kaufman explains that part of Davka's raison d'etre is to be a response to the anti-Semitism of the militia movement, the Anti-Defamation League has recorded a sharp overall decline in anti-Semitic attitudes over the last 20 years, says David Lehrer, Pacific-Southwest regional director. And the most recent ADL audit of anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. reported a decrease of 11% in 1995 from the previous year.)

Artist Dennis Kardon prepares his installation of "Jewish noses" which was featured in shows at the Jewish Museum, the Hammer and elsewhere.

Artist Dennis Kardon prepares his installation of "Jewish noses" which was featured in shows at the Jewish Museum, the Hammer and elsewhere.

Kaufman* points to an explosion of Yiddishkeit (Yiddish culture) in the arts, to "a kind of new postmodern iconography" of Jewish painters, performance artists, writers and musicians who are celebrating Jewish culture with unprecedented enthusiasm and pride. A key show at the Jewish Museum in New York, "Too Jewish?" which opened in March, has sparked considerable interest and debate. Representing the work of 23 artists in a variety of media, "Too Jewish?" is a clear expression of those who have rejected the role of assimilated Jew and are claiming a place for themselves in America's multicultural crucible. The show travels to the Armand Hammer Museum in January.

Says Irene Segalove, an L.A.-based artist included in the show, "Suddenly, the last few years, being Jewish has become this exotic quality, and my friends are wishing they were Jewish. That's been intriguing to me, a shock really, that these WASPs are coveting my ethnicity."

Norman L. Kleeblatt, the show's curator, says that for the first time Jewish artists are neither nostalgic about the past nor do they view themselves as victims. Instead, "Their use of overt Jewish imagery and themes is calculated, confrontational, highly politicized and, not least, humorous."

Central to both the work shown in "Too Jewish?" and in Davka is an inquiry into modern attitudes about the Jewish body. Several of the artists, for instance, celebrate the "Jewish nose" in ironic ways. No plastic surgery here: These self-references are not about dissimulation and disguise, but acceptance and affirmation, as in Dennis Kardon's "Jewish Noses," a sculptural piece, or Deborah Kass' "Jewish Jackies," an ironic take on Andy Warhol's silk-screens of Jackie Onassis with Barbra Streisand representing a positive idealization of Jewish female beauty.

In her videos recently screened at Jewish film festivals and at the L.A. gallery Strange Fruits, Cal Arts graduate Rachel Schreiber examines the Jewish body—her own—in an effort to understand "how the genealogy and cultural memory [of the Holocaust] make itself part of your body, and how to look at it not in terms of victimhood." Schreiber, 30, the daughter of a rabbi, has provoked hostile responses from Jewish audiences for a scene in which she shaves her pubic hair and writes the German word for Jew, "Jude," on herself. "A lot of what I do," Schreiber says, "is perceived by the Jewish community to be very shocking."

Another radical image of the sea change in Jewish self-reference can be found on Davka's first cover: a young woman with short, fuchsia-dyed hair and tattoos is wrapped in a tallis (prayer shawl); with her body piercings and defiant stare, the image challenges the Jewish mainstream to sit up and take notice.

The reason for the tattooed woman on the cover, Kaufman explains, is that "a majority of young Jews have tattoos, ear-rings, nose-rings—this is a fact of life today. Ask any parent. So it hit me suddenly, of what use is this halachic law if it's going to exclude an entire generation from Jewish ceremony and tradition?"

Davka's subtitle is "Jewish Cultural Revolution." Says the 44-year-old Kaufman: "A revolution seeks to overthrow an old order. And I really think that what we want to do is overthrow old perceptions."

The impetus for Davka came about a year ago when Kaufman, active in the beat-poetry revival and spoken word scene in L.A. and New York, and editor Danny Shot put together an anthology titled It's the Jews (Long Shot Productions, 1995)—a not-so-veiled reference to the historical scapegoating of Jews.

A compendium of underground Jewish writing, the anthology was launched in April '95 at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York and at Place Pigalle in San Francisco. Kaufman and Shot, both children of Holocaust survivors, were stunned when both events attracted sellout crowds. These weren't your strait-laced Jewish yuppies homesick for a little Gemutlichkeit, recalls Joe Berkofsky, a reporter from Northern California's Jewish Bulletin, but "hundreds of hipsters in their 20s and 30s, a whole different milieu."

Aimed at the cutting edge of Jewish culture, Davka's first issue includes a photo essay of eccentric rabbis, an essay about the Jewish bachelor on the prowl, a profile of a mandolinist who plays Jewish bluegrass and klezmer music, and new poetry from Alan Ginsberg and Marge Piercy.

Among the eclectic mix in the second issue, due in June, is an article by Doug Century of New York's Jewish Weekly Forward about Jews and hip-hop. Given the number of Jews entrenched in the music business, it's no shocker to find them involved in the black music scene, but how do you figure rappers like M.C. Serch and the Beastie Boys? "That's quite a different story," Century writes, "a saga of misfits and miscreants and the just plain meshuggah." An L.A. launch, Challahpalooza (get it?), is planned for late June.

Reform Rabbi Steve Robbins of Congregation N'Vay Shalom in Los Angeles views Davka with seeming bemusement, yet wonders, "What kind of depth will the magazine have on an ongoing basis? It's one thing to be Jewish, defy halachah and have tattoos, but what does it really mean on a spiritual level?"

Martin Peretz, the influential editor of the New Republic, bought three subscriptions to Davka—one for himself and one for each of his kids, who are in their 20s. Describing himself as a "freethinking traditionalist," Peretz says he has been unable to pass on a strong sense of Jewish tradition to his children. "It seemed to me that Davka was one of a range of Jewish phenomena which shows that Jewishness and [mainstream] culture need not be segregated in one's life. Any creative Jewish effort engages my interest."

Berkofsky suggests that Davka is reaching out to unaffiliated young Jews who may be unclear about their religious beliefs but who nevertheless share cultural interests of the ballyhooed Generation X.

Berkofsky coined the phrase "Generation J" in an article for the Jewish Bulletin. It's a moniker that seems to fit, for example, performance artist Josh Kornbluth, whose "Haiku Tunnel," a satirical, autobiographical look at the life of a Jewish male secretary slaving away in a big corporation, is in pre-production at Miramax Films.

A former TV critic and reporter, Kornbluth, 30, turned to live performances with a one-man off-Broadway show called "Red Diaper Baby," a hilarious monologue about growing up in New York as the son of a devout Marxist-Leninist who "believed there was going to be a violent Communist revolution in this country—and that I was going to lead it. Just so you can get a sense of the pressure."

vintage-typewriter-175JE.jpg

* Alan Kaufman published the memoir Jew Boy,
a few years after interviewed for this story.

Palestinian Narratives Enter the Mainstream

Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad says his Oscar-nominated film, Paradise Now, is an attempt to create peace between the Middle East's many identities.

March 3, 2006 | Alternet

Hany Abu-Assad's Paradise Now [3]," which won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film, has been nominated in the same category for an Oscar, marking the first time the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has recognized a film from Palestine about Palestinian culture. (Several Israeli and Jewish groups have petitioned [4] the academy to change the entry from "Palestine" to "Palestinian territories" to no avail as of this writing.)

With the recognition of Paradise Now, a gripping tale of two young would-be suicide bombers from the impoverished town of Nablus, the entertainment industry has acknowledged that there is not just one narrative; that the Israeli-Jewish story must make room, finally, for Palestinian stories about themselves. And a just-published translation of the novel Gate of the Sun [5] (Archipelago Books, 2006), by Elias Khoury, offers another opportunity to learn about how Palestinians see themselves as a people in exile, and how they view what happened to their country in 1948.

Director Hany Abu-Assad

Director Hany Abu-Assad

But questions of identity and identification are rarely without complexity, and the Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad is the first to recognize this. A former aerospace engineer who lived in Holland for 25 years, Abu-Assad began making films in the '90s, first coming to attention with the documentary Nazareth 2000 and the feature film Rana's Wedding (2002), which described a day in the life of a young woman in Jerusalem trying to get married before 4 p.m.

A native of Nazareth, a predominantly poor Christian town in Israel, Abu-Assad is a Muslim from a wealthy family who carries an Israeli passport. Palestinian Arabs—both Muslim and Christian—number about one million in Israel and received Israeli citizenship in 1966.

Abu-Assad views his Israeli passport as just a "ticket to cross borders."

"I have an Israeli passport, yes," he says, "but that doesn't make me an Israeli, because as long as Israel wants to be a Jewish state, and I'm not Jewish, I can't be an Israeli."

Most Israeli Arabs speak fluent Hebrew, and many writers, including Sayedd Kashua (Dancing Arabs) and Anton Shammas (Arabesques), have chosen to express themselves in Hebrew, despite their Palestinian identity and native Arabic spoken at home.

"Why not have Arabs speak and write in Hebrew?" Abu-Assad says. "I have no problem with accepting the Israelis as fellow members of the land. I have no problem accepting the Israelis, their language, their culture, as a nation. I'm not in denial. Being a Palestinian is not in denial that Israelis have the right to be there and to be as a nation. But we are also there and we have the right to be there, and there are also people who have the right to go back. As long as the Israelis are not recognizing these facts and dealing with them in a compromise, and while they are controlling the land and want to be a Jewish state, I can't be an Israeli."

Kais Nashef and Ali Suliman costar in "Paradise Now"

Kais Nashef and Ali Suliman costar in "Paradise Now"

Paradise Now is a bleak depiction of the poverty that grips Nablus and the West Bank. The film shows the Israeli occupiers as the Palestinians see them. There is endless waiting at check points and border crossings, frequent arrests and the hopelessness that empowers Islamic extremists to recruit suicide bombers from among young Palestinians who see no future under occupation. The film was co-produced by Israeli producer Amir Harel, and several Israelis worked on the film, alongside its Palestinian cast and crew.

Hany Abu-Assad says that whether or not his film wins the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film*, the nomination itself means everything for the Palestinians "because part of our struggle is just to be recognized. This is the best the West can do to give hope to Palestinians."

Popular culture can largely be credited with creating awareness of an alternative Palestinian narrative.

Kais Nashef, Ali Suliman

Kais Nashef, Ali Suliman

However, Abu-Assad says, "I don't make films to create awareness. I make films to resist. There is a civilized way to resist, by using art to tell your story, or the uncivilized, violent way. I don't believe in bullets. I make films to tell stories and to have a dialogue, but without denying the rights of others to have their stories."

Abu-Assad says, "Israel as a state denies our stories; their leaders are using fear in order to make others inhuman and to continue this injustice. And you know, I don't understand this fear. When you are stronger than me, and you are afraid of me," he says, "you don't need politics to solve your problems, you need a psychoanalyst."

Abu-Assad is a moderate who dreams of a constitutional democracy where Israel and the Palestinian territories exist today. "I would like to be a national of a state that considers all the people as equals," he says; "a state that is not a national or religious state. If Palestine were to become an Islamic state, only for Muslims, I would also be against it. I want to see a state that respects and serves the civil and human rights of all its citizens, without discriminating between races and religions."

Abu-Assad understands what it's like to be a minority and says this condition is in part what drove him to become a filmmaker. "I am a Muslim in Nazareth. I come from a wealthy family in a poor society. I am a Palestinian in what is called Israel. In Europe I am an Arab, and in Holland I'm a foreigner. Always I'm the minority," he adds with a grin.

"I'm smiling, and I'll tell you why. This is a good way to understand life, in its complexity. Because you are all these conflicting things, you have to create peace between all these identities. In order to create peace, you have to look from all points of view, to get to know more about yourself, about others, about history, about humanity. I am privileged," he says. "I have all these conflicting identities at once, yet there is peace between them, harmony, not war."

* Paradise Now lost the 2005 Best Foreign Film Oscar to Gavin Hood's South African story, Tsotsi.

Tim Robbins' Patriot Act

Robbins' newest play, an adaptation of Orwell's '1984,' speaks directly to the Bush administration's perpetual war on terror.

1 March, 2006 | Alternet | Jordan Elgrably

After his incandescent plays about the death penalty ("The Exonerated") and the media in Iraq ("Embedded"), it seemed inevitable that actor-writer-director Tim Robbins would continue to fearlessly produce politically charged theater.

In his newest production by Los Angeles' Actors' Gang ensemble, a corrosive play based on George Orwell's novel 1984 and adapted by Michael Gene Sullivan, director of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, Big Brother is here and torture is us.

"1984" directed by Tim Robbins at the Actors Gang

"1984" directed by Tim Robbins at the Actors Gang

The Actors' Gang show differs markedly from previous Orwell adaptations in that Sullivan and Robbins focus on the book within the novel, written by Big Brother's enemy No. 1, Goldstein, who argues that capitalism uses continual warfare as a means of economic exploitation and control.

"That's essential to this production," says Robbins, who directs the play. "That's where the meat is for me, because it rings so true now." Writing in 1948, Robbins points out, Orwell was not looking at the future, but "reflecting on the world around him. In fact, what he contends is that what war has really become is a way to keep the elite minority in power and to deplete the resources of the economies in the post-industrial age."

The Actors' Gang production reveals Big Brother to be an elite minority, controlling and exploiting the masses through perpetual warfare. (Wasn't it just the other day that Rumsfeld called the war on terrorism "the long war," and the Bush administration asked Congress to appropriate $439 billion for next year's defense budget?)

Speaking of government control, Robbins marvels at how Orwell the novelist did not allow Big Brother's omnipotence to concern itself with the downtrodden majority. "Brilliant how prescient he was. When you reread the book, there's a passage where they don't care about 85 percent of the people who are proles— they're so stupefied by poverty and overwork, and pacified by entertainment and by lotteries, that they're never going to be a problem. What Big Brother has to monitor and be concerned with is the other 15 percent of people who are in the upper rungs of society."

During a recent performance of the play, which opened Feb. 11 and runs through April 8, the audience appeared both entertained and disturbed by the parallels with current events: a national security apparatus eavesdropping on American citizens; the military's use of torture in prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo; and "rendition"—the Bush administration's euphemism for kidnapping suspected terrorists and sending them off to regimes in Syria, Egypt or Saudi Arabia for months, even years, of interrogation.

&nbsp;Director Tim Robbins

 Director Tim Robbins

Robbins' production is stark and something of a departure, the director feels, from the company's usually buoyant, satirical performances.

"This is not so much satire," he points out, "as it is a drama, and we think we found the humor in it." Humor in a hapless Winston Smith, who is tortured for nearly two hours onstage? No one said it wouldn't be twisted: ear-splitting music and electrodes are part of the interrogation arsenal; the play's humor, such as it is, comes unexpectedly and is short-lived.

Telescreens, naturally, are everywhere.

Much about this theatrical "1984" feels ominously real—nothing like the 1984 Michael Radford film that depicted a totalitarian futuristic society. Robbins is planning his own film version, to be shot in New York, "essentially the way it looks now. No big special effects, no futuristic imaginings; just the way it is."

"It's more about the mind and self-censorship," he continues. "Orwell writes about acquired self-censorship, the idea that Big Brother is present if you allow him to be present. There are many people living in fear, and that's really what he was writing about—totalitarianism of the mind."

Robbins balks when asked about critics who accuse him of agitprop. "It seems that anytime someone questions something from the left, or from a progressive point of view, there is an immediate rush to label it 'political,' as a way I think to marginalize it as a work of art. I find that offensive."

Robbins has stuck his neck out repeatedly over the years, with repercussions for both himself and his family—he has two children with actor and activist Susan Sarandon; when the couple spoke out against the Iraq war, they received death threats and had major public appearances cancelled.

Robbins accuses the entertainment industry of being far more conservative than we are led to believe. "I'll bring up the most crucial time in the last ten years, right before the Iraq war; Hollywood was essentially silent about that. I had many people tell me 'Now's not the time to protest.' Well, if now's not the fucking time, when is the time?"

But exercising his First Amendment rights, Robbins insists, has not hurt his career. "It doesn't hurt you to use your freedom," he says, "and if it does, then why have freedom? They told me before the first Iraq war, 'Don't go down to Washington and protest; it's going to hurt your career.' And the next two years brought Bob Roberts and The Player, and afterwards Shawshank Redemption and Hudsucker Proxy; after this war I won an Oscar for Mystic River.

Doublethink and Newspeak are still prominent features of Robbins' "1984," and never has this nightmare had more resonance than today, when the neo-conservative agenda of the Bush administration has capitalized on fear-mongering and division as a form of mass control. Robbins argues that throughout the Reagan-Bush years, through Clinton and until today, right-wing talk radio and other media have waged an effective campaign against the left and the Democratic party, while fostering hatred of Americans by Americans.

"Well, now they've got it all," he says. "They've got the executive, they've got the Congress, they've got the judicial for the most part, and things are worse. And sooner or later, if Joe Sixpack doesn't figure this out, that he's been lied to for the past 25 years."

"I'm not the enemy," Robbins says. "I've been advocating for the American worker, for peace and justice. That's not the enemy. The enemy is people who make you believe that hatred is necessary in this country, because all your hatred is doing is buoying up and keeping in power people who do not have your best interests at heart, people who will not represent you in Washington. They will close down your factories and sell off the jobs to the highest bidder in China. How un-American is that? But somehow these people are aligned with God and country, and this illusion has been sold for the past 25 years. It's very clever, very effective propaganda."

If today's citizenry lack a sufficient culture of dissent, Robbins says, it may be the result of too much comfort. "People believe they're comfortable. We're locked into our telescreens and we believe; we buy into the culture of entertainment and distraction and advertisement."

Few celebrities in Robbins' position of power are making themselves heard beyond the pale of mass entertainment. With the recent exception of George Clooney, the list of progressive entertainers willing to speak out publicly is still painfully short.

Could the Bush administration be spying on outspoken Americans with a liberal agenda?

Says Robbins, "Certainly I think the reason they are being so secretive about [wire-tapping] is they've fallen into that Nixonian trap. They're so paranoid about their own lies and deceptions that they feel like they have to monitor their opposition."

If "1984" is 2006, and torture is what Americans do to extract information from the enemy, Robbins still refuses to play his cards close to the vest, to avoid Big Brother's scrutiny. The government may be watching him, he says, but "paranoia is a sign that you're losing the battle."

The Morality of 'Munich'

Spielberg's startling new film, 'Munich,' is an incisive argument against the use of violence to resolve the Mideast conflict.

23 December, 2005 | Alternet | Jordan Elgrably

In 1972, Black September, a wing of Arafat's Al Fatah movement, kidnapped 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team during the Munich games. The hostages and most of the Palestinians were killed at the airport in a firefight with the German police (though it is generally assumed that the Israeli hostages were murdered by the Palestinian militants in cold blood).* This set in motion a series of reprisals by the Israelis, including targeted assassinations of Palestinians, and continuing acts of terrorism by militant groups against Israeli, European and American targets. Today we are no closer to an end to the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, nor to a lasting peace agreement that addresses equally the needs of both Israeli and Palestinian peoples.

Eric Bana in the 2004 feature by Steven Spielberg

Eric Bana in the 2004 feature by Steven Spielberg

Now comes Munich, a Hollywood feature film, co-written by playwright Tony Kushner and screenwriter Eric Roth, and directed by Steven Spielberg. Even before the film's release, neo-con critics have attacked what they perceive as a liberal bias in the film's portrayal of Palestinian terrorists and their would-be Israeli assassins.

Never having considered Spielberg a political filmmaker, I went to an early screening of Munich with low expectations, surprised that he would even tackle the subject. Yet the story that unfolded proved to be an incisive argument against the use of violence, under any circumstances, as a means to achieve political objectives. While the Munich attack brought the Palestinian struggle into millions of homes around the world and as such put the decades-old conflict on the map, it also embroiled Israeli intelligence services in black operations to assassinate its enemies wherever they might be found. Palestinian terrorism created an image problem for the Palestinian people, whose best interests I would argue were, and still are betrayed by savage acts of violence against Israeli civilians.

And by engaging Black September and other terrorist groups on their own violent terms, Israel betrayed its declared values as a Western-style democracy that eschewed the death penalty in 1954 for ordinary crimes (and only exercised the death penalty once, for Adolf Eichmann's "extraordinary" crimes, in 1962).

Like Hany Abu-Assad's recent film Paradise Now, which humanizes two would-be Palestinian suicide bombers from Nablus, Munich is as much an argument about the futility of violence to resolve conflict as it is a cogent historical drama. It is shot in a gritty documentary style and may remind some filmgoers of the early work of European director Costas-Gavras, his political thriller Z in particular.

In fact, Munich is the work of a mature filmmaker--one who does not appear beholden to popular American Jewish opinion that Israel is always the underdog. The film depicts Palestinian and other Arab characters as human beings, and it chronicles the change of heart that Israeli agents experience as they go about their clandestine mission to assassinate those the Israeli state identified as responsible for the Munich operation.

At the start of the film, five undercover agents based in Europe, led by Avner Kauffman (Eric Bana), believe themselves on a mission for just vengeance. But it is not long before Bana and the others begin questioning the sanctity of their assignment. The bloody acts of revenge haunt Kauffman, and though he says that he is becoming numb to murder, the truth is that he gradually breaks down, succumbing to paranoia and fear. Meanwhile, for every act of vengeance wreaked by the Israelis, the Palestinians respond with further terrorist attacks. Munich makes it clear in the film's closing frame that this cycle of violence continues to the present day.

And where are we? The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is no closer to a solution: The military occupation of Palestinian territories is in its 38th year; the settlement movement continues apace; and all the international peace initiatives have failed. The one dependable reality of the conflict—Palestinian suicide bombings and Israeli targeted assassinations—is utterly bankrupt. Nothing remains but for the Palestinians to seek justice with a nonviolent revolution for peace, in the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi, and for the Israeli people to follow new leaders who can devise political rather than military solutions. Perhaps the recently elected Amir Peretz, who now helms the Labor Party, can lead the way. "I see the occupation as an immoral act," Peretz has said. "I want to end the occupation not because of Palestinian pressure, but because I see it as an Israeli interest."

The actors of Munich perform with the intensity of an ensemble cast. Chief among them are Australians Eric Bana, who convincingly does both an Israeli and a German accent, and Geoffrey Rush, who plays Kauffman's black ops boss. The other four assassins are performed by an international cast of British, Irish, French and German actors, including Daniel Craig, who has been tapped to be the next James Bond, and Mathieu Kassovitz, who appeared opposite Audrey Tautou in Amelie and directed the hit drama La Haine (Hate). Omar Metwally, meanwhile, turns in a strong performance as Ali, a young Palestinian militant, and the other Arab character actors chosen for this film turn in subdued, thoughtful performances. There are also a number of Israeli actors who stand out, including Ayelet Zurer as Kauffman's pregnant young wife, Gila Almagor as his mother, and Ami Weinberg as General Zamir. In fact, there are few Americans in Munich, and most of them are behind the camera.

Unsurprisingly, Munich has already engendered a legion of detractors even before going into wide release. It matters not. Well into his career, after having been lionized by Hollywood, with a litany of awards too long to list, Steven Spielberg has finally made his masterpiece.* This is a caveat to what I originally wrote: "..a wing of Arafat's Al Fatah movement kidnapped and then killed 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team during the Munich games." Click here for further reading.

Food and Conflict Merge On Stage in 'The Arab-Israeli Cookbook'

Robin Soans' play is directed at The Met by Louis Fantasia

13 June, 2005| The Daily Star, Lebanon | Jordan Elgrably

Los Angeles - In "The Arab-Israeli Cookbook," kibbeh, falafel, fattoush, and grape leaves, among other mezze and main courses, are almost as central to the story as the 40 characters inhabited by the nine actors on stage. The old adage "you are what you eat" is never far from anyone's mind during the drama that ensues. Each of these residents of Jerusalem, Haifa, Tel Aviv, Bethlehem, or a West Bank refugee camp, whether they are Muslim, Jewish, or Christian, talks about family, food and the hope for a better future. And while almost everyone is paranoid about suicide bombings or Israeli military incursions, the audience quickly comes to understand that Palestinians and Israelis are in this crucible together—no wall, no matter how many meters high or how many kilometres long, will ever truly separate their interwoven destinies.

Fadi (Iman Nazemzadeh), a young Palestinian student of both law and medicine, seems almost blessed to be above the usual fray; he is never stuck at checkpoints himself, but he reports the pain of other Palestinians just the same. Nadia (Ros Gentle) is an engaging Palestinian woman, a Christian sitting in her kitchen preparing grape leaves who recalls the siege of Bethlehem with resigned sadness. And the central male figure representing the Palestinians, Hossin (played by Moroccan actor Ismail Abou-al-Kanater), is a force of nature, with undeniable charm and sophistication. Forced by circumstances to work as a gardener, despite his graduate degree, Hossin is an enviable tour guide for the future Palestinian state. As he talks to the audience about food, music and relationships, you feel safe in his hands. If anything, none of these Palestinians seems angry enough at their circumstances, but maybe when plenty of good hummus is available, rage at the daily injustices Palestinians suffer is just a little longer in coming.

Often, the Israeli characters are flamboyant, too. Their principal spokeswoman, Rena (Jill Holden), is a strident New York-born-and-raised widow who has spent over 20 years in Israel. She represents the Ashkenazi culture with a healthy dose of wit and sarcasm. The other sunny Israeli, Mordechai (Louis R. Plante), who in the first sketch runs a popular falafel stand, feels like a familiar sitcom dad but with a New York edge. One of the highlights of "The Arab-Israeli Cookbook" is comedic actor Ric Borelli; with his elastic face and quirky smile, Borelli plays several Israeli characters. He brought out the mirth in the sceptical audience members, who— whether Arab or Jew—were prepared to pan the play and go home harrumphing. As Alon, Aharon, or Giora, Borelli had us glued to his every word and gesture; but the decisive moment was when he reappeared in the penultimate sketch as Mohammad, making us empathize with a Palestinian living in an Israeli pressure cooker.

The love of good food binds together the ten sketches of "The Arab-Israeli Cookbook;" the audience is treated to some live on-stage cooking, the smells of garlic, fresh herbs and spices wafting over the theatre. The play's author, Robin Soans, is a Brit who spent several weeks in Israel and the West Bank in 2003, interviewing three generations of "ordinary" Palestinians and Israelis before drafting his play.

The "Cookbook" first ran in London, in May 2004, and is running currently at the MET Theatre in Los Angeles, under the direction of Louis Fantasia. Also the play's producer, Fantasia has directed over a hundred plays and operas on several continents. Soans is to be thanked for bothering to go out and talk to Palestinians and Israelis in the first place. He sampled their recipes, listened to their personal stories and recorded their political opinions. We in the West, far from the explosions and the chaos of their daily lives, benefit from knowing more about what average people endure in a state of perpetual war.

The play strives for balance; throughout, Jews listen to Arabs and Arabs listen to Jews. Indeed, during several monologues, whether by Fadi or Rena, Hossin or the young Arab-Israeli woman, Amal (Dre Slaman), at least one Israeli or Palestinian sits or stands quietly nearby, listening to the other side. Soans may be suggesting that everyone could use a weekend crash course in compassionate listening—not just embittered enemies in the Middle East.

Possibly the most painful, unfunny sketch conveys the beauty and tragedy of Haifa, a mixed Arab-Jewish city of tolerance, as Fadi describes how Maxim's—an Arab-and-Jewish-owned restaurant—was struck by a suicide bomber on Passover. A 29-year-old female lawyer perpetrated the attack, which blew up dozens—among them a baby whose body parts were strewn 200 meters away. Fadi shares his pain for both the Jewish and Arab victims in the restaurant, but also for the suicide bomber who, he reports, had recently lost three of the seminal males in her family.

The playwright and director want "The Arab-Israeli Cookbook" to be a work of realism, and it is; after all, paranoia in the major Israeli cities is widespread, among both Jews and Arabs: is that really a baby carriage or a package with wires sticking out of it? Is that man as fat as he appears, or is that a bomb? However, by tastefully combining cooking, soulful Arab music (composed by Yuval Ron) and irresistible humour, the "Cookbook" manages to be more than a recipe for controversy, its emotional honesty leaves the audience with more questions than answers. In the play's program, Soans described one early reaction to a staged reading of the play, from a woman who carped, "The conflict was never resolved." While his play does present a myriad of viewpoints and believable situations, Soans notes, "If I could resolve the conflict, I would get the Nobel Peace Prize. All I can do is try and stage the play."

There is an actual cookbook, by the way. Published by Aurora Metro Press in London last year, The Arab-Israeli Cookbook won two Gourmand World Cookbook awards, for "Most Innovative Cookbook" and a Special Jury Award that cited its "simple recipes for peace."

Love and the Summer War from an Arab Perspective

Love in Exile By Bahaa Taher (The American University in Cairo Press, 2001)

Summer 2002 | Al Jadid | By Jordan Elgrably

This novel by Bahaa Taher contains a great deal of heart and much truth about the Middle East. The protagonist, Umtaz, is an exiled journalist and Egyptian nationalist still enamored with Nasser, living out his days as an under-used correspondent in an unnamed city in Europe— perhaps Geneva, Brussels, or some place in France with a nascent Arab population.

Middle-aged, divorced, and alone, this fragile near-remnant of a man acquires a new lease on life when a lovely Austrian woman half his age finds herself in love with him. For a time, that magical time in which we lose ourselves, they love each other passionately. This is all set in 1982 against the backdrop of the Summer War in Lebanon, a war launched by Israel, ostensibly to create a buffer zone at its northern border. The gruesome massacres at Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in Beirut pervade the atmosphere.

Taher lulls us from the first, carrying us along like a small rowboat drifting down a quiet river, as he sets up the story with descriptions of Umtaz’s family back in Cairo, conversations with old friends, a subplot featuring a young, aspiring Arab journalist, and various and sundry musings about poetry, literature, history, and love. The novelist sets the tone by creating expectation. “She was young and beautiful. I was old, a father, and divorced,” Umtaz confesses. “Love never occurred to me and I didn’t do anything to express my desire.”

The novel also includes atmospheric encounters between human rights activists, torture victims, and the press. In another subplot, an old nemesis slowly befriends Umtaz again after decades of estrangement. Ibrahim becomes all too real to us when he muses on the aging process: “Why’ve we grown old? Why does time pass without leaving a mark on the soul?… I don’t find these marks within myself. I am still that child tormented by his mother’s suffering. I am still living the same joy when [my ex-wife] said she loved me… I hear now the stinging of the whip on my body in prison and the first bomb in Beirut is still resounding in my ears. All of that is happening now, here on the bank of this river. So what does it mean when you talk to me about time?"

Novelist Bahaa Taher

Novelist Bahaa Taher

Love in Exile was first published in Arabic as Al-Hubb fi-l-Manfa in 1995. This steady, understated English translation by Farouk Abdel Wahab appeared in English last year from The American University in Cairo Press. The Author’s Note at the end of the book carefully explains that while it is based “on imaginary characters and events,” there are several exceptions, including a Norwegian nurse’s testimony about what she saw in a Palestinian refugee camp after an Israeli attack, and the public remarks of an American Jewish journalist who was “the first person to enter Sabra after the massacre.”

Taher’s Egyptian in Europe has two teenage children back in Cairo and an ex-wife. Much to his consternation, his son Hamadi is becoming a born-again Muslim and devout fundamentalist, while his daughter is struggling to develop her own thoughts. He never speaks to his ex-wife but calls his children frequently.

The novel presents the voice of the lone wolf, or perhaps more accurately, the black sheep. Umtaz doesn’t always seek our sympathy, however. In fact he thwarts it by admitting his weaknesses rather too often. Nonetheless, somehow we feel his strengths all the more. Umtaz earns our trust, even as the facts of the day teach us (as if we could ever forget!) that mankind cannot be trusted.

The novel opens with a Doctors-Without-Borders style physician introducing a torture victim from Chile. The haunted man has an interpreter, a tall blonde woman named Brigitte. She will soon swoon for Umtaz, revealing in the process her own deep, dark mysteries. We come to admire Brigitte for her independence, her brash honesty, and her natural poetry. Yet while Brigitte has horror stories to tell, she never wallows in them.

The novel is old-fashioned in the sense that it doesn’t attempt any narrative tricks, but remains satisfied to move inexorably forward, much like the better novels of Graham Greene. This stalwart quality is a welcome one because we feel entirely comfortable in the hands of the writer. As a result, when the facts of Chilean torture or Israeli violence are presented to us, we believe Bahaa Taher almost without question. It would seem that the information available to European and Middle Eastern journalists is more extensive than what Americans learned about either the tortured and disappeared in Chile or the massacre of Palestinians in the Beirut camps. The role of Israeli forces was far more extensive than what the U.S. media reported.

Taher’s descriptions of what went on in Sabra and Shatilla, as well as an earlier massacre in Ain al-Helwah, are full of Dantesque horror. And they seem eerily similar to the recent incursion into the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank: bulldozers flatten entire neighborhoods, sometimes with people still inside their homes; tanks fire heavy artillery shells into the camps to maximum destructive effect.

What will be less familiar to American readers are the fuel air bombs Israel dropped on Beirut, and the tonnage figures of these and other conventional bombs. Make no mistake about it: Israel’s “Summer War” was no picnic for the Lebanese or the Palestinians in Beirut. I was living in Paris at the time and had traveled to northern Israel shortly before the Israeli invasion began. I followed the events that summer carefully, and remember reading French newspapers full of grim details that spared nothing. Twenty years later, when once again the Palestinians have suffered extreme retaliation for their suicide bombers, I am appalled to think of the continued U.S. support for Israel’s military forces. The U.S. uses Israel as a proxy to test out our helicopter gunships, our “smart” bombs and other weaponry—turning a blind eye to how they use these weapons even though U.S. law clearly mandates that arms we sell are to be used “for defensive purposes only.”

But Sabra and Shatilla are not the center of Love in Exile— love is, and not only is it wonderful to experience through Umtaz and Brigitte (I think, for once, an affair between an older man and younger woman did not trouble me), but it is rejuvenating for as long as it lasts. When the affair ends, as it must, Brigitte beautifully explains to Umtaz precisely how she loves him, in words that are wrenching and utterly convincing.

This is a novel I would read again in the autumn of my life.