Entanglements: Reflections on late summer reading
Jaffa- the “Bride of the sea”, that ancient, scrappy, hot,
ocean-swept port. It seems to be part of the connective tissue of some of my
recent summer reading. It's where a young, iconoclast, dreamer/rabbi comes to
take his first position of leadership in the Holy Land. Rav Abraham Isaac
HaCohen Kook was offered the position of chief rabbi of that “den of sin” in 1904.
His rabbinic colleagues of the “Old Yishuv” saw that small strip of land along
the Mediterranean as a haven for atheism and licentiousness. Indeed there was
little of the sort of piety and conformity characteristic of Jerusalem. Jaffa
was a crossroads where the train lines linking the Levant met at the port open
to the sea. It was a place of merchants and fisherman of cafes and markets, Muslims,
Christians and Jews of varied origins and who spoke many languages. Rav Kook
took advantage of being so close to the beating heart of his revolutionary age-
he saw the vitality, the courage and the creativity of these free thinkers and
he appreciated the hard work of the laborers and merchants that lived in and
around the port city.
That Jaffa was an Arab city –Christian and Muslim- as well
as a Jewish one- with a strong Levantine community of Ladino and Arabic
speakers- does not come up often in Yehuda Mirsky’s magnificent intellectual
biography of the religious visionary and deep-souled rabbi. But Jaffa –its
heterogeneity, its sensual power and the sort of comings and goings that mark
it as a port- are central to the form and some of the content of Rav Kook’s
thought and activism –at least in the early stage of his time in the Holy Land.
I think I am keyed into the Jaffa angle by the riveting and
often dreamlike novel by Moshe Sakal, The
Diamond Setter. He tells a multi-generational and cross-border tale of love
and memory and the power of unspoken legacies. It centers around a small
jewelry shop in Tel Aviv, a short distance from its other focal point of Jaffa.
The novel shuttles back in time to Damascus and a seaside Lebanese town weaving
a story that works like a time machine. The novel is made for those of us who
are in love with the stories of our parents and grandparents and want to
continue to crawl back and see and feel and smell these other places and have
them still live with us- at least the good stuff! The scent of tea and pomegranates
in the garden, the crisp linen suits and verandas- even some of the traumas-
the heroism, the lived pain.
I am drawn to stories of layers, and people with layers;
layers that blend and harmonize and serve as counterpoint. In other words,
identities that we have so many parts of ourselves, we don't need to make sense
of all of it- it is just who we are, but what happens when we do engage these
layers and vectors individually,
and celebrate them, one by one, see how they inform and
torment and enliven us, how they live in conflict- hopefully productive?
We are so many things.
We contain multitudes- we need not be either/or.
“Where are you from”? For some people that's easy- they are
from right here- they have never left the place their family has been from for
generations. However, if you scratch a bit you can find that there is more to
the story. Despite that truth, the fact that some people can answer that
question of origin with ease and others squirm in response says more about the
individual than their origin story.
Kwame Anthony Appiah’s engaging new book, The Lies that Bind is a useful tool for
navigating the layers and complexities of our multiple identities. Appiah
identifies certain fundamental elements that weave together to form our sense
of who we are and how we fit into a wider society:
Classification/Gender
Creed
Country
Color
Class
Culture
By giving these aspects of Identity a name and exploring how
they function- with real world examples, both historical and contemporary-
Appiah helps the reader to think about how these elements play out in their own
lives and why there are so many conflicts surrounding these elements in
contemporary society. His major message is that very few aspects of our
identities are unchanging or essential. We are malleable and ever evolving. We
are shaped by our encounters with other people and cultures and in turn that
encounter creates new ways of being. His discussion of cultural appropriation
is a good example of the sort of analysis he practices throughout the book.
Towards the end of the book he writes:
That’s why we should resist the term
“cultural appropriation” as an indictment. All cultural practices and objects
are mobile; they like to spread, and almost all are themselves creations of
intermixture. Kente in Asante [Appiah’s father’s tribal region in Ghana] was
first made with dyed silk thread, imported from the East. We took something
made by others and made it ours. Or rather, they did that in the village of
Bonwire. So did the Asante of Kumasi appropriate the cultural property of
Bonwire, where it was first made? Putative owners may be previous
appropriators. (p. 208)
He starts with a concrete example and works outwards. What
can kente cloth, or Goethe’s West-östlicher Diwan teach us about the
idea of cultural purity and ownership? a whole lot it turns out!
And this takes me back to Moshe
Sakal’s The Diamond Setter. Identity
here is fluid, it is constructed, it runs deep and it is a mystery. The book
evokes and plays with the constant and multi-faceted cultural dialectic of fin de siècle Levantine life. There is a
flow of people and languages and codes- religious, ethnic, sexual. These elements move between neighborhoods-
beautifully evoked in the visit of the Muslim Jabali family to the pre-wedding
party at the home of Mousa Kadosh in the Jewish quarter of Damascus- and
cities- Yaffo, Alexandria, the resort town of Aley in Lebanon and the jewel
that was Damascus—and between lovers and families and across tribal divides. He
does not romanticize this past world. There is suspicion, fear and violence
around every corner. But Sakal does not spend too much time on a blame game,
his is a human story, people in love, hungry for home and trying to make their
way in the world with grace and beauty. The artistry of the jeweler and the
craftsmanship of the storyteller go together. The author actually apprenticed
as a jeweler just like the author/narrator of the novel, Tom. And in the novel
we learn that many of the older generation put pen to paper, weaving stories in
their native Arabic or in their adopted French. These literary outlets ended
when they crossed into the land of Hebrew, it took two generations for it to
resurface.
Poetry and music also weave their
way into the story. We hear Fareed, the Syrian border crosser who finds his way
to his Palestinian grandparents old home in Jaffa, mumbling lines from the 1001
nights in his sleep, and Rami, his Isrseli Arab friend, finishing them in
response. We meet aunt Gracia and her cursed golden voice; the young beauty
whose beautiful voice brought her wealth and adventure but also pain. We see
her in her native Damascus, feted by the rich and powerful but also sharing her
gift within the intimate settings of a family celebration. We discover her deep
bond with her brilliant and sensitive blind sister Mona. And we see her as the
older diva, secluded in her Southern Tel Aviv apartment, refusing to sing
again, even for the delight of her beloved and doting nephew. Music and its
silencing, memory and its invocation
It is striking to see the grandchildren
of those who moved to Israel from Arab lands reassert their Judeo-Arabic
patrimony. They embrace the music and language that their parents often hid or
downplayed and that their grandparents mourned as they tried to make their way
in a new country. Dudu Tassa, Etti Ankri, Ravid Khalani and the sister trio
A-WA just to name a few. I thought of A-WA’s performance at the Yom Ha’atzmaut
concert this year. (You can see them here at the 1:36 minute mark https://youtu.be/LEMV4Gp0TE0) They performed
their breakout hit- Habib Ghalabi – a song loosely based on one of the many Yemenite
songs their grandmother would sing in Judeo-Arabic. And the three sisters sang
the song with their usual flare first in Arabic and then switched to Hebrew-
this was after all a Yom-Atzmaut concert. Bibi and his wife and many of the
other top ministers were there, clapping and enjoying this piece of musical dynamite
that is rooted in the singer’s pride in their family story and longing for a
culture that was ripped away from them as part of the logic of Zionism. Did any
of those politicians sense the irony or appreciate the critique implicit in
this exuberant embrace of Arabic? What did
they do with this complex sense of Israeliness?
What if they would have performed a
song from their new album
Bayti Fi Rasi.
The song, "Hana Mash Hu Al
Yaman" (Here is not Yemen), is a protest song that sounds like a dance number
(and the
video
solidifies that image). The song alternates between their grandparents’ dreams
of Eretz Yisrael as:
A land of wheat,
barley, grape and olive,
Fig, pomegranate,
date and home.
And the harsh reality they
encountered upon their arrival:
Here I will find a
good job
(in cleaning or
working the earth)
And I will learn
the language
(Lose the accent!)
With time I will
belong
(here aint Yemen!)
I came to you
fleeing
You saw me as
primitive
This pain has been simmering and transforming Israeli society
and politics for the last 40 years if not more. From the “ma’apachat hana’na”
and the “black panthers” to the rise of Likud and Shas and so much more. The
common narrative that links the treatment of Arab Jews upon their arrival to
Israel to their rejection of Labor and the left in general is well established.
However in the area of culture I think we see a more complex phenomena: the
children and grandchildren of those immigrants reclaiming their Arabness as
part of being an Israeli- of being a Jew in the Middle East and of actively
creating something new out of the old.
