Tobie Nathan
A LAND LIKE YOU
Translated by Joyce Zonana
London, New York, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2020, ISBN:
13: 978-0857427885
Reviewed by Aimée Israel-Pelletier*
After the overthrow of Egypt’s monarchy in 1952 by Gamal Abdel Nasser, his rise to power, and the stranglehold he applied on the Jewish community by the seizure of its assets and the methodical crippling of its means of livelihood, Tobie Nathan’s family, like thousands of Egyptian Jews, left for other parts of the world. Many of them chose to immigrate to France. Those who did arrived at a time when the country was facing significant challenges. These were caused by the combined pressures of the occupation’s aftermath, its reckoning with collaboration and gaping economic vulnerabilities, the arrival of many Eastern Europeans fleeing Soviet communism, and the anxieties and liabilities provoked by movements for independence in countries across North Africa, the Middle East, and Africa resulting in huge population shifts from these countries to French cities. In short, soon after World War II, France was in the midst of political, economic, and social upheaval the likes of which it had never encountered and was not prepared to deal with. These landscapes describe the climate that welcomed Nathan’s family in 1958, when Nathan was ten years old.
Today, Nathan is regarded as a “celebrity intellectual,” a respected writer in France. He is often seen on television and interviewed on the radio discussing various topics, including his current work and the latest events engaging the Republic. He is an emeritus professor of psychology, a regular contributor to Le Point, a weekly political and news magazine, and the “face” of ethno-psychiatry. Ethno-psychiatry is a clinical practice that seeks a cure to psychological maladies by appealing to the individual’s belief system and practices. For example, in A Land Like You, a novel that depicts twentieth century cosmopolitan Cairo, Nathan finds it necessary to establish for his readers that behind the modern, up-to-date manners of the Jews, Muslim, Christians lies a bedrock of beliefs, superstitions, incantations, amulets, spiritual forces, and ceremonial rituals that are fundamental to the way they live, love, think, and experience the world around them.
Tobie Nathan has written and lectured extensively on issues relating to immigrant communities and the pathologies triggered by displacement and exile. He is the author of numerous novels and works of psychology including Qui a tué Arlozoroff (Grasset, 2010), L’Evangile selon Youri (Stock, 2018), La Nouvelle Interpretation des rêves (Odile Jacob, 2011, 2015), and Quand les dieux sont en guerre (La Découverte, 2015). Nathan has been writing and speaking about the Jews of Egypt for more than two decades. His first book on the Jews of Egypt, Ethno-roman (Stock, 2012), is a biographical narrative, a life-telling of his coming of age in May ’68 Paris and his decision to take up the study of ethno-psychiatry. He writes about how he was received in France as an immigrant, how he experienced exile, and how, growing up in a closely-knit family, Egypt was to remain for all of them, young and old, a great injustice, a wound. In Ethno-roman, Nathan writes in a richly evocative style not like most memoirs but of the novel. To call it novelistic is not to suggest it ventures into the contrived and the un-truth. The word novel in the title alludes to the manner of its telling, which is intimate and affecting. Ethno-roman received the coveted Prix Fémina de l’éssai in 2012.
To date, Nathan has written two novels on the Jews of Egypt, Ce Pays qui te ressemble (A Land Like You) in 2015 and La Société des Belles Personnes, 2020. Together they earned him the distinction of being long-listed twice as a finalist for the Prix Goncourt. Joyce Zonana’s excellent translation of Ce Pays qui te ressemble is to be praised for opening the way for an appreciation in the English-speaking sphere of Nathan’s rich production. It is notable for its percipient interpretation of Nathan’s allusions and for its deftness in communicating his tone, wry humor, the liveliness of his dialogues, and the sense he shares with many Egyptian Jews of delivering a serious idea with just the right flourish of self-mockery and dismissiveness. Zonana’s translation has succeeded beautifully in calibrating the key dynamic ingredients in Nathan’s A Land Like You, the depiction of a universe in which reality and mysticism inform each other and yet each keeping to its side. It is evident that she has internalized the tone of Nathan’s world which is not unfamiliar to her, as she grew up in a Jewish Egyptian family in the United States.
The French title of A Land Like You, Ce Pays qui te ressemble, alludes to Charles Baudelaire’s poem “Invitation au voyage” where the poet entreats his lover, “My child, my sister,” to dream along with him of a place of sweetness, splendor, and calm. Never mind that the poem alludes to treason and latent violence, the novel suggests it as well. In this novel, Nathan creates two characters, a young Jewish boy named Zohar and a young Muslim girl named Masreya, a name that means Egypt in the feminine form. Both suckle at the same breast because Zohar’s mother, Esther, a poor Jew from the hara, does not have enough milk to feed him while Masreya’s mother, Jinane, a Muslim, is endowed with milk that flows with legendary abundance. Jinane is welcomed, treated with affection and deference by the Jews of Haret-el-Yahood. She returns their sentiments in kind. Because they suckled at the same breast, the love of Zohar, the Jew, and Masreya, the Muslim is forbidden. Yet they fall passionately in love, consummate their love, and thrive joyfully even as the interdiction demands they do not remain together. Their love, like fate itself, is inevitable, and so is their breakup. It does not take the reader of A Land Like You much imagination to read into this story an allegorical representation of the mythical and historical bonds that have linked the two peoples, Jews and Egyptians, since Biblical times.
A myriad of details both small and significant encourage this reading. Zohar’s and Masreya’s attachment to each other and the bonds that tie Jews and Muslims to each other and to Egypt, Nathan tells us, has been forged in good times and lasts for eternity because the two peoples are different and have come to love and respect one another in their difference. Their bond is all the more intense because and not despite of being different. But to read the novel as mainly an allegory and not much more than that is to look at the skeleton when we have a fuller view in plain sight, much richer, more meaningful, and singular. In A Land Like You, we see, sense, and are moved by the living, breathing, experience of an Egyptian lovestory which is also a love song to Egypt. We are dazzled by evocative descriptions of singing, dancing, feasting, and joking that are the hallmarks of Egyptian culture, a culture Jews, Muslims, Christians, and others who have grown up around it, can’t fail to acknowledge as distinctly Egyptian. Nathan, and Zonana along with him, evoke the lush, sensual, and mystical/magical world and invite the reader to dream.
In the course of the novel and while engaging dramatically with its representations, Nathan lays out for us the political dimension. We see the history of modern Egypt unfolding from 1925, the start of Egypt’s Liberal period after its independence from Ottoman rule, and all the way through World War II and the overthrow of King Farouk by Nasser and his Free Officers in 1952. Along the way, Nathan shines a light on the role of the British in Egypt, the exploitation of the Egyptian people, and degradation of the moral fabric of its society. He follows Nazis in Egypt, including Rommel and many less significant players, who inflected their brand of anti-Semitism on the mufti of Jerusalem and Nasser. The Italian deviousness with regard to Jews it tried to enlist to its “cause” in Ethiopia and Libya is showcased. Nathan presents the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia in 1938 as marking the beginning of the “ethnic cleansing of Jews” from the Middle East. Zohar reflects that when American Standard Oil Company first released black oil from the depths of the Arabian Desert, “a new page was beginning, one that would see the Jews driven out of all the Muslim countries, beginning with Egypt.” (p.145). The political material is central to the novel; it is dramatized through rich characters whose psychology, combined with their ideology, create volatile situations that enrich the reader’s understanding of both the politics and personal as they might have played out.
Nathan reveals to us the emotional range and complexity of both primary and secondary characters. Secondary characters are psychologically distinctive and at the same time exemplary of the diversity of points of view, experiences, and ways of expressing their identity in Egypt in the 1940s and 1950s. Joe di Reggio, the young man born to a wealthy Jewish family who turns to Zionism, is a good example. Another is Nino Cohen, a brilliant university student brimming with nationalist fervor and anguished by the poverty he sees in the people. He converts to Islam to be closer to the Egyptian people only to end up in despair, alienated from his people, rejected by Muslims, and imprisoned to boot. Nathan gives full attention to Jews like Joe and Nino as well as to members of Zohar’s family including the unforgettable Esther, Motty, Elie, Maleka, Poupy, and well-known figures like King Farouk and Gamal Abdel Nasser. All are given complex treatments.
In addition to the rich characterizations, Nathan’s novel brings to life in a realistic mode of representation life in modern Cairo and the life of the Jews of the hara. We see their everyday life, the way they express their traditions, belief systems, folklore and magical thinking. We learn what they eat and how they spent time together. We see them in their homes with their furnishings, in streets where they live, in the cafés they frequent, and we learn how these spaces function. Nathan describes the clothes and manners of speech of the Jewish community, both the Jews of the hara and those who left it for affluent neighborhoods in Abasseya, Zamalek, and Garden City and speak French, Italian, and Arabic. Nathan’s style which Zonana renders with brio is light and playful, but also seductive and serious. The novel is replete with dialogues, a form in which Nathan excels. They are informative, entertaining, and dynamic, often humorous, frankly funny. The reader is given a palpable sense of how Egyptian Jews at a certain period in time and in a certain environment expressed themselves, thought, dreamed, and how they behaved.
A Land Like You evokes a time when Jews could be both Jewish and Egyptian, just before the big breakup. The sequel, La Société des belles personnes, completes this epic poem in prose, an epic that tells of the heartbreak and longing of the Jewish people who now, once again, remember the Exodus. More than once, rearranging the words but not the thrust of their meaning, Nathan has written the following to express not merely nostalgia for what was lost but to suggest the near impossibility of getting over that loss. Here is Joyce Zonana’s translation:
We Jews of Egypt, we were there with the Pharaohs, then with the Persians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Romans; and when the Arabs arrived, we were still there … and also with the Turks, the Ottomans … We are indigenous, like the ibis, like the water- buffalo calves, like the kites. Today, we are no longer there. Not one remains. How can the Egyptians live without us? And in my head, the divine Asmahane, Farid’s sister, continues to sing: ‘Come, O my beloved, come! (p. 343)’
* Aimée Israel-Pelletier is a professor of French at the University of Texas at Arlington. Her research focuses on nineteenth to twenty-first century French literature and film. Her most recent book, On the Mediterranean and the Nile (Indiana UP), is on Jewish Egyptian writers. She is now completing a book-length study on narratives of heterodoxy and coexistence in the works of Levantine Francophone writers.