Secondhand Memories: Franco-Tunisian Jewish Women and the Predicament of Writing Return
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Abstract
Two years after the Tunisian people overthrew an entrenched dictatorship, the country seems to be definitively turning a new page in its history. Its diminutive Jewish community continues to fade away, a vestige from another time now remembered only through writing. This article analyses how four francophone Jewish writers of Tunisian origins, Catherine Dana, Colette Fellous, Corine Scemama-Ammar, and Brigitte Smadja ‘write/return’ to Tunisia in the 1990s and 2000s. Given their own interrupted experience in Tunisia, they end up remembering through and on behalf of others, including elders, grandmothers and mothers, and siblings. Along with (re)visiting the houses and graves of their elders during the last decades of Ben Ali's rule, they negotiate a role for themselves in the complex diasporic identity that emerged after Tunisian Jewry's post-independence migrations. Nevertheless, I argue that the writing of return provides no simple resolution for the rupture experienced by the last generation of Jewish women born in Tunisia before the great exile in the 1960s. Rather physical return to contemporary Tunisia and its inscription in French transforms these women into inadvertent mediators between the past and present, homeland and diaspora, oral history and writing.
Topics
Diaspora Main Topic: Identity and Community Jewish Identity Oral History and Biography North African Jewry Literature Memory Age and Generational Issues
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Geographic Coverage
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Volume/Issue
10(1)
Page Number / Article Number
25-46
DOI
Link
Link to article (paywalled), Secondhand Memories: Franco-Tunisian Jewish Women and the Predicament of Writing Return
PDF (via academia.edu), Secondhand Memories: Franco-Tunisian Jewish Women and the Predicament of Writing Return
PDF (via academia.edu), Secondhand Memories: Franco-Tunisian Jewish Women and the Predicament of Writing Return
Bibliographic Information
Secondhand Memories: Franco-Tunisian Jewish Women and the Predicament of Writing Return. 2013: 25-46. https://archive.jpr.org.uk/10.1080/14484528.2013.745222
