Denis Guenoun

A Semite

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Denis Guénoun's father was an Algerian Jew who inherited French citizenship and revered the principles of the French Revolution. He taught science in a French lycée in Oran and belonged to the French Communist Party. He rarely fought on a winning side, but his belief in the common interests of Arabs and Jews, Europe and a liberated North Africa, call out to us from the ruins.
In World War II, he was drafted to defend Vichy France's colonies in the Middle East. At the same time, Vichy barred him and his wife from teaching school because they were Jewish. When the British conquered Syria he was sent home to Oran. In 1943, after the Allies captured Algeria, he joined the Free French Army and fought in Europe. After the war, both parents went back to teaching, doing their best to reconcile militant unionism and clandestine party activity with the demands of teaching and family. The Guénouns had little interest in Israel. They considered themselves at home in Algeria. From 1958 onward, Guénoun supported Algerian independence, outraging his French neighbors. Expelled from Algeria by the French paramilitary Organisation Armée Secrète, he spent his last years in Marseille.
This book movingly recreates the efforts of a grown-up son, Denis Guénoun, to understand what happened in his childhood. Gracefully weaving together youthful memories with research into his father's life and times, this memoir confounds the distinctions — ethnic, national, and political — that might otherwise explain or justify conflict. Who belongs where? Who is one's natural enemy? Radically hostile to any sort of racism, Guénoun's father believed Jews and Arabs were bound by an authentic fraternity and could only realize a free future together. He called himself a Semite, a word that united Jewish and Arab worlds and best reflected a shared origin.
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179 printed pages
Original publication
2014
Publication year
2014
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Quotes

  • Muhammadhas quoted2 years ago
    One more, never mind who, anyone, but this one nonetheless, none other, created in that encounter, in that place at that time, from the joining of cells, during that reunion, an embrace after six years, the collapsing of one time and the arrival of another, a baby boomer is sown, a man, a Jew if you will from his four grandparents, circumcised like his elder brother to preclude any difference between them, poorly made like all human flesh, wobbly, uncertain, infirm like all lives that will have to end, a small irrefutable proof that the Nazi dream had failed, the one that would have foreclosed my birth, a kid, a sorry little spot in the world, one more Semite
  • Muhammadhas quoted2 years ago
    Only privilege fosters lies. If the friends and family around us refused to open their eyes to this plain truth, it was on account of the comfortable homes, the businesses, the little advantages of being French, while the Algerian masses endured poverty, ignorance, and servitude. People used the familiar tu with Arabs, showing them no respect. They were penned up in the Village Nègre.
  • Muhammadhas quoted2 years ago
    And she proved it later, when he lost his health and finally left her a widow. Her adherence to the communist ideal grew instead of fading, as if, in the face of illness and

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