LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

peter clarkThe novel is a great read, but also an intriguing and revealing account ofTunisian provincial life, of the dilemmas of a disillusioned Zionist and of theissue of multiple identities. Is it a Tunisian novel? A Jewish or an Israeli novel?A French novel? Should such pigeon-holing matter?A real writer who, like the fictional Mohammed Cohen, may also see himselfas 100 per cent Jewish and 100 per cent Arab is Samir Naqqash. Naqqash wasborn in Baghdad in 1936 and has written plays, novels and short stories, oftenusing the Baghdad Jewish Arabic of his childhood. He migrated to Israel as ateenager but has resisted submission to Israeli Hebrew culture. He sees himselfas part of the Arabic cultural world and has expressed the wish to live in anArab country (Elad-Bouskila 1999: 137). He looks back to Iraq with a certainnostalgia. In his Baghdad childhood he had access to the literature of the world.Coming to Israel meant a narrowing of horizons and a submission to a dominantEuropean Jewish culture (Alcalay 1996: 105). His works have limited print runsand, inevitably, the number of readers who will understand the Baghdad Jewishdialect of the 1940s must be declining annually. Fortunately his works oftenhave a detailed glossary. Nevertheless his work has received critical acclaim, notleast among Arab critics. He is happiest when he visits Egypt and meets Egyptianwriters, and keeps in touch with trends in contemporary Arab literature. Hekeeps abreast of Palestinian literature but finds it too focused on one politicalissue touching the chords of dispossession, nostalgia, loss and grievance. Takethat away, he argues, and not a lot is left. Literature should be either personal oruniversal, uncommitted to any political issue (Clark 2000: 15). Is his work partof Arab literature? Israeli literature? Does it matter?Samir Naqqash is one of a group of Israelis of Iraqi origin who have written inArabic. Yizhak Bar-Moshe and Shimon Ballas long continued to write in Arabic– ‘It is the language in which we lived,’ said the former (Berg 1996: 51) – butlike North Africans in the 1970s and 1980s have for national reasons switchedto Hebrew after twenty or thirty years. Iraqis who migrated to Israel often did soto escape political persecution in Iraq, rather than from any messianic Zionism.Jews such as Murad Mikha’il and YaÆqub Bilbul were pioneers of the Iraqi noveland short story. There is often a sentimentality, perhaps best represented inSami Mikha’il’s novel, Victoria, for a mythic Baghdad that may never haveexisted. Nissim Rejwan, in his memoirs, recalls working in al-Rabita bookshopin Baghdad which became a meeting place for intellectuals and bookworms, andadjourning to the Café Suisse with Buland al-Haydari and other Iraqi writers(Rejwan 1996: 48, 50).If the number of Israeli Jews writing in Arabic is declining, the number ofPalestinian Israelis writing in Hebrew is increasing. The success in 1986 of theHebrew novel, translated into English as Arabesques, by Anton Shammas, wasan outstanding but not an isolated phenomenon. Atallah Mansur had published— 186 —www.taq.ir