Marking the Passing of Samir Naqqash: The Sephardic Community?s Failure of Will


It is no understatement to say that the recent death of Samir Naqqash, one of the foremost literary figures of the modern Sephardi world, has been met with a somewhat deafening silence.
.
Think of the possible death of a figure like A.B. Yehoshua, another "Sephardi" writer, and how it would be treated in the Western and Israeli press: The obituaries would be flowing and plentiful. Such an iconic figure would be mourned by his many readers with great aplomb and pomp. There would be absolutely NO THOUGHT that the only obituary that could be found for such an important Israeli Jewish writer would be a 20 line mention by an AP stringer that was published in about five US newspapers. We could not imagine that a Lexis-Nexis search for articles about Yehoshua would turn up only those identical citations of the AP obit. .
.
In addition, when thinking of Samir Naqqash we have but little memory of this Iraqi Jewish writer as a literary presence of any stature within the community of "important" Israeli authors. Naqqash's literary output in English - not insubstantial by any standard in the original Arabic - has been reduced to a few pages in Ammiel Alcalay's seminal anthology Keys to the Garden. We have actually reprinted ALL of Naqqash's extant writing in English translation in the past two issues of the SHU. .
.
Even in Hebrew, the sum total of Naqqash's in-print writing is rather minimal. .
.
This meant that Samir Naqqash, one of the last Jews who was completely integrated into the world of the Arabic language and its modern literary culture, was almost completely unknown to Jewish readers the world over. And while there were doctoral dissertations written on his books and stories in the Arab world, and while he was viewed by Naguib Mahfouz as an important modern Arab author, in general the Arab world was not familiar with a man who straddled - uncomfortably it is true - the ramparts of the Arab-Israeli conflict. .
.
Naqqash - though I never met him - was a walking anomaly who saw himself as an alienated and polarizing figure. Upon leaving Baghdad at the age of thirteen, as he tells us in the documentary "Forget Baghdad" and in an interview with Alcalay in Keys to the Garden, he arrived in an Israel that served as his own personal nightmare for the rest of his life. He tried to flee Israel by going to Lebanon, but he was imprisoned and suffered for the oppositional stance that he took as a Jew who maintained his Arabic culture in a country where such a culture, as we have repeatedly stated in these pages, was demonized way beyond any rational understanding. .
.
The Arabic culture that was the cornerstone of Samir Naqqash's existential circumstances, a culture that permeated and fueled not merely his literary work but the very pulse which raced through his physical body, was not merely demonized and anathematized in Israel, it became existentially linked to the basic processes of the very conflict that has animated the life and politics of the state since its very inception. .
.
The work and cognitive world of Samir Naqqash represented a direct confrontational engagement with Zionism and its reshuffling of the inherited realities of the Jewish Middle East. .
.
It is for this reason that Naqqash, in contrast to his Iraqi Jewish peers Shimon Ballas and Sami Michael, both of whom found their own way into the Israeli literary culture by writing their books in Hebrew, continued to remain true to the Arabic language that he was raised in. Naqqash refused to accept the New Hebrew as a valid literary option. This meant that the only people who could read his writing were those Israeli immigrants who continued to speak Arabic as well as those Arabs who were aware that a Jew had continued - against all the odds - to maintain Arabic as his mother tongue. .
.
Naqqash was marginalized by an Israeli culture that sought engagement with only its inner-Jewish voices. Israeli culture was and continues to be profoundly Occidental-Ashkenazi in its orientation and the conceptual substrate of Arabic was not a valid linguistic option for an Israeli writer. In our recent discussion of A.B. Yehoshua's somewhat brilliant but truly bizarre novel The Liberated Bride, we saw that Yehoshua almost completely identified with the Ashkenazi figure of Rivlin, an Orientalist whose life has been thrown into disarray by his relationships with Arabs. .
.
Here we can see a telling counterpoint between Yehoshua - the most well-known and significant "Sabra" writer in our day - and Naqqash - a man who in his death is as little known as he was in his life. Young Jewish students, in the West as well as Israel, will in all likelihood read some of Yehoshua's writing in their Hebrew literature classes. Just as likely is the fact that Samir Naqqash, a writer who refused on ethical and political grounds to use the New Hebrew as his literary metier, will continue to remain a complete blank for any Jewish student who is regularly exposed to the writing of Israeli authors. .
.
And here we enter into an area that I rarely speak about: The few Sephardic activists and academics who have lovingly preserved both the memory and the literary work of Samir Naqqash must step back from themselves and realize the massive failure that has been engendered within our Sephardic community over the past twenty or so years. While we have seen recent translations of novels by Ronit Matalon, Sami Michael and Dorit Rabinyan, the literary figures that have dotted the Sephardic landscape and are well-represented in the Keys to the Garden anthology, contemporary Sephardic novelists like Yitzhak Gormezano Goren, Shimon Ballas and Albert Swissa as well as older Sephardic writers like Shoshana Shababo, Jacqueline Kahanoff (whose book of essays From the East the Sun, only available in Hebrew translation was - oddly enough - originally written in ENGLISH) and so many others, have not seen their work translated and made available to the dominant Anglophone audience here in America. .
.
The absence of any mention of Samir Naqqash's recent death in the New York Times and Haaretz is an important statement that speaks to the bitter failure of Sephardi writers and academics to have their voices heard in a larger public context. The death of Naqqash is a seminal moment in our history and culture and speaks volumes as to our own cultural and political disenfranchisement that must partially be laid at our VERY OWN DOORSTEP. .
.
The very inability for Sephardic activists to create an internal shared network of contacts and information pool cannot be blamed on the Ashkenazim. Even as we face the sorts of institutional and personal pressures that have been engendered by a racist Ashkenazi Jewish establishment here in the US and certainly in Israel, the minimal steps that can be taken to shore up lines of communication between us as Sephardim have not been a priority and there is an almost complete socio-cultural dysfunction within our own community. .
.
Two examples that occurred recently typify my point: An international conference on Iraqi Jewry recently took place in Vienna. A number of our readers either participated in the conference or were aware that the conference was being held. Yet I was informed about the conference - after it had ended - by someone who was not himself Sephardi! After I was informed about the conference I contacted a number of prominent Sephardic activists and was put into contact with those who participated in the conference. I continue to vainly wait for an article that would present to our readers the proceedings of such an important event. .
.
And then there is the case of the recent Andalus conference at Georgetown that we reviewed in SHU 105. It continues to amaze and depress me that there were no Sephardim invited to speak at the conference as there were no Arabs either. There are two ways that we can see this: We can cry "foul" and see that the organizers of the conference were racist by not permitting us to participate, or we can admit that we as a community have simply not done all we should to ensure that our voices get heard in such public forums. .
.
The problem is that we have not created support networks that would make our success in the political and academic spheres viable; and based on the warm responses I have continued to receive by non-Sephardi readers of this newsletter I would affirm that there are indeed many professionals who are quite sympathetic to our cause. Racism as an argument can only go so far: We must admit that many of the Sephardim who have "made it" within their prospective professional endeavors have not sought to create a shared network that would effectively form a socio-political bloc as is routinely the case in other minority communities. What little has been done by certain Sephardi activists and academics has not been translated into an organized program that would ensure the continued stability of the Sephardic cultural entity. .
.
And here I continue to be disappointed in a "me first" mentality that has drowned our community. Rather than altruistically seeking to engender institutions and networks of support and fraternity, we as Sephardim - and this goes back many years - have not supported ONE ANOTHER. The end result is that we have no institutional representation and are left scratching our heads when we hear that Samir Naqqash has died. .
.
But in a certain sense, we have no one to blame but OURSELVES. Especially when we take into account that there IS a great deal of INSTITUTIONAL RACISM that has held us back as a community we would do well to consider that it is thus incumbent upon us AS A COMMUNITY to redouble our efforts and reach out as one to others and try to have our voices heard as best as we possibly can. .
.
Not voices that are made miniscule in scope by our alienation from one another - our very lack of UNITY as a community, which is now the case - but voices made robust and passionate by a firm commitment to ourselves as a strong and unified Sephardic community. .
.
I was once taunted by an Ashkenazi institutional professional that my personal activism was a failed proposition because when looking at the plight of the Sephardi Question within the context of say the Negro Question back in the Civil Rights era of King and the SCLC, SNCC and NAACP, the Sephardic community - and by extension the Jewish community in general - is not behind me and my cause in any substantial manner. I am all alone. King and others were united in their activist work as a strongly unified African-American community and were able to include non-Black supporters in already-extant networks of activism and political institutions. .
.
The Sephardi community is, as I stated last week in my discussion of the Sephardi Israeli expatriates in Brooklyn, profoundly uninterested in the problematics and the aims of a Sephardi activist consciousness. In point of fact many Sephardim, when presented with a figure like the late Samir Naqqash, will start to howl with derision at the incoherence of his work and his life. In learning of Naqqash's stay in Manchester, I contacted a member of the community there and asked him if he knew of Naqqash. To my surprise and delight he said that he in fact spent time with Naqqash. And when I then requested that he write a short article in Naqqash's memory which would discuss his personal relationship with Naqqash, I was given a flat out rejection without a proper explanation. It was my feeling that the volatility and bitterness of Naqqash, and his resolute and steadfast hatred of the State of Israel and for what it and overall Jewry had done to him in his life, induced this Manchester Iraqi Jew to decline to write anything about his relationship with Naqqash. .
.
The lesson I suppose that must be learned from the past couple of weeks is that given the dysfunction that exists within the Sephardic community, we cannot expect to have our concerns and voices heard by the larger community - be it the Jewish communty which has been so detrimental in the preservation and substantive evolution of Sephardic culture and history, as well as the larger network of progressive elements within the Western world. .
.
Until we start taking responsibility for our own failings as a culture and community, we should not expect that a figure like Samir Naqqash will be memorialized in a manner that would befit the magnificent literary career that he worked so hard to secure in politico-aesthetic terms. The writings of Samir Naqqash are of far greater import than any writer in Israel over the past fifty years and yet because of an unfortuitous combination of Ashkenazi prejudice and Sephardi weakness his writings are not a part of the current literary discourse that would be accessible to those very people who would benefit the most from it - Jewish students, intellectual progressives and the international peace community. .
.
Permitting the death of Samir Naqqash to stand as a humiliating marker of our own communal failures is a permanent stain on our own roles as activists trying to have our Sephardic voices heard. It is for this reason that I plead to all of you to look to one another and attempt to provide those very networks of collegial and institutional support rather than simply looking at the personal bottom line. .