-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Jim House, A Semite. A Memoir of Algeria, French History, Volume 29, Issue 2, June 2015, Page 269, https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/cru133
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
Denis Guénoun’s genre-defying book, first published in French in 2003 and now available in English translation, is framed around an incomplete biography of his father, René, who was from a well-established Arabic-speaking Jewish family in Oran. However, the subtitle indicates this is a memoir: this is a biography, but one written by a son and it speaks as much about the latter as it does about the father.
Born in 1912, René Géunoun was a suitably atheistic Republican state school teacher, and a soldier, having fought and been imprisoned (in his view unjustly) in Beirut and Damascus in 1940–41 and then recalled to serve in Morocco, Italy, France and Germany later in the war. These periods of military service, like those of Denis Guénoun’s grandfather in World War One, are partially reconstructed through the frequent letters exchanged between family members. A keen member of the Algerian Communist Party, René Guénoun’s political activities continued well beyond that Party’s outlawing in 1956: indeed, he came to support Algerian independence. Focussing on the longer family history of parents torn apart by war, and the wider social and cultural context of Oran before, during and after Vichy, this beautifully written self-reflexive narrative shows how René Guénoun’s political choices led to his being increasingly ostracized: this is the tense environment in which the author Denis, born in 1946, grows up, as the narrative then shifts from the written record to incorporate experiential memory. The term Semite in the title indicates how René Guénoun sought to construct an identification of shared Jewish and Arab heritages and hence bypass attempts to view them as mutually exclusive: unfortunately, these subtleties became lost as the crisis of decolonization engulfed Algerian society; in June 1961, a bomb planted by the Organisation armée secrète destroyed the family flat, and Denis Guénoun’s parents then took him to Metropolitan France.
