A Semite

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

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.

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

His wife took his side in everything, at least as far as politics and setting standards were concerned. She considered

him ahead of her intellectually. She saw this modesty as perfectly rational. My mama was intelligent, discerning, sensitive. I understood only later how deeply her agreement with her husband sprang from fervent love. His whole style was alien to her. She was as sober and even-tempered as he was bombastic and headstrong. But she loved him, period. Therefore she loved his way of thinking, including blurted outbursts that she might have preferred to soften a bit. She took his side in a reserved, thoughtful way. She assumed that he was better at deciphering the secret laws of history

smile. Others march with them, fists raised, men and women who don’t see the photographer. It is summertime, maybe the morning of Bastille Day. In another shot they are posing in a group on the beach: pale bathing suits, ten or so of them, mainly girls, but my father is there too. They are facing the camera laughing, in disarray like an anarchic sports team, you can sense the laughter, the jostling. In the background, other swimmers. Several girls in the group laugh and raise their fists at the camera—damp, on the beach, just emerging from the water. When we think back on this period we see darkness and tragedy looming over it. Burgeoning fascisms, revolutions betrayed, trials, tortures. For them, I am absolutely sure, it was a time of joy.
(I had to choose: to

The son’s relation to the father pivots on the parsing of these categories. The son asks why “Semite” has to include the Jews at all, and the father explains that it is because of the French that both sides of the term, Arab and Jewish, must be held together. In 1870, the French government declared the indigenous Jews of Algeria to be citizens of France, but not the Arabs. A division and inequality were introduced that had to be politically opposed. One way to do that is to insist that “Semite” refers to an unbreakable bond, a name for resistance itself. It matters what language was used between father and son, but also between Jew and Arab.

Jews?” the child queries, probing to see how that word feels in the mouth, and here the father gives several answers. Judaism is a religion, and we are not at all religious. Hitler and the collaborationists, however, did not ask any Jew whether he or she was religious before they were destroyed. One cannot deny being a Jew without insulting the dead. So yes, to that question, the father instructs the child, you must answer “yes”—but this is an ethical demand, and not precisely a description of what is. In the end, the father offers “Semites,” which, he explains, means both Arab and Jew or, rather, names their commonality, proximity, intertwining. We are like Arabs, we lived close together on the western shore of Algeria. “That is what the word Semite says, either Jew or Arab without distinction, what Jews and Arabs share, what they are together.”