My Father at Age Seventy-Nine

Several weeks ago I was sitting in a café with the writer Nurit Zarkhi,¹ who has known me since I was about five—both of us are from that horrible city Petakh Tikva²— and while we were talking, an old acquaintance of Nurit came to our table. She wanted to know if I was the writer Ronit Matalon, and immediately embarked on a confession: she belongs, she declared, to that group who came here, so to speak, on the Israeli Mayflower,³ and whose members were raised on utter disdain and disregard for Mizrahim, Eastern Jews.⁴ She began reading my novel The One Facing Us strictly out of anthropological curiosity and a desire to learn about Mizrahi existence. But to her surprise, she said, she discovered that the book was simply good “by any literary standard,” and really wanted me to know that. A silence ensued, which was finally broken by Nurit. “You know,” she said, “Ronit’s parents were also Mayflower; a different sort of Mayflower, but a Mayflower nonetheless.” Another silence ensued, but of a distinct kind: the silence of an aftermath. I smiled, mostly to conceal how moved I was by Nurit’s direct and immediate solidarity on my behalf, and I thought to myself that yet again I have managed to extricate myself. But from what and from whom was I extricating myself exactly?

Is it such a great achievement, I thought to myself, to escape racism’s sharp, clawing fingernails, even if those are gloved, only to end up contending with the Zionist vision and the contest over its “Mayflower”?!

It isn’t simple, this whole business of the Mayflower in the Mizrahi context, not simple at all. Sometimes it seems to me that all of us, Nous les Orientaux are trapped within the wrench of our conflicted position vis-à-vis what can be called “our part in the Zionist project.” We skip from one emotional, intellectual, and historical option to another: within the game, or outside it? Victims of the Zionist project or its unacknowledged heroes? Tender babes abducted at birth and brought along for the ride or partners and innovators? Members of the Mayflower generation or something else entirely, holders of an entirely different status? And if we are part of the Zionist Mayflower, then in what way?

I went to consult on this subject with my father, Felix Matalon, a long-standing activist for the Mizrahi cause, mostly on behalf of himself. In the past few years he has resided in an assisted-living facility in Ha-Tikvah neighborhood,⁵ which was built through the funding of the governmental initiative for “The Rehabilitation of Neighborhoods.”⁶ Driven by deep suspicion of anything to do with the Israeli establishment (the maintenance company, the social and welfare workers of the City of Tel-Aviv) he maintains a direct line of communication with the project’s American donors and is quick to write them about every little matter, outlining the shortcomings. He, in any event, loved this Mayflower idea. For a while I studied his emaciated, beaming face, with the slightly tormented tic of the lip, and thought to myself: What right do I have? What right do I have to rip the Mayflower badge off his shirt and to step on it and crush it for whatever reason?

I thought to myself that my father, the writer Jacqueline Kahanoff, and other Mizrahi immigrants like them felt themselves strongly and principally as a social elite.⁷ A socialcultural struggle requires an abundant sense of justice and a demand for justice, but also, and perhaps to a greater extent, a strong recognition of self-worth; it demands heroes, symbols, ceremonies, and medals. How else is it possible to understand the resentment of Mizrahi Jews, my father among them, towards Ehud Barak’s 1997 apology to them.⁸ Something deeper than the allegation that “deeds and not words are needed” was at the base of the hostile Mizrahi response. At its deepest core it was a resistance to the fact that Barak’s apology humiliated Mizrahim by positioning...