Francophone Jewish Writers Imagining Israel by Lucille Cairns (review)

This interesting and unusual study tackles forty-four novels by twenty-seven French-language writers of Jewish identity written over the last forty years, the majority since 1995. Few of them have been widely read in France and only five of them seem to have appeared in English translation. (Cairns omits the most influential French and Jewish writer on Israel, Elie Wiesel, perhaps because he has spent most of his life in the United States.) Cairns uses this fascinating collection to track not so much the representation of Israel in French literature (to which many non-Jewish writers have contributed) as the feelings and attitudes towards it of these specific writers, taken as individuals and as representatives of recognized groups such as Ashkenazim, Sephardim, and Mizrahim. Her psycho-sociological approach explains why in lieu of extended literary analysis she supports her exposition with the results of face-to-face interviews with some of the authors and questionnaire responses from others. Her chapters focus on the ways that these novels, taken as direct testimony of the personalities of the novelists, elaborate and communicate passionate feelings about, respectively, the historical foundation of the State of Israel; modern paradigms of Israeli identity (principally, Zionism, the kibbutz movement, gender roles in the military, and Israeli perceptions of France); intra-Israeli conflicts (mainly, ostracism of Maghrebi and also Mizrahi Jews and disputes over the Occupied Territories); and the Arab-Israeli conflict itself and the French–Israeli stand-off it has engendered. The last chapter engages with feelings about Jerusalem and about the Hebrew language (Ivrit) in a way that cuts across the historical and political orientation of the preceding parts of the work. Cairns conveys a great deal of detailed information about a field that despite, or perhaps because of, its political sensitivity is actually rather little known. However, this is not an easy book to read, with its constant switching between quotation in French and in English, its paraphrases of quotations already given, and its thesis-like recourse to defensive definitions of terms. As emigration from France to Israel continues its upward trajectory and the francophone community in Israel rivals its counterpart in London, students of contemporary French society will find much to ponder in this intricate study of how Israel has been imagined in French fiction written by Jews over the last decades. Cairns takes literary fiction as unmediated testimony of individuals' feelings and attitudes. This is not the only way to read literature, of course, but in the case of the corpus studied here, it may not be the least pertinent.