Class 3: Odes to Old Worlds: Sephardic and MENA Literature in English

Rediscovering Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff 

In 2022, in a column entitled “Overlooked No More,” chronicling the lives of remarkable people whose obituaries were not published upon their deaths, The New York Times featured Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff, an Egyptian Jewish writer who had died in 1979.

In many ways, Shohet Kahanoff was a product of her time: her mother was Tunisian, her father was Iraqi, and she, like most of her peer group in Cairo, spoke not Arabic but French and English. Her linguistic and cultural segregation from the Arab world from which she was descended and in which she was raised meant, as she wrote, that she was part of “a people without a language. . .,” a people who “were appreciably carried farther and farther from reality.” 

The Vision of Levantine Literature

In her final years, in an essay called “A Culture Stillborn” (1973), Shohet Kahanoff looked back to what she saw as the origins of Levantine literature (in the early nineteenth-century), a literature “rooted in the realities of the Middle East and influenced by European culture.” If that literature was “stillborn,” it was because its creators died without successors as French became the language that bridged the Jews of Cairo, who had roots in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Turkey, Greece, North Africa. Later, when Jews came to Egypt from Romania, Russia, and finally from Austria and Germany, local specificities disappeared. Although Shohet Kahanoff was herself a critically acclaimed writer in New York and later Israel, her call for symbiosis, for bringing together Levantine life and European influence, seemed to have gone unheeded. On reviving Shohet Kahanoff’s memory in 2022, The New York Times, belatedly, lauded her keen ability to do just that, to observe “the collision of ideas and culture between East and West, and explore [ . . . ] how different groups can find symbiosis through a wide prism of humanism.”

Toward a New Sephardic and Mizrahi Literature

The readings for this class, however, suggest a new model of Sephardic and Middle Eastern Jewish literature. Although a body of Mizrahi writing had emerged in Israel, with towering writers like Sami Michael and Ronit Matalon, it developed far later in the English-speaking world. As in Shohet Kahanoff’s model, it was a symbiosis of old and new, Arab/Middle Eastern/North African and European/British/American. At the end of the twentieth century, with the publication of such texts as Iranian American writer Gina Nahai’s historical novel Cry of the Peacock (1991) and André Aciman’s memoir, Out of Egypt (1994), important contributions to contemporary English-language Sephardic literature emerged. Nostalgic, despite being tales of exile, romantic even, they are an ode to lost worlds—while also, in myriad ways from form to content, they take on engagement with a new world.