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Jacqueline Kahanoff

23 quotes

“Ever since that same first seder night the Egyptians and Hebrews were linked in my mind as people who belonged to another time dimension, different from those young European nations like England and France (America was not included yet on my horizons), whose history one learned in school. Egypt and Israel had been there from the start, from the very onset of things, before history. They still existed, even if they had lost some of their greatness; together they would rise again and flourish long after Britain's and France's strength had waned-like Rome's power had waned before them. I would weave every fortuitous bit of knowledge I gathered into the stories I told myself in which the Egyptians and Hebrews returned to their past glory, not as adversaries but allies.”
Jacqueline Kahanoff first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: from "Welcome, Sadat" (1978), translated from the Hebrew
“Why did we have an attitude at once so touchy and denigrating toward ourselves? I think we considered ourselves too inferior-or, as we say in Israel, too “Levantine”—to dare express ourselves in writing. Gide and Malraux were our standard, but it didn't occur to us that the point was not to emulate them, but to tell our own story, in our own words. That could be only our beginning. Once we had left Egypt, it broke our hearts to think that practically nobody had done this; that a whole community, one of the most complex and interesting, disappeared without leaving a trace. The one significant work about Egypt's Levantine world, the Alexandria Quartet, was written not by one of us, but by Lawrence Durrell, an Irishman. [...] I've known a number of women writers and painters who were born in Egypt—rather talented ones too: Andrée Chedid, who writes novels; Joyce Mansour, who has written some quite beautiful poetry; Nadine Gorse, the wife of France's ambassador to Algeria. Their work is interesting, but never quite lives up to its promise. All of them published only after they had left Egypt.”
Jacqueline Kahanoff first seen 1973 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Culture Stillborn" (1973), translated from the original Hebrew
“I prefer to use the word peace sparingly; it has become a shoddy word from use and misuse, and too much lip-service. Perfect peace and harmony do not exist, not between individuals, and not between nations. They are simply ways of accommodating one's self to others that make life mutually tolerable, and we should not ask for more.”
Jacqueline Kahanoff wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our legitimacy will be recognized on condition that we accept the reciprocal recognition of the legitimacy of the Palestinians. It is the price to pay for accommodation and eventually, hopefully, reconciliation.”
Jacqueline Kahanoff wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Gandhi too was a great showman, but he knew how to reach that deeper core in a people's soul imprisoned in its hard defensive shell. Gandhi failed, as I hope Sadat will not. May the ferment continue to be active in the hearts and minds of human beings, way beyond our borders. Not that the Arab rejectionists are prepared to abandon their set postures, as the vehement anti-Sadat propaganda in Libya and Syria clearly shows. But even there, there must be people who wonder if it is necessary to go on with all that hatred, if accommodation and reconciliation are not after all more of the essence of life than war and destruction.”
Jacqueline Kahanoff wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Zionism and the rebirth of Israel confronted Moslems no less, though differently, than Christians with the question of the right of this son of Abraham to claim and reconquer his inheritance. To admit the rebirth and triumphant return of this downtrodden son of Abraham returning as a refugee from concentration camps challenged the belief of Islam and Ishmael as the one and only legitimate heir. The presence of this reborn Israel was all the more difficult to accept when Arab countries were undergoing their own national awakening and struggle for independence. The opposition and the rejection were couched in modern terms of nationalism, but its roots are ancient, in the mythology and theology of both protagonists. The two movements of national revival were born at approximately the same time, one supported by Europe, the other rebelling against European colonial domination. The latent Ishmael-Isaac myth was more or less consciously revived, and behind the modern political parlance motivates many postures on both sides.”
Jacqueline Kahanoff wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our best chance for peace and survival may be to transform the Zionist revolution into a Levantine one.”
Jacqueline Kahanoff wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No matter how many wars may still have to be fought, we shall need to work out some alternative to warfare if we are to have a common future in this part of the world.”
Jacqueline Kahanoff wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A Jewish Israel promises the best guarantee for the freedom of other people in the region who are just as particularistic and are no more prepared to be absorbed by us than we are to be absorbed by them.”
Jacqueline Kahanoff wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I seek to discover traces of my own past here. But they cannot be separated from the history of other peoples who lived in or passed through this region; their roots and ours are intertwined, and so are our lives today, through the very intensity of the conflict that locks us in combat. In a sense, this is my dig, through many dimensions of human time, started way back in childhood, in the hope that from my own broken little Jewish-Oriental fragment, I would be able to reconstitute a living whole. [...] My formal education is Western, my deepest sensitivities are not, and as in the case of a great many other people, I have always been confronted with the need to reconcile the Western superstructure with an identity whose roots are not in the Western world. The need for adjustment to the modern world and attachment to one's specific past are quite naturally first perceived in terms of conflict, which is frequently expressed here. All around us, people are having a similar experience, striving to retain their identity and yet to belong to the twentieth century. Some, drawn to the Western world, shed their past identity as a worn, discarded garment. Others cling to the past and turn their backs on the challenge of anything new. Still others, having experienced the Western world, yearn for some remnant of their own past, but transformed, and projected in a new dimension of the future. This is essentially what Israel has done in relation to Jewish tradition.”
Jacqueline Kahanoff wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No matter how many Jews settle this country, Israel will still be in this part of the world, and therefore the question of its relationship to the other people in the area is the one which should concern us. A modernized Levantine framework, comprising people who are different, equal, and equally native, might provide a workable-not perfect, but workable-pattern for coexistence.”
Jacqueline Kahanoff wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Because of its diversity, the Levant has been compared to a mosaic-bits of stone of different colors assembled into a flat picture. To me it is more like a prism whose various facets are joined by the sharp edge of differences, but each of which, according to its position in a time-space continuum, reflects or refracts light. Indeed, the concept of a continuum is contained in the word Levant as in the word mizrah, and perhaps the time has come for the Levant to reevaluate itself by its own lights, rather than see itself through Europe's sights, as something quaintly exotic, tired, sick, and almost lifeless.”
Jacqueline Kahanoff wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Reconstructing a pluralistic Levant may offer a workable alternative to imperialism, neocolonialism, Christian, Moslem, or Great-Power rivalries and domination, by suggesting a framework in which people have the right to be free, different, and equal, rather than one in which the "superior" would subject, eliminate, or at best tolerate others in the name of universalism. We tend to forget that the Levant had a long and complex history long before the Moslem conquest, and that many of its people never renounced their specific identities, though they may have adapted in some ways in order to survive. The Druze and the Maronites in Lebanon and Syria, the Kurds and Nestorian Christians in Iraq, the Copts in Egypt, like the ancient Jewish communities scattered from Yemen to Morocco, are just as native to the region as those who converted to Islam. Are they all to be stifled and suppressed under the outmoded conformity of Islam dressed up in the new garb of Arab nationalism? Some, like the Kurds and Israelis, resist. Others, like the Copts, must at present lie low. But few, if any, consent simply to disappear.”
Jacqueline Kahanoff wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We have all clung to old hostilities from our pasts-ethnic, theological, and national-and made no attempt to reinterpret them in terms that would be mutually inclusive rather than exclusive. Reviving the notion of the Levant as a geographic entity, comprising many genuinely native peoples and cultures, may help us to create a consensus between Israel and other people in the region that stems from the acceptance of diversity not as an inevitable evil, but as a necessary good.”
Jacqueline Kahanoff wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Time and again people have had to learn to live together in the same territorial and mythical space in order to survive. This is perhaps the great historical lesson of the Levant, as each entity has had to renounce part of its claim to an all-embracing universality-so often synonymous with imperialism, oppression, and suppression. Pluralism here is the indispensable antidote to mutually exclusive territorial claims based on an obsessive concern with monotheism--in a multiplicity of forms--each of which sees itself, rather arrogantly, as the only entity with whom God is on speaking terms.”
Jacqueline Kahanoff wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Is it not the very act of contending both with and against the apparently blind will of nature and the apparently arbitrary will of God which is the very essence of a revolutionary process--as well as one of constant transformation in attempting to resolve the contradictions of human existence through a dynamic creative effort, rather than through passive submission?”
Jacqueline Kahanoff wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The present conflict tends to make us feel encircled and isolated, so that we cling all the more tenaciously to Jewishness as our main human dimension. In a way this constitutes the most effective weapon of psychological warfare that the present Arab leaders and their allies have against us in their arsenal. Still, our survival is directly linked to Levantine diversity in a modern framework, in a joint fight against any dominant hegemony. What prevents us for the most part from taking the lead in propagating the ideal of a Levant Federation is our particular—and particularly painful—Jewish experience.”
Jacqueline Kahanoff wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We need to reevaluate these psycho-historical time reckonings as related and relative, rather than as separate, antagonistic, and absolute. If we were to start out with the study of prehistory, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam would appear as branches of the same tree which continue to grow, and grow apart, but it is still one whole tree. There is hardly an educational system that does not indoctrinate youngsters to blindly support their own ideological family and reject all others. It is here perhaps that change is most called for.”
Jacqueline Kahanoff wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[I]f we refuse a common past, we can hardly have a common future and are consequently bound by the terms of the Ishmael-Israel dispute: one brother eliminating or subjugating the other, and the other people in the family having nothing to say about it. [...] Between absorbing or being absorbed, dominating or being dominated—or eliminated—there remains the alternative of establishing a mature, civilized relationship, that of recognition between free and equal people who have every right to be different from one another.”
Jacqueline Kahanoff wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How could he help her to fight for her life, to free herself from the terror of death which possessed her? Holding her damp hand, he suggested diffidently, "Doctor, perhaps if I told Rachel a story, it would help her to forget her pain?”
Jacqueline Kahanoff wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There was a sense of abundance about the woman both sweet and violent, so powerful that it could never be harnessed by things like tidiness, decency, and good manners.”
Jacqueline Kahanoff wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In Europe, Rachel knew, poor people voted and had a voice in government, but in Egypt, a shamefully backward country, they loved each other better, it seemed to her.”
Jacqueline Kahanoff wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Images linked themselves obscurely in her mind, governesses, British soldiers and policemen, who were the same person, neither man nor woman, but authority, discipline, jails, barracks, all that civilized the life out of people to turn them into joyless, well-behaved automatons. Miss Nutting was the one who wanted to make Rachel ashamed to be like the native woman, hoping to turn her into the same sterile, seedless pod that she was.”
Jacqueline Kahanoff wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source