Is it a novel? Assuredly not. Is it a simple narrative? Not that either. Is it an autobiography? Not in the least, even though everything, in literature, derives from a biography. In this instance, what is at issue in this book is the biography of an era, that of one or two countries, of at least three or four characters, and of a few clouds.
In a word, if I did not fear repelling a few readers who associate with this word notions of tedium or uselessness, I would say that it is a matter of poetry. But of that poetry which does not break into lines, the one that makes shiver not only the hard grasses of the djebels but also the laundry drying at the windows of the Mediterranean.
Suite baroque — there is a title that suits the man I met. Daniel Timsit strikes a discordant note in these times of multimedia, of internet and of walking telephones. He is content to be French, to be Jewish, and to be also an Algerian. Three balconies of his innermost being upon which he strolls, letting, at the tips of his yellowed fingers, his cigarettes smoke as he lets his memory unfurl. Yes, the man I met is first of all a human being, that is to say perfectly universal.
All these particulars seem to me important to underscore, for this book does not concern specifically the Jews as such, nor the French as such, nor the Algerians themselves. It concerns us all.
What is it about? About a man who made a choice and who went to the very end of his choices. Which would be banal if this man were not the citizen of a torn country caught up in the aftermath of a History in which he took part — but an aftermath that does not, today, go altogether in the direction he had dreamed.
What was it, colonial Algeria, the Algeria from before 1954? A country in which the norm was to live quietly (and sometimes, violently), in one’s corner, in one’s neighborhood, in the culture in which one had first seen the light of day. Invisible walls separated the communities — ah! the ugly word that shuts so many doors! But it would take too long to look for another — communities that nonetheless lived side by side without for all that mingling. The Jews, French citizens since 1870 by the grace of the Crémieux decree, were first of all Jews in the eyes of the Muslims and the Christians, those Muslims whom we called the Arabs, and those Christians whom we called the Europeans or sometimes the French. And it was the same for each of these groups with respect to the other two.
It must, however, be acknowledged that the Jews, in Algeria, felt toward the Arab population a reserve, if not a hostility, that was not solely attributable to the sacrosanct colonialist principle of divide and rule. The history of this country harbors, against the Jews, acts of violence that cannot be explained solely by the existence of an imperialism anxious to establish its economic and cultural domination over the whole of the population. The pogrom of the month of August 1934, in Constantine, which cost the lives of 26 Jews, lives on still in everyone’s memory1.
This is why the participation of Jews in the war of Independence (I mean alongside the Algerians) must be considered an unusual thing, if not even an exceptional one. In this light, Daniel Timsit’s book delivers to us a vision not only moving but also psychologically surprising. Indeed, it is not the least of the astonishments aroused by reading it to become aware of this fact: the hero (Joseph/Daniel), fighting in the ranks of the FLN, continues, nearly 40 years after Independence, to live the dramatic vicissitudes that Algeria undergoes, in a wholly… endopolitical way, a frightful neologism that I have deliberately fabricated to bring it close to the word endogamous. Joseph, the Algerian Jew — but it would be more accurate to say the Jewish Algerian — without ever rejecting the little tune that founded him, without ever disowning his origins, nor his family, will nonetheless take part in the war of liberation like any other Arab-Muslim Algerian fighter, alongside his brother Slimane and a few other “clouds.” I know well that the history of this war mentions the presence, within the Algerian people, of other heroes who were Jewish or Christian, or French from France, but it happens that, as far as Joseph is concerned, this participation took place from “within,” and this even unto the ultimate sacrifice, since Daniel Timsit was sentenced to death.
He walks today in the streets of an exile become a homeland, he continues to have for “brothers” those who, like him, escaped death, and like them, he continues to suffer before the drama that shakes and bloodies Algeria. He has aged with the skin of those who walk in streets where they were not born, he has loved and founded a family, and he continues to write as one fights. That is to say with love.
I met him and I made a point of transcribing for you the essential part of the conversation we had. Let us note that his book, Suite baroque, has just won the François Billetdoux prize.
Rolland Doukhan
Conversation with Daniel Timsit about his book Suite baroque. Histoires de Joseph, Slimane et des nuages (Baroque Suite. Stories of Joseph, Slimane and the clouds)
D. T. = Daniel Timsit
R. D. = Rolland Doukhan
R. D.: When I approached your book, I sought to link it to your first book, Récits anachroniques (Anachronistic Narratives), which, of course, is a book entirely woven into the unfolding of Algeria’s war of Independence. I quickly realized that Suite baroque (and the rest of the title is not superfluous) is more in the lived experience, in the inside of the author, of Joseph, you know, of Slimane and of others still.
D. T.: It is a trajectory.
R. D.: Yes, it is a trajectory, but of course, if you have had other conversations about this book, you will not have failed to be told that there are in Suite baroque two fundamentally distinct parts, and not only because they are, if I may say so, expressed physically on the page. In the first, your friends, your comrades in struggle, in fact your characters, position themselves, meet, speak to one another, articulate, in a way, the functioning of the war. In the second, which is a more intimate part, more steeped in your inner self, including your own lived experience, one senses the terrible passing of time, the wear and tear of things and of beings.
What struck me, even stirred me very deeply, is the atmosphere, the idea that runs throughout the book, I mean this melancholy, this impression of having reached the end of a road, the end of several roads even, with this sadness that accompanies the ends of journeys. And so I take the liberty of asking you, because I thought about it, whether one can liken this book, in any case its climate, if not its very subject, to another work that is in itself a reference worthy of yours — I mean La guerre est finie (The War Is Over) by Jorge Semprún, as well as the film that Alain Resnais drew from it.
D. T.: It is difficult for me to answer yes or no, but it seems to me, yes, it seems to me possible to make this comparison. However, I must add some reservations. Indeed, the character played by Yves Montand in Resnais’s film has a silhouette, how shall I say, of a romantic revolutionary. Which one also finds in La Condition humaine (Man’s Fate) by Malraux. This takes nothing away from the value and the quality of this novel, and of this film, which marked a whole generation. And it is true that there is always, in any revolution, a romantic component — in any case, every revolution arouses this kind of feeling. But one realizes, when one lives the event, that it is not like that. In reality… ”
Daniel Timsit falls silent. He is there, pensive, before me, lighting with a hand that does not tremble his third or fourth cigarette. He has just rejoined that reality into which he hesitates to let me enter.
R. D.: Yes, in reality?
D. T.: Well! in reality, a people is full of anonymous ones, full of little stories, full of… How shall I say? Full of people who make a crowd, and it is this crowd that is the hero, this hero who stands out far less from the mass…
R. D.: You mean that in reality, the hero is this mass, this people…
D. T.: Yes. In a book, one names, one gives a name to the hero. The same goes for melancholy. It is not all white or all black. Besides, I must point out to you that I had written the second part of this book long before the first, even though they both deal with the same period, a period all things considered rather hollow and that begins, a little, the descent into the…
R. D.: The descent into the… what?
D. T.: Oh! let us say that I said nothing. But to come back to this melancholy you spoke of, I think one can say that it was less romantic than novelistic…
R. D.: It is all the more poignant, because it comes from the belly of a man, from his heart.
D. T.: And then, when one writes, one realizes, speaking of this or that character, that he invests himself in diverse ways. There is life in History, life in what one does, and then there is also, there is always life with one’s close ones, with one’s wife or one’s children.
R. D.: That is what one perceives in your book, and this, in both parts. But I owe it to the truth to say that what seemed to me very important, at first, is the fact of your experience in this war, and in the period that followed. An experience that one may call exceptional, if not unique. I mean the participation of an Algerian Jewish citizen in the war of independence, in the ranks of the ALN, of the FLN, if you prefer.
D. T.: Yes, the FLN, since it is a matter of the autonomous zone of Algiers.
R. D.: It is thus that you came to know the prisons of Barberousse or of El Harrach, I believe.
D. T.: Yes, that is right.
R. D.: At first, then, that is what seemed to me very important to note, because our readers are not the Duponts, the Durands, or the Martins who walk around us in the streets, but Cohens, Allouches, Finkelsteins, or Grynbaums. These readers cannot imagine for a single second that a Jewish citizen — I say Jewish as an entity, as an identity-bearing person belonging to the Jewish community of this country — could have taken part, weapons in hand, in the war of liberation. But above all, I realized, throughout the testimony that your book represents, that Joseph, the witness and the actor, in a word, you, so as not to use a periphrasis, lived this period of the war and the postwar without ever abandoning for a single second, without ever disowning, your taste for the shabbats, your insertion into that little night music that accompanies our families — and I do not mean religion, nor rite, but indeed that identity, that flesh that makes you.
D. T.: Yes, and it is indeed that first of all which must be explained to the readers of your review: never did I want to be Mohamed Timsit, but indeed Daniel Timsit. And this notion is, moreover, more obvious in my first book Récits anachroniques, whose exact title is Algérie, Récits anachroniques (Algeria, Anachronistic Narratives).
R. D.: Can you remind me in what year this book was published?
D. T.: Yes, it first appeared in the review Études Palestiniennes (Palestine Studies), then later in book form, in 1998, with Éditions Bouchène. But I would like to correct a little what you were saying about me earlier, namely that I was a more or less unique example. Yes, I want to correct that a little. Indeed, I would say that I went to the end of a certain logic. But I was not the only one. Those who come immediately to mind are, for example, Dahan, or else Guenassia, of the Ténès maquis, or again the great William Sportisse, a marvelous personality and head of the Communist Party in Constantine. All these people, one may say, went to the end of this logic, to the end of this road. But there are many others who did not go all the way to that end, whether they were Jewish or European as one used to say — the Farouggias, the Pasquales, Pieds-noirs, you know. And it happens that most of these names have been obscured. One must know that, faced with the events that were being set in motion, faced with the Algerian war that was looming, the solutions were multiple, the future was not traced out in advance.
R. D.: Can you give me some explanation of this obscuring?
D. T.: In my opinion, there is a twofold phenomenon there. One is that the solution we had envisaged, with others moreover, and which had its foundations, failed.
R. D.: What do you mean by that? Do you mean the solution envisaged by the FLN concerning the non-Muslims, or…?
D. T.: Yes, the FLN had envisaged that at least half of the European population of Algeria would not leave the country, and would form an integral part of future Algerian society. That was in ’54, ’55, and even ’56.
R. D.: Was that not a very serious error of political judgment, an error one might almost call infantile?
D. T.: No, I do not think so. Of course, there was a turning point, it was at the end of ’56, the beginning of ’57. Until then, there was a majority of the population that did not imagine leaving the country bag and baggage. There were very few departures at the beginning. The Jewish community, as a whole, tried to keep its distance from the conflict. A sort of watchful neutrality, in a way. No one really knew what political formula would come into being, what form of association, or what else still… The Jews remained very attached to this country. There was a fringe, a strong minority, that did not see itself leaving this land. Even at the end, I remember those humble folk, Italian and Algerian market gardeners, Spanish workers, etc., who had stayed in independent Algeria. If one compares this attitude with that of the Moroccan Jews, one may think that the solution of “staying” was not entirely chimerical2.
R. D.: Yes, but the position of the Jews in Morocco was very different, the context was altogether other.
D. T.: Of course, of course. In any case, the attitude of that community, I mean the Jewish community of Morocco, shifted only after the birth of the State of Israel in 1948, on the one hand, after the independence of their country in 1956, on the other, and perhaps finally, after the death, in 1961, of Mohammed V, whom they revered. To come back to Algeria, I believe, for having lived it, that it was not unthinkable to imagine Algerian Jewish citizens after independence.
R. D.: We were speaking earlier of this obscuring of the very presence of the Jews in Algeria. Do you not think that there was also an obscuring on the part of the Algerians themselves?
D. T.: One may say so, especially in the Boumédiène period. But we are witnessing, I think, what I may call a return of the repressed.
R. D.: You are alluding, I think, to the recent declarations of President Bouteflika announcing that he intended to pay tribute to the Jewish community of Constantine.
D. T.: Not only that. Because, after all, these Jews of whom we speak, they were already living in the Maghreb, and particularly in what was geographically Algeria, as early as the first century before Jesus Christ, that is to say more than 2000 years ago. So, I say that one would be mistaken to characterize those who took part in the struggle as adventurers, or even as heroes. Revolutions, I repeat, are novelistic only in books. No, we were close to one another, we swam in the same music, we were humble folk, small intellectuals. I, who lived on the Place de la Lyre, knew it, that… music of the Casbah. So, we understood the humiliation lived by the Arab Algerians, the hogra.
R. D.: You have just spoken of heroes, of revolutions, and so on. But if one thinks of the Cuban revolution, for example, if one thinks of Che Guevara, of the myth he has become — and I remember his journey to Algiers where he aroused an incredible enthusiasm and set off a disproportionate Guevaramania — one is obliged to observe that this revolution was carried to its end, even if, economically speaking, the Cuban regime did not succeed, did not attain self-sufficiency, even if on the plane of social ethics, human rights, and even fundamental liberties, things are not, far from it, an obvious success. One cannot say as much of the Algerian revolution, can one?
D. T.: No, but it is always difficult to make historical comparisons, especially when the eras do not superimpose.
R. D.: I know that well, but I will take the liberty of quoting you, of quoting what you have Slimane say, one of your characters, one of your companions in struggle. It is on page 89 of your book, and Slimane was thinking of the situation of his country in those years ’80 or even ’90 that so disfigured the Algerian political landscape:
“A quarrel of chiefs. That is what it was. And Slimane thought: The militant is like a swimmer who believes he is pushing the wave when he is just barely managing to keep himself at its level. And if the surface of the sea stays flat, if no wind blows, he flails his arms, but nothing rises. The revolution is dead. Dead for us, at least, for our generation, divided, fragmented, decomposed, putrefied by the ‘gains of the revolution.’ We are, for the most part, the rentiers of the war of liberation, and we manage the interest we have drawn from it, with more or less good conscience. The others, the rankless, those who do not possess the communal certificate, have no right to speak, they do not even imagine that they could have rights.”
There it is, it is on page 89, and it is a poignant and terrible observation for those who, like you, went all the way, or like others, who left their very lives there, like a Mourad Didouche, a Larbi Ben M’Hidi, or any other less well-known martyr. When one goes back up along this road, when one wants to make the reckoning all the way to today’s fundamentalism, one is entitled to wonder: so, we did all that to come to this?
D. T.: That is precisely why the book has a rather sad tonality.
R. D.: I will take the liberty of making another comparison of your book with a work that is a reference, a comparison that may astonish or embarrass you: in the way you have constructed your book, this way you have of speaking, found throughout your pages, of exchanges, just like that, either of thought or of true dialogue between two characters, or between the author and the characters, I curiously rediscovered the technique of Plato in the Symposium. Yes, indeed, Daniel, it made you burst out laughing, but still, it is the same technique, the same means for going back up into people’s thought.
D. T.: You flatter me and you… jostle me a little. But what have I tried to do? What Joseph says, what Slimane says, what they express is in relation to their own lived experience.
R. D.: Yes, and it is very moving. Look, I will take the liberty of reading to you again, of quoting you. This passage is in the second part of the book, in fact the one written earlier than the first. There one sees Joseph arrive in Italy, at La Spezia, sit down at the station buffet, and dream:
the journeys he imagined for each of his daughters, winter on a long beach, summer in the family house, a fisherman’s house — there were no longer really any such — but he had discovered it by chance, just at the edge of a beach, over by the magical Corbières. “I will have dreamed my life,” he said to himself, but in the old days, he dreamed of generous revolutions, of peoples on the move, of dazzling loves; now it was always a matter of apartments, of a house, of money. Curiously, he himself remained poor, living in a monkish room.
You see, passages like this one, I have underlined several. I do not fear, when I love a book, to stain its pages. This other one, for example:
He told himself that he was making his way along a ledge. To his right, the rock of the real world, which he had given up scaling. To his left, the ravines of madness, fascinating. He was nothing but a tightrope walker, guided only by the soles of his feet, step by step, risking stumbling each time into a final fall.
This feeling of “what’s the use,” this transparent, light, overwhelming bitterness that weaves the last part of the book, that is called poetry, Daniel — but yes, even if you deny it.
D. T.: It is true that God, in his mercy (here, Daniel Timsit began to laugh at himself), allowed us to be blind. Because if one could see in advance, perhaps then… Well, one remains a communist, beyond the terrible and rigged experiences, one remains what one is.
R. D.: All right, but let us rather speak of that little boy who used to lie stretched out on a bench at his parents’ home, his eyes riveted to the windowpane, behind which he watched the clouds go by — speak to me of the permanent presence of the sea in the head of that little boy. After all, what is it, what was the sea for you?
D. T.: You see me very embarrassed before this question. It is not to you, who also write, that I am going to explain it, but there are the things one has within oneself, things that… How shall I tell you?
R. D.: The sea, it was like the womb from which you came, was it not?
D. T.: Yes, it was inscribed in me, it was an integral part of me in that little apartment from which I glimpsed only the sky. The sea, it is my mother. And a Jewish mother, you know what that is. I do not mean that Muslim or Christian mothers are less or more loving, they are other, quite simply.
R. D.: Explain yourself a little about this relationship with your mother.
D. T.: There is a strange thing, which is that I became aware very late of two things: one was that my mother loved me, almost favored me, and there were nonetheless five children in the family. The other was that I detached myself very late from the cocoon, a sort of persistence of childhood. That is how it is. It was an obvious fact, but obvious facts, one does not see them. It is like my mother, she was always there, and I did not see her. I felt protected because I was protected. Nothing could happen to me.
R. D.: In what way did your mother love you and protect you? I ask you this because you speak differently of your father, who loved you and protected you too.
D. T.: It is funny that you ask me that.
R. D.: No, what is interesting is to know whether this protection did not isolate you, did not separate you from the larger context that, later, you were going to embrace. Because, after all, this protection took place inside a microcosm, do you not agree?
D. T.: Of course, of course. When one belongs to a family, one belongs to a tribe. Even when one detaches oneself from it on the plane of ideas or of the road one takes. It is something carnal. I would go further: even when one must turn against it, it is for it that one does so, it is in its name.
R. D.: It is extraordinary, and it allows one to understand your commitments better.
D. T.: But it is true, it must be said, our families were patriarchal families. The mother, the father, they were different images. The mother was the one who protected from anguish. She was there, always. She was the home. I could find her again whenever I wanted. The father, in any case for me, was a model. The model from when I was small: a mass, a force that took everything upon itself all the time, all the time. He was a model of courage, of valor.
R. D.: So he was a model of ethics.
D. T.: Yes, that is it, a model of ethics.
R. D.: Did he have a religious practice?
D. T.: Ah! yes! Every morning, I was woken by his prayer. He put on the tefillin, he went to the synagogue. Yes, I can say that he was very religious, very observant. He was even a “gesbar3.” But unfortunately, we, his children, only truly “saw” him very late. We always sensed him as he was; he inspired in us a real respect.
R. D.: And how old were you when he died?
D. T.: Let me see, he died in 1971, so I was 43.
R. D.: May I ask you how he experienced your commitment?
D. T.: Like my mother. He experienced it with courage and patience. He always supported us, my sister and me, and my brothers, without for all that sharing our choices or our ideas, without passing any value judgment. He supported us. Without getting involved in all that, of course. Ah! my father and my mother, they were always near us.
R. D.: And you, how did you experience this relationship with your parents?
D. T.: The reproaches I was able to make to myself were for having made them suffer.
R. D.: Did your parents leave Algeria at independence?
D. T.: No. One must know that my brothers had been sentenced respectively to 2 and 5 years of prison, suspended. They were interned for a while, and in 1960, on his release from prison, my elder brother left for France. My parents followed him. But in 1962, they returned to Algeria. My father, moreover, remained president of the Jewish community of Algiers practically until his death. My mother, for her part, died earlier than he, in 1965. And all the friends came to accompany her to the cemetery, the Algerian friends too, who formed a guard of honor for her. My father remained in Algiers until 1970, the date at which he joined me in France. He died there in 1971.
R. D.: Can we move on to the second part of the book? That part which is a little different, which has another tone, which can astonish. It is a moving part, because… look, I will take a little at random. It is on page 137. Joseph is in Vernazza, turning over and over in his head the absence of Natacha, the absence of the daughters:
And the children! God knows what they had suffered, but they had already suffered from something. From the absence of rules? No! From his mystifying game, his theater that they had taken for reality. The mystification, not even shameless, worse, sordidly sincere. That infinite mystification. Had he not left the country, his friends? He had given up.
So there, one suddenly realizes that the character — I was going to say the hero, well, you, to be brief — is assailed, assaulted by this idea that his own children have read in him, have read in his life, a mystification. Am I mistaken? Are we in the presence of a fear?
D. T.: I cannot answer yes or no. It is more complex. I will take the example of Che Guevara. He himself may think that it is a mystification. Not only, or not so much, in the eyes of others, but above all in his own eyes.
R. D.: You mean when one no longer believes in what one believed in.
D. T.: Yes, when one seeks, how shall I say… the authenticity of the action. So, one may pass for a hero, but even the saints may not be saints, and they know it.
R. D.: It takes a great deal of courage all the same to lay bare such a lucidity.
D. T.: Not so much. You know well, when one writes, it is a struggle for each word, for each second, and it is what is written that becomes the true. I do not mean that this true was not so before the writing, but…
R. D.: Yes, I understand. I will quote you again, page 177:
Betelgeuse, at the café on the corner of the two streets… Not the best place to write, this café. But would he write?.. paper, paper! The children are playing, the people love one another, embrace, go to the cinema on this Sunday, he remains alone before this paltry paper. This morning, he had found on the kitchen table a note from his lady friend: “Find yourself another lodging, I’m having people over tonight.” He was dismissed. A year ago, no one would have written to him like that. He had stuffed his things into the plasticized canvas bag he dragged everywhere with him and he had gone out, promising himself to write. His way of reconstituting a face for himself. “I write, therefore I am.”
Is that what remains to Daniel Timsit, today? Writing?
D. T.: No, no! Of course. What you have just read concerns a character.
R. D.: I know that well. It was a manner of provocation on my part.
D. T.: Yes, because, what I am saying there is deliberate. The children, they look at you as a sort of hero. So, one must indeed undress things, decipher. But in fact, the children know everything. They are aware of the danger when it exists…
R. D.: And they know when the tiger is made of paper. But this lucidity remains for me the second lesson of this book. Because, I repeat, it takes courage to state those truths. The reader (or the spectator) looks at the truth that is on the stage, and sometimes, in your book, one sees the actor become aware of the truth that is at the back of the set, that quivers in the flies, that stirs in his memory.
D. T.: Algerian readers have sometimes questioned me about this or that anecdote. I tell them that everything is in the book. That is a little it, I think, what my publisher favored.
R. D.: There are heaps of people who decide one day to tell the story of their life. So, they put on the right the brothers, the sister, the street, on the left the father, the school, and who knows what else, and that makes the narrative of a succession of days that speak only to the ear of those who know the author. Your approach is other. It is that of those true writers who, while recounting their days and their nights, propel the narrative within reach of thousands upon thousands of unknown people who will recognize themselves between the lines, or have the feeling of having lived and understood this or that episode. Well! I maintain that you are one of those writers.
D. T.: To conclude, one must indeed conclude on a note at once optimistic and realistic: I do not say that it is over, I say simply that one begins again.
Rolland Doukhan.
Notes
See, on this subject, the excellent work of Robert Attal, entitled 5 août 1934 - Les émeutes de Constantine (August 5, 1934 - The Riots of Constantine).↩︎
See La gangrène et l’oubli (The Gangrene and the Forgetting), by Benjamin Stora.↩︎
A kind of administrator of worship inside the synagogue, a manner of “night watchman” of the prayers. ↩︎