Habitus

by Habitus · 11/21/11

This conversation between memoirist, novelist, critic, and scholar André Aciman and Habitus editor Joshua Ellison was recorded last summer at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, in lower Manhattan, at an event entitled, “Is New York the Diaspora?”

Diaspora is not a word you use a lot in your writing, but exile is a concept you return to again and again. So, I ask, as a beginning: are Diaspora and exile the same thing?

An exile is someone who has been forcibly evicted or dispossessed. Force is inherent to the displacement of an exile; otherwise he is just an immigrant. Therefore, as an exile, you are a wanderer until you find a home—if ever you do. Diaspora is a condition of dispersion that applies to more than one individual; you cannot have one person being diasporic. You cannot be a Diaspora unto yourself. This is an important distinction because the experience of solitude defines exile but does not necessarily have any kind of repercussions in a Diaspora. For example, you could dismantle an entire ghetto in Vilnius and transport it to Brooklyn. Those people are in the condition of Diaspora but they are together. They bring with them their own history, a set of cultural values, and artifacts that keep bound them together.

How entwined is your experience of exile with your idea of what it means to be Jewish?

Being a Jew, for me, and perhaps only for me, means that you are always an outsider looking for a home—a potential home in the future but it could just as easily be a home in the past. A Jew is not allowed to stop being in exile. Part of what a Jew is—and clearly this is only a part of what makes Jews Jewish—is that they remain outsiders.  So, yes, the Jew is put in a ghetto and somebody who is not a Jew builds the walls of the ghetto. But the Jew finds the wall to be quite convenient, even if painful. The wall defines what it is to be a Jew in the modern world.

So, thinking back to your childhood in Egypt: what did it mean to be a Jew for you, before you had your experience in exile?

Sephardic Jews tend to be very orthodox, so my family was orthodox—except my father, who was not anything at all, so we did not grow up orthodox. Everybody around us was orthodox.  Passover Seders were momentous and painfully long. Being a Jew in Egypt meant that I was constantly the butt of jokes. Sometimes, instead of jokes, there were very material threats, like having stones thrown at you. I went to a latter-day British school, which was basically a school for rich Egyptians. That was the only school available to us for a while.

At that school, the propaganda against Israel and against Jews was so broadcast  that I got used to a constant chill down my spine. As soon as the word “Jew” was mentioned, I was singled out in class. And the irony was that I did not have what some of my other Jewish friends had: they were proud of being Jewish. It was part of who they were. I had to pay the price for being a Jew without the indemnity that comes from being proud of it.

Let’s talk about New York a little bit. Straus Park, which you’ve written about and continue to revisit, is obviously a very important place on your personal map. Talk a little about Straus Park, what it was that captured your attention. What did you find there?

Straus Park is a little park in Upper Manhattan on 106th Street. There’s nothing really special about it. Many people come to interview me at Straus Park and they are always extremely disappointed because they expect to find a very glamorous little park, very French style. I always tell them, please don’t bring any food or drink anything in Straus Park: there are rats around.

I discovered Straus Park by accident because there was a beautiful statue there. At some point when they were refurbishing the park, I saw that they had removed the statue. I thought, oh, this is so typical of New York: here was a good thing and suddenly it’s taken away. Yes, they took it to polish it or fix it, but we’ll never see the statue again. That was my understanding. But this sense of a sudden loss of something—I mean, it was a nice statue, but I’m not going to bemoan it—created a crisis in me. I tried to understand what that crisis was.

That disappearing statue struck an alarm in me because I had seen so many things disappear before in my life. I realized that what I’m attached to is not the statue or the condition of the park. It is more that I am attached to the present. Things have to stay the way they are because if they don’t, if we don’t try to be retentive with the present and hold onto everything we are and own and love, things will just slip away. I have a whole history behind me of things slipping away from me. A whole civilization, a whole culture, a city called Alexandria had suddenly disappeared from the face of the earth. Yes, it’s still there: people still visit, people still live there. It is bigger than it ever was when I was growing up there. But the city, the culture, the universe I lived in was totally exploded. And I saw this happening in a micro version right there in Manhattan—and I immediately panicked.

Straus Park is really in the middle of many avenues—there’s West End Avenue, Broadway, 106th Street, 107th Street —and I realized that, every time I glanced at it, I would see something else. I would see parts that looked like London and another part that looked very much like Amsterdam, with those row houses on West 105th Street. And behind them, as 106th Street heads down toward Central Park, there would have to be a train station waiting at the very end, and behind the train station, of course, the Mediterranean. There was no mistaking that.

The park is the story of how a person, as a total outsider, begins to connect with the city. I felt very alone. How do you begin to rebuild yourself in this new environment?

One of the ways to do so is by finding—i.e. by building—similarities. This looks like this back home. Okay. I can build with this because the fundamental experience is one of such total deracination that there is nothing under your feet, so you have to invent connections. You begin to find inflections of Paris here, an inflection of Rome there, inflections of Alexandria everywhere. You may even try to manufacture these inflections. You project something that’s inside you onto the city. In other words, you are reinventing the city so that you can inhabit it.

Had there been an Egyptian Jewish community somewhere in New York like the one you knew, would you have been interested in being part of it?

Yes, it probably would have facilitated my induction into the United States. It would have made life easier had there been other people like me who had come, say, ten years before me and knew the system. They’d say “Don’t buy this,” “Don’t be fooled by that,” “Do this with your boss,” “Call in sick if you don’t feel well.” There is any number of little things that make you an American or make you feel that you belong in this society as opposed to feeling totally outcast—or totally paranoid. Because that’s also what you bring: you bring all your pain and all your paranoia because with pain and paranoia, when there is little else left, you can still build a life in America.

You describe New York as a place that contains other places. The New York that you related to—that you fell in love with— is cobbled together from fragments of other places. Is that a unique quality of New York?

Rome does not allow you to have another version of it. Paris does not allow you to invent a mini-Alexandria in Paris. They don’t tolerate this kind of importation. New York seems to make it quite possible. In fact, New York, as we all know, is not just a melting pot; everything can come into New York and it will just get accepted. There is nothing that is proscribed from New York.

But there’s another reason why I projected a screen city onto New York: I didn’t want to like New York; I wanted to fend it off. It threatened me. It’s a very scary city. One of the things you do when you’re afraid is to learn to hate what intimidates you. One of the ways I staved off New York for a while was by finding fault with it all the time or by forcing it to remind me of other cities.  I brought it down a few pegs to the level of something I could feel comfortable with.

You were very clearly an outsider in Egypt because you were a Jew. Are there ways in which you think that you’re still, after all these years, an outsider in New York?

Yes, I bring my own “outsideness” with me wherever I go. It is the old Tom Jones complex: when Tom was with the aristocracy, he was regarded as a foundling; but when he was with low types in the taverns, he was perceived as the aristocrat. I’m always an outsider. I was always the outsider in Egypt. Indeed, in Egypt, I was already projecting a life elsewhere. But now that I am elsewhere, I revert to being an Egyptian. I am always from the other side.

So, if you had left Egypt to, say, go to school abroad for some less traumatic reason than what actually happened, do you think that Egypt or Alexandria would still have a meaning in the way that it has today, or was it the trauma of the dispersal that sort of ossified it in your mind?

No, I think the important thing is the separation—the way it happened. You have to remember that the reason why Jewishness exists, in part, is because there was this painful truncation from Jerusalem when Jews were summarily transported to Babylon. This is where Jewishness was invented. Not in Jerusalem, where it was the religion of the people. It was only outside that a Jewish identity began to be fashioned. It’s a tricky thing to see happen: it’s outside of your own home that you develop the identity of home because, in the home, you don’t have a home identity. You just simply are.

Do you find it tempting to ascribe all of your vulnerabilities and neurotic tendencies to your experience in exile?

I think that all of us, especially those of us who write, have a person who is us, and who is very riveted in the present and has his feet on the ground. And then there’s the other person who is also us, but is shiftier and more shadowy, and who sort of floats around more and has a private life that is very different from the private life of the other person. So, in a sense, I would say that for this shadowy person, yes, exile explains just about everything about me. For the nuts-and-bolts, here-and-now me, however, what happened in Egypt is of minimal importance.

I have psychological problems that have no connection to exile. But ask me to go far into myself and provide a coherent narrative, the kind of narrative that only writers can find—in other words, a synthetic narrative—and I will bring up exile. Otherwise, I’m just a man with a load of insecurities and much paranoia, a very spiteful human being who forgives nothing and forgets nothing.

And if you were born in Queens, it would have been the same?

It would have been the same.