A Jewish Home Away From Home

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The New York Sun

Nostalgia for a home that never quite felt like home is the bittersweet theme of “The Last Jews of Libya,” a 50-minute documentary directed by Vivienne Roumani-Denn which will make its television premiere on the Sundance Channel Monday night. Narrated in lush, occasionally precious tones by Isabella Rossellini, this brief but moving history of Ms. Roumani-Denn’s Libyan-Jewish family transports us back in time and rushes us through it, as if to underscore not only temporal evanescence but also the Roumani clan’s shaky claim on their North African enclave. Their Jewish ancestors may have lived in Libya for millennia, but once the 1967 war rolled around, it was time to clear out — pronto.

Based on the journals of the director’s late mother, Elise Tammam Roumani, “The Last Jews of Libya” underscores the idea that the one indispensable facet of “home” is a sense of security. The film ends, somewhat unconvincingly, with the proposition that in Israel the Jewish people may finally have found it.

What makes this film a minor treasure are its magnificent still photographs and archival footage of Libya, then under Italian rule, between the 1920s and 1950s. The effect recalls Albert Camus’s rhapsodically lyrical essays about Algeria from the same period. We see not only bustling street scenes and sun-bleached ocean views (the Roumanis, like most Libyan Jews, lived in a port city, in their case Benghazi rather than Tripoli), but enhanced by the way they are often superimposed on pages from Elise’s lined journals, with their rows of flowing Italian cursive acting as a framing device.

The film provides an intimate glance into an obscure corner of Sephardic Jewish history and Muslim-Jewish relations. In the early part of the 20th century, we learn, Libya’s Jews and Muslims lived on cautiously friendly terms. As one surviving member of the Roumanis states, it was common for Jews to be invited into Arab homes for tea or coffee, but the invitations did not extend to dinner. Another recalls how his English professor — a Libyan who was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood — not only attended his bar mitzvah, but gave him a red-and-gold Parker fountain pen as a gift, along with an affectionately paternal letter welcoming him into adulthood according to the traditions of his people and advising him to “follow the teachings of Moses.”

Leon Trotsky’s famous dictum — “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you” — applied to the Roumanis, as to so many others. Libya was part of the Ottoman Empire until 1911, when Italy wrested control of the country. The Roumanis, like others in Libya’s Jewish community, welcomed their new leaders, feeling safer under the Italians than they had under the Turks. But Libya’s Muslims felt otherwise, and their rebellion was brutally ended in 1932 when Benito Mussolini, whom Libya’s Jews initially trusted, arrived on the scene. The footage of this human tank bearing aloft a sword as he sits astride a muscular steed is worth the price of admission.

The Roumanis were deeply religious, but they were also sharp dressers brought up in a liberal atmosphere who enjoyed music and a good dance. It was natural they should welcome Italian rule and the European-style sophistication they expected would come with it. Their mistake lay in not keeping those feelings to themselves, for the Arabs predictably felt otherwise. The Jews had even more to regret when Mussolini allied himself with Hitler and imported Nazi race laws to North Africa, forcing them to work on the Sabbath. They repeated the error when the British briefly took control of the country in 1941. Again they welcomed the invaders, and this time both the Arabs and Italians turned on them in fury, attacking them in the streets and burning and looting their stores.

If “The Last Jews of Libya” has a central flaw, it is that the surviving family members, many of whom are interviewed, never dwell on what is apt to strike the viewer as having been somewhat suicidal behavior on the part of a historically mistreated minority. But the game was essentially up in any case. Raising his sword to the heavens, Mussolini presented himself to the Libyans as the “defender of Islam,” and helped convert the Arabs to the fascist cause. (By this point, the Muslims themselves were wildly cheering on the conquering infidel, turning out in the thousands to hail him in the streets.) The birth of Israel in 1948 was a further blow to Jewish safety in North Africa, and the rise of the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser and of pan-Arab nationalism in 1951 more or less ended any chance for peace. Almost 1 million Jews fled or were expelled from Arab lands.

The Roumanis stubbornly hung on, however. Unable to find work because of Libyan quotas on Jewish employment, they found refuge in the arms of the Americans, who had installed an air force base and a cultural center in the outskirts of Benghazi. One of the Roumani children, Jacques, attended an American high school. “They had very good parties,” he recalls over a succession of marvelous photographs that prove he is not viewing the past through rose-tinted glasses. “We were taken in by what would today be called American public diplomacy,” he says, relishing the irony, for back then, American public diplomacy was at its zenith. But all hell broke loose with the advent of the Six-Day War in 1967, and most of the country’s remaining 6,300 Jews were airlifted to safety by the Italians, though some were murdered before they made it out. Today there are no Jews in Libya at all. As a lover of that most charming of hats, the fez (even if it is a Hollywood cliché), and of that most seductive of stringed instruments, the oud (liberally and elegantly sprinkled across the soundtrack), I must say all this is immensely sad, not just for the Jews, but for the Libyans, who are hardly the world’s most fortunate people. The tone of Ms. Roumani-Denn’s film is sometimes poetic to a fault, but the underlying history is granite-hard. It becomes even more adamantine when you compare the cries for the destruction of Israel and of the Jews that preceded the 1967 war (of which we are given a short but pungent taste) with the bloodcurdling rhetoric emanating from the Muslim world today. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

bbernhard@earthlink. net


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