morto.blogg.se

You can find Macias on YouTube singing Dahmane El Harrachi’s classic “Ya rayah,” with its addictive three beats: “You who are leaving, where are you going? You’ll end up coming back.” My guide had it wrong. While we were there Ali said, with no prompting, “We’re proud to say it: here in Constantine, no Jew is allowed to enter.” He told me they’d kept out Enrico Macias, a native son born in 1938 into a great Algerian-Jewish musical family, who left the country in 1961 during the Algerian War of Independence and made a career in France performing songs of exile. Then we walked through the former Jewish neighborhood, which looked ready for a bulldozer, and past the former Lycée d’Aumale, whose name I’ve seen in so many memoirs of Algerian and French intellectuals. He wanted me to know what it felt like to share his faith. He had me suit up in a djellaba and veil, showed me how to place my hands for prayer. He took me to the Emir Abdelkader Mosque and University, a vast monument of marble and granite carved as intricately as lace, designed by the Egyptian architect Mustapha Moussa and completed in 1994. He taught me the name of each bridge, then quizzed me. Even in traffic you feel like you’re perched above the underworld.Īli and I must have walked ten miles. You walk around Constantine and you can’t really believe how the ancient Numidian city managed to survive into the twenty-first century it’s built above the Rhumel Gorges, deep ravines crossed by bridges whose narrow ledges daredevil boys like to walk along, hundreds of feet from a rocky death. At the breakfast table one morning, I mentioned my upcoming Constantine trip to an Algerian graduate student, she called a friend at the Marriott there, and a day later I was set with a local guide.Īli (as I’ll call him) was perfect-young and nimble and hyperobservant, with a knowledge of the place that included its geological wonders. Beginning in 2012, I found an international community of historians and artists and cultural critics at the Glycines, a study center and residency run by the Catholic Diocese of Algiers.

American researchers in particular who could no longer travel safely to the Middle East were turning to North Africa-and there were a lot of them.

But as far as the cultural life of Algeria went, things weren’t so bad: there were international colloquiums, independent publishers, cultural visas, thriving scholarship. This was in 2017, two years before the end of the twenty-year regime of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who had been disabled by a stroke in 2013 and disappeared from public view.

That’s all.” Constantine was different, he said, more conservative, less secular than Algiers. As I was leaving Algiers for Constantine, an hour east by plane, my friend Djamel, a taxi driver, fixer, and social critic, warned me not to tell anyone there that I was Jewish: “Just say you’re American.