Aline P'nina Tayar (photo by Ari Anderson)
jewish studies
MEDITERRANEAN JOURNEY
Felicity Bloch
Aline P'nina Tayar
How shall we sing? A Mediterranean Journey Through a Jewish Family
Picador $19.95pb, 218pp
0 330 362 11 9
Aline P'nina Tayar (photo by Ari Anderson)
ALINE P'NINA TAYAR'S colourful chronicle of her family's migrations around the Mediterranean plunges the reader into the chequered history of Sephardi (Spanish) Jewry. How shall we sing? shuttles between the early nineteenth century and the present, from Malta to Tunisia, Tripolitania, Egypt, Italy, and Israel, France, and eventually, the New World. Richly documented episodes of family history read like fiction, but overall I sympathised with the boyfriend at the family gathering who quickly gave up on who was related to whom: a family tree would have been a useful appendix.
In the late medieval period, under the Muslim rulers of the Iberian Peninsula, Jews enjoyed religious tolerance, prosperity and participation in politics and culture. Sephardi Jewry's golden age was annihilated by Catholic conquests. Intermittent massacres, expropriations, forced conversions and expulsions culminated in the greatest Jewish catastrophe of modern times prior to the Holocaust, the total expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 and shortly afterwards from all territories such as Portugal, Malta, and Sicily controlled by the Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella.
The exiled Jews found pockets of refuge around the Mediterranean where they were sometimes welcomed, or tolerated, for their skills in commerce, languages, diplomacy, and trades. Multi-culturalism isn't a recent invention. Before the First World War, religious tolerance made the multi-national Ottoman Empire a haven for Sephardis, as was the Austro-Hungarian Empire for the Ashkenazis in Eastern Europe.
Indirectly, the expulsions facilitated a dense social and economic network between dispersed Sephardi communities, which later extended to the New World. In a climate of growing western hostility to the flood of third world 'economic' migrants, Tayar reminds us what a complex phenomenon migration usually is. Among Sephardis, the quest for safety, freedom, marriage partners (especially problematic in isolated Sephardi communities) and economic opportunities encouraged patterns of exchange and mobility prefiguring the late twentieth century phenomenon of globalisation.
Tayar's light fictionalising touch is complemented by her grasp of Jewish and regional history. An aunt's mental illness leading to life-long hospitalisation was probably triggered by her family's religious and social conservatism. An Egyptian cousin's marriage to an American did not survive clashing cultural expectations. Courtship, love, and rivalry, fear and hate are depicted in a variety of exotic settings. Tayar has the knack of making us feel close to her characters, without the irritating presumption of knowing more than can be documented. It is a skilful blend of journalism, travel-writing and fiction.
The title, How shall we sing?, is a quotation from Psalm 137:
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down,
Yea we wept, when we remembered Zion.
they that wasted us, required of us mirth,
Saying sing us one of the songs of Zion.
How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?
The bass notes of this lively family and cultural history are a qualified lament for a vanished civilisation savoured from a distance. The patriarchal communities dissolved in the twentieth century by war and post-colonial independence movements crushed vulnerable individuals, especially women condemned to the stark choice of spinsterhood or unwanted marriages with multiple pregnancies. An alarming number of Tayar's female characters appear to have been unhinged by family and cultural pressures.
Her parents were naturally free spirits, who hated the small-mindedness of their traditional communities and the still more claustrophobic atmosphere of the Israeli kibbutz to which they first migrated after World War 2. In Australia they deliberately cut themselves off from other Jews, which both they and their children later regretted. During her travels to Europe as a young adult, Tayar was overwhelmed and fascinated by the noisy and opinionated multi-lingual Sephardi clan spanning several continents which reclaimed her as one of their own.
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Return to Australian Book Review /September 2000