Seventh and final episode of Israel upon Danube, Guy Konopnicki’s uchronistic novel that imagines the creation of a state for Jews in Austria. At the end of his series, he wonders whether the history of the Republic of the Jewish People would have been less troubled in the lands of the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judea than in the heart of Europe…
Each weekly episode of our summer novel comes with a series of four articles, already published in our pages, but gathered around a few key themes. In “On the island”, Cléo Cohen, who was in the Ghriba synagogue on the island of Djerba when was perpetrated the antisemitic attack in which two Jewish pilgrims and three Tunisian policemen were murdered last May, recounts the anguish of the moment, the feelings of unreality and loneliness that struck the young woman who had moved to the country of her grandparents. And then there was the silence: that of her friends, Tunisian and French, committed activists always ready to denounce all injustice and racist violence, but who, in the face of this attack, remained silent… In “Are there any Jews left in Algeria?”, Joseph Benamour evokes this strange distortion that makes the Jews a fantasized Algerian presence, while they remain untraceable in reality. In “When young French Jews return to the Maghreb of their parents”, Benamour recounts the search for young people tempted to discover Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria – or even to move there – and questions this paradoxical “return” to countries primarily known through family nostalgic stories. In “Letter from Morocco”, Anshel Pfeffer sends us some images of Morocco. The Jewish community there now ranges only between 1,500 and 2,000 members who are quietly aging without renewing themselves, bathed in a mixture of kitsch, nostalgia and ghostly presence. The government is trying to preserve and open synagogue-museums (there are already about 200 of them), but they are synagogues where nobody prays. Fortunately, there are tourists…
