A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [96]
Algeria had three almost completely separate populations—the Muslims, the French, and the Jews. The war for Algerian independence was a war between Muslims and French in which Jews were caught in the middle. The National Liberation Front, the FLN, hoped that Jews could serve as mediators in its bid for independence. Some Jews among the intellectual class were militant members of the FLN. Others served in the French Army. To most Jews, it was time to take their French citizenship and move to France. But for all their talk of being Frenchmen, many were reluctant to leave Algeria and move to a strange, inhospitable, and cold northern country.
Lazare Bouaziz, son and brother of rabbis, was born in 1933 in Oran, Algeria's second city and a major center of North African Jewry, Up until the independence war, the only anti-Semitism he had ever experienced was during the wartime Vichy regime, when the decret Cremieux was withdrawn and Jews were expelled from the schools. In 1954, like many Algerian Jews, he went to Paris because the educational opportunities were too limited in Algeria. He studied dentistry and planned to establish a practice in Oran. But when he went back, it was as an officer in the French Army at war with Algeria. He, like thousands of other Frenchmen, had been drafted and was sent to Algeria from 1960 to 1963, where he served as a dental surgeon in the medical corps. The radicals of the FLN would plant bombs and ambush. The extreme right wing in the French military would torture and murder. The violence became increasingly gruesome, and Lazare, in a French uniform in his native Algeria, could only watch. But he still hoped that this would all pass and he could remain in Algeria when his military service ended. His family, like many of the Jews of Oran, was divided on whether to stay or leave. His parents wanted to leave. He and two of his sisters wanted to stay. Algeria had been good for Jews. It had been bad during the Dreyfus case and Vichy, but the bad times had always been caused by a problem in France. This too was a French problem that could pass, and life could go on for ihe Jews and the Algerians.
On June 1, 1962, Algeria became independent. One week later, an Arab mob went into a berserk killing frenzy in the Jewish section of Oran. “It went on all day,” said Lazare Bouaziz. “They killed and killed and killed.” That ended the debate in the Jewish community. The Jews left, and their synagogues were turned into mosques. Six months later, Bouaziz was discharged from the army and moved to France.
To Bouaziz, Paris was a familiar city, but for many Jews from Algeria it was a strange place with inhospitable people and unfriendly ways. As the European Jews received a small measure of success and moved from the Pletzl to better neighborhoods, North African Jews took their places. They also moved into the garment district as well as the garment trade. The area around Rue Bleue became a Sephardic ghetto, as did some of the new suburbs north of the city.
In retrospect, hardly any Ashkenazim recall any problem with the Sephardim. But the Sephardim remember it differently. “The Sephardim complain to an extent that I find unfair,” said Henri Finkelsztajn. His neighbor Roger Journo's son Andre said that at first, “the Ashkenazim took us for Indians. They called us shvartze.” In Yiddish, a shvartze is a black. They were Africans. The Sephardim—who were so proud of their Frenchness, their perfect mastery of the language—were perplexed by the fact that these people with heavy foreign accents looked on them as the foreigners. Even when they came from such noted centers of Jewish scholarship as Bone, they were regarded in Paris as ignorant third-worlders from a primitive backwater.
On Rue des Rosiers, the Sephardim went to Sephardic stores and the Ashkenazim to the Ashkenazic stores. There were people who ate couscous and people who ate knishes. The cafe