The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Jacob, Menahem & Mimoun: A Family Epic by Marcel BénabouAllen Hibbard
Marcel Bénabou. Jacob, Menahem & Mimoun: A Family Epic. Trans. Steven Rendall. Preface by Warren Motte. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1998. 222 pp. $30.00.
This is a book about the book Marcel Bénabou was trying to write. Originally Bénabou (a member of the Oulipo group, founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and joined by writers such as Italo Calvino and Harry Mathews) chose as his title “One Always Writes the Same Book,” in the playful spirit of his earlier Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books. In this book he describes so many approaches, schemes and structures taken up and abandoned. In a chapter called “Resources” he writes of a plan wherein “Moroccan Judaism would be put through the sieve of all the disciplines.” In “Models” he describes how he surveyed the Jewish tradition looking for heroic figures, contemplated the use of the synagogue as an architectural device, and reflected upon literary antecedents (Homer, Virgil, Joyce, Proust) for what they could supply. What genre was appropriate to his subject? Epic, novel, family history, tragedy? In the end, he realizes a “different goal”: to make “the unfinished and unfinishable book not an unfortunate result of my incompetence, but rather a genuine literary genre with its own norms and rules.” What we have before us then is the very book he was trying to write all along, in a language whose clarity, luminosity and beauty call to mind Proust, Leiris and Jabès.
This is a book about memory and history, the way personal memory and family history intersect and depart from a collective, historical memory and experience of a specific people at a specific moment in time. Bénabou, a Moroccan Jew, tries to make sense of the Holocaust and the amazing logic sparing him that fate. And, upon migrating to Paris, he ponders his relation both to Morocco and to Western Europe. Particular memories resonate: recollections of family members (especially his mother), celebrations of the high holy days, special foods, the influence of the West on the Jewish community of Meknès, learning Hebrew.
This is, thus, a book that through language seeks in some essential way to recreate what no longer exists: a childhood, the life of the Moroccan Jewish community in the first half of this century, before Moroccan independence. Memory is the means of consolidating and preserving wholeness of self, and writing is the process by which memories are shaped, given meaning, disseminated so they will endure beyond the remembering subject. [Allen Hibbard]