A newly translated Judeo-Tunisian novella opens a window onto life under colonial rule.
Published in Tunis in 1938, Ninette of Sin Street is one of the first works of Tunisian fiction in French and is now available in English for the first time. The story peers up at colonial society from the gutter, rather than down from the balcony of high politics. It is about ordinary, everyday life and, as such, is a study in power relations as they took shape on the ground and in the street, amidst the intricacies of French colonial rule, religious difference, and class discrepancy. This volume offers the first English translation of Vitalis Danon’s best-known work. Professors Lia Brozgal and Sarah Abrevaya Stein, editors to the English edition, answer some of our questions about the novella below.
Q:
Who and what is the story of Ninette of Sin Street about?
A:
LIA BROZGAL: Ninette tells the story of its titular protagonist, Ninette, a young Jewish woman living in the town of Sfax in the 1930s—a period during which Tunisia was under French rule. Ninette, as we learn, has grown up in poverty; she is an orphan making her way in a complicated, harsh world; she is destitute and has sometimes resorted to prostitution for a few coins. She is also the single mother of a little boy named Israel. Her primary concern, when the novella opens, is getting her son enrolled in the local Jewish school so that he can learn a trade and become, as Ninette says “honorable.” As she recounts her travails—always with a dose of pluck—we travel with her from the poor district of Sfax to Tunis, the capital, and back again as Ninette makes her way in the world.
Q:
How does the author, Vitalis Danon, characterize and portray Ninette?
A:
LIA BROZGAL: Ninette’s story is certainly compelling in and of itself. But the novella’s structure and voice are remarkable for its time. Danon chose to allow Ninette to speak in the first person, to allow a female character to tell her story in what he imagined to be her own words and her own way of seeing the world. The result is a series of monologues: each time Ninette stopped by the Jewish school to check on her son’s progress, she would sit and chat with the principal, recounting the next episode in her life of hard luck.
We might understand this as a kind of “confessional,” or even psychotherapeutic structure: Ninette does not hold back in what she tells the principal (and of course, the reader), but she does often try to soften her stories by using euphemisms or coded language to describe episodes from her life that she is embarrassed to recount.
Danon’s Ninette is candid, colorful, and full of pithy observations about human nature, the rabbinate, and motherhood. She is not educated, but she is smart as a whip. The principal only speaks at the very end of the tale; his silence over the course of the novella gives Ninette free reign over the story, and the result is one of Tunisian literature’s strongest female voices.
Q:
What does Danon’s novella reveal about Tunisia under French colonial rule?
A:
SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN: So much of what we know of colonial North Africa is told through the perspective of colonial and military officials, or local elites. Ninette is an entirely different heroine—poor, long down on her luck, a single mother, a sometimes prostitute, a spunky woman hoping for a better life for her son—and it is not surprising that she offers an entirely fresh view of colonial society. Ninette’s preoccupations are not with colonialism as it was crafted on high, or strategically navigated by the wealthy, but with the day-to-day barriers that stand in her (and her son’s) way: the challenges of finding a safe place to live, putting food on the table, educating her bastard son Israel, shedding the taboo of a past life, coping with sexual violence. Her story gives lie to the fantasy of the “civilizing project,” which favored some and pinioned others, and (nevertheless) which certain right wing forces in France trumpet as a success story to this very day. It also nuances what we know of North African Jews’ story of French colonial rule, adding a forgotten dimension of class and gender to a larger story.
Q:
Who was Vitalis Danon and how did he come to be a writer in Tunisia?
A:
SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN: Born in Ottoman Edirne (a city in what is now the northwest of Turkey), Danon was educated by the Alliance israélite universelle, a Franco-Jewish philanthropy that created a network of Jewish, secular schools across the Mediterranean and Middle East in the decades that bracketed the turn of the twentieth century. An intelligent and ambitious student, he went to Paris upon graduation to be trained as an Alliance teacher in the organization’s elite teacher training college. Danon was but twenty years old when he was assigned to his first post, in Sfax, Tunisia. Sfax was a small port town relative to Edirne, and home to a Jewish community that was mostly Arabophone (rather than composed of speakers of Judeo-Spanish, as were most Jews in Edirne). Upon arrival, he wandered the town with Orientalist delight, writing back to his supervisors in Paris of the smells, tastes, and mores of the shuk (marketplace). Yet with time, Danon would grow to accept Tunisia as his home, living there for some five decades, marrying a local Jewish woman, raising his children in the country. All the while, he worked for the Alliance indefatigably, chafing against their parsimonious allocations, surviving the German occupation and Allied bombardment. He also came of age as a writer in Tunisia, shaping, with but a few other colleagues, a pioneering school of literature known as the “Tunis School.”
Q:
What was “The Tunis School” and what characterized the writings of this group?
A:
LIA BROZGAL: The Tunis School, or l’école de Tunis, was a group of writers all of whom were teachers in the Tunisian schools founded and maintained by the Alliance israélite universelle (AIU). Danon served in AIU schools in both Sfax and in Tunis, and it was while he was in the capital that he met fellow teachers Jacques Véhel and Raphaël Levy (known by the pseudonym RYVEL). All three men had literary aspirations, and their common projects were often inspired by their students—the poor Jewish children who lived in the hara (or Jewish quarter). Among their co-authored works we find Le bestiaire du ghetto (The Ghetto Bestiary) and La hara conte: folklore judéo-tunisien (The Hara Recounts: Judeo-Tunisian Folklore). Little has been written about this group, yet they offer a very interesting study in a particular variety of orientalism: although they all hailed from the putative “orient” (Danon from the Ottoman Empire, Véhel and RYVEL from Tunisia), their education separated them from the local, indigenous Jews. And as a result, perhaps, their writing on the Tunisian Jews is infused with what can be read as an orientalist tone—they call the Jewish quarter a “ghetto,” for example, and they underscore the exotic “strangeness” of their Tunisian brethren. To date, Ninette of Sin Street is the only work by a Tunis School writer that has been translated into English.
Q:
Why was it important to translate Danon’s novella into English?
A:
SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN: Though we come from different academic disciplines (Lia, French and Francophone literature, Sarah, History) we have both struggled to find texts in English that convey the dynamism of everyday life in colonial North Africa, the diversity of Jewish culture in the Maghreb and Middle East, and, particularly, that offer a woman’s perspective (even if a fictional woman’s perspective) on the world around them. Ninette offered an ideal cocktail of these ingredients. Additionally, we both fell in love with Ninette’s sass and zeal, her easy blending of rabbinical teachings, local slang, and pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps mentality. Knowing that Jane Kuntz was uniquely skilled at bringing Ninette’s spirit to English faithfully sealed the deal—it was a collaboration among four women that was too good to resist!
Q:
What is it about Ninette’s story that remains important today?
A:
LIA BROZGAL: Initially, Ninette of Sin Street was important to me for literary reasons. It represents one of the very first works of French-language literature to emerge from Tunisia. (A tradition that has been carried on by writers like Albert Memmi—who was also a pupil at the AIU schools). It seemed worthy of note that Tunisian literature in French began with a story about a poor Jewish woman who knew how to speak for herself. Francophone literature (French-language literature from outside the mainland) tends not to feature many Jewish writers or characters, yet there were historically significant Jewish communities in many of the areas affected by French colonization.
As I began teaching Ninette (first in the original French), Ninette’s story came alive for me as a fascinating document of a particular time, but also as a critical narrative. Embedded in Ninette’s autobiographical monologue are critiques of the status quo, of religious institutions, of structural imbalances. The reader can decide for herself whether the novella celebrates or castigates the AIU and its mission; at the end, we all agree that the text complicates questions about the colonial project and minority religions.
Ninette’s story is also worth remembering in contemporary Tunisia. The multicultural, multilingual Tunisia described in Ninette may be a thing of the past, but that past is not so distant—and, indeed, contains timely lessons from Sin Street.
SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN: The Jewish community of Tunisia numbered roughly 200,000 at the end of the Second World War. After massive out-migration, the community today is minuscule, though Jews from Tunisia (and the next generation of descendants) continue to visit for pleasure and for holidays, to conduct business, and to reunite with friends. If one takes the long historical view, Ninette of Tunisia’s Sin Street is indeed a figure of the past. Ninette reminds us that the urban streets of North Africa once teemed with different forms of diversity than they do today, including the visible, active presence of Jews. What remains a constant—and what makes Ninette so contemporary a protagonist—is the challenge of poverty, the ingenuity of women, and that universal drive to see the next generation inherit a fairer, more just world.
Awesome information
Posted by: lisa | July 1, 2017 at 12:11 AM
I like the article but I didn't understand anything...let me try read it again!! The second is a charm!!
Posted by: Thomas | June 30, 2017 at 02:42 AM
Informative
Posted by: lisa | June 30, 2017 at 01:18 AM