THE VERY DAY AFTER THEHebrew translation of a collectionof poems by the esteemedEgyptian poet Iman Mersal waspublished in Israel last year, a criti-

cal article about it appeared in the influentialdaily Egyptian newspaper, Al-Masry Al-Youm.

The newspaper article was followed by atorrent of reports and reactions, arguingwhether the poet, considered one of the best inthe Arabic language today, should haveallowed her work to be translated into Hebrew.Prof. Sasson Somekh, who has been translatingArabic poetry into Hebrew for more than 50

years, says he has a dossier of more than 500articles and posts on the Internet just about histranslation of Mersal’s book.

“The majority called her a criminal and atraitor,” he tells The Jerusalem Report. “Aminority asked, ‘why shouldn’t we show theIsraelis who we are?’ Those are the more edu-cated people. One professor said he wouldnever speak to Mersal again. In the end shewrote: ‘I will not apologize for something I didnot do.’ She also said in my defense: ‘Thetranslator has translated some of the bestArabic literature into Hebrew.’ Now the furorhas quieted down, but it still makes her uncom-fortable.”

Mersal, who was born in a small Egyptian

village in 1966 and currently teaches Arabic lit-erature at the University of Alberta, Canada,gave her blessing to Somekh’s translation, dur-ing a brief, chance encounter between the twoat a professional conference in the U.S., hesays. But while the translation didn’t go overwell with the Egyptian public, the collection,“Alternative Geography” (the Hebrew editionof which was published by HakibbutzHameuchad), written in a modern style, free ofthe traditional constraints of rhyme and meter,and focusing on the relationship betweenhomeland and exile, drew significant criticalacclaim in Israel.

And that is deeply gratifying for Somekh,an Iraqi-born professor emeritus of Arabic lit-erature at Tel Aviv University and an IsraelPrize laureate, who has devoted his life to shar-ing his passion for the literature of his nativeculture with his fellow Israelis. He says it was

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Iraqi-born Prof. Sasson Somekh has devoted his lifeto sharing Arabic culture with his fellow Israelis

The Toils of an Arab Jew

SASSON SOMEKH: A bridge between cultures

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his love of Arabic poetry, and his resolve totranslate it into Hebrew, that mitigated the painof his departure from Baghdad in 1951, whenthe Jews were forced out by governmentrestrictions.

“I came to Israel when I was 17 with twobooks of the most cosmopolitan Arabic poet-ry,” he tells The Report in an interview at hisTel Aviv apartment. “My goal was to translatethem into Hebrew, of which I didn’t know a single word. I came from a com-pletely secular family and there wasn’t a wordof Hebrew in the house. Within two or threeyears I learned Hebrew and started writing articles in it. Four years after I got here, a poemI translated from Arabic into Hebrew was pub-lished in the newspaper. I have a drawer withtwo or three thousand poems I translated fromArabic into Hebrew over 50 years.”

Somekh explains that in Arab culture andtradition, poetry, which preceded Islam and,indeed, preceded writing, has the status of thehighest art form. The high language and basicstructure of the form remained unchanged formore than 1,500 years, until poets in the 19thand 20th centuries challenged it, and “devel-oped a new language of poetry.” One wave ofrenewal occurred in America in the 1920s, bythe group of exiled Arab poets that includedLebanese-American Khalil Gibran. Anotheroccurred in the 1940s and 50s in Baghdad.

“I was in the café in Baghdad where it hap-pened, although I wasn’t one of the people whomade it happen,” Somekh says proudly. “WhenI came to Israel, I brought one of the firstpoems in that style in Arabic with me and pub-lished it in an Arabic newspaper. It was notknown here. I came from the big center of poet-ry, since the Abbasid period (8-13th centuries),and here was a province that had been aban-doned by all of its [Palestinian] intelligentsia.”Young poets Mahmoud Darwish and SamikhAl-Qasem, who were to become the leadingPalestinian poets of their generation, read thepoem in the newspaper. Somekh takes creditfor introducing them to the new style thatwould have a powerful influence on their work.

THE EXCITEMENT OF DISCOVER-ing new writers and poets, infecting oth-ers with his enthusiasm, cultivating

young talent and serving as a bridge betweencultures mired in an intractable conflict arerecurring themes in conversation with Somekhabout his life, and in the two autobiographicvolumes he wrote in Hebrew, “BaghdadYesterday: The Making of an Arab Jew,” pub-lished in English in 2007 by Small Pr

Distribution, and “Call it Dreaming,” whichhas yet to come out in English.

In fact, his narratives are so packed with sto-ries about all the interesting people he has metin his 76 years of life on four continents thatone critic complained that in his first autobio-graphic book he tells too little about himself. Tothis he responds in the introduction to the sec-ond volume that his intention was not to por-tray himself as an “interesting” person, but toshare his “long-standing interaction withArabic culture and some of its prominent rep-resentatives in Israel and the region.”

The most prominent Arab intellectual toplay a seminal role in Somekh’s career wasEgyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, who in1988 became the first Arab to win the NobelPrize in Literature. When Somekh went toOxford University to do a doctorate in Arabicliterature in 1965, Mahfouz, then in his 50s,was gaining renown but was not considered theranking Arab or even Egyptian novelist. YetSomekh’s advisor suggested him as a subjectfor his thesis. “I was not enthusiastic,” Somekhadmits. But as soon as he read the three vol-umes of Mahfouz’s “Cairo Trilogy,” hechanged his mind. A book based on his thesisabout Mahfouz came out in Holland, in 1973,in English. All this time, the Israeli researcherhad no contact with his Egyptian subject; thetwo countries were in a state of war.

The following year Somekh sent a copy ofhis book to Mahfouz through a third party. Bythe time it arrived, the author had already

received a photocopy of the book from aPalestinian professor in Beirut. Somekh wasthrilled to learn about this and of the novelist’sassessment of his study from an interviewMahfouz gave a Baghdadi newspaper, inwhich he said: “[Somekh’s] is the most seriousstudy of the trilogy, where the author contendswith all of the criticism written about that workand concludes that its basis is the status of manversus time. The truth is that I was surprised bythe accuracy and depth of the study. It just goesto show you how interested they [the Israelis]are in us.”

Only in 1978, after Egyptian presidentAnwar Sadat’s historic peace mission toJerusalem, did Somekh dare write to his herodirectly, eliciting a warm response, which hassince been published. In it, Mahfouz callsSomekh’s book “deep and comprehensive,”and says it is considered “one of the best, if notthe very best of all those written about me.”These superlative words did not win Somekhmany friends in Egyptian literary circles.

Somekh and Mahfouz finally met in 1980,and were to develop a close personal friendshipthat lasted 26 years until the author’s death,including the years 1996-1998 when Somekhwas head of the Israel Academic Center inCairo. Indeed, Mahfouz’s warm relationshipwith Somekh, which was followed by a num-ber of other significant friendships between theEgyptian author and Israelis, made him the tar-get of vicious attacks throughout the Arabworld, accusing him of consorting with the

WARM RELATIONSHIP: Sasson Somekh, right, and Egyptian Nobel Literature Prizelaureate Naguib Mahfouz

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enemy. (His 1994 stabbing by a Muslimextremist was not related to this issue.)

The Egyptian intellectual boycott of Israel,which somewhat thawed for a few years fol-lowing the 1978 Camp David agreementsbetween Israel and Egypt, came back with avengeance after Israel’s incursion into Lebanonin 1982, and persists to this day in the form ofobjection to anything perceived as “normaliza-tion” of relations with Israel, including thetranslation of Egyptian poetry into Hebrew.

Five months after Mahfouz’s death in 2006,an article about his relationship with Somekhand other Israelis came out in Egypt, under thetitle: “Naguib Mahfouz died loving Israel.” Thewriter explains that he waited some time afterthe author’s death to address this “explosive”subject. Somekh says he is writing a bookabout his relationship with Mahfouz.

SOMEKH WAS BORN TO A MID-dle-class Jewish family in Baghdad in1933. Although his father’s uncle, Rabbi

Abdallah Somekh, who died in 1889, was theleading halakhic authority of his time, Somekhmakes it plain that he grew up in a secularworld.

“I was born on the first day of RoshHashana and I was my father’s first son,” herelates. “They went to tell my grandfather atsynagogue that his first son had a son. He wasso excited that he forgot his prayer shawl at thesynagogue.” Somekh pauses before he deliversthe punch line: “That was the last time I heardof a single person in my whole extended fami-ly ever going to synagogue on any Sabbath orholiday.”

He insists that whereas for centuries theIraqi Jewish community – the most ancientJewish community in the world, dating back tothe Babylonian exile – was by and large reli-gious, a significant process of secularizationoccurred in the first half of the 20th century.“Until 1900 or so the ideal groom for yourdaughter would have been a yeshiva graduate,”he says. “In the years I grew up, the 1930s and40s, the ideal would have been a clerk in aBritish bank who spoke English.” Indeed,Somekh’s father was a clerk in a British bankwho spoke English, “and never read in Arabiceven though he knew how.”

There were two schools where a Jewishchild could get a good secular education inBaghdad during Somekh’s childhood,Alliance, which taught in French, andShammash, which taught in English and whereSomekh went. The Jewish curriculum includeda single weekly hour of Bible, but Somekh,

who didn’t know Hebrew, was exempted. Inhigh school he discovered the allure of the pub-lic library and increasingly cut school to spendhours poring over Arabic literature. It was dur-ing those years that he began frequenting caféswhere the writers and poets of the day sat, didsome of their writing and often shared their lat-est work.

He remembers dimly the events of thefarhoud, the 1941 pogrom against Baghdad’sJews by their Muslim neighbors, inspired bythe identification of local nationalist leaderswith Hitler, as the exception rather than the rulein relations between the communities. But hemade friends with Arab intellectuals who iden-tified with the secular left and asserted theiracceptance and inclusion of Jews to distinguishthemselves from the anti-Semitic right.

“There was a very interesting intelligentsiainfluenced by Marxist ideas,” he says. “AnArab communist is first of all a secular person.In the Arab world it is very bold to be secularand not to believe in God.” He participated insome communist demonstrations in 1948-49,“where I saw with my own eyes signs that said‘we are enemies of Zionism, friends of theJews.’ They had to channel the rage of themasses, who were angry about Israel, so thatthey would not hurt the Jews like in the riots of1941.”

Somekh remembers attending a memorialrally for the younger brother of the admiredIraqi poet Mohamed Mahdi al-Jawahiri, whowas killed in an anti-British demonstration in1948. “The Jawahiri family were Shi’ites,based in the holy Shi’ite city of Najaf. Theyapparently chose to hold the gathering at aSunni mosque deliberately to stress the unity ofthe various sects and their love of country.Indeed, I remember the Jewish students fromthe Shammash school, including myself, wel-comed warmly by the rally organizers… theywanted badly to show that Jews are Iraqi patri-ots too, and by doing so not to identify Judaism

with Zionism,” he writes in “Baghdad,Yesterday.”

Somekh’s own family was indifferent to theZionist idea, and he remembers no talk of mov-ing to the Jewish state until the Jews were, ineffect, forced out in 1950-51. Somekh, then 17,left first, and was followed by his parents andsiblings months later. He learned Hebrewquickly and spent some years specializing inthe Hebrew language at university beforegoing back to his first love, Arabic literature.From 1962 to 1965, he worked as the scientif-ic secretary of the Academy of the HebrewLanguage. In 2005 he was awarded the IsraelPrize, for his work in Oriental Studies. He hasbeen married for 45 years to his American-bornwife Terrie. They have two daughters and ason.

Asked how many books he has published,including textbooks, anthologies, translationsand scholarly and non-scholarly studies, inEnglish, Hebrew and Arabic, Somekh shrugsand says, “10, 15, maybe 20, I didn’t count.”He gets more excited about the books he isgoing to write: the one about Mahfouz, ananthology of Arabic poetry translated intoHebrew, which is to be published by Am Oved,a collection of articles about Arabic literarystyle, and a book about four current Iraqi nov-elists whose main characters are Jews.

Since the overthrow of the tyrannicalregime of Saddam Hussein, Somekh has beendelighted to discover a cadre of interestingIraqi writers, in and outside of Iraq, with manyof whom he has developed personal relation-ships. One of those is the Berlin-based exiledwriter Najem Wali, who wrote a book about his2007 visit to Israel, some of which was spent asSomekh’s guest.

“The Iraqi writers are the surprise of my lifein recent years,” says Somekh. “They loveIsrael.” He says since the demise of Saddam,certain intellectual circles in Iraq have beenpropagating the idea that the demise of theancient Jewish community, due to emigrationmostly to Israel, was a big loss for the country.“A literary journal devoted an issue to theJewish subject,” says Somekh. “All the articlesare about ‘why we kicked them out,’ ‘what adisaster,’ ‘Iraq has deteriorated since the Jewsleft.’”

Under the U.S. occupation, it is theoreti-cally possible for Israelis to visit Iraq today,but it is still very dangerous and few have.Somekh dismisses the idea of returning tohis homeland for another look. “I don’tthink I could go there,” he says with resignation. •

‘The Iraqi writers are the surprise of my life in recent years. They love Israel.’

– Sasson Somekh