Overlooked No More: Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff, Writer of Levantine Identity

Jacqueline’s mom didn’t enable Arabic to be spoken at house, and Jacqueline “suffered from residing in a rustic the place she didn’t communicate its language,” a childhood pal, Diane Jorland, stated in an Israeli documentary about Kahanoff.

The higher center class of Egyptian Jewry, regardless of their cosmopolitan airs, designated restricted roles for girls. However Kahanoff had higher aspirations. She wrote in her essay “The Blue Veil of Progress” that “once I was little, I wished to be like my grandmother, a form of Jewish queen.” However now, she added, “I wish to do issues as girls do in Europe: be medical doctors, assist the poor, everybody, or perhaps be a author who will discover the phrases, our phrases, to inform about our misplaced time.”

Following her mom’s needs, she married Izzy Margoliash, a Jewish physician of Russian descent, in 1939. The subsequent 12 months the couple moved to america, the place he was a resident. However the marriage was short-lived.

After they divorced, Kahanoff enrolled at Columbia College, the place she studied journalism and literature. Whereas there, she turned romantically concerned with the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, whom she thought-about the best love of her life.

In 1946, she discovered success when her quick story “Such Is Rachel” received second prize in a contest sponsored by The Atlantic. That 12 months, she returned to Egypt. However in 1951, tired of the monotony and stagnation of Egyptian society and anxious a few creeping nationalism and xenophobia towards something that wasn’t Egyptian, she went again to New York. That 12 months she revealed her first novel, “Jacob’s Ladder,” a semi-autobiographical depiction of the Jewish elite residing in Cairo within the early twentieth century.

She then lived briefly along with her sister in Paris earlier than marrying Alexander Kahanoff, a businessman, in 1952. They moved to Israel in 1954, residing first in a migrant consumption heart in Be’er Sheva and later in Bat Yam, a working-class metropolis south of Tel Aviv.

Kahanoff had an ambiguous relationship with Zionism. On one hand, she was drawn to the narrative and the potential of the Jewish folks re-establishing their homeland after two millenniums of wandering, with the ladies, utterly liberated, working shoulder to shoulder with males within the fields and on development grounds. However, she disliked the Zionists’ dogmatic mind-set. “Mizrahis had been anticipating a special welcome from their brothers,” she wrote. “They needed to adapt to a society they didn’t get an opportunity to assist vogue, one by which they had been thought-about uncooked materials that wanted to be polished, to be educated.”