“Enta Omri, You Are My Life”: Embracing the Arab Self in André Aciman’s Harvard Square

Abstract

In most of his previous fiction and nonfiction writing, André Aciman constructs himself as a permanent exile, challenging Ammiel Alcalay’s claim that the Levantine Jewish experience gives the lie to the “modern myth of the Jew as pariah, outsider and wanderer.” Yet in his recent novel Harvard Square, Aciman approaches an affirmation of a very different kind of Levantine Jewish identity, exploring what Alcalay has called “the relationship of the Jew to the Arab within him- or herself” (28), and suggesting the possibility of a genuine homecoming for the Levantine Jewish self. Through his portrayal of the conflicted friendship between a diffident Egyptian-Jewish Harvard graduate student and a voluble, undocumented Tunisian cab driver, Aciman explores how his Jewish narrator, seeking to “pass” in America, simultaneously embraces and rejects his Arab double. In a counter-factual, hypothetical move at the conclusion of his narrative, the narrator confesses his love for the double, though the fact remains that he has, in truth, rejected and abandoned him.

Toward a Decolonial Queer Humanism: Thomas Hardy's The Well-Beloved and André Aciman's Call Me by Your Name

“…in the very Arab countries where Jews had lived peacefully for millennia." 47 His family were among the last Jews living in Alexandria, and he describes in his memoir Out of Egypt (1994) how they were subjected to antisemitic attacks by their neighbors until being expelled by the Nasser government, their assets seized and nationalized before they moved to France and, later, the United States. Aciman's preoccupation throughout his writings with erotic bonds between Jewish men expresses his desire for "a reflecting lover/beloved, someone in whom he might embrace an image of his own self" in response to this national and cultural displacement and the experience of exile, Joyce Zonana argues ("Enta Omre," 36).…”