Passover: The festival of freedom and the ambivalence of exile

In his 1995 memoir “Out of Egypt,” novelist, essayist and professor André Aciman – best known for the book-turned-film “Call Me By My Name” – writes movingly and memorably about living on the eve of exile.

By the early 1960s, Jews found themselves less welcome in Egypt. Aciman details the harassment his family endured – anonymous phone calls, surveillance, seizure of the family business by the government – before they were given orders to leave.

“It never occurred to us that a seder in Egypt was a contradiction in terms,” he wrote in The New York Times, describing the Passover meal his family held the night before their departure. The Egypt of the Exodus story seemed far from the Egypt of Aciman’s childhood, the one he loved.

Looking back at that last meal, the novelist wondered just what was being celebrated, and which departure of the Jews the Seder was commemorating. “The fault lines of exile and diaspora always run deep, and we are always from elsewhere, and from elsewhere before that,” he noted.

In “Out of Egypt,” the irony of the family preparing to leave on Passover is not lost on the author, the reader or, one suspects, the characters themselves. After a rather dismal attempt at a Seder, the narrator wandered through the streets of Alexandria, mourning a place that had become home. Until this moment, the idea of Egypt as a place of exile had not occurred to him; the idea of Israel being a place of return foreign.

On that last evening, the narrator walked the promenade along the waterfront and was offered “fiteer,” sold on street corners in honor of the Muslim holiday of Ramadan. It is not kosher for Passover, when leavened grains are forbidden, but the boy enjoyed the fried dough, the taste of which he recalled with pleasure many years later.

The blend of cultures, foreign and local, shows the family to be not unlike other cosmopolitan-mongrel Jews living in Egypt at the time. The city was “so inseparable from who I was at that very instant,” the narrator recalls. “And suddenly I knew … that I would always remember this night.”

It is a poignant account of the very personal nature of exile. And yet it is an experience potentially shared by everyone in the Jewish community. Exile is a place unknown, over the edge of the precipice.

The Passover holiday is also at the center of British journalist Tim Judah’s visit to Iraq to cover the 2003 American invasion. He was the first of his family in many years to “return” to Baghdad. His father’s family had left Iraq in the 19th century for India in the wake of persecutions during Dawud Pasha’s reign.

Noting that his visit would coincide with the holiday, Judah set out to meet as many of the estimated three dozen Jews who still lived in Iraq. The journalist found faint traces of the once-thriving community: palimpsests of stars of David in brickwork, a Hebrew inscription in Ezekiel’s tomb. At the time of Iraq’s independence in 1932, Jews comprised a plurality in the capital; business came to a standstill on Saturdays, the Jewish Sabbath.

The rise of Arab nationalism, the establishment of the state of Israel and shifting geopolitics led to the mass emigration of the Jewish community in the early 1950s. By 2003, the few Jews Judah found lived in trepidation and ramshackle homes.

“I tried to picture my forebears, in the fields or perhaps in the shops or the market, but I couldn’t,” Judah wrote in Granta magazine. “A cold grey dust filled the air. Wrecked cars and burnt-out tanks littered the road back to Baghdad. … So my ancestors lived here for 2,500 years? So what? My pilgrimage was over. I will never need to do it again.”

Judah’s pilgrimage leads not to a renewed sense of belonging but a break. His family’s uprooting is complete.

And so it goes, the cycle of exile and remembrance, uprooting and rerooting. With the Passover holiday, those free can celebrate their freedom, and those who are rooted, their rootedness. Yet at the same time, families around the Seder table can remember those who are not yet free, and those still suffering from being uprooted.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Nancy E. Berg, Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis

Nancy E. Berg does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.