WHO AM I?
We are in 2022 and I realized that I have been in this country fifty years, half a century! Time sometimes goes too fast!!!... I arrived at Middlebury Summer School in Vermont in 1971, to teach French literature and Theater...Me a teacher??? Ah! Ah! Ah!...I was 27 years old, and have been in Paris as an actor, a student, for 10 years... But let us remember from the beginning...
1944 Born in Tunis, from a Tunisian Jewish family, and raised in the French culture, speaking only French (some Italian) and a few words of Arabic and believing that life will be the same forever, easy and with no surprises. 16 years of an incredible and strange life, between the French and the Tunisians, not really belonging anywhere, being a question mark in the country of my birth... At that time it was an easy life for most of the Tunisian Jews but it happened...Tunisia became an independent country, the olive oil factories of my father disappeared, and the family lost everything, and as Jews we were living in constant danger...So we had to go...I did not realize at that time that very soon the entire way of living will change, and I will have to learn new rules, and all of us will have to behave differently. Yes, we had to leave Tunisia and arrived in France practically as refugees in 1960-61... Will I be able to learn other ways? Will I be able to still smile when the best of times is gone? What will be waiting for me in this new country France? I had been living in Tunisia for 16 years and now being in France was a huge question mark... Sometimes I would love to be born again knowing what I know now... THE DREAM OF FAUST... I am thinking about all I have lost fighting for useless dreams or stupid adventures... Why nobody brings to the young Faust the knowledge of the old Faust?
1960 was my first year in France, I was accepted in a school in Montpellier, I was sleeping in a dorm with real French people, and I wanted to adapt to this new reality of life as fast as possible...I was in the fog of knowledge, in the waiting room of thoughts, in the vestibule of trying to be wise. I tried to learn how to be a real French teenager, I tried to survive, spending most of my time reading and studying, really not involved in the everyday life of the others since I did not really understand their ways of thinking and I did not have a penny to participate in their happy activities... And to be realistic, everybody thought and was acting like I was from another planet...Imagine a Jewish boy from Tunisia thrown among provincial French teenagers...Most of the time I was called RABBI.
A year later I arrived in Paris...I had to learn how to smile when the only things left were the worst ending of what I believed could have been a life of achievements, recognition and love. But I promised to myself that I will contemplate new challenges even if what was left in my life was only anguish, anxiety and tears... I had to learn how to keep some dignity with all my strength. I tried not to look at the adverse events and at the difficult and painful life that history had created.
I spent 10 years in Paris, going to university and travelling all over the world hitchhiking and working in all different places as a waiter, a door attendant, or a potatoes seller, whatever was given to me. I started to be an actor, in theater and in movies, and was spending my life reading most of the time a book a day... It is incredible to think that in my entire life I spent only 10 years in France, and even if I have accumulated so much knowledge about the French culture and the French ways, I continue to ask myself... WHO AM I ? AM I FRENCH? AM I TUNISIAN? AM I AMERICAN?
In Paris, I had so many dreams, so many hopes, I will be the next Marlon Brando, the next Dustin Hoffman, the next... But with the death of my brother at the age of 25 in a car accident and a few months later the death of my father, all went away...The dreams of success, the dreams of hopes, and the trusts... The dreams disappeared in the rain and the clouds, I had to confront the reality of not knowing who I was in an unknown country... I had another dream: To be the one that everybody loves and actually I was only an appearance since I had to compose a personality to find myself .
WHO WAS I?
Amazingly fast I felt like a tired animal and was looking for a possible icy bed... I was often wondering why life had betrayed me and lost me in Shattered Skies... I tried not to be lost, I had to hope, to dream that I was loved by some, and protected by others; dreams are only a hidden reality, the reality of the unreal...
And suddenly the opportunity of AMERICA...
1971/1972... After 10 years in France, the world opened again for me...USA...
Now 50 years of fantastic life, the beginning was difficult, and later difficult again many times, but that is life, NO?
In 1988 I had accepted a position for the Montreal Opera. I did not move there but for 13 years I spent many months a year there, it was another challenge, after Tunis, Paris, New York now Montreal... Many people in my profession believed, many still do, that I am Canadian. Tunisian , French, American, Canadian...While I was in Montreal I read in a paper talking about me: "Why do we need a French Jew at the head of the Montreal Opera?" This person forgot or did not know that France had been only an episode of my life...But reading this I wrote:
Are other people really
happy? What is the meaning of having a life? Not having one is even worse, I
simply do not know what that means, I do not hate life or despise it, I do not
know anymore what it is, anymore? No, I think I never knew but I never asked.
I look around and some
days I behave exactly as they want me to be and some days what nobody wants me
to be... I wander in space looking for an island of truth and find the void and
wonder about the next wandering.
I should walk in a forest looking for a path which will bring me to a field of poppies, so red that they will look like a bleeding bull after a corrida and decide that I want to be the next torero who believes he is Rudolf Valentino... And maybe I will find the truth about being … me. I often dream about fields of red poppies, may be because I have never seen one...
Or maybe I should think about my father who was a much simpler man, and who died at 59 after a life of aggravation and thank my destiny about what I have and stop these attacks of belly button contemplation.”
And now, retired from my profession after the accusations three years ago, accusations destroying my life and my entity, I am revisiting this strange existence and found it interesting...Tunisian, French, American, Canadian...
WHAT AM I ???
We are now living exceedingly difficult times, I already talked about it in other blogs. Recently I was looking at old manuscripts I wrote during my life:
Came to my attention two lectures I gave in the mid-seventies in universities of the country while I was performing with my theater company “French theater in America.” Reading it after 50 years was a strange experience since it seemed that nothing has changed while I believed everything had changed… The first one was called “Decadence of Occidental Theater” and the one was called “Grandeur and Misery of the Actor”
Here is
an excerpt: “I gave the title “Decadence of Occidental Theater” to my lecture; I
should have called it “Death of art in Occident” because we are talking about a
death, a murder, a condemnation to death, and an "autodafe". We have never talked so much in the western world about civilization and
culture when actually it is life that is leaving us. The sign of our time is
confusion, a break between life and the words to describe life and we have
pushed the absurd to the point where we create ideas from acts instead of
trying to identify our acts to our thoughts. All
our ideas about life have to be rethought since nothing anymore is a
consequence of life, everything functions like if we had on one side Culture
and on the other side Life.”
YES, I
WROTE THIS IN THE SEVENTIES…HOW STRANGE….do we feel and think the same way now
than 50 years ago?
I tried to be one person, but it seems that I am many… Many What? Many Who? I still do not know….
WHO AM I?
