A Sephardi Life in Southeastern Europe. Aron Rodrigue
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This in turn goes against the laws of the genre of the journal, whose temporal unity usually pertains to a single day. Arié’s journal is an annual chronicle, a log book, and an account book all in one; in it, the author calculates the balance sheet, judging the positive and the negative. Thus, in the case of Gabriel Arié, “journal” does not mean a work written day by day.44 But in his autobiography as in his journal, Arié’s “self”—that of a sick man who fears he will die at any moment—dominates.
“The act of writing [of autobiography] presents itself to each of its addressees as a demand for recognition or love, or as a defense plea, destined to depict and impose an image of oneself as lovable. It is a plea able to disarm the other’s gaze.”45 That is exactly what Gabriel Arié did when he offered his history as an example to the family. At that time, the audience of autobiography was above all the family.46 For the author, his life was a lesson in morality for his children. At the end of his autobiography. Arié wrote:
In a sense, I can consider myself a happy man, since, having come to the end of the day, I can rest a little and can depart with the awareness that I leave my children, in the absence of a fortune, the example of a life of work, probity, and devotion. I would be happy with them if, in their own lives, they found inspiration in these principles, even while avoiding the faults and excess of zeal to which I may have succumbed. It is to help them avoid the latter and to acquire the former that I thought it useful to recount to them in all sincerity what my life was.
In the end, he erected himself as a model for his descendants, a paterfamilias who had nothing to hide and whose life was exemplary, founded on the values of work and honesty. As a result, sincerity became the raison d’être of the act of writing, an act that would memorialize the history of a man in order to pass it on to his descendants, as a legacy capable of guiding the life of those who perpetuate his line. This legacy would stand in for an inheritance that could be converted into cash; at the time of the writing, Arié had not yet amassed the fortune that was to come to him after World War I.
Arié’s text casts a somewhat nostalgic gaze on the past, a traditional world in the process of disappearing; the author evokes it with tenderness, even though he remains merciless in regard to a number of its aspects. It is no accident that this man, initiated into Western values but not entirely cut off from his origins, wrote an autobiography and spent so much time on his family’s past. “Autobiography appears at the point where traditional civilization becomes fissured, but appears in the most diverse forms. It is first of all linked to social mobility.”47 Gabriel Arié measured the distance traveled, not without some pride. His autobiography was not only the narrative of social ascension but also the written record of the “lost paradise” he would never find again. And throughout the narrative, the history of a family, anchored for centuries in the region after its expulsion from Spain, also emerged in writing.
The chronicle, a relatively rare genre in the Sephardi world, was already familiar within that family; we can thus cite the chronicle by Nahim J. Arié (1849–1907) and Tchelebi Moshé Abraham Arié II (1849–1919), written in Judeo-Spanish and never published in its entirety in any Western language.48 A relatively complete genealogical tree49 of the Arié family was established in 1963 by one of its members, Joseph Abraham Arié, an equally rare undertaking on the part of those from the Sephardi culture area. It was constructed from the chronicle already mentioned, from documents belonging to the family line, from data gathered and systematized by Gabriel Arié himself for the period 1766–1929, and from a genealogical tree elaborated in 1901 and transmitted to the compiler by his father, Abraham Joseph Arié, in 1944. That tree goes back to the arrival of the Ariés in Bulgaria in the eighteenth century, during the Ottoman era. Its last architect, Joseph Abraham Arié, who in fact continued Gabriel Arié’s work for the period 1923–63, belongs to the branch of the family that emigrated to Israel; we thus better understand the wish to preserve the memory of a name that was illustrious in its time in Bulgaria.
The tradition of transmitting the family memory to future generations, out of a kind of pride nourished by the awareness of belonging to an elite group, an aristocracy, was thus persistent in the Arié clan, and also in Gabriel, who was involved in the different stages of this transmission. Like aristocrats, the Ariés made up and passed on genealogical trees. Gabriel did not just follow this tradition in turn but went beyond it, writing a book on the history of the Jewish people and thus moving from personal to general history. Once we know that this was a pedagogical work for use in Jewish primary schools, we understand even better his search for transmission on a more general level. Hence, Gabriel Arié combined the preservation of his own experience with the preservation of that of his people, a sign both of openness and of modernity, if only by virtue of the form he adopted to transmit to others the history of a people without land at that time, a history that was also his own. His history writing developed in concentric circles, growing ever larger: from the fragile self, liable to disappear at any moment because of an incurable illness; to his family; his cultural group; his professional group, the Alliance, whose history he wrote in part; and finally, to the ethnic or denominational group to which he belonged, the Jewish people, whose history he also retraced. These circles interpenetrate at different moments of his own history and are an integral part of the protagonist. The same self expresses itself through these detours, which all come together to form a totality. Of course, Arié was backed into writing the history of the Alliance, acting as ghostwriter for the president of the organization, a man he admired so much that he named his younger son, Narcisse, after him. This undertaking once more reflects Arié’s dependence on the Alliance, a financial and moral dependence, where the very selfhood of the author was effaced behind an institution and an ideology. (That ideology influenced him so much that, by his own free will, he was led to denigrate a large part of his own Sephardi culture.) We know that the name “Arié” does not figure on the book’s cover, which bore the signature of Narcisse Leven. Later, in contrast, the book on the history of the Jewish people was written on his own initiative. He drafted it at the beginning of World War I, after the Balkan Wars, at a time when everything was beginning to collapse in Europe. It was when humanity, and therefore his own people, were in danger that Arié felt the need to consign his people’s history to paper. Disappearance and death always occupied a central place in his existence, and it was by writing his own history, and history in general, that he brought them under control, transforming them into “memory,” into a kind of symbolic immortality.
At the same time, the move from autobiography to the journal constitutes the move from the definitive to the provisional. Until that time, the author had reported a past that he controlled and looked upon with the distance implied in the notion of retrospection, though he made the leap into the present at the end, preparing the way for the journal. This immediate present links the journal, recounted at a year’s distance (a distance that, conversely, introduces distanciation and longer-term perspective), to the autobiography that precedes it. It is on this level that the interrelation between the two genres intervenes. We are now in the register of a present time relegated to the past—a kind of hoarding of time, hence of life, because the future is unforeseeable. We might even wonder whether Gabriel succeeded in living in the present, given the place occupied in his everyday life by his illness and its inexorable ritual. The year was quantified according to the number of times he spit blood, the days of fever, and the days spent in bed. A drop in that number was transformed into a sign of improvement, hence a triumph over the illness. The rhythm followed was that of the illness; that triumph was tangible only in the overall accounting of the year, since another year of life amounted to postponing death for a year. It was not the day that marked the journal but the year, and especially the year gone by, since the past was reassuring to the gravely ill Arié. The journal thus became a chronicle of the past year; the day would have been a present too close to the future, a future Arié could not even imagine. He begins his journal this way: “In a first notebook, I noted the important events in my life until 1906. I now propose to continue the account and to note each year, as long as Providence will allow me, the important facts concerning my family and myself.”
Why did Gabriel Arié keep a journal? We are no longer dealing with the issue of exemplarity, the moral scope of autobiography, a monument erected to his glory and given as an offering to his descendants. “Prisoner of his illness and traveler into his own abyss,