A Sephardi Life in Southeastern Europe. Aron Rodrigue
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still meant extended family, and living arrangements meant that the neighborhood was omnipresent in everyday life, further enlarging the family circle. The Jews, because of their status, were part of a community, circumscribed as such and defined as a denomination; this reinforced the community identity, of which the family was the nucleus, and did not favor the development of individual identity. There were, in addition, the imperatives of Jewish traditional life and its social control. Autobiography and the journal require a certain withdrawal, an entrenchment, and a certain intimacy; at the same time, they are the proper site of that entrenchment. “To write one’s journal is thus to rediscover a sanctuary of peace and interiority, to reintegrate that lost paradise ‘inside.’ ”69
At the beginning of Westernization, did anyone really have the notion that a world was disappearing? Autobiographies and journals are written to be repositories of recollections and may constitute true memoirs.70 It was only at the beginning of the twentieth century that an awareness of the passing of an era emerged and that people began to write history, as amateurs of course, but in a way that revealed the necessary distancing taking hold, as Sephardi Jews in the Levant experienced change and as irreversible losses occurred. There was a turn toward history, a concrete tool for fixing time.
Gabriel Arié was a man whose past was gone and who made the leap toward modernity; the terrain was favorable for such an undertaking; the tendency toward interiority aided him; and his illness was the ultimate trigger. Tuberculosis distanced Arié from his profession, cut him off from his habitual social environment, and forced him to uproot himself temporarily to a foreign region. His writing was situated in that rift, in that break from his place of origin, his profession, his health, and his past. In fact, he began his autobiography in the no-man’s-land of Switzerland, a neutral place propitious for the distancing necessary for retrospection. It was in Europe, the site of his culture of adoption, that he began to write. Hence, the act of writing his autobiography came about in the very place of the genre’s origin. The journal began in the same context and was continued in, hence transplanted to, Gabriel Arié’s native environment, thus making the transition between these two universes to which the author himself belonged. The journal that followed ensured continuity: Gabriel Arié returned to his native country and lived there until the end of his life. His autobiography and journal were the culmination of his Westernization and his social ascension, and above all of the distance taken from his own environment, which was both familiar and strange.
Family and illness were the two poles of the life of this man and were closely linked. Arié believed that the family transmitted illness. He blamed his grandparents and parents for having passed illnesses on to him. He attributed his physical defects to them. He also evoked his father under the sign of illness. The focus of his ills was thus the family. But he did not succeed in doing without family and established relations of a familial kind with the Other. The relations he had with the teacher Mme Béhar, with the Alliance, with his future in-laws in Ortaköy, and with his uncle in Galata were all of a kind. He created a large family, lived for a time with his mother and wife in the same house, brought mother, brother, and sister to Izmir after the death of his father and provided for their needs, married off brothers and sisters, took care of them when their material situation was not as good as it might have been, worried about their material future, brought his family to Davos during his illness, brought his children into his business, and maintained long-term relationships with the different members of his family throughout his life. As a newlywed, Gabriel Arié lived with his parents; later, his mother, younger brother, and sister moved in with him. He shared the same building with his brother, and then his son came to live with him. We thus have a portrait of the typical Sephardi family, where young and old lived together. Arié tried to break with this practice numerous times, but in the end was obliged to go along with it. There was a gap between his own aspirations and local contingencies. This was not yet the framework of the contemporary urban family of the nineteenth century, where intergenerational solidarity dissolved.71
To a great extent, Gabriel Arié also conducted his business with members of his family, and later with his descendants. His sense of family was very developed and his penchant toward egocentrism did not prevent him from managing his family relationships as a powerful and omnipresent—but attentive—paterfamilias, preoccupied with the material future of those close to him. Like any bourgeois, he made it a duty to place his children on a firm financial footing and made sure they did not lose their class standing by the choice of an occupation or spouse whose status was unworthy of them.72 In fact, his male children, like himself, made careers in insurance. Arié’s solicitude extended to his less immediate family as well. First Davos, then summer stays in vacation spots abroad and in Bulgaria, became occasions for family reunions. Everyone moved through these places in a continual coming and going, which pointed to both the wealth of the family and the affection that linked its members together. Summer tourism in the mountains and spas or in the country became a habit, as in the European bourgeois family of the nineteenth century.73
Gabriel Arié welcomed his niece, whose health was fragile, to Davos, oversaw her education, and reproduced in exile the family atmosphere he was accustomed to. As in any family, in this case a large one, frictions were not lacking. Certain conflicts persisted and caused the author sorrow, most of them due to the touchiness of the protagonists. Questions of money were also a subject of conflicts, such as the one that broke out between him and his brother Elia. But Elia provided for his needs during his stay in Davos, testimony to the family solidarity that existed among the Ariés. And Gabriel did not at any moment reproduce the conflictual atmosphere that reigned between his impoverished father and the wealthy family of his mother, voluntarily coming to the aid of those in his family who needed him.
The genealogical tree of the family, beginning in the eighteenth century, clearly testifies to the practice of endogamy, which was current at the time. It persisted even in the twentieth century, since the last son of Arié, Narcisse, married his cousin. Gabriel Arié himself tried to marry off his daughter to a cousin. Although long turned in upon itself, the Jewish family of the Balkans, progressively influenced by Westernization, began increasingly to look toward the outside. Marriages outside the clan became more and more frequent; leaving one’s birthplace and settling abroad began to occur; and travel was common. A number of family members of Gabriel Arié’s generation and that of his descendants established their homes outside Bulgaria, either in bordering countries or in Europe. Mobility—both vertical and horizontal—characterized this type of family, which was still in the minority. The geographical situation of Bulgaria, a gateway to the West, also facilitated that opening.
Gabriel Arié had an “arranged” marriage.74 He married the young Rachel Cohen, whom he knew in Ortaköy and whose family he visited frequently. The family was eager to bring about the marriage. The wedding was traditional and Arié received a dowry, following the local custom, which, in fact, was not particular to Sephardi culture. He himself attempted to arrange the marriage of his eldest daughter and of his brother; progressively, his other children chose their own spouses. Nonetheless, Gabriel Arié had very fixed ideas on the subject of marriage. He first had an amorous relationship with his colleague Rachel Lévy, whom he met when she was working in Ortaköy; he did not marry her, because her ways were too free. Later, in love with an Alliance teacher whom he met in Sofia only shortly before his marriage to Rachel Cohen, he sacrificed love to reason. Sara Ungar was an emancipated woman practicing a profession, was much older than Gabriel Arié, and had ways very different from those of the Eastern women around him in his family environment. She did not possess the necessary assets to become his wife; moreover, she was Ashkenazi. He did not dismiss the possibility of living with her as his mistress, but he did not envision marriage. In the end, he preferred the security of a domestic woman, the future mother of his children, which was a type familiar to him. Arié also probably wanted to keep his promise by marrying his fiancée. The sense of honor so valorized in that culture had to play a role in that decision. He preferred order. Is not the family “the cell of living order”?75 After the birth of the Arié couple’s first child, Mile Ungar, offended and without hope, left the girls school in Sofia for another position.
In marriage, Gabriel Arié behaved like any Western bourgeois. Marriage was the decisive element in advancement and a serious matter;76 Gabriel was well aware of this. In the first place,