Hiraeth

I come from everywhere and nowhere.

I call home a few places: Chartres, Paris, and Boracay. And Algeria. But not the country of today; the one who used to be, long time ago, who is not anymore. The one I never knew and will never know.

According to Geiriadur, Welsh-English / English-Welsh dictionary, "Hiraeth is a Welsh word for which there is no direct English translation. The University of Wales, Lampeter, attempts to define it as homesickness tinged with grief or sadness over the lost or departed. It is a mix of longing, yearning, nostalgia, wistfulness, or an earnest desire for the Wales of the past."

This is a concept hard to grasp, a fascinating word yet altogether.

How can one long for a home that was never home? A time one never knew?

It is hard to explain, yet very real. I know this feeling well, actually. How peculiar it sounds, thinking about it.

My family is pretty big. And by this, I mean my direct and extended family. Yes, in my family, extended family IS family. Grandchildren of cousins are cousins. Great great uncles are uncles. Third-degree cousins are the same as first-degree cousins. And some of my family members were patient and brave enough to research the roots of our family and managed to go back as early as the 15th century.

And there we were, jews from Andalusia who went through the expulsion of all Jews of Spain by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492.

My family escaped to North Africa and settled in what is now known as the country of Algeria. 

They spent five centuries there. During the 20th century, France colonised Algeria, and my great uncles fought for this foreign country during the First World War. My grandfather was born way after them, as my great-grandfather had about 13 children (the last one was born when he was more than 70 years old).

The book "80 Letters from Abraham Ben Meir to his
Five sons mobilized during the war, 1914-1918."
by Andre Chouraqui. 

My grandfather left his country to study and become a doctor in France. The Second World War came, and my grandfather worked in the French villages to help people. He met my grandmother, a catholic young woman, daughter of a steelworker. She never really went out of her village, was years younger than him, but was bold enough to marry a Jew at the nose of the Nazi. 

Fortunately, a relative of my grandfather told him he was on a list of Jews supposed to be arrested. He had to plan a quick escape back to his home country. My grandmother, young and very adventurous, followed him in the Free Zone in southern France, crossed the Mediterranean Sea, and ended up in Oran, Algeria. 

Oran before 1962

Three children were born there. My mother was the youngest. They had a beautiful childhood. The sea was breathtakingly beautiful, they were living all together with their cousins, grandmother, uncles, and aunts. The Sundays on the beach, grilling fish with the family. The seeds of the fruits were used to play marbles.

But when my mom was 4 years old, the Algerian War started against the French. Nasty, scary. Every day, the impacts of bullets in the walls, the death threats in the street, the killings in front of anyone, anxiously waiting for my grandfather when the curfew started, but he was still taking care of patients, the bombs. This one bomb that exploded right next to my mom while she was biking, throwing her to the ground, while my grandfather ran to check if she was still alive.

Oran, 1962

When my mom was 12, they had to leave the country. The War was still going on, and it was not safe enough to stay any longer, as the Jews were attacked as well. As France colonised Algeria as early as 1830, my mom was born officially French. The easiest solution for them was to move to France. My mom was the first one to leave, joining my uncle, who was married to a Swiss woman. She left everything behind in the middle of the night. She could not bring her teddy bear, nor say goodbye to her friends. She left behind her mother, father, sister, and brother, who were older and had things to fix before leaving. 

She spent a trimester in Geneva at her cousins' before meeting her parents in Paris, their new home. Since then, our family has been in France. I am part of the first generation of our family, born in France. And my children are already born somewhere else.

But to go back to this word, "hiraeth". I always felt my roots were in Algeria. I always felt that part of me was so strongly North African. During family meetings, we will always talk about Oran, Ain Temouchent, Tlemcen, the towns and villages in Algeria where we are from. We would always cook the food from there. 

A beach in Ain Temouchent

For many years, it's been an untold custom in the family to try and find the perfect recipe of this orange pie my mom, uncle, and aunt were eating when they were small, the one Madame Pedro was baking. None of us ever tried the original, but we talk about it almost like our own childhood memory. We heard them talk about their childhood so much, the fond memories, that this is also part of us. We miss it as much as they do. 

And it is sad because it is no longer a safe place for us to go and visit. But it is home. My great-grandfather, Abraham Baba Ben Meyer, an old man with a white Sarwel and a headwrap like the Ottoman time, is buried there. As my great-grandmother, Ramona.

This man in the photo, Baba, even my mom never met him. He was born in 1848 and died in 1929. He was speaking Judeo-Arabic, a dead language today. But we talk about him as if we all knew him. And I carry this place and these people in me. 

Baba is inside each of us, standing proudly. He had a dozen children, 54 grandchildren, and more than a hundred great-grandchildren. We stopped counting. 

My children are far from Andalusia, Algeria, and France. They are born in yet another continent. But I do hope they will carry Baba inside them as much as we all do on this side of the family. Because it is home to me.