20 Jackie 1930–1962
insults from the children, my classmates, the kids in the street,
and sometimes threats or blows aimed at the ‘dirty Jew,’ which,
I might say, I came to see in myself.^5In the weeks immediately following this hardening of anti-Semitic
measures, the war took a major turn in Algeria. On the night of
7–8 November 1942, American troops landed in North Africa. In
Algiers, fi erce fi ghting broke out between the Vichy forces, who did
not hesitate to shoot at the Allies, and groups of resistance fi ght-
ers led by José Aboulker, a twenty-two-year-old medical student.
Derrida gave a detailed account of that day to Hélène Cixous:
At dawn, we started to hear gunfi re. There was an offi cial resist-
ance on the French side, there were French gendarmes, French
soldiers who pretended to be going off to fi ght the English and
Americans coming in from Sidi Ferruch. [.. .] And then, in
the afternoon, we saw soldiers deploying outside our house
[.. .] with helmets like we’d never seen. They weren’t French
helmets. We said to ourselves: they’re Germans. And they were
Americans. We’d never seen American helmets, either. And
that same evening, the Americans arrived in force, as always
handing out cigarettes, chewing gum, chocolates [.. .]. This fi rst
disembarkation was like a caesura, a break in life, a new point
of arrival and departure.^6This was also a turning point in the Second World War. In met-
ropolitan France, the southern, so-called ‘free’ zone was invaded on
11 November by the Wehrmacht and became an ‘operational’ zone.
As for the city of Algiers, which had hitherto been preserved from
the direct eff ects of war, it was subjected to over a hundred bombing
raids, which caused many deaths. The view from the hills of El Biar
was terrifying: the sea and the city were lit up by the guns of the
navy, while the sky was crisscrossed by searchlights and ack-ack
fi re. For several months, the sirens wailed and there was a stam-
pede to the shelters almost every day. Jackie would never forget the
panic that seized him one evening when, as so often, the family had
taken shelter in a neighbour’s home: ‘I was exactly twelve, my knees
started to tremble uncontrollably.’^7
Shortly after being expelled from the Lycée Ben Aknoun, Jackie was
enrolled at the Lycée Maïmonide, also known as Émile-Maupas,
from the name of the street on which it was located, on the edge of
the Casbah. This improvised lycée had been opened the previous
spring by Jewish teachers driven out of their jobs in state educa-
tion. While his exclusion from Ben Aknoun had deeply wounded
Jackie, he balked almost as much at what he perceived as a ‘group