22 Jackie 1930–1962
two boys never wearied of observing the soldiers queuing up outside
the establishment.
Another favourite pastime was the cinema, as soon as they had
enough money to buy a ticket. In Jackie’s eyes, this was real time
out, an essential emancipation from his family, but also a sort of
erotic initiation. He would remember all his life an adaptation of
Tom Sawyer, especially the scene where Tom is trapped in a cave
with a small girl.^10
The political and military situation developed rapidly during
- The Allies wanted to embark on their reconquest of France
from Algeria. Algiers, which had been the heart of colonial
Vichyism, soon became the new capital of Free France. According
to Benjamin Stora, the Jewish populace greeted the American sol-
diers with particular enthusiasm and ‘passionately followed the
progress of the Allied armies on maps pinned to their dining room
walls’.^11 For Jackie, it was ‘a fi rst amazing encounter’ with foreign-
ers from a faraway land. The ‘Yankees’ (‘Amerloques’), as he and
his friends called them, brought in quite an abundance of foodstuff s
and introduced them to hitherto unknown products. ‘Before I ever
went to America, America took over my “home”,’ he later said.^12
His family struck up a friendship with a GI, welcoming him into
their home on several occasions and even continuing to exchange
letters with him after his return to the United States.
For the Jews of Algeria, however, it was some time before life
returned to normal. For over six months, during the period of power-
sharing between General Giraud and General de Gaulle, the race
laws remained in force. As Derrida told Hélène Cixous, ‘Giraud’s
only plan was to renew and extend the Vichy decrees and ensure that
Algerian Jews were still seen as “native Jews”. He didn’t want them
to be citizens again. And only when de Gaulle ousted Giraud, using
those cunning manoeuvres for which he had such a genius, were the
Vichy laws abolished.’^13 The discriminatory anti-Semitic measures
that had been brought in were abolished on 14 March 1943, but
only at the end of October did the French Committee of National
Liberation, with de Gaulle at its head, reinstate the Crémieux
Decree. The Jews of Algeria could fi nally reassume a nationality of
which they had for two years been deprived.
In April 1943, Jackie was allowed to go back to the Lycée Ben
Aknoun, at the end of the cinquième. So his absence had lasted less
than a year. But the return to proper education happened in a hap-
hazard and rather unenthusiastic way: ‘I was taken back into the
French school system. This was not something one could take for
granted. I was very unhappy about this return: not only my expul-
sion, but my return too was quite painful and upsetting.’^14 The lycée
buildings had been transformed by the British into a military hospi-
tal and a POW camp for Italians. Lessons took place in extremely