2 Under the Sun of Algiers 1942–1949
Entry into adolescence happened all of a sudden, one October
morning in 1942. On the fi rst day of the new school year, the sur-
veillant général of the Lycée Ben Aknoun called Jackie into his
offi ce and told him: ‘You are going to go home, my little friend,
your parents will get a note.’^1 The percentage of Jews admitted into
Algerian classes had just been lowered from 14 per cent to 7 per
cent: yet again, the authorities had outstripped Vichy in their zeal.^2
As Derrida would often say, this exclusion was ‘one of the
earthquakes’ in his life:
I wasn’t expecting it in the least and I just couldn’t understand
it. I am striving to remember what must have been going
through me at the time, but in vain. It has to be said that,
even in my family, nobody explained to me why this was the
situation. I think it remained incomprehensible for many Jews
in Algeria, especially as there weren’t any Germans; these ini-
tiatives came from French policy in Algeria, which was more
severe than in France: all the Jewish teachers in Algeria were
expelled from their schools. For this Jewish community, things
remained enigmatic, perhaps not accepted, but suff ered like a
natural catastrophe for which there is no explanation.^3Even if he refused to exaggerate the seriousness of the experi-
ence, which would be ‘off ensive’ given the persecutions suff ered
by European Jews, Derrida acknowledged that this trauma left its
mark on him at the deepest level, and contributed to making him the
person he was. He wished to erase nothing from his memory, so how
could he have forgotten that morning in 1942 when ‘a little black
and very Arab Jew’^4 was expelled from the Lycée Ben Aknoun?
Beyond any anonymous ‘administrative’ measure, which I
didn’t understand at all and which no one explained to me,
the wound was of another order, and it never healed: the daily