Teboul, Victor
Teboul, Victor Victor Teboul was born in Alexandria on May 9, 1945. When he was eleven, his family was expelled from Egypt on the grounds that they had a French passport and given seven days to leave the country. They arrived in France on December 25, 1956 and from January 1957 to May 1957 lived, under the auspices of the French government, at the convent of Notre-Dame-de-l’Osier in the Isère with a hundred other expelled Egyptian Jewish families. In July 1963, the Tebouls emigrated to Canada, where in due course Victor earned a B.A. degree at Concordia University, a master’s degree at McGill University, and a doctorate at the Université de Montréal. Teboul, who writes in French, is a novelist, essayist, professor, and the founder and director, since 2002, of the online magazine Tolerance . His essay “ Mythe et images du Juif au Québec” (1977) provoked heated public debate about the role of the Jew in Canadian life and literature. In contrast to other writers, Teboul sees exile less as a state of suffering than as a chance to strengthen Jewish identity. He is the author of two novels, Que Dieu vous garde de l’homme silencieux quand il se met soudain à parler (1999; May God Help You When the Silent Man Begins to Speak) and La lente découverte de l’étrangeté (2002; The Slow Unrelenting Discovery of Strangeness). His novels are fiction, but they borrow freely from his own life, expanding on his experiences to the point where, as he states, they reflect lives not his own and histories he could not have known first-hand. For Teboul, writing is an opportunity to create a place of one’s own for Jews within a larger context, whether political, cultural, literary, or institutional. There is no question of erasing the distinctions between the Jew and others. Rather, his novelistic ambition is to insert the Jew, and particularly the Sephardic Jew and experience, into the literature of French Canada. Teboul’s main character and alter-ego, Maurice Ben Haïm, is conceived as a figure typifying the Québecois Jew. Maurice has a place in the ongoing history of the Jews of Quebec that began long before he arrived, for he works and interacts, as he must, with the history that preceded him. Similarly, when a Jew goes to France, say, on arriving there he identifies immediately with the history of the Jews in France even though, as an individual coming from someplace else, he has only just arrived. And thus, Teboul contends, Jews are never strangers in a strange land, because wherever they may be, some of their own were there before and prepared the ground for them. Teboul’s work takes a positive view of exile and expounds a nuanced understanding of the modern Jew living, as so often, outside his motherland and speaking in languages other than his mother tongue. Aimée Israel-Pelletier Victor Teboul Selected Bibliography Teboul, Victor. Mythe et images du Juif au Québec. Montreal (Montreal: Editions de Lagrave, 1977. ___________. Le Jour. Émergence du libéralisme
Article d’encyclopédie
Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World