Following Models, Wherever You Find Them

10 May, 2026

Marcel Bénabou tells us about the way his younger self pondered writing a grand epic which, centered upon his family, would also depict the history of the Moroccan Jewish community. He was well aware that this was a massive undertaking, and the first step in getting it going was figuring out how to go about the whole thing. What he needed was models for how to proceed—but which would fit? Proust, shaping his own voluminous work according to a “cathedral structure?” Not appropriate, Bénabou thought, for a region dominated by Muslim and Jewish architecture and culture. Greek epic had been put to good use by Joyce, but that didn’t seem right either. And so, the would-be author goes in search of help from “the Jewish tradition”—finding, though, that said tradition was never one thing, and that much of the way that tradition had taken shape in different parts of Europe was unfamiliar to the one he knew in Morocco.¹

At this point in the book (I’m a little over halfway through), it seems the ambitious young author has discovered he’s going to have to dump pre-made structures and work this thing out on his own, whatever that means for its form. However it turns out, Bénabou’s explorations feel entirely familiar to me—not because I had once wanted to write my own epic, but because of a lifelong sense that I don’t fit, or even reside comfortably, within my “native” cultural and literary models, i.e., US American offerings of literature or philosophy, not to mention “popular culture” in general. This all undoubtedly has something to do with the fact that 1) as a kid, I was sucked in by mostly European literature; 2) much of my extended family’s conversations and practical activities took place in German; and 3) my formative years were those of the waning days of the Cold War, where you couldn’t help but notice that rigidly drawn cultural and social dictates weren’t doing anyone any good. The set-up meant it was no surprise that I developed an insatiable curiosity about other languages and the places they came from—especially at a time when all those comments and quotations in French or German or Latin, which it was assumed the reader would understand, weren’t translated in helpful footnotes. As a kid, then, I realized I’d have to decipher those passages on my own—and so started teaching myself foreign languages, a rocky process that was eventually made smoother with actual, qualified instruction. Whatever the case, I was aware early on that there was a very wide world out there, and that the corner in which I existed didn’t seem all that interested in studying or participating in it.

Be all that as it may, that background may be one reason I’m such a fan of authors like Bénabou (and Jacques Derrida, Ken Bugul, etc., etc.,) who grew up in what would have been sneered at as French colonial outposts. Both Bénabou and Bugul explicitly mention being taught in school about “our ancestors the Gauls,” about being educated into a history, tradition, and even geography that had little if nothing to do with lived reality in the places they actually spent their day to day.² And when they do end up in the great ancestral homeland, there’s always a culture shock; the nostalgia into which they’ve been schooled isn’t exactly the reality they’d imagined to themselves.

Different, then, from my own native national milieu, which was (and still is, probably from certain sectors even more disturbingly so) more akin to the givenness of attitude behind testosterone-infused chants of “USA! USA!” In terms of questioning what it means to be an author or thinker or artist in this country, I am in line with a long tradition; Emerson, Whitman, Kerouac, James Dewey and all the pragmatists, Frank O’Hara and the New York School, Barnett Newman, and so many others were on some noticeable level trying to understand and foster a uniquely US American way of producing art and thought, in a society that for one thing, didn’t much value any of it in general. But even with that tradition, so much of it—Whitman especially—feels all too celebratory and secure in a particular form of exceptionalism, maybe even good-natured belligerence, for my taste. And behind that bluster or pride, there seems to lie some residue of insecurity about being not quite as sophisticated as the European models that provided the bedrock of much of that cultural output. Add to that the current cultural climate that values profit and virality above everything else, and what feels like the formulaic nature of creative writing programs, workshops, and many journals: outside of the New York Review of Books, I feel like I just have to do the best I can, reach out from my outpost of crowded shelves and be grateful for the good conversation partners I can find.

The sense of being a freak aside, I’m tremendously thankful to be immersed in Bénabou’s world, grateful to have access to it, to know that one of my countrymen also felt drawn in enough by that world to make it available to others in English. Where models are concerned, then, he might help me think through my own complicated relationship with where I am and where I come from (and of course, it’s never all that simple even for people who do feel comfortable with their place). What keeps coming to mind, though, is an ambivalent realization I had about a dozen years ago.

I’d spent about a week and a half in the Middle East, making do in Europeanized coffee shops with americanos, in lieu of the brain-buzzingly strong, giant cup of French press coffee I was used to making for myself at home. It was a familiar form of settling that would occur on most trips abroad, Europe included. When, about to start on the last leg of a long, long chain of plane rides home, I spied a Starbucks in the Brussels airport, my long criticism and avoidance of said chain went up in a puff of fickle smoke. As I savored their largest size of average-quality dark roast and too-sweet soy milk, it hit me: by virtue of accepting my thralldom to this particular variety of dietary vice, I couldn’t escape the fact that I was unarguably and incurably American. Whatever that’s meant since, I still haven’t unraveled it; maybe it means I’m just the latest in a long line of a tradition trying to get to the bottom of this unique sense of unease, uprootedness, whatever. It took Bénabou thirty years or so to determine what he was doing with his own story. In the spirit, then, of my own compatriot and good literary model Ralph Ellison’s reminder that “while one can do nothing about choosing one’s relatives, one can, as an artist, choose one’s ancestors,” I guess I’ll have to keep puzzling it out on my own.³

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