“The Last Jews of Libya,” regrettably, does not deliver on the full promise of its title.
The viewer tunes in for an in-depth recounting of a little-known chapter in history, and instead gets one extended family’s saga of dislocation, emigration and exile.
Vivienne Roumani-Denn, the middle-aged filmmaker daughter of the Roumani-Denn family, uses archival footage and other techniques to place her clan’s experience in the larger historical-political context. It’s a gallant effort, and she provides a fascinating glimpse of an era and a culture. Ultimately, the 50-minute “The Last Jews of Libya” is an above-average home movie.
“The Last Jews of Libya” airs Dec. 3 on Sundance Channel.
The experiences of Sephardic Jews in Arab countries have long been overshadowed by the well-documented history of Ashkenazi Jews in Eastern Europe and Russia before and during World War II. (There is no “Fiddler on the Roof” immortalizing the prewar lives of Iraqi or Egyptian or Libyan Jews, similarly.) This documentary in no way aspires to even the scales by itself, but one wishes it had been weightier.
Roumani-Denn traces her family back to the glory days between the wars, when Jews and Arabs lived in harmony in the port cities of Tripoli and Benghazi. Her parents grew up and met in Benghazi, and married in 1938.
But after 2,500 years, Jewish life in Libya was in for a series of shocks. For starters, Italy, which occupied Libya, instituted a number of “Jewish laws” and restrictions after Mussolini and Hitler signed their infamous pact.
Then World War II erupted, and Libya became a battleground between Great Britain and Italy. The Roumani clan was shipped to Tunisia, where members of the family were killed in a daylight bombing. They suffered less, however, than the thousands of Jews sent to Italian labor camps and, at the Nazis’ behest, the death camps.
After the British ousted the Italians, the Roumanis considered various options, choosing to return to Benghazi in 1944, albeit without the resources and lifestyle they had before the war. But Arab youths waged terrifying pogroms in 1945 and 1948, and the vast majority of Libyan Jews wasted no time emigrating to the new state of Israel.
Vivienne Roumani-Denn’s grandparents were among them, and we get a snapshot of the harsh treatment afforded the Jews from Arab lands. They were housed in tents and found it impossible to get decent jobs.
The film doesn’t linger on this bit of Israeli history, perhaps because none of the surviving members of the family interviewed on-camera had direct experience.
They do share what it was like being struggling Sephardic Jews in middle-class postwar America. One of Roumani-Denn’s brothers came first, gaining acceptance to Brandeis University in the mid-1950s.
Another brother followed, and eventually the family reunited in Massachusetts. It’s an especially bittersweet chunk of a bittersweet movie. While the Roumanis couldn’t stay where they were, the Northeast was not a natural fit for people from Mediterranean climes.
Nor were they embraced by the Ashkenazi Jewish community. The prevailing attitude was that they couldn’t be Jews because they didn’t speak Yiddish (even though they spoke Judeo-Arabic). The painful irony is that the Roumanis were (and still are) more deeply in touch with their Judaism, from prayers to holidays to the embrace of family, than a lot of the assimilated Ashkenazi Jewish families who looked down on them.
So for all the opportunities that the United States offered, it never felt like home to the Roumanis. As with most immigrants, the assimilation process didn’t really take hold until they had and raised children here.
In Libya, meanwhile, Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War made life untenable for the few remaining Jews. They were hurriedly airlifted to safety by the Jewish state within three weeks of the war’s end
“The Last Jews of Libya” airs 10 p.m., Dec. 3 on Sundance Channel.