Photo Credit : Alex Dworkin Canadian Jewish Archives
Naïm Kattan, ca. 1960s.
Photo Credit : Alex Dworkin Canadian Jewish Archives
Naïm Kattan, ca. 1960s
Photo Credit : Alex Dworkin Canadian Jewish Archives
Speakers at the Cercle Juif de langue française meeting, including Réné Lévesque (middle) and Naïm Kattan (right), February 1960.
Photo Credit : Jewish Public Library - Archives
Speakers at the Cercle Juif de langue française meeting, including N. Kattan, M. Myerson, and Jean Bruchesi, March 1955.
Photo Credit : Jewish Public Library - Archives
1928 -
Naïm Kattan
Writer, literary critic and professor, Naïm Kattan, is an iconic figure in Montreal’s Sephardic community, who has published over 30 books and has used his internationalist perspective to build bridges between Quebec’s English and French-speaking communities.
Kattan was born in Baghdad, Iraq, at a time when the life of the city was marked by a strong Jewish presence. After studying law at the University of Baghdad, he received a scholarship from the French government in 1947 to study literature at Université Paris I – La Sorbonne. In 1954, he decided, like many Jews living in the Middle East, to immigrate to Canada, to escape the rising tide of Arab nationalism and anti-Semitism.
In the 1950s, Montreal’s Jewish community was predominantly English-speaking, and Kattan observed the difficulty it had in integrating the new French-language immigrants. (It should be noted that the linguistic situation began to shift in the 1970s, with the community now solidly bilingual.) As a writer, Kattan has published some 30 books in French, including the semi-autobiographical novels Adieu, Babylone (1975; translated as Farewell, Babylon, 1976), Les Fruits arrachés (1977; translated as Paris Interlude, 1979) and La Fiancée promise (1983). Widely translated, his works examine such issues as cultural difference, exile, belonging and nostalgia for lost origins.
Kattan was an active member of the Cercle juif de langue française, created in the early 1950s by the Canadian Jewish Congress as the first French-language Jewish cultural association in Canada. He also founded, through the CJC, the Bulletin du Cercle juif, a newspaper for the French-speaking Jewish community. Kattan went on to write a literary column in Le Devoir, and for close to 25 years he headed the writing and publishing division of the Canada Council for the Arts. Over the course of his career, he has been awarded numerous distinctions, including the Order of Canada, the Ordre du Québec and the J. I. Segal Award for Literature.
Special thanks to the Museum of Jewish Montreal.
