Albert Memmi (1920–2020)

"I am dying through having turned back to look at my own self. It is forbidden to see oneself, and I have reached the end of discovering myself. God turned Lot's wife into a pillar of salt--is it possible for me to survive my contemplation of myself.?"

I had originally thought this was a memoir, but it is actually an autobiographical novel, the coming of age story of a Tunisian Jew. The story of Alexandre Mordekhai Benillouche starts in a poverty-stricken ghetto alley. His father is a leather-worker and his mother is an illiterate Berber. He is the oldest of many children. He does excel at school however, and he wins a scholarship to the French high school. At high school he is ashamed of both his poverty and his Jewishness. He sees himself as a combinations of Jewish, Arabic, African and European, but not accepted anywhere. He becomes one who feels at home nowhere, with no one. "I was doomed forever to be an outsider in my own native city." He is conflicted, and, "...saw clearly that my cutting myself off entirely from my own original background did not necessarily allow me to enter any other group." He viewed himself as on the fence "between two civilizations," as well as feeling caught between two classes. He thinks, "Faced with the impossible problem of joining the two parts of myself, I made up my mind to choose one of them. Between the East and the West, between the African superstitions and philosophy, between our dialect and the French language, I now had to choose."
The book moves us from Alexandre's somewhat idyllic (though poverty-stricken) childhood, through his conflicted years of schooling, and ends shortly after the end of WW II, during which he spent time in German work camps with other Tunisian Jews. This was an interesting and moving look into a culture I knew little about.

3 stars… (més)

This is a coming-of-age novel based on the life of the author. The youth, Alexandre Mordekhai Benillouche, is caught in the quandary of being a little wealthier in his poverty than the very poor around him in the Jewish ghetto in Tunis, and much smarter than his peers. His identity crisis of having a Bedouin mother and a Jewish father is expanded when he makes it into a middle-class school and is selected as the Jewish community's pick to continue school beyond his natural working age. Thrust into a wealthier cohort, and having violently rejected the trappings of Judaism, Alex swirls around shedding his immaturity and arrogance far too slowly and his educational and emergence into adulthood progresses. The insights in the book are almost too stark and painful, the book too realistic, the characters too close to life to be anything but hard reading. Fortunately many seem spared of those touched by Alex, and the reader is left wondering and waiting to see the evolution of Alex's personality and quest toward (away from?) self after the end of the book.… (més)