Eliette Abecassis, Sepharade
2009, Albin Michel Fiction, French

Reviewed by M. Eliany

Eliette  Abecassis  knits a love tale, contemporary,  as well  as, ancestral, the tale of Moroccans and Sephardi Jews, vacillating between  stereotypes, intentionally and intentionally, stretching limits of facts and  truth, to make a story, anchored in the real, in a pursuit of her heroes’  identity, one’s identity, one’s self, free of constraints (p. 239-246), yet  subject to endless affinities, overt and hidden, conscious and unconscious, and  subject to misunderstandings and contradictions, in which rebellion and  conformity are blurred (p.347).
Eliette Abecassis tells her tale of the Sephardim, aware  there must be different perceptions of it, as in the case of multiple  co-existing realities (p.265-266). It is a touching tale of a person,  male, female, discovering the human and universal in himself, herself, through  shaping encounters with the ‘other’, in love and hate, in a course of a  lifetime, in which, a memory of historical dimensions in contained.
Eliette Abecassis deserves much respect for digging deep  into herself, her heritage, our colorful heritage, cherishing its splendor, in  spite of its entrapments, to make us aware who we are, as individuals, as a  community, to love ourselves as we are, in our strengths and weaknesses.
Read this book and spread the word that it is, perhaps, a contemporary  amulet, to save us from losing a sense of who we are.