Albert Memmi (1920–2020)
Autore di The Colonizer and the Colonized
Sull'Autore
Born in Tunisia, a Jew among Moslems, an Arab among Europeans, Albert Memmi is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Paris.
Opere di Albert Memmi
The Desert: Or, the Life and Adventures of Jubair Wali al-Mammi (Middle East Literature In Translation) (1989) 10 copie
La estatua de sal 2 copie
Kip od soli 1 copia
Journe Scientifique 1 copia
The Two Answers of the Colonized 1 copia
Who is an Arab Jew? 1 copia
Opere correlate
Etichette
Informazioni generali
- Data di nascita
- 1920-12-15
- Data di morte
- 2020-05-22
- Sesso
- male
- Nazionalità
- Tunisia
- Luogo di nascita
- Tunis, Tunisia
- Luogo di morte
- Neuilly-sur-Seine, Paris, France
- Luogo di residenza
- Tunis, Tunisia
Paris, France - Istruzione
- Lycée Carnot de Tunis
University of Algiers
Sorbonne, Paris, France - Attività lavorative
- novelist
poet
sociologist - Organizzazioni
- Sorbonne
- Premi e riconoscimenti
- Grand prix de la francophonie de l'Académie française (2004)
Utenti
Recensioni
Liste
Premi e riconoscimenti
Potrebbero anche piacerti
Autori correlati
Statistiche
- Opere
- 44
- Opere correlate
- 1
- Utenti
- 1,058
- Popolarità
- #24,346
- Voto
- 3.8
- Recensioni
- 8
- ISBN
- 104
- Lingue
- 8
- Preferito da
- 3
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… (altro)