At half way between fiction and reality, the latest novel "Sépharade" by Eliette Abécassis, is an open invitation to tell the story and history of Moroccan Jews and their attachment to Morocco.

"It's a real novel that intermingles a love story and family saga, with its mystery, but also a document that takes us back several centuries of the history of Sephardis and Moroccan Jews through their music, cuisine, rituals and traditions, religion and relations with other communities, especially Muslims," the writer, of Jewish Moroccan decent, tells MAP.

Abécassis, whose novel has marked the literary start this fall in France, has opted for "the fictional world, very interesting to revisit this saga. It's a way to tell the "Great history" through a story," that runs over 450 pages.

The author of "La Répudiée", which draws its inspiration from a script she had written for the much successful movie, "Kadosh", does not stand for a historian, though she spent ten long years (the time she took to write her novel), in research on Sephardis, following their movements in different countries, notably Morocco.

A peaceful coexistence

“The Jews are extremely attached to the Kingdom (of Morocco), and even if they have left in masses towards the 50s, they somehow remained in Morocco,” Abécassis says. Her novel recalls the “very close” relationship of Jews and Muslims in Morocco, where “they have coexisted in a generally more peaceful way than elsewhere.”

“Morocco is a country of openness and hospitality where different communities found a way of living together, which is unique in the world,” she adds. Abécassis explains that she did not want to write “pure history” because the result would have been “too rational and cold” in comparison to the reality of the Sephardis whose life is full of “warmness, passion, emotion, sensations and flavour.”

From the outset, the choice of this literary genre was unavoidable to give a “human portrait” of the Sephardis through the character of a woman, her love story, her relation with her family and friends.

The novel tells the story of Esther Vital, a young Moroccan Jew who was born in Strasbourg, and who decides to get married, against the will of her parents, with a young Frenchman, of Moroccan Jewish origins.

The Vitals didn’t appreciate the fact that their future son-in-law, Charles Tolédano, is too liberal and less respectful to religion and traditions, which they want to preserve.

Henna and superstition

What his parents-in-law reproach most is his belonging to a family from Meknes (northern Morocco), which is not as “prestigious” as theirs, as the mother is from Essaouira (west) and the father is from Fès (north).

On the night of marriage, Esther discovers that the two families had been indeed linked in the past. Her grandmother, Sol, was even about to get married with the grandfather of her fiancé, but the cause of this “bad spell” that her rival, Yacot (Charles’ grandma) cast on her on the eve of marriage, foiled the alliance.

The author takes advantage of a small interval in the novel to tell the story of each character of her novel by means of sound documents, parents, grandparents, friends and family, ex-boyfriends. Each character is an incarnation of the (stereo) type of Jews.

Through this quest of origins, Eliette Abécassis explores with passion and erudition, the history of Moroccan Jews. Five centuries of Jewish stories file past since Inquisition and the expulsion from Andalusia, Spain by Isabelle the Catholic, to contemporary times, their rivalries, their cultures and their creed.

“It is a fiction, but there is also a side of autobiography, because this young lady (Esther) has a lot in common with me,” admits the author. “Like her, I am French, born in Strasbourg and my parents are from Morocco. There is a lot of me in her and a lot of her in me,” says Abécassis, whose father is philosopher Amand Abécassis, a renowned historian of the Jewish thought. Having grown up in Casablanca, he revisits his childhood and adolescence in his book “Rue des Synagogues”.

Beyond its autobiographical side of Sépharade, Eliette wanted to “create a true character that is exemplary of today’s women at all levels, love, family, femininity, identity…”

Transmitting the Sephardi culture

This philosophy scholar and full-time writer (about ten novels and three children books), wants to be “inside the Sephardi culture transmission chain,” and she knows it’s necessary to “transmit without smothering.”

If Abécassis has chosen to write as a means of transmission, others have chosen to express their attachment to their Moroccan Jewish culture in other terms: drawing, music, cinema. The choice of a humorist to be the fiancé of Esther in the novel wasn’t a fluky one. The author was referring to the new generation of Jewish artists of Moroccan origin and working in France (Gad el Maleh, Arthur…), who “haunted by their culture, use humour to speak about their families and their traditions.”

By this novel, Eliette Abécassis engraves, in writing, this attachment to Morocco and to its culture, and revives her own Moroccan part.

By Amal Tazi