Memories (out) of place: Franco-Judeo-Algerian autobiographical writing, 1995–2010

Abstract

This article examines the construction of memory through relation to lost Jewish places and spaces in Algeria in recent French-language autobiographical writing of Albert Bensoussan, Alice Cherki, Annie Cohen, Jean Cohen, Attica Guedj, Benjamin Stora and Daniel Timsit. Published between 1995 and 2010, these works represent a duel interrogation of memory through evocation of place: first, remembering the ways Jews carved out space for themselves at home, at school, in spaces of leisure and sacred spaces, second, where Jews situate themselves given the lack of Jewish presence in Algeria today, and the ways the community gets forgotten in its present-day exile in France and Israel. Jewish writers retrospectively relocate themselves to Algeria in an effort to maintain their position in between Algerian Muslims and pieds-noirs, forever attached to both, but reducible to neither.