Led by BJ members Jennifer Sylvor and Carole Balin, the long-running Israeli Authors Discussion Group is expanding its reading selection to include authors from across the globe. For this year, we will read important books of Jewish interest by authors from global Jewish literatures, in addition to Israel.
We look forward to welcoming new readers along with our beloved regulars for rich and thought-provoking discussion.
We meet on the third Thursday of the month.
In this session, we’ll discuss Mazaltob: A Novel, by Blanche Bendahan. Raised in the Judería or Jewish quarter of Tetouan, Morocco, at the turn of the 20th-century, sixteen-year-old Mazaltob finds herself betrothed to José, an uncouth man from her own community who has returned from Argentina to take a wife. Mazaltob, however, is in love with Jean, who is French, half-Jewish, and a free spirit. In this classic of North African Jewish fiction, Blanche Bendahan evokes the two compelling forces tearing Mazaltob apart in her body and soul: her loyalty to the Judería and her powerful desire to follow her own voice and find true love.
Yaëlle Azagury and Frances Malino provide the first English translation of this modern coming-of-age tale, awarded a prize by the Académie Française in 1930, and analyze the ways in which Mazaltob, with its disconcerting blend of ethnographic details and modernist experimentation, is the first of its genre—that of the feminist Sephardi novel.
