We specialize in hard to find items
All Categories
*Price and Stocks may change without prior notice
*Packaging of actual item may differ from photo shown
- Electrical items MAY be 110 volts.
- 7 Day Return Policy
- All products are genuine and original
About The Pillar Of Salt
Product Description Originally published in 1955, The Pillar of Salt the semi-autobiographical novel about a young boy growing up in French colonized Tunisia. To gain access to privileged French society, he must reject his many identities – Jew, Arab, and African. But, on the eve of World War II, he is forced to come to terms with his loyalties and his past From Publishers Weekly Alexandre Mordekhai Benillouche, Memmi's young hero and narrator, is a Jewish native of French-colonized Tunisia. His rich description of ``the almond bitterness of blackened calfskins'' in his father's tanning shop, among other things, betrays Memmi's nostalgia for his own childhood in a Tunis ghetto. By the eve of his bar mitzvah, however, Alexandre confesses to an acrid ``distance between myself and the tribe.'' Questioning the Judaism of his family and community, he finds it ``an incoherent mixture of Berber superstitions . . . and rites that could not satisfy the smallest spiritual need.'' An exceptional student, Alexandre forsakes tradition for an intellectual life. But unable to assimilate the ways of his wealthy, gentile classmates, he feels isolated at school. Memmi's ( The Colonizer and the Colonized ) long-out-of-print semiautobiographical novel powerfully distinguishes itself through its unblinking examination of the contradictions that thwart even Alexandre's most altruistic ambitions. After volunteering to work in a labor camp during WW II, Alexandre discovers that the class and ethnic distinctions haunting him continued within the camp. Ultimately, only exile and fiction writing--``mastering . . . life by recreating it''--can avert despair. Yet like Lot's wife, whose backward glance turned her into salt, Alexandre's existentialist self-revision only lands him in the prison of his own solitude. Copyright 1992 Cahners Business Information, Inc. Review 'His father an Italian Jew, his mother a Berber, Benillouche struggles on the tattered fringe of the Tunisian ghetto for the very air he breathes. . . . A mature, thoughtful book.' – The New York Times"Told with clarity of vision, a passionate sense of justice, and a warm heart." – New York Herald Tribune "In the Celine-Sartre-Camus tradition of the contemporary French novel of despair, this autobiographical narrative has maturity, stylistic grace, and purpose ... A thoughtful, perceptive work." – Library Journal About the Author Albert Memmi is the author of many books, including The Colonizer and the Colonized (also available from Beacon Press) and Arab and Jew.
