The Pillar of Salt

'I must have been about ten years old and already in the fourth grade when I suddenly ceased to believe in my father...'

Alexandre Benillouche is born in the Jewish Ghetto of Tunis into a poor, proud family. Though his ailing father harangues him to drop out of school and work, Alexandre dreams of studying philosophy in France, and his fragile self-worth is bound up in trying to fit in with his wealthy European classmates. Caught between Jewish, Arab, Tunisian, African and French identities, we follow Benillouche to the precipice of adulthood, but when a second World War breaks out in Europe, Alexandre and his whole community find themselves caught up in something else...

In The Pillar of Salt Memmi tells the story of an idyllic childhood in a colony careening through the early twentieth century in beautiful, heartfelt writing.