Rue de la Grande Chaumière

Description

The poignant testimonies of five women are at the center of this novel: Debbie, a Sephardic Jew, disturbed by her union with a Catholic; Elsa, suffering from the absence of her parents caught up in the whirlwind of a life of parvenus; Solène, frustrated by her marriage of reason; Teresa, marked by the tipping of her companion into Islamic fundamentalism; Imane, a Muslim woman married to a Jew, who asserts her identity at the risk of her life.
Whatever the origin of the heroines, some haunted by the Shoah, others obsessed by their experiences, they are all in search of themselves.
The author mixes reality with fiction, narrative with reflection, in order to reconstitute the puzzle of his own identity, evoking in passing his childhood in Meknes, his youth in Haifa, his life in Tel Aviv and his move to Paris. In his bookshop-cafe - a place of openness and encounters located in the heart of the Latin Quarter - the narrator observes the people who make his space a lay parish, and of him a confessor or a pseudo-psychoanalyst.