A Forerunner of Modern Sephardi Feminist Literature in French
Thanks to a new (and first ever) translation of the novel Mazaltob by Blanche Bendahan (originally published in France in 1930, and now by Brandeis University Press, $29.95), English readers are able to gain insight into an important time and place in Jewish history. That is Jewish North Africa in the 1920s, during French colonization—when many Jewish women began to question centuries old norms and expectations in what was traditionally an extremely patriarchal culture.
Blanche Bendahan (1893–1975) was born in Algeria to a Jewish family of Moroccan descent and moved to France shortly after she was born. A writer of poetry as well as fiction, Mazaltob, her first novel, won the prestigious literary prize from the Académie Française, establishing Bendahan on the French literary scene. The fact that she hailed from the Maghreb, but lived and was educated in France, positioned her as an in-between observer, critical yet attached, acutely aware of the differences of the two universes.
The novel’s main character, Mazaltob, is a young woman growing up in the Jewish quarter in Tetouan, Morocco in the early twentieth century. The Jewish quarter, or the Judería, is depicted as a place with “strangled horizons” and a “narrow sky” due to its walls and lack of open-air spaces, and the Judería also serves as a metaphor for the heroine’s emotional and intellectual suffocation. Mazaltob struggles to find her own voice (literally and figuratively) and agency to make independent decisions in a family, culture, and society where women were expected to blindly follow customs. At the outset of the story, our teenage heroine is in love with a boy, Jean, but is forced to marry José, “And Mazaltob, with eyes shut, is led to her destiny.” A much older man whose business brings him to Argentina, José abandons Mazaltob, leaving her wistful and childless, yearning only for Jean, who is from a mixed Jewish-Christian background, and lives in Europe, similar to Bendahan herself.
Mazaltob portrays the acute tension between tradition and modernity within a North African Jewish community, and although our heroine appears to meekly do what is expected, Bendahan shows her growing awareness of the limitations of her society. Due to her education in all things French in the Alliance Israélite Universelle school (which was operated in the French colonies and focused on “enlightening” the “primitive” non-Western Jews,) her eyes are opened to the world beyond the Judería. “Had it not been for France, I could neither read nor write,” she says, while the narrator, who we can assume is the voice of Bendahan, makes references to classical French authors. Mazaltob’s vistas are further expanded during her first trip abroad to Spain, described as “her first freedom!” Here with her Ashkenazi friends, she experiences sunshine, smiles, and joy, as well as gardens filled with fragrances, roses, lilacs and geraniums “crisp as a child’s cheeks!”
As the characters move through life cycle events such as marriage, birth, death, holidays, and other daily rituals and traditions unique to the Jewish experience in the Judéria, the narrator interjects and explains it to the presumably non-Jewish reader. In this the novel serves a specific didactic purpose. (As the translators note, everything Jewish was in fashion in France in the 1920s which also accounts for the author’s use of common orientalist descriptive tropes and archaic stereotypes of the day.) Furthermore, misogyny and subjugation of women is exposed through the ongoing narrative commentary, although affectionately and with plenty of humor and irony. The narrator often interjects, giving the reader a point of view of someone at once an insider and outsider, like Bendahan, as in describing Passover preparations: “Nothing must elude the lady of the house, who rules over chaos, brandishing her spiderweb brush like a military banner.” The epitaph on Mazaltob’s mother’s grave pushes the narrative into pure social satire in a long tally of self-sacrifice, typical of the women in the Judería: “Between her fifteenth and her thirty-eight years, she kneaded more than ten thousand kilos of bread…prepared more than eight thousand lunches and dinners, spent seventeen thousand hours making preserves…” and the list goes on.
A novel whose characters live at the crossroads of four different linguistic and cultural universes—Ladino or Judeo- Spanish, French, Arabic, and Hebrew—it underscores the rich and multilayered universe of the Sephardim of Morocco. If more of this linguistic metissage had been left intact by the translators, especially in the lyrical passages and in everyday expressions used in dialogue, the reader would have been encouraged to engage more deeply with the text.
Nonetheless, the collaboration of scholars Yaëlle Azagury and Frances Malino yields not only access for the English reader to a tender and at times lyrical coming of age story of a young Sephardic heroine, but its historical introduction (by Malino), annotated text, and supplemental essay of literary analysis (by Azagury) presents readers with a skillfully contextualized literary work. With this edition, we are able to appreciate fully how unique the novel was for its time, and why it is relevant for anyone interested in understanding how the awakening of a feminist sensibility took shape in this distinct cultural and historical climate.
nina b. lichtenstein is the founder and director of Maine Writers Studio and the author of Out of North Africa: Sephardic Women’s Voices and Body: My Life in Parts.
