Mazaltob

Blanche Bendahan (1893–1975) was born in Algeria to a Jewish family of Moroccan descent and moved to France shortly after she was born. She was a writer of poetry as well as fiction. Mazaltob, which won an award from the Académie Française, was her first novel. Yaëlle Azagury is a writer, literary scholar, and critic. She was a lecturer in French and Francophone studies at Barnard College and a lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is a native of Tangier, Morocco. Frances Malino is the Sophia Moses Robison Professor of Jewish Studies and History Emerita at Wellesley College. In 2012 she was named Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the French Ministry of Education.

“This is a poignant coming-of-age novel which explores themes of feminism, decolonization, diaspora, orientalism and the struggle between modernity and tradition. The text is rich and lush in its descriptions of North African Jewish life and customs; it’s also slippery in its point of view, meandering between narrators and voices in a way reminiscent of fellow modernist feminist writer Virginia Woolf.”

• Prefaceby Yaëlle Azagury and Frances MalinoAcknowledgementsIntroductionby Frances MalinoA Note on the TranslationMap of the North of Africa and the Mediterranean (1910) Mazaltob by Blanche BendahanChapter 1Chapter 2Chapter 3Chapter 4Chapter 5Chapter 6Chapter 7Chapter 8Chapter 9Chapter 10Chapter 11Chapter 12Chapter 13Chapter 14Chapter 15Mazaltob and the Rise of the Modern Sephardi Novelby Yaëlle AzaguryEndnotesFurther Reading