The Pillar of Salt

Alexandre Mordekhai Benillouche, a poor Jewish boy from the old quarter of colonial Tunis, comes of age torn three ways between his Berber-Jewish origins, the Arab-Muslim city around him and the French education that promises escape and delivers exile. Memmi maps the real Tunis: the cramped Jewish hara, the Arab medina and its souks, the European lycée of the Ville Nouvelle, the synagogue, and the shadow of the Second World War, when the German occupation drives Tunisia's Jews into forced-labour camps.

The father

The Jewish quarter (the hara)

Childhood

In the narrow, crowded hara, Alexandre is born into a poor family, his father a harness-maker bent over his leather in a dim shop. Memmi sets the boy's first world in the real Jewish quarter of Tunis, its poverty and its warmth the ground he will spend the rest of the book learning to leave and grieving.

The childhood chapters

explicit Alexandre grows up in the hara, the real poor Jewish quarter on the edge of the Tunis medina, among the artisans and the crowding the book describes; sited in that quarter.

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