La Hara, Tunis: Of Wings and Footprints

From JSTOR

The French writer Hubert Haddad, born in Tunis, grew up between the Jewish quarter of the old city, La Hara, and the beaches of La Goulette before his family moved to Paris. In this short memoir from the 2023 collection A Jewish Childhood in the Muslim Mediterranean: A Collection of Stories, curated by Leïla Sebbar (University of California Press, 2023), he looks back on that childhood.

A mixed heritage

Many roots

Haddad describes how, over the centuries, North Africa's Jews, including those whose ancestors had lived there since ancient times and those who came from Spain, lived among and blended with their Muslim neighbors, sharing tastes, music, superstitions, and customs. His own family carried many strands: a deeply Arabized father's side, and a grandmother from Constantine in Algeria, a bilingual storyteller who could not read or write.

What he kept

Women, food, and music

What stayed with him most, he writes, were the faces of women, Muslim and Jewish, grandmothers, aunts, and neighbors. From them he learned to make couscous with its many side dishes, mloukhia, and holiday sweets like makroud and zlabia. Jews and Muslims, he recalls, shared the same love of Arab music.

Return

The good old days

On a later visit to La Goulette, an old man passing by greeted him with “Ya hasra!”, the good old days, as if he recognized him. The moment captures the nostalgia that runs through the whole collection.

Read the chapter free at JSTOR →

This summary was written by JIMENA and is based on “La Hara, Tunis: Of Wings and Footprints” by Hubert Haddad, translated by Jane Kuntz, in A Jewish Childhood in the Muslim Mediterranean: A Collection of Stories, curated by Leïla Sebbar (University of California Press, 2023), licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.