Moulinville, Sfax: Nothing about Childhood

From JSTOR

The novelist Chochana Boukhobza was born in Sfax, Tunisia, like seven generations of her family before her, and left for Paris with her parents when she was four. In this memoir from A Jewish Childhood in the Muslim Mediterranean: A Collection of Stories, curated by Leïla Sebbar (University of California Press, 2023), she writes about a childhood she barely remembers and a homeland her family never stopped carrying.

Leaving Sfax

Running in Paris

Her parents did not want to leave. They loved their neighborhood, its people, its olives and fresh fish. In Paris, they felt that time ran faster and life was harder: there was no real sun, the city was enormous, and, as they kept saying, unless you kept running you were lost.

Tunisia in Paris

The forest in the eye of the lion

The family kept Tunisia alive at home. Her grandfather wore his baggy trousers and hat around the apartment, and the table held couscous, pkaila, hlalem soup, and homemade harissa from peppers dried on the balcony. In their first week, her mother searched all of Paris for a live chicken so her grandfather, once a ritual slaughterer in Sfax, could prepare it for Shabbat. As her father liked to say, the lion left the forest, but the forest is still in the eye of the lion.

Belonging

From Sfax

Boukhobza writes that she cannot recover what her eyes saw or her skin felt. But Sfax draws closer every time she speaks the Arabic phrases of her childhood to her own children. “I'm from there,” she writes. “From Sfax.”

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This summary was written by JIMENA and is based on “Moulinville, Sfax: Nothing about Childhood” by Chochana Boukhobza, 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.