An account of what it was like to be Algerian, Jewish, and French at a time when those “identities” were fighting words.

Denis Guénoun is professor emeritus of French literature at the Université Paris-Sorbonne (Paris-IV). A playwright and essayist, he has published numerous books on theater and philosophy, including Actions et acteurs, Livraison et délivrance, and Hypothèses sur l'Europe, which has been published in English as About Europe: Philosophical Hypotheses.

Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature and the codirector of the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley.

Ann Smock is professor emeritus of French at the University of California, Berkeley. She has translated two books by Maurice Blanchot and a memoir by Sarah Kofman. Her own most recent work is What Is There to Say?

William Smock, a documentary filmmaker, has translated scholarly articles and a chapter in The Foucault Reader. He is the author/illustrator of The Bauhaus Ideal Then and Now.

Susan Gilson Miller:
Guénoun has written a riveting account of his larger-than life father that brings into sharp focus the last chapters of Jewish life in French Algeria in the 1960s.... A remarkable memoir.

Marcus Barnett:
A Semite is an evocative work imparting to the reader that Jews and Arabs can and should, to induce the recent slogan, refuse to be enemies with each other. This wondrously written portrait of a cry is a resource of hope in our own envisaging of beautiful tomorrows.

Olivia Harrison:
[A] moving family biography.

An expert translation

[Guenoun] is a extraordinarily talented and creative Algerian born author and playwright and professor of French literature. Enticing... spellbinding... There is a musical rhythm to Guenoun's writing; a jazzy beat that feels like improvisation.

Drawing on his own recollections as well as documents that offer an official chronicle and letters and journals that pour out personal desires, Guénoun explores the complications of family and identity.

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, philosopher, author of Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry:
This 'fable,' if I can call it that, is unmistakably magnificent, the form—an inquiry—both rigorous and moving, the historical/political overview impeccably accurate. This is 'our' story, with its mistakes, its blind spots, its equivocations, its truth, with nothing omitted: families and the bonds of love, the teaching profession, an almost hallucinatory grasp of certain occasions, steadfastness, chance occurrences. Of all the things people have written about 'France,' this is the most just.

Penelope Deutscher, Northwestern University:
This is a complex engagement with the unique temporal, linguistic, and embodied qualities of family and cultural heritage. It is philosophically important and politically engaging, speaking to the necessities of repetition and distortion in the accuracies of memory and historical truth. It is also a delicate prose work of exceptional literary quality, an important contribution to contemporary studies in trauma and testimony and to the field of autobiography.