Jacob, Menahem, and Mimoun: A Family Epic

by Marcel Benabou, Steven Rendall (Translator), Warren Motte Jr. (Introduction)

Overview

Benabou, a professor at the University of Paris, was born to a traditional Jewish family in Morocco, and returned to Meknes after an extended absence. His secular education in France, combined with his physical removal from his roots, gave him a bittersweet view of this past, as the world of his memories had ceased to exist. While examples of the "lost world of the shtetl" exist for Eatsern European Jewry, Benabou's memoir eloquently gives the reader the distinct flavor of a similar, yet different, experience.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780803261938
Publisher:	University of Nebraska Press
Publication date:	09/01/2001
Series:	Stages Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	4.60(w) x 7.50(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Marcel Bénabou is a professor of ancient history at the University of Paris and the permanent provisional secretary of Oulipo. Steven Rendall is the author of Distinguo: Reading Montaigne Differently. Warren Motte, a professor of French at the University of Colorado, is the author of several books including Playtexts: Ludics in Contemporary Literature (Nebraska 1995).

Editorial Reviews

A professor of ancient history at the University of Paris VII, Bnabou has authored a dozen books, including Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books (LJ 5/1/96). In these memoirs, he tells the history of a Moroccan Jewish community in the city of Meknes through the history of a family, particularly the lives of three of the author's great grandparents: Jacob, Menahem, and Mimoun. What Bnabou terms a family novel is in reality a family history mixed in with a great deal of reflection on the mysteries of memory, change, writing, and literary form. Having left at age 17 for Paris, where he has lived ever since, the author struggles to come to terms with childhood memories. He recalls with fondness daily life in the Jewish community in Meknes. Bnabou depicts his main characters not only as real but also as heroes, with the allusion to the epic. His references to his own experience of Jewish religious texts, however, are limited, compared with the abundance of references to secular literary tradition from Homer to Melville, Beaudelaire, and Flaubert. Bnabou shares with the reader of this family epic his experiences in struggling to choose the various writing techniques and material for his book while questioning whether this is the one book he has long imagined, the one he owes to himself and the world. Recommended for large collections.Ali Houissa, Cornell Univ., Ithaca, NY

Library Journal

A dry wit and surprising pathos infuse this "family epic," which turns out to be "merely" the telling of B‚nabou's failed attempt at creating his literary masterpiece. The Moroccan-born B‚nabou's book, at face a memoir, is, as University of Colorado professor Warren Motte says in his preface, impossible to categorize generically. B‚nabou, born in 1939, after turning away from a rabbinical calling, left Morocco for Paris, where he eventually became a professor at the University of Paris, and where, explains Motte, with his friend, the author Georges Perec, he was a member of Oulipo, or Workshop of Potential Literature, an experimentalist writers' group. B‚nabou describes the origins of "the Book" he first planned to write as a young student in his impressions of a Morocco that "stuck" to his memory þas if the bonds that attached me to that land had refused to break.þ B‚nabou had come to feel that Moroccan Judaism was misunderstood, a centuries-old world whose people, adventures, and accomplishments were unknown, unremembered. Hardly surprising, in the idea of a book, a family, and ethnographic history, he saw a path before him. But an endearing madness is revealed in B‚nabou's self-consuming obsession with method and materials. The reader shares his initial hopefulness as he details his younger self's ambitious plans for a family epic, founded in memory, supplemented by ever-growing mountains of scholarly documentation, what B‚nabou calls "Resources," and formally grounded in a literary model of the past that, ultimately, eludes him. In telling the stories of his three selected ancestors, Jacob, Menahem, and Mimoun, B‚nabou realized he was caught up in a process that had noreason to end. Eventually, the book seemed less and less important. Years having passed, B‚nabou notices that his youthful project has not disappeared. He's decided to let his book tell itself; he'll merely hitch himself to the story and go along for the ride in this artistic tour-de-force, by turns playful and serious.

Kirkus Reviews

"What we have before us is . . . the very book [Bénabou] was trying to write all along, in a language whose clarity, luminosity and beauty call to mind Proust, Leiris and Jabes. This is a book about memory and history, the way personal memory and family history intersect and depart from a collective, historical memory and experience of a specific people at a specific moment in time."—Review of Contemporary Fiction

Review of Contemporary Fiction

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