"I am dying through having turned back to look at my own self. It is forbidden to see oneself, and I have reached the end of discovering myself. God turned Lot's wife into a pillar of salt--is it possible for me to survive my contemplation of myself.?"

I had originally thought this was a memoir, but it is actually an autobiographical novel, the coming of age story of a Tunisian Jew. The story of Alexandre Mordekhai Benillouche starts in a poverty-stricken ghetto alley. His father is a leather-worker and his mother is an illiterate Berber. He is the oldest of many children. He does excel at school however, and he wins a scholarship to the French high school. At high school he is ashamed of both his poverty and his Jewishness. He sees himself as a combinations of Jewish, Arabic, African and European, but not accepted anywhere. He becomes one who feels at home nowhere, with no one. "I was doomed forever to be an outsider in my own native city." He is conflicted, and, "...saw clearly that my cutting myself off entirely from my own original background did not necessarily allow me to enter any other group." He viewed himself as on the fence "between two civilizations," as well as feeling caught between two classes. He thinks, "Faced with the impossible problem of joining the two parts of myself, I made up my mind to choose one of them. Between the East and the West, between the African superstitions and philosophy, between our dialect and the French language, I now had to choose."
The book moves us from Alexandre's somewhat idyllic (though poverty-stricken) childhood, through his conflicted years of schooling, and ends shortly after the end of WW II, during which he spent time in German work camps with other Tunisian Jews. This was an interesting and moving look into a culture I knew little about.

3 stars ( )

This is a coming-of-age novel based on the life of the author. The youth, Alexandre Mordekhai Benillouche, is caught in the quandary of being a little wealthier in his poverty than the very poor around him in the Jewish ghetto in Tunis, and much smarter than his peers. His identity crisis of having a Bedouin mother and a Jewish father is expanded when he makes it into a middle-class school and is selected as the Jewish community's pick to continue school beyond his natural working age. Thrust into a wealthier cohort, and having violently rejected the trappings of Judaism, Alex swirls around shedding his immaturity and arrogance far too slowly and his educational and emergence into adulthood progresses. The insights in the book are almost too stark and painful, the book too realistic, the characters too close to life to be anything but hard reading. Fortunately many seem spared of those touched by Alex, and the reader is left wondering and waiting to see the evolution of Alex's personality and quest toward (away from?) self after the end of the book. ( )

This is the story of a Tunisian Jew of French culture, of finding his identity (which it seems he doesn't actually figure out), about the second world war. I enjoyed reading it, but not much. I didn't find in it anything I haven't read elsewhere. ( )

'The Pillar of Salt' is the thinly fictionalized autobiography of Memmi, in the guise of Alexandre Benillouche, a Jewish inhabitant of the poorer quarters of Tunis. It covers his rather confused development from child to young adult. As a child he must comes to terms with awareness of what it means to be Jewish (or indeed 'different'). Subsequently he must cope with other factors in his life that isolate him from his community: his intellectualism, his rejection of religion, his shyness with girls. The whole book is filled with Alexandre's struggles with identity and isolation. His instincts pull him both towards and away from the herd, and he never manages to fit in. Even in a labour camp, caught on the fringes of the holocaust in World War II, he is unable to assert his jewish identiy because he has spent so much time shedding it. It is a wonderful memoir of struggling to find identity while growing up, and finishes on a note that is both rebellious and melancholy in equal measure. The writing is dense, and Memmi doesn't give his life much of a narrative flow, so some may struggle with this book. However, I found his writing and observation of minutiae captivating, and found recognition and empathy for his plight. A fantastic, if sobering, read.

This bildungsroman charts the childhood and adolesence of Alexandre Mordekhai Benillouche, a native African Jew growing up in Tunis during French colonial rule. It's filled with his struggles to find an identity and deal with his loneliness as he does this.

The first section deals with his childhood and family, tracing his gradual realisations about the world and his family's place in it - their poverty and their otherness due to their race. He records brilliantly the moments of clarity that come during childhood as we gradually start to piece together the world around us and his descriptions of the world in which Alexandre lived in made it easy to isee the world through his eyes.

The second section begins with Alexandre starting study at a lycée on a scholarship, wanting to make his way in the world through intellectual brilliance and rejecting his family's way of life. It chronicles his experiments at trying to fit in with the mostly middle class children he studies with and his discovery that, ultimately, he can't and doesn't want to fit in with them any more than with his family. I actually really enjoyed all his angsting in this section - I could relate to being a bookish, shy teenager struggling to work out who to be, how to relate to people and what to think. Alexandre's struggles are exacerbated though by the fact that he is stuck between worlds: east and west, poor and middle class, African and European.

I found the third section less satisfying than the first two, possibly because it's slightly confusing chronologically to begin with and feels a bit fragmented. Ultimately, as in any bildungsroman, it's about how events force him to face the ideals he has taken on and resolve as best he can the ideas he has been struggling with as he grows up.

I thought the first two sections of this were fantastic in the way that they portrayed such personal experiences in growing up in an environment very different from mine. Despite the slight frustrations I found with the last section, overall I enjoyed this read and its insights into growing up as an Arab Jew in pre-Independence Tunisia. ( )