eSefarad Noticias del Mundo Sefaradi
The American Sephardi Federation presents:
Rediscovering Mazaltob
Book Presentation by the editors Yaëlle Azagury and Frances Malino and discussion (Q&A).
Wednesday, 29 May at 6:00PM EST
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Tickets: Complimentary RSVP/Suggested Donation
Blanche Bendahan was born in Oran, Algeria on 26 November 1893, to a Jewish family of Moroccan-Spanish origin. Shortly after her birth, her family moved to France, where she was educated in the French system. Bendahan published her first collection of poetry, La voile sur l’eau, in 1926 and then her first novel, Mazaltob, in 1930. Mazaltob, which won an award from the Académie Française, portrays a North African woman in Tetouan, Morocco, and the oppression to which she is subjected by the patriarchal society in which she lives. Eleanor Foa, writing for the Jewish Book Council, describes Mazaltob “psychologically astute, highlighting clashes—of traditions and of values—that are incredibly modern. The history of this little known corner of the Jewish world where ‘the Sephardim view themselves as aristocrats’ is fascinating and moving. Bendahan was ahead of her time as a feminist yet of the moment as a novelist. She had one foot in twentieth century European culture and another in the rituals and rhythms of ancient Sephardic Jewry.”
Yaëlle Azagury grew up in Tangier, Morocco and moved to Paris, France to study French and English Literature. She graduated from the University of Paris, and has a Diplome de l’Institut d’Etudes Politiques (Paris) and a Ph.D in French Literature from Columbia University in New York. Yaëlle taught Literature-Humanities at Columbia University, French and English Literature at Barnard College and the State University of New York (Purchase College). Her articles and book reviews have appeared in academic and non-academic publications such as Lilith, the Jerusalem Report, the Jerusalem Post, the Washington Post, the New York Times and the New York Times Book Review. Yaëlle writes about art, literature and culture, primarily French, Sephardi and North African.
Frances Malino is the Sophia Moses Robison Professor of Jewish Studies and History Emerita at Wellesley College. She is author of The Sephardic Jews of Bordeaux: Assimilation and Emancipation in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France (1978) and A Jew in the French Revolution: The Life of Zalkind Hourwitz(1996) and co-editor of Essays in Modern Jewish History: a Tribute to Ben Halpern (1982), The Jews in Modern France(1985), Profiles in Diversity: Jews in a Changing Europe (1998), and Voices of the Diaspora: Jewish Women Writing in the New Europe (2005). Her current project is titled Teaching Freedom: Jewish Sisters in Muslim Lands. In 2012 she was named Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes académiques by the French Ministry of Education. Malino is a co-founder and current President of Digital Heritage Mapping, whose flagship initiative is the Diarna Geo-Museum of North African and Middle Eastern Jewish Life.
