Two new titles from Stanford University Press: "Ninette of Sin Street" & "The Merchants of Oran: A Jewish Port at the Dawn of Empire"

Jacob Mundy Discussion

The Merchants of Oran weaves together the history of a Mediterranean port city with the lives of Oran's Jewish mercantile elite during the transition to French colonial rule. Through the life of Jacob Lasry and other influential Jewish merchants, Joshua Schreier tells the story of how this diverse and fiercely divided group both responded to, and in turn influenced, French colonialism in Algeria. Jacob Lasry and his cohort established themselves in Oran in the decades after the Regency of Algiers dislodged the Spanish in 1792, during a period of relative tolerance and economic prosperity. In newly-Muslim Oran, Jewish merchants found opportunities to ply their trades, dealing in both imports and exports. On the eve of France's long and brutal invasion of Algeria, Oran owed much of its commercial vitality to the success of these Jewish merchants. Under French occupation, the merchants of Oran maintained their commercial, political, and social clout. Yet by the 1840s, French policies began collapsing Oran's diverse Jewish inhabitants into a single social category, legally separating Jews from their Muslim neighbors and creating a racial hierarchy. Schreier argues that France's exclusionary policy of "emancipation," far more than older antipathies, planted the seeds of twentieth-century ruptures between Muslims and Jews. About the author: Joshua Schreier is Professor of History at Vassar College. He is the author of Arabs of the Jewish Faith (2010).

 

Published in Tunis in 1938, Ninette of Sin Street is one of the first works of Tunisian fiction in French. Ninette's author, Vitalis Danon, arrived in Tunisia under the aegis of the Franco-Jewish organization the Alliance Israélite Universelle and quickly adopted—and was adopted by—the local community. Ninette is an unlikely protagonist: Compelled by poverty to work as a prostitute, she dreams of a better life and an education for her son. Plucky and street-wise, she enrolls her son in the local school and the story unfolds as she narrates her life to the school's headmaster. Ninette's account is both a classic rags-to-riches tale and a subtle, incisive critique of French colonialism. That Ninette's story should still prove surprising today suggests how much we stand to learn from history, and from the secrets of Sin Street. This volume offers the first English translation of Danon's best-known work. A selection of his letters and an editors' introduction and notes provide context for this cornerstone of Judeo-Tunisian letters.

About the authors

Vitalis Danon (1897–1957), born in Edirne (Adrianople) in the Ottoman Empire, spent much of his life in Sfax, Tunisia. A novelist, teacher, and school director for the Alliance Israélite Universelle, he is best known for Ninette of Sin Street, his last work of fiction.

Lia Brozgal is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Univeristy of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Against Autobiography: Albert Memmi and the Production of Theory (2013) and co-editor of Being Contemporary: French Literature, Culture and Politics Today (2016). Her work has been recognized by the American Council of Learned Societies, the University of California Presidential Grants, and the Camargo Foundation.

Sarah Abrevaya Stein is Professor of History and Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies at Univeristy of California, Los Angeles. Her recent books include Extraterritorial Dreams: European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century (2016), Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria (2014), and Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History, 1700-1950 (2014).

Jane Kuntz holds a doctorate in French from the University of Illinois and is a translator of French-language fiction and nonfiction. Recent translations include A History of the Grandparents I Never Had, by Ivan Jablonka (2016); Islam and the Challenge of Civilization, by Abdelwahab Meddeb (2013); and Meddeb's experimental first novel, Talismano (2011). Kuntz lived and worked in Tunisia from 1975 until 1993 as a teacher and translator and as an educational adviser for AMIDEAST-Tunis.