Albert Memmi-André Schwarz-Bart, écrivains à vif

Abstract

Albert Memmi and André Schwarz-Bart, authors with universal reach, have both marked the history of Jewish culture, and first their respective communities, the Jews of Tunisia for one (and beyond the Sephardic community), the Jews of Europe for the other. Both discussed the fate of these communities: the first, with La Statue de sel (1953), through his character Alexandre Mordekhaï Benillouche, was able to address the question of the future of Jews in the Muslim countries of North Africa; the second, through the history of the Lévy family beyond the centuries in Le Dernier des Justes (1959), was able to develop a form that would do justice to the Shoah’s six million dead. Each has adopted a specific composition, and it is precisely this composition that we address in this article, establishing convergences but also irreducible differences between our two authors.

Keywords

• community
• tradition
• Jew
• antisemitism
• pogrom
• Shoah