Degracia

Known primarily for autobiographical evocations of her life and times, Gracia Cohen, known by her pen name Degracia, was born in Fès, Morocco, into a family of Sephardic landowners. The sudden, tragic death of her fiancé radically changed the course of her life and, for some years, her religious practices. An affair with a married man left her pregnant, which precipitated her departure from Morocco and her initial residence in France. In 1940, she married Pierre-Louis Cassou, a Catholic military man with whom she would eventually return to Morocco. In 1942, at great personal risk, she traveled to Marseille to recover the child she had earlier placed in an orphanage. Her writing career was delayed by her duties as the mother of seven children, but with the publication of Mariage mixte in 1968, Degracia became Morocco’s first francophone Jewish woman writer.