Jacques Zibi

Jacques Zibi was born into a Sephardic family in Tunisia and later moved to France. He was especially concerned with questions relating to Sephardi identity and came to grips with such problems in a semiautobiographical book called Mâ. A gentle evocation of a Jewish mother who speaks in a Judeo-Arabic dialect, the book addresses the challenges of communication between mother and son, who has assimilated French language and culture. Another of Zibi’s books, Le Cinquième singe, was made into a film.