The Reporter
During the past few decades, scholars and feminists has been recovering work written by Jewish women during the first half of the twentieth century. The majority of these books are from the Ashkenazic world, which makes the new edition of the novel Mazaltob by Bendahan, translated and edited by Yaëlle Azagury and Frances Malino, even more welcome since it offers a view of Sephardic culture.
Jewish Book Council
Mazaltob is 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.”
Abrevaya Stein
English-language readers will rejoice at this translation of Bendahan’s coming-of-age story, set in northern Morocco at the turn of the century and following the dreams and travails of a Jewish young woman who chafes at the constraints that society places upon her. This marvelous annotated translation restores to us the forgotten words of an award-winning Jewish woman writer—and introduces us to a young, female Jewish protagonist whose sexual and spiritual desires are evocative and timely. With artful, informed introductory words by Azagury and Malino, Mazaltob is a crucial compliment and counterpoint to Albert Memmi’s The Pillar of Salt: it is what students of French, North African, and Jewish culture have been thirsting for.
First Rough Draft of History
It is a little gem of a book, not a historical curiosity but something to be read for all the good reasons you read a novel.”
Hey Alma
This is a poignant coming-of-age novel which explores themes of feminism, decolonization, diaspora, orientalism and the struggle between modernity and tradition. The text is rich and lush in its descriptions of North African Jewish life and customs; it’s also slippery in its point of view, meandering between narrators and voices in a way reminiscent of fellow modernist feminist writer Virginia Woolf.”
Deborah Starr
A beautiful, poetic novel, Mazaltob offers rich description of the lives of Jewish women in early twentieth-century Tetouan, while also reflecting upon the early twentieth-century French intellectual milieu of its author, Bendahan. The fluid translation makes the work of this important but long-overlooked Sephardic writer a pleasure to read in English.
Elizabeth Graver
A fascinating portrait of a young Moroccan Sephardi woman as she navigates the ever-shifting ground between tradition and modernity, East and West, self and other, obligation and desire. Stylistically bold, culturally rich, by turns comic and wrenching, this polyphonic novel is both historically important and, in its new translation, a gift for our current times.”
Jessica M. Marglin
Bendahan’s masterpiece—a stunning exploration of Jewishness, feminism, and modernity in Morocco—deserves to be read far and wide. Malino’s excellent biographical introduction and Azagury’s fascinating literary analysis beautifully frame their translation. A delight and a triumph!”
