Knafo Setton succeeds here with he first
novel in describing the world of the Jewish Sephardim in Morocco and most precisely the world of
women in Judaism.
The novel starts by menstruation, and by doing so, the novel marks its field. This is done very mildly, and probably in the way Moroccan women feel their period.
Very quickly we are thrown into the
life of Brit Lek, born in Fez and emigrating with her parent into small town USA, then coming back at the age of 17 because of the wish of her dead mother that she visit the grave of Suleika. Suleika is a
mythological woman for the Jews of Morocco, executed in 1834 for not agreeing to convert to Islam. Many different versions, luding the version of Brit, to this history are brought in this book. All this happens in a very tense period of Moroccan Jewry, 1969, just after the six days war, when many of the Jews have already left the country for Israel or France or other parts of the globe. And just a few days before most of the Jews in Morocco disappeared from the small and big cities, with just a tiny community concentrating in Casablanca.
Brit Lek falls in
love with her older/masculine twin, her uncle Gaby. He feels the same, but what used to be common among Jews, an uncle marrying his niece, is now a forbidden love, not able to come to fruition. Gaby, a man of many women, and one marriage, ended by the suicide of his
wife, is considered guilty of the death of his wife, Estrella. Estrella is one the most vivid secondary characters here, and asks from her husband to beat her everyday, or else she can't make love to him or be his wife. Gaby can't do so, and in despair she burns herself in flames.
I liked very much the fact that there is no idealization of the life between Jews and Muslims in Morocco, as is often the case in books of this subject. Neither are the Muslims depicted as Jew-killers and haters as in other books. "The Road To Fez" describes a complicated relationship between these two groups, but it was always the Jews who had to suffer from changing of times and upheavals. Brit's father describes convincingly the big pogrom in Fez at the beginning of the 20th century, and how his mother was saved thanks to the Pasha, and all her family killed. That's why he decides to leave Morocco when he is older, and why, when he comes to the states, he says he is a "Catholic from Paris".
This is a very richly textured novel, not one very easy to describe in a few hundred words, and most of it reads as an open dream. I have tried here just to open your appetite to read one of the best novels I have read in the last 3 years and probably one of the best first novels I ever came through in my life. I expect Ruth Knafo Setton will become one the best writers and most famous writers in this century.
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