For the Love of the Father

For the Love of the Father is about the effect of exile on a Jewish family from Tunisia as they immigrate to Paris, France. It is a gripping novel that tells a story at once intimate and universal. Universal in that it narrates the traumatic experience of displacement and of the challenges of resettlement in a new country, shared historically by many people, especially in postcolonial times as well as in today's refugee crisis. In Boukhobza’s novel, the Saada clan represents but one family of the nearly 500,000 Jews who were uprooted from their native countries of Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco in the 1950’s and 60’s; many of these families had roots there going back to before the Arab conquest in the 7th century. As many as 235,000 settled in France during this period; and, with their identities and stories deeply anchored in their North African and Judeo-Arabic cultural heritage, a unique character and flavor was added to the multicultural immigrant narratives to flourish in France in the late 1900’s.