This is an excellent resource for those students who study french and are reading Sherazada in literature or grammer classes. It also is a wonderful book.

I truly enjoyed Sherazade. I read it in a North African women's literature class in college. . . it opened my eyes up to a totally different culture. Sherazade is a young woman searching for her true identity, attempting to reconcile her past with the present. I recommend this book for any one who is interested in reading about growing up in a different culture.

Having spent my childhood years (1976-81, when I was 5-10) in Algeria, I rushed out to get this handsome book of sixteen essays by Francophone writers reflecting on their own childhood spent in Algeria. Having read the book in one sitting, I have to confess a certain disappointment. While several of the essays are quite good and evocative, a number suffer from a kind of overwrought impressionism. The selections are to be commended for the wide range of contributors (male, female, Arab, Kabyle, Jewish, pied noir), and mainly focus on the era from the end of the first World War to independence.

My favorite essays were Malek Alloula's recounting of the springtime joy of tekouk; Albert Bensoussan's straightforwardly telling of getting lost in the market and making friends with an Arab girl who naturally disappeared to him at age eleven; Roger Dadoun's celebration of cuisine and a trip to the bathhouse; Fatima Gallaire's adventures in the house with her little brother; and Mohamed Kacimi-el-Hassani's essay on the arrival of independence and the confusion it caused in he and his classmates. The other essays do have merits scattered amongst them, most notably a solid vision of how multiethnic and multireligious Algeria has been in the past, but too often the authors forego the opportunity to present a straightforward reflection on their childhood in favor of a hindsighted metaphorical or allegorical scene. Still, those interested in Algeria would be well advised to spend the few hours it takes to read the entire work and find their own touchpoints.

Camus was right: only the sun has been kind to Algeria. Geography, demography and history have not. The thread of green with which desert yields to sea was originally named Ifriqqiya, whence comes "Africa." (Below the Sahel was "Niger.") Over the last 2,000 years its many cultures were side-by-side civilizations speaking in common the tongue of the marketplace but otherwise each their own. Among those cultures were the pre-Muslim Berbers (themselves of many tribes), Jews who condensed over the millennia like dewbeads on a thread, Arabs who arrived with the Qur'an and remained to trade. A handful of Christians remained from Roman times and many more coattailed the reconquista seeking a quick dirham. And finally the French, nominally Christian bourgeois but culturally Imperial Bourgeois. When the Algerians exploded after Dienbienphu showed colonies need not submit, the French left, but only after a ghastly fight. The political scirocco still blows and headlines in red tell of it.

How could one possibly have a happy childhood in a place like this?

A book with the right editor can illuminate the souls politicians and economists forget. The Algeria that Leïla Sebbar finds was a courtyard more than a country, and in it people reconciled their differences and got on with their lives. That's not what the history books say, but historians, too, know how sensation sells.

Ms. Sebbar is an Algerio-French professor and writer who has written of her ancestral land for many French literary reviews. Here she has revived a niche of the Algerian literary world quite popular in the 1950s that withered during the Algerian war: childhood reminiscences.

The sixteen authors in her anthology do not Pollyanna their pens through days of happy yore. There is much between the lines, and even more between those lines. The jacket blurb describes Hélène Cixous's Bare Feet as, "a deeply resonant story about a young girl's search for place in a colonial society," which "recounts how, at the age of four, an encounter with a shoeshine boy awakened her to the harsh realities of her own class standing." Anne Donadey's foreword expands that to, "The protagonist, a four-year-old girl, constantly wonders where she belongs in a world divided between colonizers and colonized ... innocent of and responsible for the injustices of the world in which she is growing up." (p. xv)

Then we get to Ms. Cixous herself, who gives flesh to these: "Suddenly I was a grown woman. ... I resolutely pretended to be the little girl I had been ordered to be. Again the feelings of shame that accompanies our lies invaded me. And it is shame that is the sign of our childhood. ... I saw the face of the little shoeshine boy and I recognized the sparkle in his eyes: it was the lust of hatred, the first shimmer of desire." (p. 58) One is only fleetingly aware until this that, as she is middle-class Jewish and he dirt-poor Arab, social standing hurls a curse even on awakening desire.

There are other references to the social chasms of skin color-the arrival of a room-hushing lily-white French boy in Mohammed Dib's Encounters relates, "We would not take our wide-open eyes-and rightly so-off him anymore, we weren't doing any work, incapable as we were of doing anything but staring." (p. 110) Jean-Pierre Millecam's grandmother's driver, "... whose soul is as delicate as his features pure, suffers from his swarthy skin tone." (p. 165) This reminds of India, where skin color still cleaves societies more visibly than economic standing and more permanently (these days) than caste.

The Algeria of these writers was no happy barrio of race and religion thriving beneath the colonial rubric "the locals." The cities were divided into enclaves-this district in Tlemcen for the Arabic Muslims; that rue in Oran where the Jews lived. Locals, yes, real people the more so. Algerian-turned-Parigot Mohammed Dib describes the arrival of his physician with, "Two imperious thumps on the front door with the knocker ... were not only dealt to the door of the house but also to that of my heart, which would instantly crumble with sadness, just that-sadness-because I already knew how to take my pain in stride. ... As if to announce them, my mother used to boil two needles for the syringes. ... He saved my leg, which by all logic should have been amputated." (p. 107)

Throughout it is writing that enchants. There are so few simple declaratives that they could hardly stand out more if printed in yellow. Annie Cohen's Viridiana my Love is a stream of consciousness romp through word-images like dessert-case sweets. As befitting the Arabic reverence for poetry, the Algerian writers are the most lyrical of the lot. Jemel Eddine Bencheikh writes sumptuously baggaged sentences-caravans, really-between first cap and full stop there is a lot of tapestry, and yet you never lose the main image. His dreamcatching story Tlemcen Up High gives us five stanzas of a uniquely Algerian popular metrical style called the tahwîf, which consists of two sung phrases to each line, originally meant to accompany pushing someone on a swing.

Ironic, the monopoles of cultural imperialism that drew these literary filings author by author to Paris. All these reminiscences were written there, encouraged there, published there. The capsule bios that preface each dolefully announce in the sentence after their name, "So-and-so has been living in Paris since ...." Pushed there by the Franco-Algerian war of the 1960s and the ethnopolitical pogroms thereafter, they now write mainly for Francophone literati. How cheering it must have been for them to disalign from the magnet of Racine, Stendahl, et al, and realign themselves to the multipole that once was Algeria-ethnic, religious, economic, geographic-by way of childhoods regained. These memoires are stunning testimony to the eloquence France ignored but these filings retained.

This is a unique collection of 16 autobiographical recollections by male, female, settler, indigenous, Arab, Kabyle, French, and Jewish writers who grew up in Algeria. Anne Donadey, in the book's foreword, explains how the history of Algeria influenced its writers. Sewn through some of the stories are hints at children's reactions to social distinctions, colonialism, restrictions, and war. Algeria, North Africa's largest country, has been the home to blacks, whites, Arabs, Jews, Romans, Berbers/Kabyles, Europeans, Corsicans, Christians, and Moslems. Jews moved to Algeria in the Sixth Century, the Arabs arrived in the Seventh, naming it the Maghreb for the Western setting sun of the expanding empire. More Jews and Moslems arrived during the Iberian Inquisition, the Turks arrived, and the French took over in 1830 after fighting Abdelkader for three years. Algeria's war for independence from France lasted eight years, from 1954-1962, and it and the murders that occurred before and after independence play a role in the stories. The book opens with Malek Alloula's "My Exotic Childhood" in which the Parisian poet recalls the Tekouk, that springtime season of anticipation, smelling of pine resin and paella, a time of languid craziness that preceded Easter and Summer vacation from school. Jamel Eddine Bencheikh, a Sorbonne poet from a Tlemcen family, contributes "Tlemsen Up High." In it he recalls the springtime celebrations of al-Ourit, where girls would sing tahwif, Jewish women would pass by singing Passover songs and exchange greetings and sweets, young men sought to play pranks, and his grandmother would recount her dreams. He recalls his Summer visits, the colors and smells, and the places he can recall only in dreams. Among my other favorites in the collection of 16 are the following: Mohammed Dib, who was born in Algeria over 80 years ago, recalls David with the Tunisian pastry stand, and the kids' fears of French people, and the fist of the French teacher. "By Independence Clear" by Mohamed Kacimi el Hassani of Zaouia d'El Hamel in Southern Algeria's plateau. In his story he recalls second grade and the Algeria's independence, when all the women baked cakes and sewed flags, his classmates wondered whether they would have to study French, and the author met Colonel Chaabani of the FLN (who would later be assasinated). In Albert Bensoussan's "The Lost Child", he recalls his mother's shopping trips to the market and his family's Rosh Hashana traditions in Algiers, where the ADA (tradition) was to eat fish, sweets, and go to the crowded casbah to purchase and eat jujube fruits that tasted of dates. It is there that the author, who knows little Arabic, loses sight of his mother at the age of six, and is saved by an Arab man (Sidi Lardjouz) and his 8 year old daughter. They become playmates for the next 3 years until... In "Bare Feet", Helene Cixous, a native of Oran, now a director at Paris VIII, she recalls Oran, its sailors and natives, how her doctor father became a pedicure under Vichy. The oppression makes her happy, since she no longer feels an ambiguity as to her social class. Annie Cohen, a native of Sidi-Bel-Abbes, in "Viridiana My Love", recalls housekeepers, their children, and the children of the employers. Roger Dadoun in "The Hammam" provides a story from his Shem chronicles, recalling the hammam (bath), the foods, the Sabbath shopping trips, the stores, the fritters, recipes, the backgammon at Café Benayoum, and the conversations in tetouanais/staonne. Jean Daniel, born in Blidan eighty years ago, was editor in chief of L'Express. He recalls the banality of a fun childhood, his god-like teachers, the Spanish war, and his Jewish father, a grain merchant, who could speak Berber and worshipped knowledge. In all, a quick unique reading experience.