Session 2: 92NY Roundtable with Yaëlle Azagury and Frances Malino

Join Yaëlle Azagury and Frances Malino, editors and translators of Mazaltob: A Novel, for a deep dive into Blanche Bendahan’s groundbreaking coming-of-age tale.

This is a two-session, live, virtual seminar. Sign up here!

From Roundtable:

Course Overview

Raised in the Judería, or the Jewish quarter of Tetouan, Morocco, at the turn of the twentieth century, Mazaltob finds herself betrothed to an uncouth man from her own community. However, she is in love with another — a French, half-Jewish, and a free-spirited man. Will she prove her loyalty to the community and choose to build her home in the Jewish quarter? Can she do so and follow her own voice? In this classic of Jewish fiction, author Blanche Bendahan’s writing is a masterly exploration of the language, religion, and customs of North African Jews on the cusp of decolonization.

The groundbreaking novel was awarded a prize by the Académie Française in 1930. Yaëlle Azagury and Frances Malino have now provided the first English translation of this compelling work by a forerunner of modern Sephardi literature. For this course, they will focus on select passages from the novel to illuminate themes such as the role of France and of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in North Africa, and the multi-layered identities of Sephardi. Azagury and Malino will also examine issues of language, translation, and genre to highlight the novel’s singular place in the canon of Jewish literature.

Join them for an in-depth literary analysis and an examination of broader intellectual contexts and discover Bendahan’s groundbreaking novel. The instructors encourage having read the entirety of the novel by the second session. They will be using the English translation of Mazaltob.