« La femme de Loth regarda en arrière et elle devint une statue de sel. » (Genèse, 19:26). Lot’s wife looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.

Albert Memmi’s debut novel La Statue de Sel (1953), The Pillar of Salt, opened a door I hadn’t known I needed. The Tunisian Jewish writer’s work entered my life at a very moment where I, too, was trying to retrace where I belonged. 

My parents and I were born in France; but the generations before us, my grandparents, were all born in the Maghreb, in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.

At the time, these lands were either French territories or under French protectorate rule. Though my grandparents were born on North African soil, many of them left after the independence movements of the 1950s and 60s. They were no longer welcome in the lands where their ancestors had lived for over 3,000 years— long before the Arab conquests, alongside Berbers and other ancient communities. 

Once colonial powers had departed, many Jews were cast as relics of a colonial order they never chose.

Albert Memmi was a major figure in Francophone Maghrebi Jewish literature and one of the most important postcolonial thinkers of the 20th century. Born in Tunisia under French protectorate to a Jewish family of Berber and Italian descent, Memmi’s life and work were defined by the struggle to  reconcile multiple cultural identities and by his deep  reflections on the tension between East and West. Although he is best known in academic circles for his seminal essay The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957), prefaced by Jean-Paul Sartre, Memmi was also a celebrated novelist, philosopher, and sociologist. His writings on racism, colonial domination, and Jewish identity had a significant impact on anti-colonial debates of his time, even if his legacy remains somewhat underrecognized today.

Yet at the heart of his literary career stands La Statue de sel, his first and most iconic novel. Considered a cornerstone of Francophone Jewish-Maghrebi literature, this autobiographical work traces the identity crisis of Alexandre Mordekhaï Benillouche, Memmi’s literary alter ego. Born into a modest Jewish family on the edge of the Tunis ghetto, Alexandre grows up  amid conflicting worlds: traditional Judaism, Berber rituals, Arabic culture, and French colonial influence. His French education distances him from his roots and leads him to idealize the West— an illusion that shattered during World War II, when Nazi-allied Vichy rule subjected North African Jews with discrimination, forced labor, and deportation. 

Brilliant but poor, Alexandre believes talent and effort will grant him acceptance, and he dreams of integration. Yet he soon realizes that no matter how hard he tries to assimilate, he will never truly belong— not to the West he emulates, nor to the East from which he has become estranged. Caught in this painful in-between, his sense of identity collapses. 

It is only through writing that he finds a means of survival, and ultimately, of self-affirmation.

In La Statue de sel, Albert Memmi delivers a deeply personal coming-of-age story while offering a pioneering literary exploration of what it meant to be a North African Jew at the twilight of French colonization. For many Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews— especially those from the Maghreb— Memmi’s narrative speaks to the fractures of identity created under the weight  of conflicting histories, cultural affiliations, and exile.

One of the most striking elements of the novel, whose full meaning only becomes clear at the end, is its title. La Statue de sel— The Pillar of Salt— refers to the biblical episode of Sodom and Gomorrah, in which Lot’s family is commanded to flee without looking back. Lot’s wife, overcome with longing or disbelief, turns around and is transformed into a pillar of salt. This image has inspired countless interpretations, but for Memmi it becomes a powerful metaphor for exile and memory. Through the lens of his own experience, he suggests that moving forward is impossible without confronting where we come from— a truth that resonates deeply with the Jewish condition, and the experience of being uprooted that defines so many Sephardic and Mizrahi stories.

For Memmi, “turning back” is not a transgression but a necessity. It is an act through which Jews have preserved fragments of their past in a world that has repeatedly sought to strip them away. 

I know this because I’ve held those fragments myself. 

I’ve spent so much time digging through my grandparents’ photographs, jewelry, clothes, tableware, handwritten letters, and recipes, their heirlooms of a world that no longer exists. These objects were anchors, tying me to a lineage that shaped what I valued, how I lived, what I cherished, the quiet sense of difference I carried when surrounded by non-Jewish friends. In La Statue de sel, Memmi demonstrates that these pieces of inheritance— objects, customs, and memories— are the very fabric of survival. 

Albert Memmi understood that history often reduces lives like his to footnotes, flattening Jewish existence in the Maghreb into something forgettable or marginal. When people recall history, of course, any “in-betweens” that don’t fit neatly into the larger narrative are often erased. His story, like mine, is slipping away; no one remains in my grandparents’ native cities to remember their lives. The Jewish Maghreb they knew is gone, and what survives only does so through us, to tell their stories, and through them, better understand our own. •

Born from Jewish Algerian, Moroccan, and Tunisian roots, Charlotte Ada studied Francophone literature and specializes in 20th century Jewish literature from the Maghreb.