Jacob, Menahem, & Mimoun: A Family Epic / Jacob, Menahem, and Mimoun delves into Marcel Benabou's uncommon family history while reflecting on the mysteries of memory, the past, and writing. Born in Morocco in 1939 to a Jewish family, Benabou left his home at age seventeen to study ancient history in Paris.
Benabou's memoir returns to his childhood in Morocco -- to his parents, their home, and the Jewish community in Meknes. At the same time he accounts for all that has changed, including his very different life in Paris and the disappearance of the world of his childhood. He notes how he has turned from his family's wish that he become a rabbi to his absorption, as an adult, in several millennia of secular literature. And he worries about how his "family epic" -- an epic meant to include the history of Morocco's Jews -- has become a book about himself and his inability to write the great book he has long imagined -- the book one owes oneself and the world. The impossibility of fully recovering the past hovers over his memories. And the impossibility of writing a book about that past is also there -- an impossibility that Benabou acknowledges, delineates, and, in a real if also provisional sense, transcends. In his inspired attention to that impossibility, Benabou has written a book that transforms absence into presence and the past into rich matter for the present.
