« Bouquet de Coriandre » is a collection of thirteen short stories about the lives of a number of recurrent characters: the President of a small Jewish community native to North Africa, his wife, his children, his great-children, his son-in-law, his friends. The author leads us from the dining room to the bedroom, from the bathroom to the kitchen, to all the places where the domestic relationships are played out. The characters are the heroes of a daily life punctuated by the periods of Jewish holidays and those of the life cycle. We are witnesses of births, weddings and mourning; we enter a world where a failed cake can be the cause of a cancelled wedding, where to shave for the first time amounts to cutting the umbilical cord, where writing a speech can become a metaphysical act. An intimate and humoristic look at the President’s family and his community. The tone is sharp but always warm. Even though all of these engaging characters evolve in between two cultures, the tension between tradition and modernity is always resolved thanks to the tenderness that unites them. And it is sometimes at the smell of the spicy scent of a bunch of coriander that the material and the spiritual become harmonized… « I do not doubt that the reader will enjoy these evocations which bathe in the scent of the coriander; you will have contributed to our common enterprise of the restoration of our memory and of fixing it for our descendants. » Albert Memmi
Rachel Samoul is native to Algeria. A History and Theatre studies graduate, she lives in Tel Aviv.