In A queen, Judith Elmaleh tells the story of her grandmother, who was forcibly married at 14 to a man who was already married. A secret that has long been kept in the family and that marked his life. We met her.
Posted at 8:00 a.m.
Judith Elmaleh is moved to present her first novel in Montreal, a city so dear to her eyes, her second home, where her daughter was born and still lives. She lived there for a few years with her brother, comedian Gad Elmaleh, in the early 1990s. She was 18, he was 17. They arrived from Morocco and discovered Quebec, the snow, the cold and life without their parents. “We lived crazy years in Montreal, we only have good memories,” she recalls.
“Even today, we use Quebec expressions, Gad and I, to talk about certain things, it’s part of our intimacy,” says the one who lives in Paris.
Judith Elmaleh works as a screenwriter and author for television programs in France and collaborates with Gad in the writing of his shows. It was he who pushed her to write the story of their grandmother. The click was made during the most recent show By the way, where Gad talks about the fact that his son has two great-grandmothers: Grace Kelly and Simha de Casablanca. “He has an amazing family tree! I wanted to write a passage about our grandmother. I started to write and I couldn’t stop and he said to me: this is the subject of your book. »
Their grandmother Mimi (the nickname of Simha) was forcibly married at 14 to a man who was 26 years older than her and who was already married. But his first wife was sterile. “In Morocco, in the 1930s, a rabbinical law authorized a man to take a second wife if she had not succeeded in having children after 10 years”, specifies Judith Elmaleh. “What’s even crazier is that it was my grandfather’s first wife who chose Mimi as a second wife for her husband! She chose her niece, for genetic reasons, but also because she was only 14 and wanted to have control over her, even if they lived separately, in two houses,” she says.
PHOTO MARCO CAMPANOZZI, THE PRESS
Judith Elmaleh
What marked her was the ignorance of her grandmother who, one day, arrives at a party wearing a very beautiful dress, without knowing why. “She never went home, because she got married that day. She had seven children. “She had to give her first three children to my grandfather’s first wife who raised them, but with the fourth child, that’s when it changed, she kept it. This is the birth of my father. She asserted herself and she had three others that she kept and raised completely, ”she explains.
It remains that his grandmother was unhappy. “She was the second wife, more beautiful, younger, the one who could have children, but she was not the favorite. With my grandfather, it was not love that there was between them, but affection. All her life, she loved watching romantic movies in rose water because it made her dream. »
Life-saving humor
It is thanks to humor and lively family gatherings that the seven siblings all get along very well. “Humour is the family language, it is the means of communication. Everyone tells jokes, it’s our value system, and everyone is funny in their own way. My father did mime, my brother Gad is a comedian, my other brother, Arie, is an actor, and I write his shows with Gad, and my uncles are very funny too. »
Humor is also a way to de-dramatize, a way to bury the unsaid, and to drown the most painful events in laughter. Judith Elmaleh discovered very late, at 32, the story of her grandmother. It was her uncle who wrote it down in a document that he sent to all the family members. “We didn’t talk about it, it was a secret that was in front of us, an unspoken more than a secret. I always saw that older lady [la première femme de son grand-père] at my grandparents, I was always told that she was my great-grandmother, but this lady was not my grandmother’s mother nor that of my grandfather! she exclaims.
She wrote this book to transmit the history of the family to her children, but also to highlight the existence of this woman who lived in self-sacrifice and who allowed them all to exist. “We all have a queen in our families, a grandmother who sacrificed herself. That’s why I called my book A queen, because Mimi is a queen among many others. There are many women who have suffered, who never complained and who gave everything to their children. Mimi passed away at 102, and I know her life influenced mine. I have this guilt of having lived in complete freedom, unlike her, ”concludes Judith Elmaleh.
A queen
Judith Elmaleh
Editions Robert Laffont
266 pages