The Negus 1930–1942 15
Algeria, it was kept completely out of the picture: the history of
France taught to pupils was ‘an incredible discipline, a fable and a
bible, yet a doctrine of indoctrination almost ineff aceable’. Not a
word was said about Algeria, nothing about its history or its geo-
graphy, whereas the children were required to be able to ‘draw the
coast of Brittany and the Gironde estuary with our eyes closed’ and
to recite by heart ‘the names of all the major towns of all the French
departments’.^14
However, with ‘Le Métropole’, as France had offi cially to be
called, pupils had a relationship that was ambivalent at best. A few
of the privileged ones went there on holiday, often to spa towns
such as Évian, Vittel, or Contrexéville. For all the rest, including the
Derrida children, France – at once close and faraway, on the other
shore of a sea too deep and wide ever to be crossed – appeared like a
dream country. It was ‘the model of good speech and good writing’.
It appeared less as a native country than as an ‘Elsewhere’, both ‘a
strong fortress and an entirely other place’. As for Algeria, they felt
they knew it ‘by way of an obscure but certain form of knowledge’;
it was something other than one province among others. ‘Right
from childhood, Algeria was, for us, also a country [.. .].’^15
The Jewish religion played a rather low-key part in the Derridas’
family life. On high days and holidays, the children were taken to the
synagogue in Algiers; Jackie was particularly aff ected by Sephardic
music and singing, a taste that would stay with him throughout his
life. In one of his last texts, he would also remember the rites involv-
ing light in El Biar, starting on a Friday evening. ‘I see again the
moment when, all care having been taken, my mother having lit the
lamp, la veilleuse, whose small fl ame fl oated on the surface of a cup
of oil, one was suddenly no longer allowed to touch fi re, to strike
matches, especially to smoke, or even to let one’s fi nger touch a
light switch.’ He would also remember joyful images of Purim with
the ‘candles planted into tangerines, almond guenégueletes, white
fl atcakes full of holes and covered with icing sugar after having been
dipped in syrup then hung like laundry over a cord’.^16
In the family, it was Moïse Safar, the maternal grandfather, who,
although not a rabbi, incarnated the religious consciousness: ‘a
venerable righteousness placed him above the priest’.^17 Austere in
manners, and very observant, he would stay seated in his armchair,
absorbed for hour after hour in his prayer book. It was he who,
shortly before his death, at Jackie’s bar-mitzvah, gave him the pure
white tallith that he would evoke at length in Veils – the prayer
shawl that he later said he liked to ‘touch’ or ‘caress’ every day.^18
The maternal grandmother, Fortunée Safar, outlived her husband
by many years. She was the dominant fi gure in the family: no de cision
of any importance could be taken without her being consulted; she