16 Jackie 1930–1962
stayed for long periods in the rue d’Aurelle-de-Paladines with the
Derridas. On Sundays, and during the summer months, the house
was fi lled to overfl owing with people. It was the rallying-point for
the fi ve Safar daughters. Georgette, Jackie’s mother, was the third:
she was famed for her bursts of uncontrollable laughter and for
her fl irtatiousness. And even more for her passion for poker. Most
of the time, she kept a kitty with her mother, which enabled them
to balance out losses and gains. Jackie himself later told how he
had been able to play poker long before he learned to read; he was
capable at an early age of dealing the cards with the dexterity of a
casino croupier. He liked nothing better than to stay sitting among
his aunts, delighting in their silly gossip before passing it on to his
male and female cousins.
Georgette loved having guests, and she could also occasionally
whip up a delicious couscous with herbs, but she did not much
bother her head over everyday practicalities. During the week, the
shopping was delivered from the nearby grocer’s. And on Sunday
mornings, it was Georgette’s husband whose job it was to go to
the market, sometimes in the company of Janine or Jackie. Aimé
Derrida was a rather taciturn man, without much authority, who
hardly ever protested against the power of the matriarchs. ‘It’s
Hotel Patch here,’ he would sometimes say, mysteriously, when the
women dolled themselves up a bit too much for his taste. What he
liked doing was to attend the horse races on certain Sunday after-
noons, while the family would go down to one of the beautiful fi ne
sandy beaches – often the one at Saint-Eugène called the Plage de la
Poudrière.^19
War had been declared, though as yet without much impact on
Algerian territory, when tragedy struck the Derrida family. Jackie’s
young brother Norbert, who had just turned two, was laid low by
tubercular meningitis. Aimé did everything in his power to save him,
consulting several doctors, but the child died on 26 March 1940.
For Jackie, then nine years old, this was the ‘source of an unfl ag-
ging astonishment’ in the face of what he would never be able to
understand or accept: ‘to continue or resume living after the death
of a loved one’. ‘I remember the day I saw my father, in 1940, in
the garden, lighting a cigarette one week after the death of my little
brother Norbert: “But how can he still do that? Only a week ago he
was sobbing!” I never got over it.’^20
For several years, anti-Semitism had fl ourished in Algeria more
than in any region in metropolitan France. The extreme right
campaigned for the Crémieux Decree to be abolished, while the
headlines in the Petit Oranais repeated day after day: ‘We need to
subject the synagogues and Jewish schools to sulphur, pitch, and
if possible the fi res of hell, to destroy the Jews’ houses, seize their