An interview by
and
, curator
curator
as I was a girl. I read a lot, looked after my small
brothers and learnt how to cook.the only luxurious
things I met as a child were the precious objects in
the synagogue, the blue and red embroidered velvet
covering the book of the thora,the silver and gold oil
lamps that girls and women were not allowed to
approach or touch. I remember women adoring the
thora from far, throwing their hands towards it and
this image has remained with me. And yes blue is a
recurrent colour in my paintings, especially ultra
marine. And of course I carry with me the arabesques
in the forged iron on the doors and windows of my
home town, the white terraces, the blue and green
shutters, the arcades of the market, the special tiles
in our half broken home, the domes and the minarets,
the palm trees and the camels... they all come alive in
my paintings as do the lines of the poems that I learnt
by heart. Those poems made my life a happy and rich
life in spite of everything . I saw in every pool of dirty
water the lake of Lamartine.It helped me escape into
a dream world, I was no longer living in a poor and
dry street without any blade of grass, but in a garden
full of flowers , the river was running through it and
the roses were climbing on the windows of my room.
Yes, I owe a lot to the french education I received, but
also to the proverbs in arabic that my grand parents
loved to use for every situation. The fact that I heard
many languages as a child helped me learn
I have had a difficult childhood, as I was born during
the war. Being jewish my family had to hide in an
arab village and my mum gave birth to me in the
tranches during an alert.. Of course I cannot
remember any of it, but I must have suffered a
certain traumatism as my mother’s milk dried up
and that I was often hungry as most people were in
those terrible years during the war. After the war we
were very poor and we lived in a house that had
been half destoyed by the bombing in a street
strewn with rubble. Our neighbours came from all
parts of the world, from Sicily, Malta, Tripoli, Italy
etc.. Right in front of our house lived a bedouin
family in a roofless house, together with their camel,
chickens and their goat. I recall the naked little
children, in summer and winter. Those were very
difficult years for everybody. I went to kindergarden
before I was three years old and I remember loving
it. I still have an image of huge drawing of leaves on
the wall in the class room and those same leaves
still come back in my paintings.My mother valued
education very much and in order to make us study
she used to invite the neighbourhood kids to sit and
study with us around our dining room table.Also,our
neighbourhood was a dangerous neighbourhood ,
dark at night with prostitutes on the corner of the
street and all sort of shady people hanging about, so
she didn’t let us go out in the street.Especially me,
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Special Issue