While the Internet era has not been kind to local newspapers, it also allows me to find pieces in such publications that would otherwise never come to my attention. Here’s one: a review by Andy Hoffman of Josh Harmon’s play A Prayer for the French Republic, from Massachusetts’s Somerville Times.
Brother and sister Patrick Salomon and Marcelle Salomon Benhamou represent two sides of the problem. Patrick has assimilated to the extent that neither he nor his children observe Jewish holidays. Marcelle, on the other hand, married an Algerian Jew and described herself to a visiting young American cousin, Molly, as “traditional.” Both Marcelle and her husband Charles are successful physicians, he with a large practice and she as psychiatry department head. Their two adult children, Elodie and Daniel, still live with them. Charles says of his family that they lived in Algeria for 500 years, and in Spain for a thousand years before that, marking the family’s movement around the Mediterranean with the Spanish Inquisition and the rise of Islamic nationalism.
Read more on Somerville Times: https://www.thesomervilletimes.com/archives/127160