Mario Bensasson was born in 1923 in Tunis, into the Grana community. He graduated from the prestigious Lycée Carnot in Tunis. In 1950 he emigrated to France to study medicine, graduating in 1956 as an internal physician and receiving French citizenship. His oeuvre expresses fears, hopes, frustrations, questions, and reflections, via lamentations, humor, poetry, proverbs, and prose, not only in writing, but also through drawings.

During the German occupation of Tunisia, the adolescent Mario, who had escaped with his family to the suburb of La Marsa, began writ…