Hélène Cixous, born in Oran on June 5, 1937, is a French intellectual, academician, feminist, philosopher, and writer. Her father, Georges Cixous, was a Spanish-speaking Sephardi immigrant from northern Morocco who spoke Spanish at home and was a physician in Oran. Her mother, Eve Klein Cixous, was a German-speaking Ashkenazi Jew who left Germany for Algeria in 1933 after Hitler came to power. Much of her mother’s family perished in the concentration camps of Holocaust. Surviving these atrocities influenced Cixous’s early studies of Eng…