Albert Memmi, one of the best-known North African Jewish writers of the twentieth century, was born on December 15, 1920 in a poor Jewish neighborhood of Tunis, to a father of Italian-Jewish descent and a mother of Berber-Jewish origins. As the son of an artisan, Memmi experienced a sense of alienation from the richer Jewish community which surrounded him. In his first and perhaps most famous work, the autobiographical La statue de sel (Pillar of Salt), published in 1952 with an introduction by Albert Camus, Memmi explains this feeling of difference as one of the many layers o…