Daniel Sibony is a psychoanalyst and the author of Don de soi ou partage de soi? (2000) and Lectures bibliques (2006).

During a weekend trip to Marrakech — his hometown — a novelist has a love affair that becomes intertwined with reminiscences of his childhood. His narrative lays bare the clash between cultures, the gap that separates the different communities, and the disappearance of one of them.
His Jewish childhood was poised between wellbeing and poverty, happiness and misery, exile and his roots in an ancient tradition. But more powerful than any of these factors was the insistent aspiration toward departure. When he leaves he takes with him the strange exile that he was born to, his medieval life cracked by modernity, and his unshakable, youthful desire to live as he seeks his path among the opposing demands of God, sex, love for an unattainable woman, French culture, Marxism, the unliveable Promised Land, and the founding, intrinsic experience of exile.

In this novel, Daniel Sibony delves into his origins — the childhood of a dhimmi in an Arab land.

A fascinating psychoanalytical novel that flirts with poetry. Wandering through the land of his past, an exile gives life to the lost world of his childhood and youth.