Éliette Abécassis (born 27 January 1969) is a French writer of Moroccan-Jewish descent. She is a professor of philosophy at the University of Caen Normandy.
Contents
Biography
Éliette Abécassis was born in Strasbourg, France into a practicing Moroccan Jewish family. Her childhood was permeated by the daily life of the Strasbourg Jewish community. Her father, Armand Abécassis teaches philosophy and is a renowned thinker of Judaism whose thought permeated the Talmudic interpretation of Strasbourg. He notably played a considerable role in the creation and teaching of the Aquiba school in Strasbourg. Her mother, Janine, is a professor and specialist in child and developmental psychology. In several autobiographical novels, Éliette Abécassis declares to have been very influenced by the Sephardic religious environment and education, but to have also sometimes been suffocated by it and tried to emancipate itself from it on numerous occasions, especially during her youth. She declares her attachment to French universalism.
After the baccalaureate, she left Strasbourg at 17 to go to Paris to study in preparatory literary classes, at the Lycée Henri-IV. She then joined the École normale supérieure in rue d'Ulm, where she obtained the agrégation in philosophy, and then taught philosophy at the University of Caen. "I wasn't much older than my students. They were very good, all passionate about philosophy, which, however, does not lead to anything other than itself."
At 23, she went to the United States for a year at Harvard University, in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, on a scholarship. She then wrote her first novel, Qumran, a metaphysical detective story that deals with mysterious murders linked to the disappearance of the recently discovered Dead Sea scrolls.
For her first novel Qumran, Éliette Abécassis was not satisfied with her prior knowledge of the Hebrew world. She went to the United States in several libraries, archives and places of contemporary Jewish culture in order to obtain as much information as possible. Her research lasted three years and it paid off: Qumran was released in 1996 and immediately achieved immense success; the book being translated into eighteen languages. The main publishing houses had however refused the manuscript, until Ramsay editions accepted it.
In 1997, she began to teach philosophy in Caen and published L'Or et la Cendre, the mysterious story of the murder of a Berlin theologian, still with Ramsay editions. In 1998, she wrote an essay on Evil and the philosophical origin of homicide: Little Metaphysics of Murder at the Presses Universitaires de France.
Women's rights activism
Eliette Abécassis is involved in associations fighting for the rights and freedoms of women, including the association SOS les Mamans. Alongside the lawyer Marie-Anne Frison-Roche and the philosopher Sylviane Agacinski, she campaigned vigorously against surrogacy, which she likened to a practice of commodification of the body of women and reification of the child.
Works
Books
Qumran (1996)
L'Or et la cendre (1997)
Petite Métaphysique du meurtre (1998)
La Répudiée (2000)
Le Trésor du temple (2001)
Mon père (2002)
Sacred (2002)
Clandestin (2003)
La Dernière Tribu (2004)
Un heureux événement (2005)
Le Corset invisible (2007)
Mère et fille, un roman (2008)
Sépharade (2009)
Le Messager (2009) (with Mark Crick)
Et te voici permise à tout homme (2011)
Le palimpseste d'archimède (2013)
Un secret du docteur Freud (2014)
Alyah (2015)
Le Maître du Talmud (2018)
L'Envie d'y croire: journal d'une époque sans foi (2019)
Nos rendez-vous (2020)
Instagrammable (2021)
Transmission (2022)
If Only (2023)
Participations
Lettres à Dieu, Calmann-Lévy (2004)
La Rencontre, collection of short stories, Éditions Prisma, (2010). Alongside Marek Halter, Camilla Läckberg, Didier van Cauwelaert, Claudie Gallay and Agnès Desarthe.
Enfances, adolescences, Librio (2015).
Books on feminism
Éliette Abécassis has written books and articles on the status of women, which she defends in several associations, such as Le Corset invisible in 2007, with Caroline Bongrand."The corset, with the advent of feminism, has disappeared from our wardrobes. Today our belly and our movements are free, and we can breathe. But our body and our mind are locked, compressed, atrophied in a corset more insidious than that of previous centuries, because it cannot be seen. [...] Today's female body is actually controlled by task exhaustion, diets and new beauty standards. Her mind, supposedly free from male domination, is in the grip of society as a whole, which seems to be conspiring against her."In 2018, she published Bébés à vendre at Robert Laffont, a review of surrogacy, in which she denounced the commodification of women's bodies.
Children's literature
Éliette Abécassis has also published a series of children's books: T'es plus ma maman, Je ne veux pas dormir, Il a tout et moi j'ai rien, Astalik fait ses courses et Je ne veux pas aller à l'école.
She, with her daughter, told and sang a children's story, Lulu veut être chanteuse (Lulu wants to be a singer) published in a digital book on the Whisperies platform.
Filmography
Directed
2001: La nuit de noce, twelve minutes short film with Samuel Le Bihan and Isild Le Besco.
2007: Tel Aviv la vie, directed with Tiffany Tavernier.
Scriptwriter
1999 : Kadosh, by Amos Gitaï.
Cinematographic adaptation of her work
2011 : Un heureux événement, by Rémi Bezançon.
Music
Éliette Abécassis is a lyricist, notably for the French rock group Debout sur le zinc. She also wrote the song La chanson Sépharade for Enrico Macias.
Titles
2001: Prix Écritures & Spiritualités for the novel La Répudiée (2000).
2010: Alberto Benveniste Prize for the novel Sépharade (2010).