The Origins of In Living Memory: Helping to Carry the Torah
The project In Living Memory was born from a flash of inspiration, but it unfolded at its own pace — a rhythm I had to learn to follow.
WHAT YOU WILL FIND HERE…
This blog is a path that carries me as much as I trace it. In Living Memory was not born of my will alone; it is a legacy entrusted to me. I am not its origin, but its messenger, the one who receives a light and chooses to pass it on.
Through these pages, I wish to honor the absent, the voices silenced too soon, the stories hidden in the shadows of family secrets, the fragile traces still waiting to be found. I was born Catholic, and yet, from the very beginning, my path has intertwined with Jewish history, in a silent solidarity that, over time, became a profound need to honor it.
This project is larger than myself, for it touches something greater than my own life. It belongs to a universal memory: the reminder that there is no future without fidelity to the past, and that to preserve names and stories is to safeguard our shared humanity.
What I write here is not a private diary, but a shared quest. An inner journey I invite you to follow, step by step, like the quiet glow of a star, one that bridges past and present, and whose light continues to illuminate the path of In Living Memory.
The Genesis of My Novel
It was a friend to whom I had shared my idea of reproducing the boxes entrusted to my grandparents during the war who suggested that I should write their story.
When Memory Found Its Way Back
In 2006, Samuel, my eldest son, celebrated his Bar Mitzvah.That day, Aline, my mother, chose to pass on to him one of the three Judaica that had been entrusted to her parents during the war by a Jewish couple, Charles and his wife, whom I chose to name Esther, since her real name has been lost...
The Hexagram on Morocco’s Nineteenth-Century Coins
When I discovered coins in Morocco marked with a hexagram, I sensed a tremor of History. For an instant, I thought the Jews of the mellah had minted their own money. I imagined a first sign of emancipation, a discreet sovereignty, engraved in copper and passed from hand to hand. I even dreamed that while Herzl, in Vienna, was sketching modern Zionism, a star was already shining on the kingdom’s coins—as if two impulses, one political, the other symbolic, were answering each other across distance.
The Story Behind Our Logo
The In Living Memory logo carries the very origin of the project.