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.

At first, the idea seemed unrealistic: I was not a writer. Yet the thought grew within me until it became undeniable: these wooden boxes could only reveal their full symbolic value through the story they carried.

Then a small miracle occurred: Charles and Esther, the couple who owned the judaïca, entered my life. All I had to do was listen. They confided in me their fears, their anxieties, and their love. They revealed to me a daily life suspended between normality and abomination. They spoke of my grandfather, a man of heart and openness, and of the day they entrusted him with the three objects they cherished most.

They knew almost nothing of the conditions awaiting them on their journey, yet they were certain of one thing: they would recover their three treasures intact upon their return. Charles and Esther came to embody the three pillars of In Living Memory: trust, loyalty, and restoration.

Then Rachel, the great-grandmother of my children, made her voice heard.
She told me how her sheltered bourgeois life collapsed when she settled in Palestine in 1927.
She spoke of uprooting, solitude, questions, and regrets. But she also transmitted to me her unshakable conviction: that the Jewish people must have a land of their own. That conviction alone gave her the strength to endure the climate, the exhausting labor, the malaria, the hunger, and the fear — the harsh daily life she shared with her Zionist companions.

Yakov, on the other hand, I had never known.
He appeared with the serenity of an old sage, determined to testify to those Jews of Jerusalem who had been rooted there for centuries, who had survived Christianity and Islam, and who drew from their millennial memory the strength to remain faithful to their faith.

Finally, figures inspired by my children appeared, giving shape to the third part of the novel - a part nourished by our family experiences, by my perspective as a non-Jew close to the community, by my many journeys to Israel, and by the encounters that, for more than thirty years, have shaped my bond with this memory.

All of these voices came together to weave this narrative and to bear witness.
They fulfilled a double mission: to transmit their unique destinies and to offer the non-Jewish reader a clear vision of Judaism - its traditions, its memory, its challenges past and present. A vision that, at times, even some Jews themselves, deprived of any transmission, no longer know.

It was also to restore Zionism to its rightful historical perspective, at a time when ignorance fuels hatred of every kind.

When I completed the writing of my novel in 2022, I could not have imagined how prophetic Alma’s words about antisemitism would prove to be: “It will happen again, in Belgium and elsewhere”.

These characters, who have become my lifelong companions, now awaken in the consciousness of every new reader.
And so, the challenge set by my friend has been met: the owners of the box have become immortal.