Elissa Rhaïs

Elissa Rhaïs , born Rosine Boumendil (12 December 1876 – 18 August 1940) was a Jewish-Algerian writer, who adopted the persona of a Muslim woman who had escaped from a harem to further her literary career. Her novels were popular in her lifetime, but declined; interest in her life was revived in the 1980s by a claim that all her publications had been ghost-written and that she was illiterate.

Biography

Early life Rosine Boumendil was born on 12 December 1876 in Blida to a Jewish family of modest means. Her father, Jacob, was a baker and her mother, Mazaltov (born Seror) was a housewife. At 18 years old, she married a rabbi named Moïse Amar. The couple had three children: a daughter, who died at eleven years old; a son, Jacob-Raymond (1902-1987); another daughter Mireille (1908-1930). They lived in a villa called the Villa des Fleurs in Algiers, where she opened a literary salon. It has been suggested that her new identity was created as marketing ploy orchestrated by Louis Bertrand and René Doumic; alternatively that it was an invention of Rhaïs herself.

From 1919 to 1930, numerous novels, novellas and short stories were published under Elissa Rhaïs' name, mostly romances that are set in an exotic north African settings featuring female heroines and Muslim culture in the period surrounding the First World War. writing:“It seems that in France, we love the Moors in all conditions. This is why there is an old Jewess, a former rabbi's wife, who masquerades as an Arab, and falsely tells stories about our race and our traditions. She thus earns a lot of money, she says."

Legacy Regardless of the situation that the novels were produced in, Rhaïs has an important place in Judeo-Maghrebian literature, as an early female Jewish-Algerian writer. However her life has continued to be a source of intrigue and fantasy in the media, due to the publication of the novel Elissa Rhaïs, un roman and the subsequent television production. This book caused a sensation in the media and Paul Tabet was interviewed by Bernard Pivot on Apostrophes on 7 May 1982. However, the majority of academic critics specializing in French-speaking Maghreb literature, consider Tabet's allegations to be unlikely. Denise Brahimi, writing in the introduction entitled Lire Elissa Rhaïs speaks of "a poor scandal".

The TV movie Le secret d'Elissa Rhaïs was filmed in 1993 by the director Jacques Otmezguine (fr), based on the book by Paul Tabet but in a romanticized way.