Jacob Jacob: Valérie Zenatti book price 2015 Inter – Le Figaro

The 41st literary prize was awarded Monday to French novelist. His book explores the Algerian memory through portraits of Jacob, a young Jew from Constantine enlisted June 44 to liberate France from the Nazis.

Three days of voting were necessary to the 24 listeners of France Inter that made up the jury of the 41st Literary Award of the station to crown Valérie Zenatti.

Chaired this year by the doctor, writer and academician Jean-Christophe Ruffin, the meeting had to choose between the ten books competing. Already rewarded this year by the Mediterranean Prize and the Booksellers Seine, the book of Valérie Zenatti has become the 3rd round of voting by 14 votes.

Jacob is the brother of the grandfather of the novelist. (Second left from right)

Jacob, and sweet young Jewish scholar Constantine, sent to the coast of Provence in 1944 to release the France, died in a fight in Alsace a few weeks later at the age of 19.

The story of a rare power, Valérie Zenatti’s novel tells the war of the young man (brother of her grandfather), concerns his mother, Rachel, the lives of his family and his friends away from this country, France, they only know from books.

But “tells” might not be the right word, the writer wife, by the grace of his chosen words, an odyssey – it does not turn into the skin of his character, rather the reader feels she pointed a camera that found the spirit and flavor of the time.

The novelist 45 years, raised in Israel, makes especially honor those Algerian families, particularly women, tossed between two languages ​​(French and Arabic) and two cultures (Jewish and Muslim) to make a great novel about exile and rootlessness. “I went looking for what could this melee between France and Algeria, among Jewish history, Algerian and French history,” said Valerie Zenatti to France Inter antenna receiving the prize.

Translator of the great Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld, Valérie Zenatti is also the author of numerous novels for young teen whose book A Bottle in the Gaza Sea , published in 2005 , which earned him a score of awards and was translated into fifteen languages. His book was adapted for the cinema under the title A bottle in the sea (2012).

A L’Olivier, she published Late for war (2006) , The soul mates (2010), Lies (2011) and Jacob, Jacob (2014). The 40th Inter-Book prize was awarded in 2014 to Céline Minard for To fail to gun (Shores).