A group of Jewish refugees from Egypt at Notre-Dame-de-l'Osier, Isère, France, 1957. In the picture, I am wearing a hat and am kneeling beside Father Margan's dog (right). I was 11 years old. We had left Alexandria a few months earlier, in December 1956. - Victor Teboul 

By Aimée Israel-Pelletier, Department of Modern Languages, University of Texas at Arlington

Victor Teboul was born in Alexandria, Egypt on May 9, 1945. He was expelled from Egypt and arrived in France with his family on December 25, 1956. The family had seven days to leave Egypt. The reason they were given for the expulsion was their possession of a French passport. In France, the family lived under the auspices of the French government at the convent of Notre-Dame-de-l’Osier in the Isère from January 1957 to May 1957.  

Now available in ebook, please click HERE

Jewish Writer Reviews His Diary And a Wonderful Book Is Born. Review on my novel La Lente découverte de l'étrangeté

By Nancy Snipper, The Chronicle, West End Edition, Montréal

When Victor Teboul was a young boy, he began writing a diary. The time was 1956 when England, Israel and France began the protracted conflict against Egypt over the Suez Canal. At the age of 11, he witnessed his father being shut away in jail and the subsequent expulsion of his family, along with thousands of other Jewish families. 

The French Review, the American publication of Teachers of French, devotes a study in its December 2014 issue by Robert Watson to my novel La lente découverte de l'étrangeté. In his article entitled, "Narrating a Diasporic Childhood around the Mediterranean in Victor Teboul’s La lente découverte de l’étrangeté "Watson writes ''Alexandria represents one of the most striking examples of colonial cosmopolitanism, with a nineteenth-century boom that was fueled by migration from around the Mediterranean basin and beyond. Writing from Montreal,Victor Teboul remembers the Alexandrian mosaic in autobiographical novels, illustrating his colorful post-WorldWar II polyglot Sephardic Jewish childhood alongside several other communities''. 

"Unlike Jabès, Victor Teboul, a French Canadian writer, sees exile not as a state of suffering but as a chance to strengthen Jewish identity. Teboul was born in Alexandria and left Egypt in 1956. He immigrated to Canada in 1963 when he was in his 20s. He has not written a lot but he has produced two remarkable novels Que Dieu vous garde de l’homme silencieux quand il se met soudain à parler and La lente découverte de l’étrangeté.'' 

Francophone Canadian writer and educator Victor Teboul, Ph.D., was born in Alexandria, Egypt. A longtime resident of Montreal, his work focuses on Jewish and Quebecois identity, the Egyptian Jewish community, and his own experiences as a Jewish individual exiled from Arab lands. He is the founding editor of the Tolerance.ca webzine, which he created in 2002 to promote a critical approach to issues of tolerance and diversity. He has also been a tireless promoter of Québécois-Jewish relations. 

Mr. Gordon Ross in the following excerpt of his thesis, ''The Historiographical Debate on the Charges of Anti-Semitism Made Against Lionel Groulx'', (M.A. Thesis History, University of Ottawa, 1996, 141p), also deals with a few of the topics which I examined in my essays.

Here is the excerpt as it appears in the Marianopolis college web site (Full link below).

P.S. Contrary to the information below, I hold a PH.D. in French Literature and not in Communications.   

In the semiautobiographical novel, La lente découverte de l’etrangeté, published in Quebec in 2002, Victor Teboul, a Francophone Canadian writer born in Alexandria, describes himself as a “Jew from Egypt” and recalls a childhood experience that occurred after visiting a department store, writes Amr Tawfik Kamal in his doctoral thesis submitted in 2013 at the University of Michigan.  

Rachel Marlene Barda discusses La Lente découverte de l'étrangeté in her doctoral thesis submitted at the University of Sydney, in Australia.  

By Ronald Sutherland, professor in Comparative Literature at l'Université du Québec à Montréal

Full PDF copy HERE.

Victor Teboul's candid analysis of Myths and images of the Jew in Quebec, published in 1977, created quite a stir. His latest book (Le Jour. Émergence du libéralisme moderne au Québec), a study of the weekly newspaper called Le Jour, which was founded by Jean-Charles Harvey in 1937, deals with an equally controversial subject and is equally thorough and candid.(…) 

For a list of articles, books, studies which discuss my works, as well as references to my own publications, please link to Google Scholar.