This slender little volume tells the story of the chatty, charming, down on her luck Ninette in a lengthy monologue broken only by occasional dialogue with the director of her son's school. A Jewish woman in Tunisia in the 1930s, she is a protagonist who is a breath of fresh air today, but would have been entirely shocking 80 years ago. Used and abused by men, by unhappy social structure, by colonialism, Ninette lives on Sin Street, trying to make ends meet in order to provide her son with food and shelter. Her tone is conversational, witty, a bit apologetic but not ashamed - she knows she has made mistakes, that she has sinned, but she is clear with the reader and herself that these sins were sins of circumstance, that the world is a cruel place and that she is only a cog in it, doing the best that she can with what little she is given.

I thoroughly enjoyed dipping into this novella. When stories rely entirely on a character, that character needs to be vital, vibrant, with a strong, clear voice and a defined personality. Ninette is all of these things. While her story is bleak, and relatively uneventful for a modern reader, she carries it on strong shoulders, lending an unconventional charm that results in feeling an incredible amount of tenderness even when she reveals significant character flaws. The writing itself is interesting - I found the prose very casual, and wonder if it is similar in French. The translators do include a number of notes indicating that they've attempted to follow the spirit over the letter, which I find generally lends to more enjoyable translations. Considering this is easy to sit down and read in less than a couple of hours, I'd say that it's well worth the read, especially in the way it opens the readers eyes to other areas of Jewish culture, often ignored in the deluge of (wonderful) Ashkenazi Jewish stories.

beautifully written, and contains some of my favorite lines about the criticism of religion and capitalism. Stein & Brozgal's introduction is magnificent. but its downfall is that it is an inherent piece of Alliance Israelite Universelle propaganda.