Publisher's Synopsis
It's the story of a deep friendship, between two people of the city of Bône, a coastal town in North Africa in the early 19th century and through it, the everyday life of people of all Mediterranean southern cities. Si Ahmed, the Muslim was a great trading merchant. Shaloom, his friend, a Moorish Jew who has a more modest social situation was a tailor. Their friendship, date back to their ancestors who came from Andalusia in the early 16th century during the Spanish Reconquista by the same boat, conveyed by Turkish pirates. Both Moors had inherited from their respective fathers, their businesses and also the friendship that had always united them in the best and the worst. The siege of the city of Bône by the army of the province of Constantine, his fire and finally the deportation of the majority of its inhabitants, had completely destruct the social fabric. The city hardly arrives to reborn from its ashes. After being manhandled and scattered (Some in the mountain and others in Bizerte in Tunisia), the Moorish friends returned to their hometown and tried to rebuild once again, their lives. The city leaves the Turkish apartheid and enters in the French apartheid. To tell the truth, nothing had changed for these two Moors. But still clinging to their hopes, this semblance of peace has revived in them the hope of seeing again the happiness. The Ghriba (a bit special synagogue) of Bône, which contained, according to the local legend, a miraculous holy book from Jerusalem, had played a big role in the rapprochement of communities in the misfortune which had hit them. Nobody wanted to know if this religious building was a synagogue, a mosque or a church, but only a house of God, which contains a miraculous book that relieves all pains and solves all the problems with the help of God. A common God who, they were not forced to know who.
