Le Café de Cadix: Or An Invincible Summer Review

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(More customer reviews)Le Cafe de Cadix by Pierrette lili Camps.

Although everything about her early life should have compelled the author to be resentful about her parents and her upbringing, she chose instead in her book, "Le Cafe' de Cadix", to make an homage to her family, her upbringing, and to the Cafe' where the story takes place.

Set in Bab-el-0ued, a poor working class neighborhood in Algiers near the famed Casbah, the author, Pierrette Lili Camps, recalls her early life working in her parents' cafe'. Working sometimes 10-12 hours a day, 7 days a week, that still added up to no pay! She writes with humor, never falling into the pathos that too often characterizes memoirs of this genre.

She recalls in charming, interesting French-accented prose, the wonderful stories of her neighbors, a mixture of Jews, Arabs and Latino French, who lived together peacefully in those days, and had a joie de vivre unique to them. It was a lifestyle she never found again in her long and well travelled life. She recounts her meeting and marriage to John, an American G.I. And in 2004, they celebrated their 60th anniversary.

And finally, the book finishes with a startling prediction about the Muslim world from Albert Camus, the noted Nobel prize winner and a customer of her parents' Cafe as well as what happened to the "Pieds Noirs" of Bab-el-oued, following the Algerian independence in 1962-63.

Well told, it is a must-read for everyone who follows the news today. A story that is timely and meaningful.

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From the age of twelve at the start of World War II, until I met myAmerican G.I. husband, I worked in the caf© my parents owned in Bab-el-oued, a working-class neighborhood in Algiers. My parents, whose stories we treasured, were exceptional in many ways. My father Salvador was a constant, reassuring presence in our lives. My mother Rose, epitomizing mind over matter, treated neighbors afflicted with typhoid fever, typhus, malaria, meningitis, and even cholera! She was absolutely certain she would never catch anything; according to her, because she never charged anyone, rich or poor, for her services, andshe was guaranteed God's protection! And neither she nor her four children ever caught any of the diseases that afflicted the people she cared for. I recall the neighbors, the customers at Le Caf© de Cadix, Arabs,Jews, and Latinos-mixed French, now called pieds noirs, who exuded a joie de vivre rarely found anywhere.

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