Tsarfati's Obsession

In his last novel, the acclaimed Mois Benarroch weaves a profound and labyrinthine tapestry of memory, identity, and the relentless pull of the past. Tsarfati's Obsession is a genre-defying masterpiece that blurs the lines between memoir, fiction, and philosophical inquiry. At its heart is Salomon Haserfaty , a writer and poet who, after a lifetime of literary struggle, lands a position teaching Spanish at the French School in Jerusalem. This homecoming to a Francophone environment becomes a portal, plunging him back into the classrooms of his youth in Morocco and forcing him to confront the ghosts of his upbringing, his complex multilingual identity, and the "de-education" inflicted upon his generation. As Salomon navigates the chaotic, multicultural microcosm of the school, his personal history bleeds into his present. His story intertwines with "Ottobio," a man who confesses his life to the wind, and "Ottobi," a woman haunted by a recurring dream and a tragic accident. Through their parallel narratives, blog entries from a conference of Hispano-Moroccan Jews in Spain, and raw autobiographical fragments, Benarroch constructs a powerful meditation on the languages we speak, the stories we are forced to forget, and the active, often painful, act of remembering. Tsarfati's Obsession is more than a novel; it is an "Ottobiography"—a searing, witty, and deeply moving exploration of a life caught between Morocco and Israel, between Spanish, French, and Hebrew, and between the relentless demands of art and the crushing weight of history. This is Benarroch's culminating work, a testament to a lifetime of writing against the wind.