The Algerian Memoirs

Days of Hope and Combat

Henri Alleg

Translated by Gila Walker

 

6 x 9 inches, 442pp. 2012

ISBN : 9780857420305

Rs  695.00 (HB)
$35.00 (HB)
£22.50 (HB)

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The personal history of journalist Henri Alleg is tied inextricably to the history of the French-Algerian Conflict. Best known for his book The Question, a first-hand account of his torture by French troops during the Algerian war for independence, Alleg is famous both for having brought the issue of French torture to the public eye and for his passionate work as a writer, a newspaperman, and a communist activist.

 

Beginning with his arrival in Algiers in 1939, when he fell immediately in love with the vibrant city, to his departure in 1965, after Boumédienne seized power, this is a critical work of history made devastatingly personal. Algerian Memoirs recounts his experience under the Vichy regime and such watershed moments in colonial history as the infamous Battle of Algiers. In these pages, he relives the violence and the summary executions, the communist struggle, and his party’s strained relations with the National Liberation Front. And, of course, he revisits in stark detail his arrest and torture by the French, his years in prison, and eventual escape to Czechoslovakia. 

Henri Alleg is a French-Algerian journalist and Director of Alger républicain newspaper. Although best known for The Question (1958) which turned public opinion in France against the war in Algeria, Alleg is also the writer of several books, including Red Star and Green Crescent (1985). 

 

Gila Walker is the translator of more than a hundred works in Frence, including texts by Jacques Derrida, François Julien, Hubert Damisch, Thierry de Duve, Georges Didi-Huberman and Alain Fleischer. She divides her time between her homes in New York and in the Southwest of France.

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