When Hélène Cixous was 3 years old in Algeria, she recounts in an interview with Haaretz, “I was dispossessed of my Frenchness” as part of the anti-Jewish legislation of the Vichy regime in 1940. “My father was a doctor and was forbidden to practice medicine. Our rights were stripped from us by the French government. Was I French? No. I despised France, and some of my suspicion toward it still exists.
