Marseille is both Didier Levy’s birthplace and the city he left behind at sixteen. In his account, it is shaped by his family’s return after wartime persecution, the loss of his mother, and a childhood under a brilliant but brutal father; leaving Marseille marks a decisive break with that life.

A city reclaimed after persecution

Didier was born in Marseille. After the war, his father returned to the house he had been forced to leave when Jew-haters took control of the town. A teacher of chemistry and mathematics, he had fought with the French Resistance and been wounded in hand-to-hand combat with the Germans. Didier recalls that, because of his father’s wartime record, no one dared challenge him openly. Yet he understood the family’s return as a cold triumph: his father’s Jewish face, pride, and young Jewish bride stood against a community that had betrayed French Jews and sent thousands to their deaths.

The city’s antisemitism forms part of Didier’s explanation of his father’s emotional coldness, but he presents that connection as his own interpretation. He believes the bitterness of returning to a community that had betrayed him claimed his father’s heart after Didier’s mother died. Marseille is thus remembered not simply as a setting, but as the place where public persecution and private grief converged in the family story.

Family life and childhood

Didier’s mother was eighteen when he was born and died before he was two, during the influenza epidemic. He had no memory of her. He recalls hearing cruel whispers that his father neglected her and was too miserly to pay for doctors when she became ill; these are reported rumors, not established facts. Her early death left Didier to understand his childhood largely through his father’s conduct and the stories attached to the family.

His father became headmaster by the time Didier started school and was regarded as brilliant, but Didier could not understand science or mathematics. The father responded to his son’s academic difficulties with a brutal temper. Didier remembers his father’s hand as cold and immense, and recalls the blows as leaving his whole body shocked and bruised. Afraid of him and ashamed of failing at school, Didier often played truant. He fell into bad company, appeared in court repeatedly, and served two years in prisons for children before his thirteenth birthday.

Leaving Marseille

At sixteen, Didier left his father’s house, Marseille, and his country for good. The departure gives the city a clear boundary in his personal history: it is the place of his birth and childhood, but not the place in which he chose to remain. He came by chance to Genova, where he met Rinaldo, a man who introduced him to art, history, poetry, and music. Didier locates the beginning of his emotional and intellectual renewal there, in sharp contrast to the fear and failure he associates with his upbringing in Marseille.