The One Facing Us

the long version

In Ronit Matalon's inventive debut, Esther, seventeen years old, wild and rebellious, is sent from Israel to Cameroon to stay with her hardheaded uncle Sicourelle, who is charged with straightening her out. But Esther resists her uncle's plans for her future - which include marriage to a cousin - and in the privileged indolence of postcolonial Africa she looks to the past instead. With sepia portraits and scraps of letters, Esther pieces together the history of her family, a once-grand Egyptian Jewish clan, and its dispersal from Cairo in the 1950s to Israel, Africa, and New York.