Albert Cohen wrote this book when he was eighty years old and approaching death, as he states early on in this book. It describes his experiences and emotions when, on his tenth birthday, he encountered a street vendor in Marseilles, where he was living at the time. A small crowd had gathered around, and the boy was fascinated by the colorful goods the vendor was selling, so bought some trinkets with the money his mother had given him for his birthday. The vendor noticed the boy’s dark hair and eyes and began insulting him for being Jewish, telling him to ‘shove off, scum,’ and ‘we don’t like dirty bloodsucking Jews here.’ The people around him either laughed or kept quiet, adding to the boy’s pain. [Dorothea Shefer-Vanson]