In August 18th, 1972, two years before I was born as a genuine ZABAR, my parents and 8 of their kids immigrated to ISRAEL from Tunis, the capital city of Tunisia. Few years earlier my family moved from the village Gabes to the big city of Tunis. 2 other kids of my father and his late first wife already left Tunisia, the elder - Najie moved to Paris as a bachelor and became a proud "Francauie" for the rest of his life until these days when he bacame an Ole Chadash in Israel, his younger brother ,Amos, moved to Israel with his wife.
I grew up to native French and Tunisian - Arabic spoken languages but was never asked to answer or have conversations with my family in these languages (what a pity), very soon I have become the youngest, non religious, hebrew speaker in my family, and I am just the same "she" since, and looks like forever.
I guess that one day soon I will find the time to accomplish that gap in my identity but till then and since I was very young my family's history fascinated me and I will probably turn all the great, sad, sometimes tragic stories into a book, till than, I am collecting old photographs that were taken in the first years in Israel and back than at the real HOME of my siblings whom sometimes I feel like a total stranger to theme, still trapped in their nostalgia towards their homeland while I cannot find mysel in theire history nor can find myself in what is becoming from my homeland, Israel.
Trapped between the 2 world, photography arranges present for me. As a photographer and my family archive curator.
This Page is dedicated to my brothers and sisters whom I have seen all of theme struggling and succeeding in becoming Israelis but never stopped being Tunisian:
Najie. Amos. Gabi. Shylbia. Claudine. Odet. Pinhas. Yossi. Kamoona. Nadav (ZABAR, younger than me).
from highest to shortest: gabi. dovi.shilbya. claudin. odet. yossi
1970, Bul. De Madrid. Tunis.