Tributes

Frederique Apffel-Marglin

Morocco, Africa

Having been born in Alsace, France, during World War II and raised in Tangier, Morocco, I never knew why my parents had left France right after the war. I grew up never having heard of the Holocaust. My first year at Brandeis, right after leaving Tangier, I was shown news clips of the release of concentration camp victims. This was the first I heard of the Shoah. It was traumatic. It sent me on a life-long quest for the truth. It turned out to be a very difficult endeavor since none of my relatives wanted to speak. But it changed me forever.

I married an American Jewish man, Stephen A. Marglin, have four Jewish children, three Jewish grandchildren, and have myself converted to Judaism. I became an anthropologist, working for decades in eastern India. I now work in Peru, collaborating with a Fair Trade coffee cooperative there. My youngest daughter, a PhD candidate in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton, is focusing on Jewish-Muslim relations in Morocco.