Emilie Haya Moatti​

 

​Emilie Haya Moatti was born in 1980 and grew up in a religious family of Tunisian descent in the town of Netanya. The oldest of six siblings, she dropped out of high school to go to work and in 2003, she traveled to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. In Paris, she also worked as a producer and spokesperson for the Israeli Cinema Festival and joined several forums dealing with Jewish culture. She was involved in two left-wing peace projects: the Geneva Initiative and the Israel Regional Initiative. Since 2014, she has been a member of the board of WePower, a feminist NGO that aims to integrate women into the municipal and national political arenas. She was elected to the 24th Knesset (Israeli parliament) as a member of the left-wing social-democratic Labor party (Ha’avoda). She served as a member of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee and the Education, Culture and Sports Committee. She also chaired the Subcommittee for the Preservation of Heritage and Aliyah Culture. 
 

Today, Moatti is a writer, publicist, politician, and social activist who appears regularly as a commentator on various Israeli TV channels. She heads the Diplomacy department in the Hostages and Missing Families Forum. Blue Marks is her debut novel. She was awarded the Culture Ministry Prize for a Debut Novel in 2018. A French-speaking film version of Emilie’s novel, shot in Paris and starring French actors, is scheduled to premiere in France in 2026. Renowned actress and producer Virginie Lacombe, of the French production company Virginie Films, bought the film rights to the film, and currently a behind-the-scenes ‘making-of’ documentary, incorporating interviews with Emilie herself is in under production.

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Blue Marks

Novel

246 pp.
Publisher: Tchelet
Year: 2018

 

Translation Rights: World

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A young woman flees the life she has been living on the margins, and lands in Paris — but life on the margins isn’t done with her: it comes crashing back just as Iris starts to believe she has finally left it behind for good.

 

All she wanted was to start over, in another language, where no one knew her. With a steady job and a new apartment, her dream felt just within reach. But then “that man” entered her life. She thought his beauty was divine, with the scarf wrapped around his neck and that gaze that followed her wherever she went. The man who only had a first name. The man she killed. 

 

Behind prison walls, the abyss within Iris is laid bare — the woman who took a gun and shot the man who raped her. Through raw, searing fragments of memory, her path winds between pain and a fragile hope for redemption. From the father who abandoned her, leaving behind a home darkened by grief, to the mother frozen in her humiliation; from the streets of Paris that refused to embrace her, all the way to that cursed night she believed she could leave behind. With tenderness and courage, it gently pries open, finger by finger, the clenched fist of pain, bathing the soul of its wounded heroine in light, and transforming an unfathomable strangeness into intimacy.

    

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Critical Praise

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Blue Marks is not a story of revenge, because revenge is a set of searing, vibrant moral fantasies, the very thought of which arouses a feeling of control and purification. The heroine of the novel kills the man who raped her not because of what he did, but because of the smiling newborn he left within her; a baby that awakens no feeling in her, only threatens to erase who she is - like his father before him... She kills in order to survive: the baby will be taken from her, she will go to prison, where she will be able to sit in a cell for years, emptied, indifferent, and protected. And so it happens; that’s all that happens...
Blue Marks is a book that requires time. It is not literary fast food that proceeds according to familiar paradigms of loss and redemption. It gives voice to a voiceless figure, without flaunting a sense of triumph or self-intoxication. Yet it has a sober, even daring power that gradually develops over the course of the novel and justifies its stylistic and narrative syntax. Moatti has written a story about a woman on the margins, who erases her act of erasure, and thereby secures meaning for herself - even if destructive and draining… leaving you with a (blue) mark on your body.

Omry Herzog, Haaretz

 

Blue Marks is a heartbreaking book, well-written, with clear and grim observations about the power relations between men and women and about the all-too-likely possibility that women will be exposed to violence, will become victims simply because someone stronger has decided so, and that’s simply how it is. It offers an understanding of the human soul in a state of distress. Moatti sketches the technical blueprint for erasing yourself, the timing of the soul’s disappearance as a refuge from an unbearable situation. The heroine’s mental state, the emotional numbness and distance, are described without being too emotional. It is precisely for this reason that reading Blue Marks is so harrowing.

Gilli Izikovitz, Haaretz

 

At the center of Emilie Moatti’s debut novel, Blue Marks, is a murder that, technically, is a very brief episode in the overall plot. There is also a murderess who lives in absolute alienation, who expresses no remorse for her actions and is unwilling, even for a moment, to surrender to the story that society (the legal system, the press, her family) tells about her. This is the reason why Meursault, the protagonist of Camus' The Stranger, surfaced and came to mind more than once during my reading.

Dorit Shiloh, Hamussach

 

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