Algeria

Jacques Derrida was born on July 15, 1930, in El Biar, Algeria, where he lived until 1949. His parents, Georgette Safar and Aimé Derrida, who married in 1923, gave birth to five children, of whom Jacques was the third. The second child, Paul, died as an infant, a few months before Jacques was conceived (Cf 277). Another son, Norbert, died at two years of age. Derrida's only sister, Janine, was born in 1934. When Derrida's father was only twelve, he began working for the Tachet family, prosperous French-Catholic merchants of spirits and wine. After years of apprenticeship, Aimé became a sales representative for the Tachets, whose wares he marketed from one grocery story, café, or hotel to another. Derrida said of his father that he was always behind the wheel of a car, sometimes accompanied by Derrida himself. On these travels, he saw his father “in the persona of the petitioner or the applicant: in relation to the clients but also to the boss, whose authoritarian paternalism irritated me as much as his benevolence” (FWT 107). Whether or not it was for reason of his Jewishness, Derrida's father suffered humiliation from his Catholic employer, and as if bent by this, “he was stooped; his bearing, his silhouette, the line and movement of his body, it was a though they all bore his signature” (FWT 108).