Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran

Having “always been old” (7) in the eyes of locals, this austerely mustached, white-toothed Muslim grocer with green-brown eyes quietly and diligently serves his clientele night and day, seven days a week—a portrayal that relies on the racist trope of benign prejudice. Hailing from an undesignated Middle Eastern country in the Golden Crescent—likely Turkey or Iran—Monsieur Ibrahim says little, smiles often, and exudes an aura of mystery—he has no personal life, desires, or agenda independent of dispensing wisdom to others.

Upon striking up a friendship with Moses, Monsieur Ibrahim, endowed with a hearty sense of humor, immediately gives the boy the nickname “Momo.” Over time, as Monsieur Ibrahim steadily imparts life lesson—pearls of wisdom putatively plucked from the Koran—to Momo, he also gradually divulges that he is somehow, almost magically, privy to Moses’s secrets (visits to the brothel, his father’s disappearance, etc.). After Monsieur Ibrahim legally adopts Moses when the latter’s father dies by suicide, the two travel across Europe to the grocer’s birthplace. En route, Monsieur Ibrahim continues to share his joy, wisdom, and love of mystical dance with Momo; after a car crash, he dies in the boy’s arms in his hometown. Upon returning alone to Paris, Moses discovers that his adoptive father had planned everything, leaving him the grocery store and his Koran with two dried flowers inside.

The novella’s portrayal of Moses’s family relies on disturbing anti-Semitic tropes of greedy, money-obsessed Jewish people. Unsuccessful in work and love, Moses’s father is a depressed middle-aged man who is convinced that “money is made to be saved, not spent” (5). Having lost his family to the Holocaust and been abandoned by his wife, this unnamed low-level lawyer lives in a state of emotional shutdown that renders him unable to extend love and warmth to Moses. When his firm fires him, his overwhelming sense of failure prompts him to flee Paris, leaving only a short note and a bit of money for the boy. Upon reaching the south of France, the despairing man throws himself under a train.

Having left her husband and son shortly after the latter’s birth, Moses’s mother is absent in the first half of the novella. Upon being notified of her ex-husband’s suicide, she reunites with Moses—who introduces himself as “Mohammed.” There she explains her abandonment of Moses: She married his father without love only to escape her overbearing parents, and then fell in love with another man. When “Mohammed” explains that Moses, plagued by bad memories, has left, his mother astutely notes that the boy’s decision was wise, as “There are some forms of childhood you should leave behind, that need healing” (51). Returning to Paris after Monsieur Ibrahim’s death, Moses reconnects with his mother, still under the ruse that he is Mohammed rather than her son Moses. Over time, Moses, his wife, and their children attend weekly suppers with his mother and her husband.