"I buy fruit, vegetables - it's expensive, but it's fresh, clean - that's very important." "If you want good quality, it's here," she said. The bombings in London and Egypt are no issue for Maria Pinto, 58, a concierge in a neighborhood apartment building. What did he think of the bombing? "That's politics," he replied. "Our clientele is very loyal," he said, searching for reasons for the store's continued success.
If his figs are going for 4.90 euros a kilo, the chain store's price is 4.30 his Provençal melons may go for 3.90, against 1.50 at the competition. Tiouajni's customers, despite the higher prices. The fantasy, fable and warmth surrounding these stores may explain in part the attachment of Mr. And who was Momo? He paused, then asked, "Me?"
I was fascinated, I realized that many Jews felt much closer to the Arab - someone from the Mediterranean basin - than to other Jews, say the Ashkenazim," the central and northern European Jews. Schmitt, now 45, replied: "Yes, when I wrote the story I was living in the Jewish neighborhood around the Rue Bleue - there was an Arab - open from 8 in the morning until midnight. "Arab, in the grocery business," he muses in the story's closing line, "means staying open nights and Sundays."Īsked if he had a particular Arab grocer in mind, Mr. When the Arab dies, Momo inherits the store and becomes Mohammed. Several years ago, the French author Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt published a novel, "Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran," a kind of fairy tale of religious harmony in which an elderly Arab grocer befriends a Jewish boy, Moise, nicknamed Momo. The Arab on the corner has always had his poets, defenders and exalters. His most profitable goods are the fruit, he said, because of the larger markups. "Most stores like these are run by Tunisians and Moroccans," he said, making them to Paris much of what the Koreans grocers are to Manhattan. Tiouajni inherited it five years ago, after his father, now 45, opened a fruit store in the southern suburb of Palaiseau. His father opened the store - barely 1,300 square feet of fruits and vegetables gradually giving way to shelves of oil and flour, cereal and wine and liquor - and Mr. Tiouajni, 25, who followed his father, Salim, to Paris from the Tunisian island of Djerba two decades ago. "Competition is very severe my competitors buy as a group," said Mr.
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