Clara Breteau and the King of Diamonds – Libération

A girl on the trail of her father, a window cleaner born in Algeria, in “The Avenue of Glass”, first novel.

Anyone who spends a little too long in front of a television screen has at one time or another been asked: “Hey! Get over it, you’re not the daughter (or son) of a glazier”. Anna, in Clara Breteau’s first novelthe Avenue of Glass, is not the daughter of a glazier, but of a tile cleaner. It is even, in the city of Tours, “the most famous”, so much so that the New Republic dedicated an article to him when he died. He had a red beret (green, sometimes), carried his ladder on his moped, and had his headquarters at the Brasserie l’Univers when he wasn’t handling mousse and raclette along the avenue that s Its real name is Avenue Nationale. The father’s name, the article said, we did not know. It was simply called «Johnny».

Following the obituary, a reader, whom Anna was unable to contact, left a comment on the Internet. “We called him Johnny because, when he arrived from Aurès in 1962, where his father Harki was massacred by the Algerian FLN, he loved Johnny Hallyday.” Anna’s grandfather, Hadj, harki? Murdered? The young woman knew him to be a healer, he had married Fatima in 1934, who died in the 2000s, but there will not be much to extract from the archives. As for the father, he said nothing.

“The shadow still lurked”

Anna’s father was 17 when he arrived in France with his little brother. They lived on the streets for a while. Then he found his place