Driven by his mother’s high expectations, Magyd the Algerian became the top student in his class in French. As a teenager, the young immigrant tutored his peers. Although he was forced to work hard in elementary and middle school and felt trapped there, Magyd blossomed in high school, where he discovered literature, Flaubert, and freedom. It was this extraordinary childhood journey that would make him a singer and a writer—he who had managed early on to grasp the “codes of French society and master the language.”