Shadows in the City of Light: Paris in Postwar French Jewish Writing

Description

The essays in Shadows in the City of Light explore the significance of Paris in the writing of five influential French writers-Sarah Kofman, Patrick Modiano, George Perec, Henri Raczymow, and Irene Nemirovsky-whose novels and memoirs capture and probe the absences of deported Paris Jews. These writers move their readers through wartime and postwar cityscapes of Paris, walking them through streets and arrondissments where Jews once resided, looking for traces of the disappeared. The city functions as more than a backdrop or setting. Its streets and buildings and monuments remind us of the exhilarating promise of the French Revolution and what it meant for Jews dreaming of equality. But the dynamic space of Paris also reminds us of the Holocaust and its aftermath. The shadowed paths traced by these writers raise complicated questions about ambivalence, absence, memory, secularity, and citizenship. In their writing, the urban landscape itself bears witness to the absent Jews, and what happened to them. For the writers treated in this volume, neither their Frenchness nor their Jewishness is a fixed point. Focusing on Paris's dual role as both a cultural hub and a powerful symbol of hope and conflict in Jewish memory, the contributors address intersections and departures among these writers. Their complexity of thought, artistry, and depth of vision shape a new understanding of the impact of the Holocaust on Jewish and French identity, on literature and literary forms, and on the development of Jewish secular culture in Western Europe. Contents Illustrations Acknowledgments 1 Introduction: The Long Shadow of the Jewish Question in Paris In Search of Shadows Past A Brief, Modern History of the Jews of Paris Vichy France and the Paris Cultural Scene The Authors and Their Contexts: The Paris of the Postwar Literature Bibliography Part 1 Topography 2 A Psychogeography of Dora Bruder Bibliography 3 “Ô popoï, popoï, popoï”: Breathless Sobs, Displacement, and Parisian Cartography in Sarah Kofman’s Rue Ordener Rue Labat Memories, Places, Encounters Mapping Readings of Rue Ordener Rue Labat A Gift as Yet Unfully Unwrapped Temporality and Displacement Reading the Mappings of Rue Ordener Rue Labat Place-mapping the Past Bibliography 4 Perec, Raczymow, and Their Sites of Memory The Belleville Neighborhood in the Works of Perec and Raczymow The City as a Book (Re)mapping Belleville and the rue Vilin Notes Bibliography Part 2 Familiar Strangers 5 Comme Dieu en France? Disillusionment and Dreams in Twentieth-Century French Jewish Immigrant Literature France in the Eastern European Jewish Imagination City of Dreams, City of Temptations: Paris in French Jewish Literature of the 1920s A City of Dreams (and Disappointments) Once More: Paris in the Postwar Sephardic Literary Imagination Paris, City of Dreams Fulfilled? Notes Bibliography 6 Sarah Kofman: A Strange Familiarity Rue Ordener Rue Labat The Cadavre, the Cadaveresque Two Mothers The Carrion Beetle Smothered Words To Write about That And Paris? Notes Bibliography Part 3 Ambivalences 7 A City of My Own: Paris and Desire in the Works of Patrick Modiano and Georges Perec Bibliography 8 Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder: Wandering Down Memory Lane A Topographical Inquiry From Biography to Autobiography: An Excursion into Jewish Identity Bibliography 9 “Paris of Days Gone By”: The Quest for Memory in a Postwar Haunted City—A Case Study of Georges Perec’s and Patrick Modiano’s Novels Bibliography Part 4 Absence 10 Mourning and the Work of Memory in Holocaust Memoirs Memory and the Work of Mourning: The Work of Memory Repression under Review The Primary Mourning of Lost Parents Preserving the Bond through Memoir-Writing Bibliography 11 Paris Obscur Bibliography 12 Algerian Echoes in Modiano’s and Perec’s Cityscapes of Holocaust Memory Modiano Perec Bibliography Part 5 Past Imperfect 13 Perec’s Ghost City Notes Bibliography 14 Street Walking Paris Note Bibliography 15 The Afterlife of Irène Némirovsky’s Suite française Notes Bibliography Contributors Index