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.
Author(s): Sara R. Horowitz (editor), Amira Bojadzija-Dan (editor), Julia Creet (editor)
Series: (SUNY series in Contemporary Jewish Literature and Culture)
Edition: 1
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 278
Tags: Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, Jewish Literature, Hebrew Literature
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
