Arts & Culture

As a student and fan of modern French literature, I’ve recently come across three books that each examine the intersection of French and Jewish identity. These books – two novels and a memoir – look at the Holocaust from a contemporary perspective and examine how it has shaped Jewish life in today’s France. If you’re looking for summer reading that’s a grade above the usual beach fare, you might want to give one of these a try.

• Philippe Grimbert- Memory (published in French as Un Secret) In this lovely but heartbreaking memoir, a French writer discovers what really happened to his family during the Holocaust. Though his parents managed to evade deportation and lived out the war years hiding in the South of France, they were not immune to tragedy. Like many diaspora Jews, he learns that his family’s name was changed – his father deliberately changed "Grinberg" to "Grimbert," altering only two letters in an attempt to make their name sound more French. Grimbert also learns the sordid truth of how his parents met and fell in love and what family members are willing to do in order to keep the past in the past.
• Tatiana de Rosnay- Sarah’s Key This bestselling book tells about a Franco-American journalist who becomes intrigued by the story of a French girl named Sarah whose family perished in the camps. As she recreates Sarah’s history, she finds unusual connections between her own life and that of the young girl who escaped the Holocaust. While the novel’s style is more didactic than literary, it does a good job of educating readers about Vel d’Hiv (the Velodrome d’Hiver, where Jews facing deportation were isolated and forced to endure disgusting living conditions), one of the saddest chapters in French Jewish history. The novel’s narrator is a relatable working wife and mother whose forays into history mirror her own conflicted emotions.
• Lydie Salvayre- The Company of Ghosts When a process-server comes to deliver papers to a young woman named Louisiane and her mentally ill mother Rose, he gets much more than he expected. This lyrical novella travels back and forth in time between the present and the past (Vichy-era France, where Rose’s beloved brother is brutally murdered by anti-Semites) as the mother conflates the process-server with the policemen and government officials who tormented her in her youth. The book is a haunting portrait of PTSD and the way that the past can haunt those who manage to survive, as well as a method of giving a voice to those in the generation that came after the war and how they internalize their parents’ struggles.

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