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This book analyses Irene Némirovsky’s literary production in its relationship to the literary and cultural context of the inter-war period in France. It examines topics of central importance to our understanding of the literary field in France in the period, such as: the close relationship between politics and literature; the historical, political, cultural and personal legacies of the First World War; the so-called ‘crisis of the novel’ and the attempt to create and develop new narrative forms; the phenomenon of Russian emigration to Paris in the wake of the Russian Revolution and Civil War; the possibilities for the creation of a French-Jewish identity and mode of writing; and the threat of fascism and the approach of the Second World War.
In this work, the first critical monograph on Suite française, Nathan Bracher shows how, first amid the chaos and panic of the May-June 1940 debacle, and then within the unsettling new order of the German occupation, Némirovsky's novel casts a particularly revealing light on the behavior and attitudes of the French as well as on the highly problematic interaction of France's social classes
This is the portrait of a world on the eve of its destruction. Bernard Wasserstein presents a disturbing interpretation of the collapse of European Jewish civilization even before the Nazi onslaught and World War Two. In this revisionist account of modern European Jewry, Wasserstein shows how the harsh realities of the age devastated the lives of communities and individuals. By 1939, the Jews faced an existential crisis that was as much the result of internal decay as of external attack. Ranging from Vilna ('Jerusalem of Lithuania') to Salonica with its Judeo-Español-speaking stevedores and singers, and beyond, the book's focus is squarely on the Jews themselves rather than their persecutors. Wasserstein's aim is to 'breathe life into dry bones.' Based on vast research, written with compassion and empathy, and enlivened by dry wit, On the Eve paints a vivid and shocking picture of the European Jews in their final hour.
Bestselling historian and author Ken McGoogan delves into dictatorships of the twentieth century to sound this crucial alarm about the possibility of democratic collapse in the United States and its implications for Canada. Twentieth-century novels such as George Orwell’s 1984 and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale produced visions of future dystopia that rang with echoes of past tyrannies. Always implied was a warning that history’s worst chapters are never truly closed, and that we must not fail—as many of our forebears did—to recognize that the threat of totalitarianism cannot simply be wished away. Awakening to Invasion, an alarming and engrossing work of non-fiction from ...
This is the first book of its kind to address modernist autobiography in a comprehensive manner.
This book presents the first comparative study of the works of Charlotte Delbo, Noor Inayat Khan, and Germaine Tillion in relation to their vigorous struggles against Nazi aggression during World War II and the Holocaust. It illuminates ways in which their early lives conditioned both their political engagements during wartime and their extraordinary literary creations empowered by what Lara R. Curtis refers to as modes of ‘writing resistance.’ With skillful recourse to a remarkable variety of genres, they offer compelling autobiographical reflections, vivid chronicles of wartime atrocities, eyewitness accounts of victims, and acute perspectives on the political implications of major events. Their sensitive reflections of gendered subjectivity authenticate the myriad voices and visions they capture. In sum, this book highlights the lives and works of three courageous women who were ceaselessly committed to a noble cause during the Holocaust and World War II.
A fascinating look into the life and work of controversial French novelist Irène Némirovsky Irène Némirovsky succeeded in creating a brilliant career as a novelist in the 1930s, only to have her life cut short: a “foreign Jew” in France, she was deported in 1942 and died in Auschwitz. But her two young daughters survived, and as adults they brought their mother back to life. In 2004, Suite française, Némirovsky’s posthumous novel, became an international best seller; some critics, however, condemned her as a “self-hating Jew” whose earlier works were rife with anti-Semitic stereotypes. Informed by personal interviews with Némirovsky’s descendants and others, as well as by extensive archival research, this wide-ranging intellectual biography situates Némirovsky in the literary and political climate of interwar France and recounts, for the first time, the postwar lives of her daughters. Némirovsky's Jewish works, Suleiman argues, should be read as explorations of the conflicted identities that shaped the lives of secular Jews in twentieth-century Europe and beyond.
Girls in French and Francophone Literature and Film is a collection of essays focusing on constructions of girlhood in French and Francophone Literature and Film from the late-Nineteenth to the early-Twenty-First centuries. The volume is firmly anchored at the intersection of French and Francophone studies and the bourgeoning field of girls’ studies. Collectively, the articles demonstrate that girls’ experience, historically viewed as a mere deviation from the “normative” male model, is a product of diverse ideological, cultural and economic factors, and is deserving of its own field of inquiry.
These further six chapters of Jews in an Illusion of Paradise now focus on individual exemplary figures and clusters of poets, dramatists, critics, journalists, art historians—Jews whose achievements were once celebrated, but now are almost all but forgotten, not because of changes in aesthetic taste or style but because of social, political and other ideological issues. The book continues to examine the clash between their conscious and unconscious self-presentation as Jews in a culture that wilfully or inadvertently misunderstood or rejected this aspect of “otherness” the men and women represented from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Whereas the first volume concentrated on the themes, images and rhetorical motifs of this awkward status of Jewish intellectuals and artists, here the ambiguous personalities and repressed anxieties of the exemplary figures are stressed. For millennia, Jews were considered outside of normal history, passive victims of persecution; then suddenly, with Emancipation, they fell into history and out of their mythical place in the scheme of things. Everything seemed to crumble into dust and ashes.