Shadows in the City of Light: Paris in Postwar French Jewish Writing ed. by Sara R. Horowitz, Amira Bojadzija-Dan and Julia Creet (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Shadows in the City of Light: Paris in Postwar French Jewish Writing ed. by Sara R. Horowitz, Amira Bojadzija-Dan and Julia Creet Gayle Zachmann Sara R. Horowitz, Amira Bojadzija-Dan, and Julia Creet, eds., Shadows in the City of Light: Paris in Postwar French Jewish Writing, SUNY Series in Contemporary Jewish Literature and Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2021. 278 pp. 32 illus. Hardcover $95.00. Paperback $32.95. ISBN: 9781438481739, 9781438481746 Shadows in the City of Light: Paris in Postwar French Jewish Writing, edited by Sara R. Horowitz, Amira Bojadzija-Dan, and Julia Creet, presents an English-language collection of fourteen essays that explore literary memory and the ways that the city of Paris may depict absence in select postwar works of Jewish writers. Beautifully crafted, the introduction offers a useful historical survey of the context for Jews in France before, during, and after the war. It establishes the volume’s spatial approach to the palimpsest of Paris history and memorial culture, specifying too that “[t]he Jews of Paris in the books that we study in this volume are mostly from elsewhere, [ . . . ] from Poland, from Germany, from North Africa, contributing to the character of ‘the wandering Jew’ and a ‘uniquely Jewish anxiety’” (4–5). Idealized in literature and painting throughout the nineteenth century, the City of Light was for many Jews of Europe and North Africa a beacon of hope and the land of Jewish emancipation. A magnet for artists and writers in the early decades of the twentieth century, Paris in the interwar years became a refuge for Jews fleeing the rise of fascism. As it did for Thomas Muritz in Vercor’s La Marche à l’étoile (Guiding Star), for the families of these writers, the dream of emigration to France brutally ended with the fall of the Third Republic and the rise of Vichy France during World War II. Taking up important questions of commemoration, history, and living memory, Shadows in the City of Light tracks the tensions that arise when postwar Paris sites meant to laud an emancipatory land of the French Revolution instead become haunted by absences and the Shoah. Focused primarily on Patrick Modiano and George Perec, the volume also offers important pieces on Sarah Kofman, Henri Raczymow, Irene Nemirovsky, and five lesser-known writers. It engages Holocaust memory and trauma studies, examining how [End Page 268] postwar writers explore the relations between the physical, the past, and the present. Organized into five fluid thematic sections—“Topography,” “Familiar Strangers,” “Ambivalences,” “Absence,” and “Past Perfect”—the articles build on each other, elucidating immigrant, 1.5, and second-generation writers’ experiences of Paris spaces. They target maps, addresses, streets, and monuments; hope, disillusionment, memory, and mourning, with each taking on different facets of the works in question. In “Topography,” Julia Creet provides a psycho-geography of Dora Bruder, while Gary D. Mole’s excellent piece on Parisian cartography in Sarah Kofman sets the stage for Annelies Schulte Nordholt’s discussion of phantoms that circulate in Perec’s and Raczymow’s streets. Nadia Malinovich’s rich study of disillusionment and dreams in lesser-known immigrant writers fortuitously frames Henri Raczymow’s reading of Sara Kofman and his own experience in “Familiar Strangers.” Homing in on Modiano and Perec, the essays in “Ambivalences,” and “Absence” feature pieces on mourning and memory, exploring how writers reconcile the City of Light with its dark years during the war. As Thomas Nolden notes, “The act of remembering the victims disrupts the evocations of quintessential Paris tropes. Put differently, writing about Paris’s antisemitic past constitutes a break in French literary history” (165). Closing the volume, “Past Perfect” moves from “Perec’s Ghost City” by Nelly Wolf to Sara R. Horowitz’s “Street Walking Paris,” a consideration of how writers “negotiate memory through spacial practices” (208), as well as how Jewish walkers may “redefine official space to give it personal meaning” (215). Finally, Susan Suleiman traces the shadow of the Holocaust and its impact on the legacy of Nemirovsky’s unfinished wartime manuscript in “The Afterlife of Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française.” Exploring different genres, Shadows in the City of Light features...