Telling the Untold Story: Jewish Wartime Refuge in Haiti in Louis-Philippe Dalembert’s Avant que les ombres s’effacent

Abstract

Abstract Literary narratives of Jewish refugees in the Caribbean uncover a forgotten chapter of wartime history. A key example is Haitian author Louis-Philippe Dalembert’s novel Avant que les ombres s’effacent (2017), which tracks the traumatic dispersion of a Polish Jewish family to Haiti, Cuba, Israel, and the US in the late 1930s. Dalembert interweaves the tale of his Jewish protagonist’s flight to Haiti with portrayals of the Haitian émigré community in Paris and the Haitian concentration camp prisoner Jean-Marcel Nicolas. Blending fact and fiction, the novel highlights the Haitian state’s little-known efforts to aid Holocaust refugees and connects those efforts to the island nation’s own revolutionary history. In this article, I argue that fiction’s unique traits as a medium of cultural memory enable Dalembert to reframe the wartime past from a Haitian perspective. Avant que les ombres s’effacent harnesses the fictional privileges of literary narrative, mediating between the real and the imaginary and combining Jewish and Caribbean memory systems in unexpected and often startling ways. Generating images of the wartime past that transform our perception of it, the novel moves Haiti to the center of the story and in so doing uncovers global dimensions of Jewish experience.