Shadows in the City of Light

The essays inShadows 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 andarrondissments 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.

Illustrations
Acknowledgments

1. Introduction: The Long Shadow of the Jewish Question in Paris

Part I: Topography

2. A Psychogeography ofDora Bruder
Julia Creet

3. "Ô popoï, popoï, popoï": Breathless Sobs, Displacement, and Parisian Cartography in Sarah Kofman'sRue Ordener Rue Labat
Gary D. Mole

4. Perec, Raczymow, and Their Sites of Memory
Annelies Schulte Nordholt

Part II: Familiar Strangers

5. Comme Dieu en France? Disillusionment and Dreams in Twentieth-Century French Jewish Immigrant Literature
Nadia Malinovich

6. Sarah Kofman: A Strange Familiarity
Henri Raczymow

Part III: Ambivalences

7. A City of My Own: Paris and Desire in the Works of Patrick Modiano and Georges Perec
Amira Bojadzija-Dan

8. Patrick Modiano'sDora Bruder: Wandering Down Memory Lane
Maxime Decout

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
Ruth Malka

Part IV: Absence

10. Mourning and the Work of Memory in Holocaust Memoirs
L. Scott Lerner

11. Paris Obscur
Thomas Nolden

12. Algerian Echoes in Modiano's and Perec's Cityscapes of Holocaust Memory
Sarah Hammerschlag

Part V: Past Imperfect

13. Perec's Ghost City
Nelly Wolf

14. Street Walking Paris
Sara R. Horowitz

15. The Afterlife of Irène Némirovsky'sSuite française
Susan Rubin Suleiman

Contributors
Index