Post-War Jewish Women's Writing in French

268 Pages·2017·4.581 MB·English

by  Lucille Cairns

Cairns_10mm:Cairns_10mm 1/11/2011 7:10 PM Page 1
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How have French Jewish women reacted to the great traumas LEGENDA is a joint imprint
of the last century — the Holocaust, North African of the Modern Humanities A
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decolonization and the resulting migration of African Jews to Research Association and
France, the Arab-Israeli crisis and the aftermath of 9/11? Routledge. Titles range from JE
Cairns’s major new volume identifies the themes of books by medieval texts to W
French Jewish women from 1945to the present day, gauging contemporary cinema and IS
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to what extent they are dominated by, informed by, or form a widely comparative
relatively indifferent to these threatening events. Thirty view of the modern W
authors in particular serve as representatives of a great, and humanities.
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greatly diverse, pool: divided not only as Ashkenazim or
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Sephardim, but by origins scattered across Algeria, Egypt, E
Germany, Hungary, Morocco, Poland, Romania, Russia, N
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Tunisia, and Turkey. Theirs is a transnational, doubly- S
Post-War Jewish Women’s
diasporic, and thus particularly complex paradigm in which W
feminism, loyalty to family culture and to the traditions
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of Judaism often exists in tension with French Republican
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models of assimilation, non-differentiation, and gender- I Writing in French
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blindness.
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Lucille Cairns is Professor of French Literature at the N
University of Durham.
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Lucille Cairns
cover illustration:Miriams Tanz, from the Tomic´
Psalter (Tarnovo, Bulgaria, c.1360), illustrating Exodus
15:19: ‘Then Miriam the prophetess, Aaron’s sister, took a
tambourine in her hand, and all the women followed her,
with tambourines and dancing’ Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge
Post-War Jewish Women’s Writing in French
legenda
egena, founded in 1995 by the european Humanities Research Centre of
the University of Oxford, is now a joint imprint of the Modern Humanities
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edITORIal BOaRd
Chairman
Professor Colin davis, Royal Holloway, University of london
Professor Malcolm Cook, University of exeter (French)
Professor Robin Fiddian, Wadham College, Oxford (Spanish)
Professor Paul garner, University of leeds (Spanish)
Professor andrew Hadfield, University of Sussex (english)
Professor Marian Hobson Jeanneret,
Queen Mary University of london (French)
Professor Catriona Kelly, new College, Oxford (Russian)
Professor Martin Mclaughlin, Magdalen College, Oxford (Italian)
Professor Martin Maiden, Trinity College, Oxford (linguistics)
Professor Peter Matthews, St John’s College, Cambridge (linguistics)
dr Stephen Parkinson, linacre College, Oxford (Portuguese)
Professor Suzanne Raitt, William and Mary College, Virginia (english)
Professor Ritchie Robertson, The Queen’s College, Oxford (german)
Professor lesley Sharpe, University of exeter (german)
Professor david Shepherd, Keele University (Russian)
Professor Michael Sheringham, all Souls College, Oxford (French)
Professor alison Sinclair, Clare College, Cambridge (Spanish)
Professor david Treece, King’s College london (Portuguese)
Managing Editor
dr graham nelson
41 Wellington Square, Oxford ox1 2jf, UK

[email protected]
www.legenda.mhra.org.uk

Post-War Jewish
Women’s Writing in French
❖
lucie Cairns
Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge
2011
First published 2011
Published by the
Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
LEGENDA is an imprint of the
Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© Modern Humanities Research Association and Taylor & Francis 2011
ISBN 978-1-906540-40-1 (hbk)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopying,
recordings, fax or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the
publisher.
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Contents
❖
Author’s Note ix
Introduction 1
1 World War II: The Shoah and its Psycho-Memorial legacies 7
2 Second generation: The Transmission of Trauma 64
3 nation/deracination: gendered experiences of diaspora and the
French Republic 123
4 new Sites of Conflict: The Personal and the Political 181
Conclusion 239
Bibliography 246
Index 255
i eicate this book to my mother,
orothy scott cairns (née samue),
with a my ove
Author’s note
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I would like to record my thanks to Sonia Sarah lipsyc, for our stimulating dialogue
on the role of women in Judaism, and to Keith Reader, for his invaluable comments
on a first draft of this monograph (and also on some of the translations). I am also
grateful to graham nelson for his efficient and encouraging work as editor, to
Richard Correll for his meticulous copy-editing, and to legenda’s specialist reader
for helpful evaluation of the first draft of this monograph.
Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the original French into english
are my own.
. c., October 2010