Writing Occupation: Jewish Émigré Voices in Wartime France

290 Pages·2020·3.16 MB·English

by  Julia Elsky

WRITING OCCUPATION
Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture
W RI T I N G
O CC U PAT I O N
Jewish Émigré Voices in Wartime France
o
JULIA ELSKY
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum.
©2020 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by
any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written
permission of Stanford University Press.
The opinions expressed in this book are those of the author and are not
necessarily those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free, archival- quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Elsky, Julia, author.
Title: Writing occupation : Jewish émigré voices in wartime France / Julia
Elsky.
Other titles: Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture.
Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2020. |
Series: Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020025606 (print) | LCCN 2020025607 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781503613676 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503614369 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: French literature—Jewish authors—History and
criticism. | French literature—20th century—History and criticism. |
Jewish authors—France—Language—History—20th century. | French
language—Political aspects—History—20th century. | World War,
1939–1945—France—Literature and the war. | France—History—
German occupation, 1940–1945.
Classification: LCC PQ150.J4 E47 2020 (print) | LCC PQ150.J4 (ebook) |
DDC 840.9/21296—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020025606
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020025607
Typeset by BookComp, Inc. in 10.25/15 Adobe Caslon Pro
Cover design by Rob Ehle
Cover credit: Rouzes | iStock
For my parents, Martin and Harriet Elsky,
and in loving memory of my grandmother, Elaine Sloan

CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction
Jewish Émigré Writers and the French Language 1
1 A Jewish Poetics of Exile: Benjamin Fondane’s Exodus 29
2 Accents in Jean Malaquais’s Carrefour Marseille 63
3 European Language and the Resistance:
Romain Gary’s Heteroglossia 93
4 Buried Language: Elsa Triolet’s Bilingualism 129
5 Displacing Stereotypes: Irène Némirovsky
in the Occupied Zone 165
Epilogue
Memory, Language, and Jewish Francophonie 203
Notes 213
Index 259

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In writing a book about French as an adopted language, I have also received
an education in writing in my own tongue. For this, and for so much more, I
thank Alice Kaplan. Without her guidance, endless generosity, and expertise,
this book would not have been possible. I also thank Maurice Samuels for
his kind support throughout the process. Maurice Samuels, Bruno Cabanes,
and Thomas C. Connolly gave substantive feedback in this project’s early
iterations. I am grateful to them and to my professors Christopher L. Miller
and Edwin Duval for all that they taught me, not least about intellectual
rigor. In some ways I set off on this project when Serge Gavronsky told me
about the rediscovery of Irène Némirovsky during my time as his student at
Barnard College. I thank my professors at Barnard, Laurie Postlewate, Serge
Gavronsky, and Peter Connor, as well as Elizabeth Castelli and Tim Halpin-
Healy in Barnard’s Centennial Scholars Program, all of whom inspired me
and encouraged me to go to France and seek adventure in the archives.
My year at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies at the Albert-
Ludwigs- Universität Freiburg, which was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation and the Volkswagen Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship for the
Humanities in Germany, provided me with the time and environment to
write much of this book. This writing was nourished by stimulating conver-
sations with Bernd Kortmann, Carsten Dose, Britta Küst, Marco Caracciolo,
Benoît Dillet, Sabine Hake, Suzanne Romaine, and Andrew Port. Since