Erika Dreifus

In which I participate in David Abrams’s “Sunday Sentence” project, sharing the best sentence I’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”

A comparison might be made between Gary and his good friend and admirer Albert Camus: both were outsiders, the Eastern European Jew and the Algerian; both were resisters (though Camus’s war was nowhere near as heroic as Gary’s); and both spoke up for the particular and against the abstract, following the hope, embedded in the French vocabulary, that the word humain could stand for both the human and the humane.

Source: “The Made-Up Man” by Adam Gopnik (The New Yorker)