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French Connections

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

Two articles in yesterday’s New York Times really caught my attention.

First up is this profile of Samuel Pisar. I met the Pisar family back in 1990, when I was spending a semester in Paris. During my undergraduate years at Harvard, I held a termtime job in the admissions office, and while I was in Paris I was an unofficial “greeter” for local students who had just been admitted to the school. One of them was named Leah Pisar (Leah is multiply referenced and quoted in the article, too). Meeting her father, a Holocaust survivor, all those years ago made my subsequent reading of his harrowing memoir, Of Blood and Hope, all the more powerful.

Next, sadly, is a story of all-too-contemporary anti-Semitism in my beloved France. In the print edition, this appears on the same page as the Pisar profile. Which, for some reason, also affects me profoundly.

Irène Némirvosky and the Jewish Question

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

Unfortunately, I was unable to attend last week’s panel discussion at the Museum of Jewish Heritage on “Irène Némirovsky and the Jewish Question.” On the bright side, though, the Museum has made podcast segments available on its Web site, and I’ve had some time this weekend to listen. Well worth my time, and, if you’re interested in Némirvosky and her work, quite likely worth yours, too.

Woman of Letters and Other Goings-on at the Museum of Jewish Heritage

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

In the current (November) issue of The Writer magazine, I’ve contributed a short news item on Woman of Letters: Irène Némirovsky and Suite Française, an exhibition at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage-A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. Woman of Letters runs into March 2009, but if you can’t get to the Museum to see it, you can still check it out online.

Plenty of events are being planned in conjunction with this exhibition, among them a discussion of “Jews in Vichy France” (featuring scholars Robert Paxton and Michael Marrus) and another session on “Irène Némirovsky and the Jewish Question,” with my own former professor, Susan Suleiman, and The New Republic‘s Ruth Franklin. Check out these sessions, and other events planned for this fall at the Museum, right here.

(I won’t be blogging on Yom Kippur. See you back here in a few days.)

Sharing "Un Secret"

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

Last weekend I saw an extraordinary film: A Secret (“Un Secret“), based on the autobiographical French novel by Philippe Grimbert.

The New York Times review got it right:

To describe “A Secret” as a Holocaust movie would be perfectly accurate but also somewhat misleading. Its chronology is complex and elusive. It shifts from the immediate postwar years into the 1980s…and then back into the anxiety and panic of impending and actual war. In those days Maxime spelled his last name Grinberg, he was married to a woman named Hannah (Ludivine Sagnier) and the two of them occupied the stolid center of a large and complicated extended Jewish family.

That family, as it heads toward catastrophe, is as much the setting of the story as its subject, and their fate as Jews under Nazi occupation is entangled in murky, sticky domestic issues of jealousy, betrayal and desire. An erotic spark ignites the first time Maxime and Tania meet — the day of his wedding to Hannah — and it causes plenty of guilt and tension. But it might have been safely (if agonizingly) extinguished in more peaceful times….

What is most impressive about “A Secret” is the way Mr. Miller artfully and gently gestures toward such enormous themes without spelling them out. Nearly every melodramatic impulse has been suppressed in favor of a calm precision that serves both to intensify and delay the emotional impact of the film’s climactic disclosures.

There is so much more to say about this movie, and given my past studies in 20th century French history, I feel compelled to say it. But I also want to wait until I have the chance to discuss it with one of my mentors and friends to get his take (and to ask him if he agrees with me about one possible anachronism amid all the incredibly good historical detail).

The film is just becoming known here in the United States, where Grimbert will be meeting with American readers/audiences in the coming days. I’ve already ordered the original novel from amazon.fr (it has been published in English in the United States as Memory), and I’m looking forward to hearing what the author of this intense, and intensely sad, story has to say when I attend this event at the Mercantile Library Center for Fiction in Manhattan. Keep an eye out for any Grimbert appearances near you. And go see that movie. ASAP.

This Week In Jerusalem

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

Somewhat belatedly, I’m reading all about the first International Writers Festival in Jerusalem, which took place this past Monday-Thursday (May 12-15). And I’m wishing I’d been there.

You can read some of the press coverage here, here, and, in tandem with coverage of a similar event taking place to celebrate Palestinian literature, here.

Of course, all “boycott” talk I’ve found so far has to do with urges to boycott the Israeli-planned festival, not the Palestinian one (and I’m not going to do the proponents of that cause any favors by linking to anything explaining their “reasoning”). It seems that Nadine Gordimer, in particular, was the target of appeals urging her to cancel her participation. Kudos to Ms. Gordimer for resisting the pressure.