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"Among the Jewish writers who immigrated from Eastern Europe to France in the 1910s and 1920s, a number chose to switch from writing in their languages of origin to writing primarily in French, a language that represented both a literary center and the promises of French universalism. But under the Nazi occupation of France from 1940 to 1944,these Jewish âemigrâe writers--among them Iráene Nâemirovsky, Benjamin Fondane, Romain Gary, Jean Malaquais, and Elsa Triolet--continued to write in their adopted language, even as the Vichy regime and Nazi occupiers denied their French identity through xenophobic and antisemitic laws. In this book, Julia Elsky argues that these writers reexamined both their Jewishness and their place as authors in France through the language in which they wrote"
List of contents
Introduction: Jewish Émigré Writers and the French Language
1. A Jewish Poetics of Exile: Benjamin Fondane's Exodus
2. Accents in Jean Malaquais's Carrefour Marseille
3. European Language and the Resistance: Romain Gary's Heteroglossia
4. Buried Language: Elsa Triolet's Bilingualism
5. Displacing Stereotypes: Irène Némirovsky in the Occupied Zone
Epilogue: Memory, Language, and Jewish Francophonie
About the author
Julia Elsky is Assistant Professor of French at Loyola University Chicago.
