Dora Bruder - Hardcover

Modiano, Patrick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520214269 ISBN 13: 9780520214262

Publisher: Univ of California Pr, 1999

Synopsis

The story of a missing French Jewish girl.

About this title

Review:

In 1988, the French novelist Patrick Modiano happened upon a notice in a 1941 Paris newspaper, placed by the parents of a 15-year-old Jewish girl, Dora Bruder, who had disappeared from the Catholic boarding school where she was being hidden. The notice stuck in Modiano's memory, and it launched him on a quest for information about the girl's life that resulted in this book: Dora Bruder. Modiano's long investigations turned up only tiny scraps of information about Dora Bruder's biography--but every scrap made the mystery of her disappearance more haunting. Most strikingly, Modiano found her name on a list of Jews deported from Paris to Auschwitz in 1942. "It takes time for what has been erased to resurface", Modiano explains. "It took me four years to discover her exact date of birth: February 25, 1926. And a further two years to find out her place of birth: Paris, 12th arrondissement. But I am a patient man. I can wait for hours in the rain". Eventually Modiano's search for information about Dora's life forces him to come to terms with his own difficult adolescence. Yet Modiano's book defies the categories of both history and memoir. It is something more complex, and harder--a poetic acknowledgement, and a philosophical refutation, of common and terrifying human fates: being isolated, being forgotten, and being lost. --Michael Joseph Gross

Review:

A hauntingly fetching book, centered on one teenage girl's avoidable death. Modiano's novel Out of the Dark (1998) is also a short, nostalgic work fixated on a woman. This work is even darker, in that it weaves research, logical speculation, and emotive imagination around a Jewish girl who runs away from the convent school that is hiding her and soon disappears in Auschwitz via Drancy. Modiano's obsessive search began about ten years ago when he saw an old 1941 newspaper notice about a missing 15-year-old girl named Dora Bruder. Using the powerful description that makes him a noted novelist in his native France ("the black interminable wall, the penumbra beneath the metro arches"), Modiano goes to the listed address and to many uncooperative offices to follow the paper trail, the bureaucratic banality of evil, that leads to Bruder's bolting from her tedious but safe hiding place during the Nazi occupation. The tragedy took place in parts of Paris familiar to the author, though much has changed in 50 years, "and it takes time for what has been erased to resurface." What resurfaces through months of patient investigation are details about Dora's parents and his own Jewish father, who abandoned the family, with speculation placing Dora and his father in the same predicament. Beyond the guesswork, like describing Mr. Bruder's likely battles during five years with the French Foreign Legion, Modiano comes up with a few photos of Dora and her family and interviews a few survivors that knew the family. The author combines empathy and facts to see the suicidal ecstasy of Dora running away and hiding out on the wintry Parisian streets until her documented arrest and transport to oblivion. Not a Holocaust memoir or historical fiction but a skillful reconstruction of a life that strides the two genres. (Kirkus Reviews)

About this edition

• Publisher: Univ of California Pr
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0520214269
• ISBN 13: 9780520214262
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 119