Dora Bruder - Softcover

Modiano, Patrick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520218787 ISBN 13: 9780520218789

Publisher: California University Press, 2014

Synopsis

In 1988 Patrick Modiano stumbles across an ad in the personal columns of the New Year's Eve 1941 edition of Paris Soir: "Missing, a young girl, Dora Bruder, age 15, height 1 m 55, oval-shaped face, gray-brown eyes, gray sports jacket, maroon pullover, navy blue skirt and hat, brown gym shoes." Placed by the parents of Dora, who had run away from her Catholic boarding school, the ad sets Modiano off on a quest to find out everything he can about her and why, at the height of German reprisals, she ran away from the people hiding her. There is only one other official mention of her name: on a list of Jews deported from Paris to Auschwitz in September 1942. What little Modiano discovers about Dora in official records and through remaining family members becomes a meditation on the immense losses of the period - lost people, lost stories, and lost history. Modiano delivers a moving account of the ten-year investigation that took him back to the sights and sounds of Paris under the Nazi Occupation and the paranoia of the Petain regime. In his efforts to exhume her from the past, Modiano realizes that he must come to terms with the specters of his own troubled adolescence. The result, a montage of creative and historical material, is Modiano's personal rumination on loss, both memoir and memorial.

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:

"Modiano has an almost paranormal capacity to sense vibrations from the past or intimations of the future."

--Debarati Sanyal"Public Books" (10/01/2015)

About this edition

• Publisher: California University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0520218787
• ISBN 13: 9780520218789
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 128