Proust, a Jewish Way
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Marcel Proust once wrote, “There is no longer anybody, not even myself, since I cannot leave my bed, who will go along the Rue du Repos to visit the little Jewish cemetery where my grandfather, following a custom that he never understood, went for so many years to lay a stone on his parents’ grave.” Investigating the origin and significance of this statement, Antoine Compagnon offers new insight into the great author’s underappreciated Jewish side.
Compagnon traces Proust’s ties to the French Jewish community, examining his relations with his mother’s successful and assimilated family, the Weils. He explores how French Jews read and responded to Proust’s masterpiece In Search of Lost Time in the 1920s and 1930s. Challenging contemporary critics who perceive self-hatred or even antisemitism in Proust’s work, Compagnon shows that many Jewish intellectuals and young Zionists admired and vigorously debated the novel, some seeing it as a source for pride in their Jewish identity. He also considers Proust’s portrayal of homosexuality and how it relates to notions of Jewishness. A work of remarkable erudition and deep research, Proust, a Jewish Way brings to light the vanished world of Proust’s first Jewish readers and shows how it can illuminate our reading of the great novelist today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Compagnon (A Summer with Pascal), a comparative literature professor at Columbia University, provides a niche deep dive into how Jewish readers of the 1920s and '30s responded to the works of French novelist Marcel Proust (1871–1922), whose father was Christian and whose mother was Jewish. Compagnon explains that contemporary scholars' tendency to view Proust as a self-hating Jew can be traced back to critic Siegfried van Praag, who lamented in 1937 that In Search of Lost Time's Jewish characters include an avaricious caricature and an actor undeserving of her success. Complicating such readings, Compagnon notes that Proust's novel was enthusiastically received by French Zionists in the 1920s, who viewed Proust's Jewish characters as complex and multifaceted. Compagnon also devotes two chapters to his successful efforts to uncover the origins of an oft-studied remark from Proust on his Jewish ancestry ("There is no longer anybody... to visit the little Jewish cemetery where my grandfather... went for so many years to lay a stone on his parents' grave"), but the answer doesn't reveal anything new about the author and the literary detective story ultimately feels like an unnecessarily extended footnote. Because Compagnon is more interested in what Jewish communities thought of Proust than in what Proust thought of Judaism, readers won't get much insight into the writer's personal beliefs, and there's not enough historical detail for the book to serve as a window into French Judaism in the interwar period. This is best suited to scholars of French literature.
