Wide Awake
A Novel
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Coming of age in 1960s Paris, Bernard Appelbaum exists in the hazy shadow of the Holocaust and on the electric cusp of the French New Wave. We find the narrator of Wide Awake as he wanders the city streets in search of signs of his father, who was deported by the Nazis in 1942. Bernard’s chance encounter with a former acquaintance who has become filmmaker François Truffaut’s assistant leads to a spot as an extra on the set of Jules and Jim—setting into motion a series of discoveries and lost memories that crack open a hidden past.
On seeing Jules and Jim, Bernard’s mother is moved to divulge the secrets of her own past as a Jewish-Polish immigrant to France, which curiously mirrors that of the film’s heroine. When revelations about his mother’s two loves lead Bernard on a fateful journey through Paris, to Germany, and back to Poland and Auschwitz itself, he must plumb haunting depths in order to recover his own identity.
A beautiful and mysterious fictional memoir with echoes of W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, this riveting new work by one of France’s celebrated directors and writers will be a major new contribution to the literature of memory, loss, and how we grapple with the legacy of the Holocaust.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this meditative novel set in the early '60s, French film director Bober looks at the Holocaust's legacy from the perspective of the generation that immediately followed. Bernard Appelbaum, 21 years old and newly entranced by his native Paris seen through the lens of filmmaker Fran ois Truffaut, lands a role as an extra in Truffaut's latest, Jules et Jim (a story of simple coincidences shaping one's life). Upon seeing the film, Bernard's mother, Hannah, opens up about her own life's coincidences, especially how her marriage to Bernard's father, Yankel, resulted from their mutual friend Liezer's absence one evening, giving Yankel the chance to confess his love. After Yankel died in the camps when Bernard was only two, Hannah reconnected with Liezer, whom she married and with whom she had Bernard's half-brother, Alex. However, when Liezer dies in a plane crash, both boys are left fatherless and brimming with questions about their shared heritage. Though Bober writes lyrically of Paris and its young people struggling with the legacy of WWII, the plot meanders toward the end as Bober depicts obscure corners of the city, Bernard's young loves, and the choices that lead him to face his family's past.
