- Person
- Patrick Modiano
- Lived
- b. 1945
- Field
- Literature
- From
- French
The story
Patrick Modiano was born near Paris in July 1945. His father, Albert Modiano, came from a Jewish family with roots in Thessaloniki; he refused to wear the yellow star, was arrested in February 1942 and narrowly escaped deportation. The German occupation of Paris, the years just before his own birth, became the great subject of Modiano’s novels about memory and loss.
In 1988, leafing through an old newspaper, Modiano found a notice in a December 1941 issue of Paris-Soir. Parents in the 18th arrondissement were searching for their daughter, Dora Bruder, fifteen years old, and described her height, face and clothes. Dora was the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and had run away from the Catholic boarding school sheltering her. Modiano set out to find out what had happened to her. Using archives, old telephone directories, documents and testimony, and records compiled by Serge Klarsfeld on the Jews deported from France, he reconstructed the fragments of her life. It took him years; the book appeared only in 1997.
Dora Bruder is part biography, part memoir and part investigation. Modiano follows her through the streets of Paris to her arrest and her deportation to Auschwitz in September 1942, and sets beside her story the arrest of his own father in the same city in the same year. The Swedish Academy singled it out as a work of documentary character about a fifteen-year-old girl who became one of the victims of the Holocaust.
The book did more than tell a story. After Modiano received the Nobel Prize in 2014, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo proposed naming a public space after Dora Bruder, and on 1 June 2015 Modiano inaugurated the Promenade Dora Bruder in the 18th arrondissement, near where she had lived and gone to school. He remarked that it was the first time an anonymous teenager had been inscribed for ever in the geography of Paris.
Why it matters
Dora Bruder has taught readers in many languages what the deportation of the Jews of France meant for one ordinary girl, and her name now stands on a Paris street because a novelist refused to let her be forgotten.
About Patrick Modiano
French novelist of memory, son of a Jewish father who escaped wartime deportation, whose Dora Bruder rescued a deported Jewish girl from oblivion. Nobel 2014.
Sources
- Patrick Modiano, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Biobibliographical notes: Patrick Modiano NobelPrize.org
- Patrick Modiano inaugure la promenade Dora Bruder Livres Hebdo
- Patrick Modiano Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.