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Annette Wieviorka, Daniel Mendelsohn, Ivan Jablonka... in the name of all their people

2022-11-27T08:03:04.641Z


The stories of family tragedies, and in particular of the descendants of Jewish deportees, are on the way to becoming an editorial genre. Historians, in particular, congratulate themselves on the fact that they can produce very good books.


The Femina essay prize, awarded to historian Annette Wieviorka, specialist in the Shoah, is a literary consecration for a book which is part of a recent line, that of the family autobiography signed by descendants of Jews from Eastern Europe. 'East.

Another literary prize, the Prix Médicis Etranger, was dedicated fifteen years ago to one of the pioneers of the genre,

The Disappeared

, by the American critic Daniel Mendelsohn.

Published in the United States in 2006, and the following year in France, this investigation traced the journey of the author's great-uncle, his wife and their four daughters, who were exterminated by the Nazis in 1941 in eastern Poland.

For

Tombeaux, autobiographie de ma famille

(Seuil), Annette Wieviorka, who really liked

Les Disparus

, insisted on writing differently.

On the one hand,

"it's not a book about the Holocaust

," said the 74-year-old author to AFP.

It recounts more broadly the fate, between the interwar period and the beginnings of the Cold War, of the grandparents and other members of two Polish Jewish families.

She pays homage to these immigrants driven out by anti-Semitism, who patiently inserted themselves into French society in the 1920s and 1930s. On the other hand,

“the choice to describe the investigation was that of Mendelsohn (... ) Many books followed on this model.

What I did not do

, ”she adds.

Historical rigor

The best known is by Ivan Jablonka, a historian Annette Wieviorka knows well, having co-authored with him in 2013

New Perspectives on the Shoah

.

The previous year, he had published

Histoire des grandparents que je n'ai pas

(also at Le Seuil), about Matès and Idesa Jablonka, murdered in Auschwitz.

Unknown authors have explored this path in recent years, with small publishers: Odile Suganas, Anny Bloch, Franck Fajnkuchen, Jean-Bernard Fortis.

“The historical account of family tragedies is on the way to becoming an editorial genre in its own right.

So much the better if it gives us books like that of Annette Wieviorka

”, wrote in August on Twitter another historian, André Loez.

Alongside these works which insist on their historical rigour, a freer literature has developed.

"Post Memory"

It is the work of novelists who can be linked to the current of "post-memory".

In 2021, Anne Berest with

La Carte postale

, Renaudot prize for high school students, this year Cloé Korman with

Les almost sisters

, even Lola Lafon who evokes her family in a book on Anne Frank,

When you will listen to this song

.

“I am not a historian.

On the other hand I try to have the rigor of it.

It's almost four years of very intense work with the hope that, when you read the book, you don't read the work

, ”said Anne Berest to AFP.

Journalist Sonia Devillers traced the journey of her Romanian Jewish grandparents in

Les Exportés

.

According to her,

“to the children of exiles, there is a part of the journey that we never tell.

It is up to the untraumatized heirs to redo the trip in reverse

, ”she confided in September.

“You have to consider the generations

,” explains Annette Wieviorka.

She notes that these authors are in their forties, born when she herself began to collect documentation on all her ancestors mentioned in

Tombeaux

.

While writing this book,

“of course, I learned things.

And above all, I learned what you can't learn

,” says the historian.

"I realized - when I wrote a whole book on Auschwitz, and I went there many times - that we could not know exactly who had entered the camps and who was not there. did

n't come in

,” she explains.

And that concerning those who died there,

“we could not know, except if there was a testimony, what had happened, for lack of archives”

.

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2022-11-27

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