She wrote ‘Gigi’ and inspired a Keira Knightley movie — was she also a Nazi collaborator?
To save her husband from the Nazis, did Colette become one?
French Literature
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Culture Books Briefing: A mysterious postcard illuminates a French family’s Holocaust history
Plus doppelgänger stories, new Jewish romance and a reboot of a Yiddish classic in this month's books newsletter
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Life Bernard-Henri Lévy’s Lady-Lacking Reading List
As I was perusing the New York Times book reviews this weekend (yes, the section whose cover features a review by Woody Allen), I happened upon an interview with French-Jewish writer and public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy. As someone with an above-average interest in French and Jewish (I’ve got a doctorate in just that topic, and…
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Culture Interpreting the Holocaust Dreams of Literary Puzzle Master Georges Perec
● La Boutique Obscure By Georges Perec Translated from the French by Daniel Levin Becker Melville House, 214 pages, $18.95 The Anglophone world is currently undergoing one of its periodical revivals — this time, of the panegyric experimentalism and formalist frolics of the French avant-garde literary collective Oulipo. The Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle), a…
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The Schmooze Frédéric Chouraki’s Yom Kippur Comedy
France’s Frédéric Chouraki is one of Europe’s most frivolous and insouciant young Jewish novelists. Chouraki’s 2008 “Ginsberg and Me” (“Ginsberg et moi”), from Les Éditions du Seuil, is a fictional jape about Simon Glückmann, an observant young French Jew who meets and seduces the elderly American poet Allen Ginsberg in a Paris gay sauna. Hijinks…
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The Schmooze Bernard Frank: France’s Much-Missed Literary Wit
In 2006, when the French Jewish author Bernard Frank dropped dead of a heart attack while dining with a cardiologist friend at a fancy Paris restaurant, readers felt it was a fitting end for this waspish gourmet with a fine talent for conviviality. Since his death at age 77, Frank’s articles on books, gourmet food…
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The Schmooze Patrick Modiano: Writing and Rewriting Recent Jewish History
On June 9, French novelist Patrick Modiano will receive a prestigious literary prize from the Fondation Simone et Cino del Duca, previously given to Jean Anouilh, Jorge Luis Borges, and Milan Kundera. Modiano, born in 1945, is the son of Albert Modiano, an Italian Jew with roots in Salonica, who survived the war as a…
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