Judéité

French-Jewish literature is less a clearly defined genre than an imaginary territory in which belonging, memory, and identity are renegotiated. This literary field has developed since the Middle Ages—from Rashi's Judeo-French glosses to contemporary novels. Uniform criteria are lacking: there is no common language or fixed genre, but rather a distinctive literary sensibility shaped by the tension between Jewish identity (Judéité in the sense of Nelly Wolf) and French universalism. Central themes include assimilation, alienation, Holocaust remembrance, antisemitism, Israel/the Middle East, migration, genealogical tracing, and questions of linguistic identity. Stylistically, traces of Hebrew or Yiddish are evident, as well as a reflective engagement with the French language.

Definition by Nelly Wolf: "Un écrivain juif de langue française est un écrivain dont la judéité produit des effets dans le champ littéraire francophone. À l'image de sa judéité civique que le citoyen juif négocie dans l'espace politique, la judéité littéraire est confrontée à a large spectrum of possibilities, dont le camouflage and l'ostentation constituent les deux extrémités.” (Le Juif imaginé, 2023)

"A French-speaking Jewish writer is a writer whose Jewishness has an impact in the Francophone literary sphere. Like bourgeois Jewishness, which the Jewish citizen negotiates in the political arena, literary Jewishness is also confronted with a wide range of possibilities, the two extremes of which are concealment and display."

Unlike Nelly Wolf's category, this section generally includes books on the topic of Jewishness, regardless of the author. France was the first country in Europe to grant Jews full citizenship rights in 1791. Today, France's Jewish community is the largest in Europe and the third largest worldwide, after the USA and Israel. French Jewish life is strongly concentrated in Paris and several southern cities such as Marseille, Lyon, and Toulouse.

Israel, Gaza and the French intellectual discourse after October 7: Interpretive authority according to Denis Sieffert

This review analyzes the French intellectual debate following October 7, 2023, as a deeply polarized field of discourse in which three central positions emerged: a dominant pro-Israel camp, a marginalized pro-Palestinian spectrum, and a fragile, long-silent intermediate position. At its core is Denis Sieffert's book "La mauvaise cause" (2026), which is read as a committed counter-narrative against what he sees as a hegemonic, pro-Israel discursive order. The review meticulously reconstructs Sieffert's argument—from the historical entanglement of France with Israel and the analysis of media and rhetorical mechanisms to the critique of prominent intellectuals such as Gilles Kepel and Eva Illouz—and demonstrates that his central point of departure lies in the repoliticization of the conflict as a colonial issue. In comparison with Kepel's geopolitical-religious studies approach and Illouz's sociological critique of the Western left, the review highlights the fundamental epistemic differences between these positions: While Kepel and Illouz problematize the reactions to October 7th, Sieffert focuses on the mechanisms of discursive power and the rendering invisible of Palestinian suffering. In conclusion, the review assesses the book as an important, albeit not unproblematic, intervention that exemplifies the political, media, and moral fault lines of contemporary France.

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Between myth and mass murder: German-French novels under the shadow of the Third Reich

Michel Tournier's "Le Roi des Aulnes" (1970) and Jonathan Littell's "Les Bienveillantes" (2006), despite the 36-year gap and two fundamentally different literary temperaments, are both Franco-German novels in the most precise sense: Tournier sends his Parisian garage owner Abel Tiffauges as a prisoner of war to East Prussia, where he experiences Germany as a mythological mirror land – herds of deer like heraldic animals, Göring's hunting lodge as a "palais sur rails", the Napola castle Kaltenborn as the fulfillment of an Erlking obsession – until the Jewish child Ephraïm inverts all his symbols at the end and transforms himself into the Star of David in the last sentence; Littell equips his first-person narrator, Max Aue, an SS officer and mass murderer, with Alsatian origins, a French mother, a Sciences Po education, and Parisian collaborators, so that Franco-German hybridity appears not as a humanizing bridge, but as a prerequisite for complicity—whoever knows Racine and Hölderlin equally well simply writes mass murder in better French. The present contrasting interpretation argues that both novels share precisely this commonality: They reject the comforting narrative that National Socialism was something culturally alien, imposed on the Franco-German heritage from the outside, and instead force their protagonists—the fascinated Frenchman as well as the hybrid perpetrator—to recognize their own education, fascination, and language skills as a gateway to the Nazi regime. The review sharply distinguishes between Tournier's mythological alienation – the crime is sublimated into archaic patterns (Erlkönig, Christopher, inversion of signs) in order to become visible – and Littell's hyperrealistic immanence, which denies any mythological shield and draws the reader into a complicity through Aue's cultivated narrative tone, from which he cannot escape; the review suggests that this difference is not only aesthetically but also historically explainable: in 1970 Auschwitz was still indescribable, it was sublimated – in 2006 it was academicized and museumified, and Littell insisted on its unprocessability. As Franco-German texts, both novels are also examined in terms of their language policy: the German, which Tournier leaves in the novel as reverently untranslated foreign material (Napola, Reichsjägermeister, Jungmann), and the French, which Littell chooses as the written language for the German mass murder – a literary sacrilege that turns the “clarté française” against itself and thus illustrates the thesis of the review that the Franco-German cultural community cannot close the black hole in its history, but can only circle around it.

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Belonging as exclusion: the foreign language and the father as Yekkes at Manor Dory

The novel reveals how Jewish identity functions simultaneously as a historical protection and as a normative inscription on the body, placing the individual in an irresolvable tension between diaspora and Israeli belonging. A son writes to his dead father in a foreign language, demonstrating how history, origin, and power are indelibly inscribed on bodies, names, and desires—and how one can only escape them by retelling them. Manor Dory's "Le Gorille" (Grasset, 2026) explores how identity is produced through historical, bodily, and linguistic inscriptions—and how these inscriptions cannot be overcome, but only transformed. The starting point is the constellation of an autobiographically grounded epistolary novel in which a son writes to his dead father in order to escape his grasp and simultaneously recreate him in literary form. From this starting point, the essay reconstructs the central lines of movement in the text: the childhood experience of a physically and symbolically different father (non-circumcision, name change from Reinhard to Ezer), the author's own adolescence as a phase of violent approach to this very body and simultaneous resistance (culminating in a psychiatric episode and homoerotic impulses), and adult life, in which genealogical, political, and erotic conflicts converge in a transnational existence between Tel Aviv, Berlin, and Paris. The interpretation reads the novel along the lines of the thesis that different power structures—family, religion, state, masculinity—function homologously insofar as they mark, discipline, and make legible the body; circumcision acts as a paradigmatic figure, but is expanded through names, languages, and institutional practices. Particular attention is paid to the poetics employed: the choice of French as the “private” language of writing, the mosaic structure as a reflection of a non-linear memory, and the figure of deadnaming as an intersection of Zionist naming politics and queer-theoretical thought. At the same time, the review highlights the central paradox of Jewish existence, which the novel encapsulates in a concise image: what ensured survival in Europe (the uncircumcised body) signifies exclusion in Israel—a historical reversal realized in the father's body and made explicit in the son's writing. From this perspective, writing itself appears as an ambivalent practice: not as liberation from violence, but as its displacement into a self-determined form, as a “translation” that makes loyalty possible only through betrayal. The ending—the announcement of an uncircumcised, multilingual child—is interpreted as a deliberate interruption of a context of inscription, the continued influence of which the novel simultaneously reflects upon and does not negate.

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Genealogy of Hate: Autobiography, Antisemitism and the Poetics of History in Édouard Drumont and Christophe Donner

As this essay demonstrates, Christophe Donner's novel "La France goy" unfolds a genealogical narrative project in which individual family history and collective ideological history intertwine: The starting point is the first-person narrator's archival search for his great-grandfather Henri Gosset, which quickly expands into a far-reaching reconstruction of French antisemitism since the late 19th century. Through Gosset's social mobility and his entanglement in the circles of Léon Daudet and Edgar Bérillon, the family is directly integrated into the ideological network of the time, while in parallel, Édouard Drumont's biography unfolds as an "anatomy of hatred," revealing how personal failure, social humiliation, and media strategies condense into a powerful antisemitic narrative. This network is complemented by counter-figures such as the anarchist Marcelle Bernard, as well as by the genealogical perspective on the grandfather Jean Gosset, whose death in a concentration camp brings the historical threads to a brutal culmination. The interpretation argues that Donner's method is neither purely autobiographical nor classically historical, but rather, as a kind of "genealogical archaeology," develops a reflexive poetics of the archive in which documents, fiction, and self-observation intertwine, systematically subverting the boundaries between self-biography and biography. Central to this is the thesis of a structural continuity of antisemitism, which is not asserted discursively but demonstrated narratively by making visible ideological, linguistic, and affective sediments across generations. Donner's literary achievement is seen in not only morally condemning antisemitism, but also revealing its aesthetic and narrative appeal: Drumont's success is understood as the result of a narrative logic that transforms diffuse resentments into a coherent story. This leads to a sophisticated critical approach that understands writing itself as an ambivalent power—as a medium of both ideological seduction and enlightened counter-work—and reads the novel as a whole as an attempt to gain a form of historical knowledge that transcends mere factuality through the literary exploration of genealogical entanglements.

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Where the trauma begins: Camille de Toledo

Camille de Toledo's "Thésée, sa vie nouvelle" (Verdier, 2020) develops a multifaceted literary investigation from a shocking moment—the discovery of her brother's hanged body in Paris in 2005—intertwining mourning, family chronicle, essay, and poetic evocation. The novel follows its narrator, Thésée, over the course of years in a dual movement: into the present of a traumatized body and simultaneously backward into the genealogical depths of a family marked by loss, silence, and concealed Jewish heritage. Starting with three boxes containing photographs, letters, and the manuscript of her great-great-grandfather, a "poem-inquiry" unfolds, revealing how historical violence, suicides, and repressed memory are inscribed not only narratively but also physically in the bodies of descendants. The review interprets this formally hybrid work as a performative poetics of the transgenerational: the non-linear temporal structure, the synchronicities of the dates, the shifting pronouns, and the incorporation of documentary voices realize precisely the entanglement of past and present that the text asserts. At its core lies the reinterpretation of the Theseus myth: the labyrinth is no longer an external place, but rather the interior of the family history, the "Ariadne's thread" a fragile web of archival material that only emerges in the act of writing. By returning at the end—in a radical inversion of chronology—to the great-great-grandfather's suicide in 1939, the novel marks the origin of the wound and reveals that knowledge is only possible through return: through arriving at the place from which everything originated. The essay emphasizes that Toledo thus provides neither a psychological nor a sociological explanation of suicide, but rather establishes a literary form of knowledge that gives voice to the memory sedimented in matter. Literature appears here as a place of “revival” – not as a resolution of trauma, but as a reconnection with the dead, as a careful mending of a broken thread that makes a “vie nouvelle” conceivable in the first place.

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Alain Finkielkraut between cultural criticism and political reflection

Alain Finkielkraut's "Le cœur lourd" (Gallimard, 2026) is a personal and diagnostic portrait of the intellectual, born in 1949, who experiences himself as an "orphan" in a world in upheaval. The review highlights that the book, based on conversations with Vincent Trémolet de Villers, not only reflects Finkielkraut's postwar biography and his belonging to the "post-Shoah" generation, but also critically analyzes the threats to language, culture, and identity in the present. Central themes include responsibility towards one's own historical and Jewish identity, concern for France and Israel, the loss of high culture and education, and nostalgia for a past, harmonious world. Finkielkraut presents himself as a melancholic chronicler who simultaneously makes concrete political, ethical and ecological proposals – from saving language to integral ecology to a model of conservative-liberal-socialist values ​​– thus showing how personal experience, philosophical reflection and concern for the future are inextricably linked.

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Negative Identity: Problematizing French-Jewish Literature in the Work of Bernard Vorms

Bernard Vorms' novel "Pas gentil" (cited as PG) unfolds, in essayistic form, the self-examination of an assimilated French-Jewish intellectual who, faced with age, origin, and societal ascription, is forced to grapple with an identity he can neither positively define nor completely shed. Starting with a banal everyday scene—a letter regarding funeral arrangements—a multifaceted text of reflection develops, intertwining autobiographical memories, family history, political analysis, and literary intertexts. The narrator traces the paths of Jewish existence between assimilation and exclusion, analyzes the persistence of antisemitic stereotypes, and formulates a central insight with the "axiom of absolute otherness": Jewishness is neither fully comprehensible to non-Jews nor to Jews themselves. The essay argues that the text unfolds its literary and theoretical radicalism precisely in this way: PG is not to be read as a contribution to an existing “French-Jewish literature,” but rather as a problematization of it. By consistently defining Vorm’s identity negatively—as something that reveals itself only in its indeterminacy—he develops a poetics of “negative identity” characterized by irony (for example, in the “shm” prefix), essayistic openness, and intertextual polyphony. The novel eschews classical plot and heroic narratives in favor of a thought process that culminates in a sober, unconciliatory, yet dignified conclusion: a self-reflective acceptance of one’s own belonging without illusions about its content. The interpretation simultaneously reads this approach as a plea for the essay as an adequate form of modern identity reflection—tentative, contradictory, and without claiming to definitive answers.

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Land of Child Kings: Palestine Between Violence and Mercy by Yasmina Khadra

Yasmina Khadra's new novel, "Le prieur de Bethléem" (Flammarion, 2026, cited as PB), thematically follows his so-called "Trilogy of the Great Misunderstanding," which created a literary cartography of the crisis regions of the early 2000s: Afghanistan under Taliban rule (with "The Swallows of Kabul"), Israel and the Palestinian territories during the Second Intifada (in "The Assassin"), and Iraq in the context of the Iraq War after the 2003 American invasion (in "The Sirens of Baghdad"). As in these novels, Khadra here also combines a suspenseful plot with a moral reflection on violence, humiliation, and radicalization. The story centers on the French-Israeli publisher Alexandre Yakovlevoi, who receives a manuscript from a Palestinian monk and is shortly thereafter kidnapped by its author. As Alexandre is forced to listen to the life story of Prior Wahid—a chronicle of displacement, familial loss, and political violence in Palestine—a personal entanglement gradually unfolds: Alexandre himself, as a young soldier in Israel, was involved in the killing of Wahid's pregnant cousin. The novel develops from this a confrontation that aims not at revenge, but at moral insight. In parallel, visionary and almost messianic scenes—such as mysterious healings in Jordan or the appearance of a pilgrim in the ruins of Gaza—open up a spiritual perspective in which Khadra places the conflict within a universal horizon of human responsibility. The essay interprets the novel as a late continuation of the trilogy, one that deepens and simultaneously transforms its diagnosis of the "great misunderstanding" between East and West. While the earlier works primarily analyzed the genesis of violence from humiliation and political powerlessness, here the focus shifts to a moral confrontation between perpetrator and victim. The essay's argument explores several levels: first, the novel's political dimension as a critique of military violence and the asymmetrical perception of the Middle East conflict; second, the psychological structure of guilt, embodied in the figure of the French-Israeli publisher; and third, a religious-symbolic level on which Khadra envisions a moral rebirth. It is particularly emphasized that the novel does not remain within the realm of political realism but formulates a utopian counter-movement: truth, empathy, and the "saving gesture" appear as possibilities for breaking the cycle of trauma and retribution. The interpretation therefore reads PB less as a political novel in the narrow sense and more as a literary attempt at disengagement, a quest to transform the Middle East conflict into a universal ethic of humanity.

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Pascal Bruckner: the philosopher as son

In "Un bon fils" (2014, cited as BF) and his most recent book, "De mère inconnue" (2026, cited as MI), the nouveau philosophe Pascal Bruckner undertakes a twofold familial self-examination that can also be read as an intellectual biography. While BF portrays the violent and ideologically rigid father figure—an antisemitic and authoritarian man whose worldview both shaped the young Bruckner and forced him to distance himself—MI reconstructs the long-neglected story of his mother. The two books thus form a complementary diptych: on the one hand, the father as a symbol of a repressive, resentment-laden mindset; on the other, the enigmatic, sometimes absent mother, whose biography raises questions about origin, identity, and emotional heritage. Together, these autobiographical texts sketch a genealogy of Bruckner's intellectual self-positioning. The review demonstrates how central themes in Bruckner's essayistic publications can be explained by this familial constellation. His critique of Western ideology of guilt (in works such as "La tyrannie de la pénitence," "Le sanglot de l'homme blanc," and "Je souffre donc je suis") appears newly legible against the backdrop of his personal experience of guilt, authority, and moral self-examination. Similarly, his analysis of modern discourses on victimhood can be linked to his exploration of familial power dynamics and roles of victim. The review therefore argues that BF and MI are not merely autobiographical documents, but key texts for understanding Bruckner's work of ideological critique: in them, family history, moral reflection, and political essay writing intertwine to form an intellectual self-interpretation.

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Diaspora and Nationalism: European Transitional Period 1913 by François Sureau

François Sureau's novel "Loin de Salonique" (Gallimard, 2026) is set in 1913 in Monastir (Bitola) and Thessaloniki, and unfolds a panorama of the politically overheated Balkans immediately before the First World War through a mysterious murder case: The unofficial investigations of the Frenchman Thomas More and the Jewish businessman Paul Seligmann lead through a web of diplomacy, trade and intelligence activities, revealing the tectonic tensions that were shaking the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire; Thessaloniki appears as a Sephardic, multilingual diaspora city whose fragile plurality contrasts with the hardening nationalisms, while France is simultaneously portrayed as a universalist reference power and a power-political actor. The review argues that the criminal case forms a narrative surface for making a historical diagnosis: through the double coding of the character Thomas More – as an allusion to the humanist and author of "Utopia" and as a modern, disillusioned observer – the novel highlights the discrepancy between normative idea and political reality; methodically, the review develops its interpretation by first outlining the geopolitical liminal space, then analyzing the symbolism of the naming, elaborating on the representation of Jewish diaspora as a relational form of identity, and finally determining the genre-poetic mixture between detective novel, historical novel, and political essay, thus arriving at the judgment that the work offers less a criminal resolution than a melancholic meditation on the disintegration of a European model of order.

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1966 or the Birth of Our Present: Antoine Compagnon

Antoine Compagnon's "1966, année mirifique" (Gallimard, 2026) reconstructs the year 1966 not merely as a historical point in time, but as an epistemological turning point in French modernity. Drawing on the press, literature, theory, film, everyday objects, and political debates, Compagnon demonstrates how long-term trends converged in this year: the massification of universities, the rise of youth to the economic class, the breakthrough of consumer society, the canonization of theory and structuralism, and the entry of the Holocaust into the French collective memory. Figures such as Foucault, Barthes, Aragon, Malraux, and Sartre are presented less as isolated geniuses and more as symptomatic representatives of a profound transformation in which 19th-century humanism and the existentialist concept of meaning were replaced by systems thinking, semiotic logic, and technocratic rationality. 1966 thus appears as the true turning point between the old order and the new world: youth is integrated through consumption, culture becomes a commodity, theory the new currency of intellectuals, while the political explosions of 1968 are already structurally prepared. The review reads Compagnon's book as a genealogy of our present. It highlights his skeptical tone by interpreting the mass expansion of education described by Compagnon as the origin of today's "Potemkin universities," interpreting structuralism as an ideological precursor to an algorithmically managed world, and unmasking the youth culture of 1966 as the birth of the perfect consumer. 1966 is not only explained but also morally questioned. In doing so, it elucidates the book's internal logic—the replacement of meaning with system, of experience with sign, with an emphasis on loss, alienation, and long-term damage. The review also critically reflects on the book's blind spots, such as the male-dominated perspective and the marginal treatment of feminism, colonialism, and the gay rights movement. The review makes it clear that while the “epistemological revolution” of 1966 is brilliantly analyzed, its social and political scope is narrowed more than the complexity of the era would allow. Overall, the review reads Compagnon less as a chronicler of a miracle year than as an unintentional witness to a fateful turning point.

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Light from dead stars: Georges Perec's mother at Olivia Elkaim

In her exploration of Georges Perec's mother, Cécile, Olivia Elkaim, in "La disparition des choses" (2026), chooses the motto borrowed from André Schwarz-Bart, "Nos yeux reçoivent la lumière d'étoiles mortes" (Our eyes receive the light of dead stars), as her poetic program: that which illuminates us today comes from lives long extinguished. Elkaim's book reconstructs Cécile's journey from the everyday life of a Jewish-Polish immigrant and hairdresser in Belleville, through her separation from her five-year-old son at the Gare de Lyon, to her arrest, Drancy, and deportation to Auschwitz. In parallel, the narrator pursues her own research in archives, conversations with Perec's friends, and in the writer's own texts, whose entire oeuvre is permeated by the absence of his mother. Where historical documents are lacking, Elkaim turns to imagination: she invents scenes, gestures, voices to give the "eternal absent" woman back a body and everyday life. The result is less a biography than a literary mausoleum—a book that doesn't factually reconstruct Cécile, but makes her afterglow visible. The article reads Elkaim's novel as both a complement to and a correction of Perec's "oblique" poetics of memory, as Philippe Lejeune calls it. While Perec formally encrypted loss—through anagrams, lists, lipograms, and writing around an absence—Elkaim places the mother's human fate at the center and replaces the aesthetics of lack with a poetics of tender reconstruction. The review shows how the book mediates between document and fiction and gains its ethical strength precisely in its admission of uncertainty—no grave, no date, only an "acte de disparition." Memory does not appear as the possession of truth, but as continued work on what is painfully missing.

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Contamination after October 7: Amanda Sthers

Amanda Sthers' novel "C" (Grasset, 2025) paints a bleak panorama of contemporary France after October 7, 2023, in which private life, political discourse, and historically sedimented traumas intertwine. It begins with a fungal infestation in the Paris apartment of Jewish editor Rebecca Vermusein and her husband Gilles, which quickly proves to be a central motif: the fungus is not presented as a mere horror element, but as the materialization of an antisemitism that circulates invisibly, normalizes itself, and ultimately bears deadly fruit. Parallel to the disintegration of the marriage, the novel depicts the disintegration of the French "vivre ensemble": political radicalization, selective empathy in the aftermath of October 7, the moral self-exoneration of Western elites, and the isolation of Jewish individuals form a tightly interwoven scenario. In its connection to Sthers' novel "Les gestes," "C" simultaneously reveals itself as the culmination of a longer-term project that conceives of Jewish identity not as a stable sense of belonging, but as a historically burdened body of memory. This review analyzes this constellation by reading "C" as a continuation and radicalization of the motifs established in "Les gestes": from the "archaeology of intimacy" to the "biology of hatred." The central argument is that Sthers presents antisemitism not as a marginal phenomenon, but as a structural product of a moral climate in which discourses, aesthetics, and affect intertwine. The review demonstrates how the novel, through the metaphor of mushrooms, connects normalization, seduction, and violence, and how it thereby subjects contemporary feminism, identity politics, and anti-Zionism to rigorous scrutiny. “C” is not understood as a novel of ideas, but as a literary diagnosis of a state of affairs: without catharsis, without a conciliatory outlook, but with the insistent demand to recognize the spores before they bear fruit again.

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Song of Songs without witnesses: Patrick Autréaux

Patrick Autréaux's "L'Époux" (2025) is a quiet, existentially intense novel that begins with the civil wedding of two men. A ritual intended as a sign of social recognition becomes an experience of radical isolation: through the conspicuous absence of their families, one geographically distant, the other ideologically and religiously opposed. The narrator observes his partner's tears; in this moment, years of silence, conformity, and suffered rejection are unearthed. From this point, the text unfolds a multifaceted retrospective in which a homosexual love story intertwines with biographical wounds, illness, and a profound spiritual quest. Central to this is the Jewish background of the partner's family, whose history is marked by the Holocaust, displacement, and exile, and whose traumatic experiences culminate in religious rigidity and the rejection of the relationship. Autréaux shows how these collective wounds poison familial bonds, generating silence, erasure, and exclusion. Engaging with the Song of Solomon and the work of Edmond Jabès, the novel develops a poetics of absence, silence, and exile, in which the beloved's body becomes the sacred. "L'Époux" thus reads as a modern Song of Songs, intertwining the intimate story of a homosexual love with the burden of Jewish memory and sketching a fragile yet persistent transcendence—"coming from the desert, as one comes from beyond memory."

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Lise Meitner's victory against Otto Hahn: Cyril Gely

Cyril Gely's novel "Le Prix" (2019) stages an intense psychological clash between Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner on the day of Hahn's Nobel Prize award in 1946. In the confines of a Stockholm hotel suite, a moral and intellectual duel unfolds, exploring the unequal power dynamics, gender dynamics in science, and the ethical failings of National Socialism. Gely's dramatic prose transforms historical facts into a huis clos, in which Lise Meitner reclaims her suppressed scientific achievements and Hahn is forced to confront his moral guilt. In the end, Hahn receives the Nobel Prize—but true recognition belongs to Meitner, whose quiet justice rewrites history as an indelible echo.

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Christian-Jewish France and identitarian forced assimilation: Eric Zemmour

The presidents of the French Republic each sought their own way to politically reconcile the tension between France's self-understanding as a historically Christian nation and the principles of the strictly secular republic. "La messe n'est pas dite" (2025) presents Éric Zemmour's far-right vision of a civilizational rebirth of Europe through a return to its Christian foundations. In his account, Christianity forms the historical, cultural, and political foundation of Europe. From this, however, he derives the demand for an intensive, authoritarian re-Christianization, encompassing both legal measures (e.g., restrictions on the choice of first names, remigration, limitations on judicial powers) and a cultural and moral transformation of society. He links this reorganization to the idea of ​​a "grand alliance" between traditionalist Catholics and assimilated Jews, who together are to safeguard the cultural heritage of Europe. The review traces how Zemmour's argumentation rests on a selective interpretation of history and religion, reducing complex cultural and political dynamics to a dualistic threat scenario. It demonstrates that Zemmour seeks to suppress freedom, the rule of law, and universalism—values ​​he himself describes as a Christian heritage—in the name of identity-based self-assertion. The review reveals how Zemmour constructs both Islam and modern liberalism as monolithic enemies, employing double standards, for example, through selective readings of religious texts or the simplification of historical examples. Furthermore, it shows how Zemmour instrumentalizes secularism, transforming it from a principle of state neutrality into an instrument of cultural dominance. Zemmour's program represents less a defense of the Christian heritage than an authoritarian-identitarian revision of the republican tradition, fundamentally challenging the foundations of the Fifth Republic.

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Return to the École Normale Supérieure: Éliette Abécassis

Éliette Abécassis, herself normalienne and agrégée of philosophy, returns in 45 rue d’Ulm (Flammarion, 2025) as part of the intimate literary book series “Retour chez soi” to her former student digs (thurne) the Ecole normale superiorieure (ENS) back. The book is her first autobiographical work in the first person and condenses the experience of one night and one day into a pointed assessment of her intellectual generation. The journey through time is triggered by a box of old correspondence and, in particular, by a letter that has remained unopened for thirty years, the unveiling of which forms the narrative framework and fuels the story of friendship, failure, and intellectual freedom.

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This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.

Ambivalence of Jewish Assimilation: Philip Roth and Marc Weitzmann

Marc Weitzmann, La part sauvage: the world of Philip Roth and the chaos in America. Return sur vingt to the d'amitié. Grasset, 2025.

Philip Roth and the Fragility of American Democracy

Marc Weitzmanns La part sauvage is a tribute to the late writer Philip Roth; but it is also a literary investigation that uses Roth's work, life and friendship to analyze the fragility of American democracy and the transformation of literary culture in the face of chaos.

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This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.

Dominique Fourcade: Poetry after October 7, 2023

In “Ça va bien dans la pluie glacée?” (POL, 2024), Dominique Fourcade responds to the Middle East conflict in a literary way by elevating the writer's moral powerlessness to an aesthetic principle. He transforms shame, alienation, and skepticism toward language into a poetics of delicacy and responsibility. Through fragmented syntax, intertextual ethics, and imagery (wall, Javelot, rain), the conflict is not explained but rather “experienced”—as an experience of the border, where language itself becomes an act of resistance.

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Shoalzheimer: Raphaël Sigal

Raphaël Sigal's novel "Géographie de l'oubli" (2025, Prix Méduse) revolves around the silence and forgetting of his grandmother, doubly deprived by the trauma of the Holocaust and Alzheimer's disease. The narrator inherits only fragments—snatches of sentences, gestures, objects—and attempts to create a book from them that doesn't reveal the void but rather makes it visible. Instead of documentary research, he chooses a poetic method based on fragmentation, repetition, and silence. The neologism "Shoalzheimer" combines the active, survival-related forgetting of the Holocaust with the passive, destructive forgetting of the disease. The book is conceived as "Ricercar à x + 1 voix": a musical search for the lost voices of the ancestors (x) and the grandson's own voice (+1), whose polyphony intertwines to form a fragile, almost unreadable score. The result is a polyphonic text, permeated by emptiness and memory, that redefines the boundaries of testimony, fiction, and literary form.

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Rentrée littéraire: contemporary French literature
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