A little
add in the newspaper catches the attention of Patrick Modiano. It is a newspaper from 1941 and the add is about a
15 yo girl who ran away.
People are asked to give information to an address in the north of Paris where her parents live.
People are asked to give information to an address in the north of Paris where her parents live.
In the next
years Patrick Modiano tries to
follow this Dora Bruder. Where was she, did she return home and what happened
to her?
What follows
is a report of the facts he managed to find. Dora Bruder was a Jewish students
at a catcholic boarding school and one night she ran away.
We never find out why and where she was all those months also never becomes clear.
We never find out why and where she was all those months also never becomes clear.
We do know
that the German occupiers came with more and more rules against the Jewish
population of Paris, and Dora and her parents fell victim to those.
This book
is hard to place in a specific genre. It is both a novel, an account, a
detective and memoires.
On one hand
it is non-fiction, but Modiano
always remembers he is a writer and even when he writes about his own
experiences you never know for sure what is real or where he makes himself into
a character in his own novel.
He is known
for naming places and dates, but at the same time he can also manipulate these
facts and change things when he wants to.
As usual Patrick Modiano realizes that time
moves on and people can disappear. That also goes for places and buildings,
houses are demolished, new roads are built and before you know it there is
nothing left of the things that once were.
We know a
few things about Dora, and only because she was arrested and that makes the
quest for her very sad. We knew we will never find her marriage announcement or
something like that in the papers.
Really sad
is the fact that Dora might have had a chance to survive the war, but by
running away from the conventschool, she also gave up the relative safety this
could offer her. During the war many convents hid Jewish children from the
Nazi’s and tried to protect them.
Many things
stay unclear in Dora’s life. We do not know where she was or what she did when
she ran away. Just a few sparse facts are all Modiano could find, the rest is speculation.
This may
sound like Dora Bruder is a thin
story, but Modiano manages to give
it body with the account of the other things he also finds, about other people
during the war, and all of this makes a very simple, but poignant story.
.
Patrick Modiano links Dora Bruder’s life to his own life. He
remembers the places where she was from his own childhood, but also the
parallels in their lives since they both once ran away from their parents. He
seems to feel a connection with this girl, separated from him by death and many
years. She is also a symbol of a time, a life and a Paris that is gone and will
never come back, just like so many people never came back.
The last
time I was in Paris, I went to the address where Dora Bruder and her parents
lived, Boulevard Ornano nr 41. The house is still there and this house,
together with this book, are the only things that will remember Dora Bruder’s
young life.
Original
French title: Dora Bruder
Published
in 1997
Wow. Sounds good. There are so many sad stories from that time period, aren't there? But I'm glad there are so many people writing them. I think they need to be told.
ReplyDeleteYes, there are many stories, but this is also quite original in the way he writes it. And that makes it extra interesting.
DeleteKind regards,