Proust, a Jewish Way - (European Perspectives: A Social Thought and Cultural Criticism) by Antoine Compagnon

About the Book

Antoine Compagnon brings to light the vanished world of Marcel Proust's first Jewish readers and shows how it can illuminate our reading of the great novelist today.

Book Synopsis

Marcel Proust once wrote, "There is no longer anybody, not even myself, since I cannot leave my bed, who will go along the Rue du Repos to visit the little Jewish cemetery where my grandfather, following a custom that he never understood, went for so many years to lay a stone on his parents' grave." Investigating the origin and significance of this statement, Antoine Compagnon offers new insight into the great author's underappreciated Jewish side.

Compagnon traces Proust's ties to the French Jewish community, examining his relations with his mother's successful and assimilated family, the Weils. He explores how French Jews read and responded to Proust's masterpiece In Search of Lost Time in the 1920s and 1930s. Challenging contemporary critics who perceive self-hatred or even antisemitism in Proust's work, Compagnon shows that many Jewish intellectuals and young Zionists admired and vigorously debated the novel, some seeing it as a source for pride in their Jewish identity. He also considers Proust's portrayal of homosexuality and how it relates to notions of Jewishness. A work of remarkable erudition and deep research, Proust, a Jewish Way brings to light the vanished world of Proust's first Jewish readers and shows how it can illuminate our reading of the great novelist today.

Review Quotes

Literary scholar Compagnon offers an authoritative examination of the reception of Proust (1871-1922) by the French Jewish community following the author's death.-- "Kirkus Reviews"

In this delicate, detailed account of certain readings of Proust, Compagnon evokes a double destiny: that of Proust as a Jewish writer and that of France as a country where Zionism and assimilation clash and where antisemitism seems to fade only to rise again with a vengeance. The story, which takes us from the 1920s to World War II, is fascinating, troubling and haunted by a discreet, difficult hope of understanding. A masterpiece of historical re-creation.--Michael Wood, professor emeritus of English, Princeton University

Antoine Compagnon makes a poignant contribution to an already rich critical literature on Proust's complex relationship to his Jewish ancestors by Evelyne Bloch-Dano, Maurice Samuels, Pierre Birnbaum, and others. Compagnon's search for the letter where Proust evokes his grandfather laying a pebble on his own father's grave becomes, through his meticulous account, an allegory of the triumph of research against error and loss. The master of what he called, in his classic study of Montaigne, 'The Second Hand or the Work of Quotation' has surpassed himself in this, his fiercest search.--Alice Kaplan, author of Seeing Baya: Portrait of an Algerian Artist in Paris

Compagnon, a world-renowned Proust scholar for the past four decades, reveals the history of the maternal side of the novelist's family and explains how Proust was read and appropriated by Jewish critics after his death in France and elsewhere. The book unfurls like an investigation and is a highly enjoyable read.--François Proulx, author of Victims of the Book: Reading and Masculinity in Fin-de-Siècle France

About the Author

Antoine Compagnon is the Blanche W. Knopf Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, professor emeritus at the Collège de France, and a member of the Académie française. He is the author of many books on subjects including Montaigne, Baudelaire, Proust, Colette, literary theory, and cultural history.

Jody Gladding is a poet who has translated dozens of works from French.