Born in 1926 in Paris, from Jewish parents - father originary from Austria, mother from Hungary - Dora Bruder was killed in Auschwitz in 1942. Modiano is trying to recreate her life from fragments of archives and encounters with the places she and her family lived. There is a race against forgetting, for marking the memory of the deported.
I feel there are so many untold stories of French Jews, stories of resilience, of resistance, but also hopeless stories, of people killed and disappeared without trace. People who were forced to wear the German-imposed yellow star and betrayed by their non-German neighbours. 2014 Literature Nobel Prize Winner Modiano himself has a complex WWII Jewish history, on his father side. While researching and writing about Dora Bruder, there are episodes from his own life slipping away, as memories or sensations or allusions.
The I-centered story of Dora Bruder is a story of Paris too. A story of Jewish Paris, of immigration and despair, of a geography of hate and exclusion, but also of everyday life flowing slowly its pace, out of history. It is a history common to many Jews, those hidden in Catholic institutions and maybe never brought back to their families or to their faith. Dora run away from her Catholic school, she was for sure a rebelious girl.
But fate and what humans made of it, wanted her to die in Auschwitz. She ´disappeared´. There are so many hidden chances and opportunities and failures in a name. Dora Bruder. She never got old. Or had her own children to stroll with alongside the streets of Paris.
Since 2015, her name was given to a street in the 18th arrondissement.
I had access to the book in the audiobook format, read by Didier Sandre, an actor that played in J´Accuse too, a film inspired by the tragic fate of Albert Dreyfus.
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