L'identité juive en question: Irène Némirovsky, Patrick Modiano, Marc Weitzmann

Jewishness, that is to say the personal and singular relationship that an individual experiences regarding their Jewish origins, finds significant resonance in certain literary works. If it is dangerous to assign writers an identity that in and of itself is problematic, it is nonetheless useful to interrogate their relationship with this identity as they make formal and thematic choices. This is less a question of finding a place for writing Jewishness within a canonical and minor literary corpus, instead related to questioning the changing forms of this writing as seen in various epochs and within various aesthetics. Through a corpus composed principally of the works of Irène Némirovsky, Patrick Modiano and Marc Weitzmann, this study examines the evolutions of relationships between writing and Jewishness over three generations of authors, as well as changes in the Jewish literary consciousness as it faced historical and cultural realities over time. This means paying particular attention to the representation of Jewishness at the crossroads of autobiographical and social discourses. The works of Némirovsky, Modiano and Weitzmann are notably emblematic in their questioning of Jewish identity through a reappropriation of anti-Semitic discourses that is at times ambiguous and at times deflecting. Analyzing these texts, which appeared over the course of almost a century, allows us to open a particular perspective on French literature, including some of its most recent developments. Notably, the question of terrorism as it is linked to the situation in the Middle East, relations with Israel, and the memory of the camps as it becomes more often a post-memory, are at the center not only of Jewish writing, but more generally of trends throughout French literature. Even at the aesthetic level, today’s codified and widespread textual forms such as auto-fiction, “récit de filiation” or “roman archéologique” seem quite capable of hosting investigations of a fleeting or problematic Jewish identity.