Family context and Jewishness: the case of Albert Cohen, Romain Gary and Georges Perec.

15

JULY

2012

Psychogenealogy

Families

The present symposium will provide us with the opportunity to present and compare the trajectories of three major contemporary Jewish writers in French literature: Albert Cohen, Romain Gary and Georges Perec. The three of them became well known French writers with a certain amount of prestige (we will objectivate this by using various criteria) both in the Jewish community area and the French literary field at large.

Whereas their point of arrival may seem identical or at least quite similar, the three of them are French writers who belong to the same period (second half of the 20^th Century) and family and Jewish themes play an important part in their works - their starting points markedly diverge, particularly their family origins.

Thus we will first try and retrace their very different family contexts (geographic, social, ethnic and religious) in which the three writers to be were born and raised and on which they all provided us with much information in the very core of the literary texts they produced. In a second phase we will try and show that there is a link between these initial family contexts and their subsequent trajectories as writers, in particular regarding the way Jewishness is treated in their works (how these questions are treated and which notions of judeity are developed in their literary works).

CGV