Searching For Dora Bruder. - Review - book review

Judaism, Fall, 2000 by Joel Streicker

Dora Bruder. By PATRICK MODIANO. Translated by JOANNA KILMARTIN. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1999.

As the generation that lived through the Shoah nears its end, the need to document the losses becomes ever more urgent. The spread of Holocaust denial makes this endeavor even more agonizing, and more important. Memorializing the victims, and proving the deniers wrong, involves increasingly strenuous attempts to detail the lives of the murdered.

Yet French Jewish novelist Patrick Modiano takes a strikingly different tack in Dora Bruder, his haunting meditation on loss incurred during the Shoah. Modiano's slim volume acknowledges how much cannot be known of the lives of individual victims, and suggests that this inability weighs heavily on those fated to live in the generation after the Holocaust. Far from calling the Holocaust's horrors into question, the tragic near impossibility of knowing indicts the murderers and the collaborationist French government.

Raised in Paris, Dora Bruder was the daughter of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Fifteen-year-old Dora ran away from boarding school for four months during the darkest days of the Nazi Occupation in December 1941, returning briefly to her home, and running away and returning again, before being deported to Auschwitz. In 1988 Modiano learned of Dora from a notice placed in a 1941 Paris newspaper seeking information regarding the runaway. The author recounts his search for traces of Dora in official records, the memories of survivors, and the urban landscape where Dora lived her brief life. It is a frustrating search. In contrast to her contemporary, Anne Frank, Dora left no journals, and only scant evidence of her life and death exists in official records. If much of the poignancy of Anne Frank's diary derives from the window it opens onto a young girl's world, it is the opacity of Dora's world that generates the intense sense of loss that the author conveys. Readers of Anne Frank's diary mourn the loss o f someone that they feel they have come to know well. Modiano compels readers to grieve for a girl whose life reveals few of its details. At the same time, in searching for the details of Dora's life, Modiano rescues her memory from oblivion through a book that directly solicits information from readers who may have known her. In so doing, Modiano's work shares with so much Holocaust writing the desire to reconnect a horrible past and the present that it afflicts.

In part, the death of a young person is heart-rending under any circumstances: the interrupted arc of a life leaves us wondering what the adult might have been. The fact that so little is known about Dora makes the wondering even more painful. Modiano reports that a cousin of Dora's--apparently, the only family survivor--vaguely remembers Dora as rebellious, and this fragile memory guides Modiano's speculations. Modiano believes that he can glimpse her independent spirit in a photograph of her with her mother and grandmother. He imagines how a rebellious young girl would have felt on a gloomy Sunday in December, returning to the Catholic boarding school to which her parents had sent her (for reasons that Modiano is compelled to infer), and suddenly deciding to run away.

The lack of details of Dora's life also allows the author to connect her shadowy life to his. Like Dora, Modiano is the child of immigrant Jewish parents. He was born in Paris in 1945 and, like an amputee suffering from the absent presence of a phantom limb, Modiano constantly feels the pain of loss, of a world brutally destroyed: "The streets of Paris are empty since Dora Bruder's deportation to Auschwitz" (119). Before he learned of Dora, and without being aware of it, Modiano haunted the same neighborhoods as Dora and, he believes, may have met people who knew her. Indeed, at one point Modiano describes how his own father had been rounded up in early 1942, and briefly considers (and ultimately dismisses) the possibility that a young woman arrested by the Jewish Affairs police at the same time may have escaped when Modiano's father did, and that that young woman was Dora. Moreover, a series of eerie coincidences between his post-war life and that of Holocaust victims other than Dora haunts Modiano. For exa mple, as a young man the author wrote a book of poetry that he unwittingly titled with the name of a volume written by the French Jewish poet, Robert Desnos, who died in Terezin. A young Jewish writer whose father, like Modiano's, was an Italian Jew from Salonika, lived in the same apartment in which Modiano grew up until he joined the Resistance, and was murdered by the Nazis. The man, Albert Schaky, like Modiano at the same age thirty years later, published his first novel with Gallimard. Reflecting on the parallels between his life and that of the generation that suffered the Holocaust. Modiano writes: "So many friends I never knew disappeared in 1945, the year I was born" (81). Searching for Dora appears to have given Modiano an opportunity to articulate his sense of belonging to a world whose shattered past echoes persistently but which he can hear only imperfectly.