Rue Ordener, Rue Labat (Stages) - Hardcover

Kofman, Sarah

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0803227310 ISBN 13: 9780803227316

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 1996

Synopsis

Rue Ordener, Rue Labat is a moving memoir by the distinguished French philosopher Sarah Kofman. It opens with the horrifying moment in July 1942 when the author’s father, the rabbi of a small synagogue, was dragged by police from the family home on Rue Ordener in Paris, then transported to Auschwitz—“the place,” writes Kofman, “where no eternal rest would or could ever be granted.” It ends in the mid-1950s, when Kofman enrolled at the Sorbonne.

The book is as eloquent as it is forthright. Kofman recalls her father and family in the years before the war, then turns to the terrors and confusions of her own childhood in Paris during the German occupation. Not long after her father’s disappearance, Kofman and her mother took refuge in the apartment of a Christian woman on Rue Labat, where they remained until the Liberation. This bold woman, whom Kofman called Mémé, undoubtedly saved the young girl and her mother from the death camps. But Kofman’s close attachment to Mémé also resulted in a rupture between mother and child that was never to be fully healed.

This slender volume is distinguished by the author’s clear prose, the carefully recounted horrors of her childhood, and the uncommon poise that came to her only with the passage of many years.

About this title

About the Author

Rue Ordener, Rue Labat was first published in France in 1994. Sarah Kofman, best known as a philosopher and theoretician, died that same year. Ann Smock is an associate professor of French at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Double Dealing (Nebraska 1986) and the translator of Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster (Nebraska 1986).

Reviews

Kofman, a prominent French philosopher, wrote this memoir of her life as a Jewish child under the German occupation in 1994, shortly before she committed suicide. This is a strangely detached recollection of what it was like to be a little girl in France during the traumatic days of the Occupation. Kofman's father, a Hasidic rabbi, was arrested on July 16, 1942, during the first large round-up of French Jews and sent to Auschwitz, where he was murdered by a kapo for refusing to work on the Sabbath. The author's recollections begin on the ill-fated day of that round-up and follow her life through her admission to the Sorbonne ten years later at the age of 18. All she retains of her father besides her memories is his fountain pen, which sat on her desk driving her to write her own books: ``Maybe all my books have been the detours required to bring me to write about `that.' '' Kofman and her mother managed to avoid the Nazis, hiding with friends and acquaintances. Eventually, they settled in with a Gentile woman whom Kofman remembers as M‚m‚. M‚m‚ gradually won the little girl over and at war's end tried to take custody of her. Because Kofman's relationship with her mother was a tortured one, the child carried a considerable weight of ambivalence at this turn of events. Finally, her mother was forced, literally, to kidnap Kofman in order to reclaim her. Kofman retells this story in short vignettes, dispassionately and coolly. The result is all the more powerful for its author's distanced voice. Smock's translation catches the tone quite successfully. At times almost painful to read, a different kind of Holocaust memoir and a book that, with hindsight, suggests the fate that the author had perhaps already chosen for herself. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Kofman, a professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne and author of more than 20 books, was one of France's most important contemporary thinkers, best known for her works on Nietzsche and Freud. Kofman wrote this short memoir--an acount of her childhood between the ages of 8 and 18--in 1993, and it was published in France in 1994. It begins on the last day she ever saw her father, July 16, 1942, the day that Vichy police picked up Rabbi Kofman in the family apartment in Paris, and ends when she enrolled at the Sorbonne in the mid-1950s. That day in 1942, some 13,000 French Jews were rounded up and taken to Auschwitz. A Christian woman hid the author and her mother until the liberation of Paris. In October 1994 Kofman killed herself, leaving behind a haunting and painful chronicle of the Holocaust. George Cohen

Kofman, a philosopher-theoretician of art, philosophy, literature, and psychoanalysis at the Sorbonne until she died by her own hand in 1994, describes the horrors that she and her family endured in Paris during the German occupation after her father, a rabbi, was dragged from their home on the Rue Ordener and deported to Auschwitz on July 16, 1942. (He was bludgeoned to death there with a pickax a year later by a Jewish butcher turned Kapo.) Throughout the occupation, Kofman and her mother lived on the Rue Labat, protected by a Christian woman whom Kofman calls Meme. Meme detached Kofman from her mother and from Judaism, but she saved them both from Nazi raids. The memoir ends with Kofman's enrollment at the Sorbonne in the mid-1950s. Published in France in 1994, this short, gripping memoir, adeptly translated, offers a vivid account of one person's struggle in Vichy France. Recommended for all libraries.?Bob Ivey, Univ. of Memphis
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0803227310
• ISBN 13: 9780803227316
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 87