Dora Bruder

Within the large oeuvre of Patrick Modiano, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014, "Dora Bruder" stands out in having a historical figure as its protagonist. Dora, after whom a passageway in the 18th arrondissement of Paris was recently named, was born in the capital, the sole child of Jewish emigres. When 15 years old in late 1941, her family reported her missing from her Catholic boarding school, and it is possible that she was but a few years older when her life ended during the war years of Nazi occupation. Dora was rounded up in the deportation of French Jews and sent to Auschwitz. But then the canvas on which the outlines of Dora's life was painted goes blank. "Dora Bruder" is arguably Modiano's most haunting, unforgettable, and beautifully written book. And this is notable because few people who had known Dora still lived in 1988 when the author--his interest piqued by a December 1941 missing persons notice in "Paris-Soir"-- began his research. Intimate details of the young Jewish girl's days and pleasures, snippets of conversation, and even records penned by her hand were all totally lacking. Yet Modiano makes me weep for the loss of Dora. Modiano achieved this thanks to his skill for reading the neighborhoods and buildings of the Paris that Dora knew and his tenacity in unearthing documentary information preserved over decades by the obsessively bureaucratic security services of France. That the reader is able to join Modiano in walking in Dora's shoes results from his having traced the exact streets and metro lines she likely used. American readers reviewing Modiano's books are sometimes puzzled and dismayed by of the amount of time devoted to naming the capital city's streets and providing precise locations for even the most trivial of events. In this case, however, the author's attention to such details reveals how much one can glean by revisiting the physical environments in which a person lived. A further sense of reality regarding Dora's life is imparted by text that describes the atmosphere, and even the weather, of Paris as Dora would have known it. Take, for example, a paragraph that runs from page 73 to 74. "One way not to lose all touch with Dora Bruder over this period would be to report on the changes in the weather. The first snow fell on 4 November 1941. Winter got off to a cold start on 22 December. On 29 December, the temperature dropped still further, and windowpanes were covered with a thin coating of ice. From 13 January inwards, the cold became Siberian." It was at this time that Dora had run away from school. Interleaved with writing about Dora Bruder, Modiano provides information about his relationship with a distant father, a Jew who escaped Nazi deportation and survived the occupation as a black marketer. Further material is offered documenting Modiano's own experiences as a young man and, as the author is wont to do, the chronological sequencing of this information follows a scrambled sequence. For those new to Modiano's work, this pattern is sometimes confusing, but for those of us now well along reading the author, it offers a charm all its own.

"Dora Bruder", by French author Patrick Modiano, is not a novel, though some reviews and articles refer to it as a novel. It's a true story, written in meandering form, about a 15 year old Jewish girl who is a victim of the Holocaust. This book was written in the 1990'a and all the dates referred to as "50 years ago" or so, are from Modiano's search, begun in 1988. Modiano is able to track down surviving relatives of the Brudners and he includes several pictures of Dora and her parents. We see the actual face of a Holocaust victim, which makes her much more real than simple text. Dora Bruder was an only child of two Austrian Jews who had settled in Paris. They were not particularly prosperous but were able to sustain a life in the city. They sent Dora to a Catholic convent school, beginning in 1940 as the Germans were invading France, but she "left" after a year and a half as a student. By leaving, she lost any protection that she could have been afforded by hiding in the convent. At the same time, Modiano's Jewish father was also trying to evade the occupying Germans. He survived, but Dora Bruder, her parents, and thousands of other Jews did not. Modiano's book is short and the text does meander quite a lot between the "Dora" story and his story of his relationship with his father. I was intrigued by the comparison between Dora and his father. I'd also like to recommend Ethan Mordden's superb book, "One Day in France", which is a novel based on the very real massacre at the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane, days after the D-Day invasion. The murders of 640 townspeople by members of the Waffen-SS was in revenge of partisan killings of German soldiers.

Modiano describes his dogged pursuit of what happened to a young Jew caught in the nightmare machinery of occupied France and the German killing machine that was the Holocaust. He embarks on his quest upon reading a 1941 notice in a wartime newspaper (Paris Soir) seeking information about a missing child. He find out unexpected things. He sometimes finds only blind alleys when information leads nowhere. He makes educated surmises to interpolate. He traces Dora Bruder to her death in Auschwitz. It is a short but moving book. Modiano does for Dora Bruder something like what Daniel Mendelsohn did for his relatives the Jägers in "The Lost: A Search for Six of the Six Million" -- though without the detailed specificity of what Mendelsohn finds out. Still, the impulse is more or less the same: to see that these people's fates are known and their deaths do not remain obscure. Modiano's motivation is a moving and humane impulse. It recalls the inscription at the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation, the monument that De Gaulle dedicated in 1962 on the Île de la Cité in Paris: “Ils allèrent à l'autre bout de la terre et ils ne sont pas revenus.” ("They went to the other end of the earth and they have not returned.") Like the Jägers, Dora Bruder did not return, but, like Mendelsohn, Modiano followed her and found out where she went. So her life, though it ended bitterly, has not been lost without a trace. Modiano's work is a triumph over the German occupiers of France and their French collaborators.

For such an emotionally charged subject as the Holocaust, I was underwhelmed. The story meandered around a few facts and a lot of conjecture as to what happened to Dora Bruder. I have not read anything else by this French writer and I think perhaps the translation was not very good since this author is a Nobel Prize winner.

This poignant story that will haunt me for a long time. Modiano has become one of my most favorite writers. I loved this book. Set in German-occupied Paris during WWII, he personalizes the horror inflicted upon jews during the most shameful era in human history and does so with sensitivity, compassion and eloquence. Not a word is wasted. He is a transportive writer.

The specs on the book say it's 128 pages, but my copy had only 116. As far as I can tell, it's complete, but it made me wonder. Also, I read it in the English translation, so I don't know what liberties were taken with the original text. Some reviewers have mentioned that there's really not a lot about Dora Bruder in the book. And there is definitely a lot about streets and addresses in Paris. And the author speculates a lot: Did she do this? Why? Did this happen to her? Did she possibly meet that person? Well, he doesn't really know; he only knows the little bit of factual information that he has--and that is not a lot. However, the book draws the reader in, and it haunts the reader after it is done. The pictures of Dora, her mother, and her father help bring the person alive. And her future is all too well known. Certainly, her ending was so tragic and unnecessary, as so many of Jews and others experienced. But for all the meandering between the present, the past, and the distant past, one gets a sense of the girl and is sorry for the way she was obliterated. As Mondiano says, "I shall never know how she spent her days . . . . That is her secret. A poor and precious secret that not even the executioners, the decrees, the occupying authorities, the Dépôt, the barracks, the camps, History, time--everything that defiles and destroys you--have been able to take away from her." It is our loss, and we feel that it is. One is left with the wish of wanting to know more about this girl who lived, and died, in such a short time. I have never before read anything by Patrick Modiano, but I will seek out some of his other books. This one certainly sticks with you and makes you want to know more. For as few real details as he knows about Dora Bruder, one does have the sense of knowing her, and the sense of loss at her ending. How many stories do we not know about the Holocaust? It seems like something new comes out every week, but soon all those who survived will be dead, and we shall never find out what happened to many of them.

Dora Bruder is the story of a teen aged Jewish girl in Paris during the German occupation, who ran away from a Catholic school where she might have been safe. Only a few records and photographs of Dora and her parents survive, all with no reason for her escape, her return to her parents, her subsequent return to the school and her second escape. Shortly afterwards Dora and then her parents were arrested and sent to Auschwitz. Patrick Modiano weaves Dora’s story with his search for the truth about his father, also a Jew, who mysteriously survived arrest himself, possibly because he was working with a criminal organization that was part of the French Gestapo. By compressing the Holocaust into the story of one girl, her family, and his own life and memories, Modiano expresses the horror and compels our compassion and understanding. This is a masterpiece.

A few thought provoking and poignant passages does not a novel make. Furthermore, is the author so well regarded that an editor is forbidden to take a pen to it and strike out the many, and tiresome, street names in Paris? Apparently so. I finished reading the book but found it difficult to do so. I cannot recommend it.

This book is a subdued masterpiece: because the voice is so restrained, persistently curious, and observant, it offers a way of thinking about the Shoah that is more attuned to time than most others.

Pequeño pero hermoso este texto de Modiano. En el mismo se resalta la contribución que pueden dar microhistorias a la comprensión mas global de la historia y de la condición misma de la persona humana. Una pequeña perla literaria--histórica