D’un passé l’autre: aux portes de l’histoire avec Patrick Modiano by Ora Avni

Avni, Ora. D’un passé l’autre: aux portes de l’histoire avec Patrick Modiano. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997.

In her most recent book, D’un passé l’autre: aux portes de l’histoire avec Patrick Modiano, Ora Avni presents a fascinating dialogue between a scholar and a “personnage mal dans sa peau, meurtri et m&content” (21), a voice that relies on irony and sarcasm instead of reason. Each has her own take on the Holocaust and its representations in literature and other writings. The scholar takes the dispassionate road for the most part, analyzing the place of the Jew in France as seen through Proust and Modiano, or reassessing Freud’s and Sartre’s attempts to deny racial or religious identity as a factor in character formation. The more personal voice scolds, pushes, complains and generally makes the scholar and her readers uncomfortable with their rational explana tions. This voice accepts no easy explanations that would permit us to forget such as the statement that says the Holocaust was so horrible it is impossible to talk about it. And that is the crux of this work. In a society that has asked us to forget for the past fifty years, we must not do so.