When I heard that Patrick Modiano had been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature this fall, I called several friends to share my excitement. “Patrick Who?” “Modi-what?” they replied.
Perhaps I called the wrong friends. But I was struck by the lack of familiarity in North America with the celebrated French writer. Especially among Jewish readers on this side of the Atlantic, the sort-of-Jewish novelist remained surprisingly unknown.
I encountered his first novel about a decade after its publication. Many consider the 1968 La Place de l’étoile as one of his best books. But it has yet to be published in English translation. It is at once a descent into the moral ambiguities of wartime and post-war France, and a harsh criticism of those ambiguities. Like much writing by the generation born just after World War II, it is about being born into a world already shaped, already devastatingly marked, by events lived and remembered by the parents’ generation.
By now, most people know that Modiano is a French Jewish writer. Or “Jewish-ish.” Modiano’s father was a Sephardi Jew from Salonika with familial roots in Italy. Like many other Jewish immigrants to France during the interwar period, he was no doubt drawn by the promise of civic equality and economic opportunity. The older Modiano survived the German occupation of Paris by successfully dissociating himself from his Jewish identity, and by collaborating with the very people and institutions that targeted him for genocide.
Engaged in black marketing and wartime profiteering, he developed ties with the French Gestapo and the underworld. He did not wear the yellow star mandated for all French Jews, and on at least one occasion, he reportedly was rescued from deportation by friends in high places. He married Patrick’s mother, a Belgian actress, during the war.
Patrick was born soon after the war’s end. By all accounts, his childhood was rocky, with protracted absences of both parents, but especially his father. One would not say that he was raised as a Jew, but Jewishness and the Shoah played a strong role in his struggles to define himself.
The many biographical sketches publicized after the Nobel Prize announcement give Modiano’s date of birth as 1945. But the jacket of my yellowed copy of La Place de l’étoile indicates that he was born in 1947. The disparity puzzled me, so I researched. According to French journalist Denis Cosnard – whose book about Modiano was published in 2011 – and others, Modiano used to make a habit of lying about his birth year. He wanted to attenuate the link with the war’s freighted legacy of collaboration and death, and to create distance from his father’s experiences.
Yet the war and the genocide held a central place in his writing, beginning with La Place de l’étoile. A biting satirical exposé of French collaboration and anti-Semitism, the novel centres on a Jewish collaborationist named Schlemilovitch, whose path brings him to encounter a panoply of French anti-Semitic writers and thinkers. The book probed this shadowy past during a time when France had not yet grappled with the shame of wartime collaboration. Some readers were offended by the character of Schlemilovitch, who seemed to internalize and affirm anti-Semitic rhetoric, while others saw him as part of the satire.
The novel opens with a sober joke, characteristic of Holocaust humour: “In June 1942, a German officer approaches a young man and says to him: ‘Excuse me, where is la Place de l’Etoile?’ The young man points to the left side of his chest.”
The joke rests, of course, on the dual meaning of the phrase la Place de l’Étoile, at once a space in the urban landscape of Paris and – literally – the place of the (yellow) star worn by Jews under racial laws.
I suspect – I hope – that in conferring the prestigious award on this gadfly of wartime memory, the Nobel committee is signalling the ethical necessity to take on the threat of anti-Semitism.
Read Review of Modiano's book here.