Published in 1997, this is by Patrick Modiano, whose Dark Shops Street I enjoyed reading back in April. There is an English version, called -- somewhat bizarrely -- The Search Warrant. I read the French original, and found it beautiful. Moving, fascinating, horrifying, thought-provoking. Not bad for a short work...

As he did in the previous book I'd read, Modiano starts out by drifting backwards and forwards in time like a jellyfish. There's a newspaper advertisement, dated 31 December 1941, appealing for information about a lost girl, Dora Bruder. She's 15 years old, measures 1.55 metres, and is wearing common-or-garden clothes, all described meticulously. Respondents should contact Dora's parents at 41 boulevard Ornano, Paris.

Modiano is writing in 1996, and says he came across the little advert "eight years ago", ie 1988. He knows the area around boulevard Ornano. He was there from 1965-68. In 1965, he knew nothing of Dora Bruder. But 30 years later, ie 1995, he thinks that all his wanderings in that area during those years, and the fleeting impressions he came by, were not just coincidence: "Perhaps, without having any clear consciousness that this was the case, I was on the track of Dora Bruder and her parents."


Charles Ornano, born in Ajaccio, has given his name to many French streets

He thought about the advert for months and months, haunted by the contrast between the extreme precision of what meagre details there are (the colour of her clothes, for example) and the oblivion by which the story is surrounded.

He begins to research the life of this person, but it's not easy to find anything: "It takes a long time for what has been erased to resurface... You need to have a little patience." It's four years before he has figured out her date of birth (25 February 1926), and it takes even longer to track down where she was born (Paris, 12th arrondissement). But bit by bit, he puts together an outline. He finds photos of Dora, which he describes for us (some are reproduced here). He pores over old maps, and reconstitutes as many details as possible. (He's an expert in the geography of Paris, and knows how to connect it with history and with literature. The picture at the top is the rue de Menilmontant, by the way, one of the many Parisian streets mentioned in the text.) He wonders; he speculates. While always taking fact as his departure point, and never allowing himself to claim to know more than he can know, he also reflects that there is a kind of clairvoyance that operates among writers (it's not so much a gift, he says, as a result of the writerly need to imagine, and focus on details, which can lead to flashes of intuition and an openness to coincidence).

But there is so much that has disappeared. So much that we'll never, ever know.

"Tomorrow," he writes, "we'll move into the month of December [1996], and 55 years will have gone by since Dora ran away... I have the impression that I am the only person linking the Paris of those days and that of today, the only person who remembers all these details. Sometimes the link diminishes, and threatens to break; on other evenings, the city of yesterday appears to me, furtively reflected behind the city of today."

Because time shifts and an unnamed narrator and an impossible quest are all characteristic of Modiano's oeuvre, many assumed this was another novel. But it isn't. This is a mix of biography, memoir, and memorialization. It works very powerfully.

In a very interesting article, John Taylor comments: "One of the central components of twentieth-century literary modernism has been its interest in breaking up chronological linearity; Modiano’s special insight is that time periods can mesh, interpenetrate, layer up, blend, and blur naturally in the mind. One senses no attempt to explore avant-garde experimentation in his books; his literary vision is inherently complex, his style eminently fluid, suggestive, and tantalizing." Absolutely.

Modiano also tells us that during the period when he felt he was getting nowhere, and would never learn anything concrete about Dora Bruder, he used the newspaper advert as the inspiration for a fictionalized version of Dora Bruder's life, called Honeymoon (Voyages de Noces). Definitely one to read.


A young Modiano. From a collection of his novels, available here



***

Dora's father was Ernest, born in Vienna in 1899 to parents who probably came from Galicia or Bohemia or Moravia, like many Viennese Jews. After World War I, he joined the French Foreign Legion. He served in Morocco, and was invalided out as "war-disabled". At the age of 25 he went to Paris, but his service didn't entitle him to French nationality. Dora's mother was Cecile, born in Budapest in 1907. She marries Ernest in 1924, having arrived in Paris the previous year with her parents, four sisters (three die in short order of typhoid), and a brother. Her family were originally from Russia, but had probably been resident in Budapest since the beginning of the century.

And painstakingly, Modiano pieces together scraps of Dora's own story. At the age of 14, on 9 May 1940, Dora is enrolled in a religious boarding-school, 60-64 rue Picpus. It is noted in the records that she ran away. Why was she enrolled here? Because space was tight for three people in the boarding-house room in which she lived with her parents? Because she was a bit hard to handle? (Modiano tracks down a cousin of Dora's, who reports that she had a reputation for being independent and rebellious.) Or because her parents, as non-nationals, were under threat of internment? People had already been interned, in the autumn of 1939, divided into "suspect" and "non-suspect".


Dora and her parents, about 1938

And why did she flee, from a place where, if she'd kept her head down, she might have stayed safe? She would have gone home on Sundays. Returning, perhaps, would have felt like going back to prison, a long grind of prayers and duties. And December 1941 was a bad month, the most suffocating Paris had experienced since the beginning of the occupation. Curfews; raids on places where Jews could be found; the gunning down of hostages... Perhaps there was an overwhelming desire to escape from it all. Or maybe she was just motivated by loneliness and the feeling of being trapped.

Her reasons remain unclear, but Modiano learns from a report dated 17 April 1942, that she did return home. By now, though, it was only her mother who was there. Her father had been arrested in March, and sent to the camp at Drancy. He hadn't declared his daughter in the census of October 1940. Did filing a report about her disappearance (13 days after the fact) shine an unfortunate searchlight on his status? Questions, questions...

Another report, dated 17 June 1942, noted that Dora had been returned to her mother through the efforts of the Clignancourt police. So she had fled again... Because of her successive attempts to run away, the report continues, she was to be admitted to a reform school.

June... Hundreds of adolescents like Dora were arrested on the streets during this month. They were sent to camps.

And, indeed, on 19 June 1942, Dora was sent to Tourelles. The building still exists. But there's a sign on a wall saying it's a military zone, so no filming or photographing is allowed: "I told myself that no-one remembers anything any more. Stretched out behind the wall was a no man's land, a zone of emptiness and forgetting... And yet, under this thick layer of amnesia, you did feel something, from time to time, a distant echo, soon smothered, but no-one could have said of what exactly."

On 13 August, Dora was moved to Drancy. There she found her father. And they left Drancy for Auschwitz together, on 18 September.

Cecile Bruder, meanwhile, was arrested and briefly detained in July 1942. Probably she was freed because she was born in Budapest, and the authorities didn't yet have the order to deport Jews from Hungary. But that piece of luck wouldn't hold. In January 1943, she was again sent to Drancy, and from there to Auschwitz.

Modiano remains haunted by this character, as indeed are we by now. He concludes the book like this: "I can't stop myself thinking of her, and sensing an echo of her presence in certain areas. I will never know, during the winter months when she first ran away, and the few spring weeks when she escaped again, how she passed her days, where she hid, or who she was with. That's her secret. A poor and precious secret that the executioners, decrees, and so-called occupying authorities, the Depot, barracks, and camps, History itself, and time -- everything that soils and destroys you -- will not have been able to steal from her."


Monuments to those killed at Auschwitz in the Pere Lachaise cemetery, Paris



***

Interspersed with the stories of Dora are letters (from families asking police officials for information or intervention on behalf of relatives; or from a detainee to his family as he was waiting to be sent to Drancy); and police reports on the arrests of French Jews; and records of other young women picked up at the same time as Dora; and references to authors (Friedo Lampe, Felix Hartlaub, Francois Vernet, Robert Desnos...) whose work also attests to the terrors of the time.

Interspersed also are memories of Modiano's own, many of which resonate -- although on a lower frequency, as it were -- with Dora's experiences. Trying to track his father down in an immense hospital, for example (he couldn't find him, and never saw him again). Or, as a result of a family fracas, being taken away in a paddy wagon (with his father's consent -- thus forcing him to relive, though in much less dangerous circumstances, his father's arrest in February 1942). Not to mention the experience of running away...

The layering adds to the impact of the book, increasing its factual and emotional heft.

Modiano's relationship with his father is particularly intriguing. Simon Kemp sums this up very well: "Modiano’s father, we learn, was a Jewish man who survived the Holocaust through his close association with a band of collaborationist thugs, the Rue Lauriston Gang, who at one point intercede after he has been arrested to save him from deportation to the death camps. This difficult legacy of a father who was both Jew and collaborator, victim and accomplice in the Holocaust, lies at the root of all Modiano’s writing, but rarely as clearly shown as here."

Modiano was always drawn to the years of the Occupation. As noted here: "During the 1970s [his] reputation in France grew as one of those novelists who dared to confront long-suppressed questions arising out of the Occupation and, in particular, about the operations of the Carlingue, the French Gestapo... Questioning the role of the French Gestapo and exposing the extent of collaboration directly challenged post-war myths about the resistance... Those who, like Modiano, confronted the role of collaborators during the Occupation were part of a wider engagement in France with the role of Vichy in the Holocaust." This same commentator also perceptively notes: "At no point in this brief, tragic story did Dora Bruder come into contact with Germans. Not until the doors of the waggon in which she was transported were flung open at Auschwitz."

There's really LOTS more I want to read about and by Modiano...


Monument to an unknown deportee