A Jewish Poetics of Exile: Benjamin Fondane and Jewish Émigré Authors in Occupied France

Among the Jewish writers who emigrated from Eastern Europe to France in the 1910s and 1920s, a number chose to switch from writing in their languages of origin to writing primarily in French, a language that represented both a literary center and the promises of French universalism. Under the Nazi occupation of France, these Jewish émigré authors continued to write in their adopted language, reexamining both their Jewishness and their place as authors in France, even as the Vichy regime and Nazi occupiers denied their French identity through antisemitic and xenophobic laws. This talk pays particular attention to Benjamin Fondane’s rewriting of his poetry during the war.

Julia Elsky is Associate Professor of French at Loyola University Chicago. In 2020 she published Writing Occupation: Jewish Émigré Voices in Wartime France (Stanford University Press). She has published articles on World War II and its legacy, as well as on Jewish identity in France in PMLA, Yale French Studies, Nouvelle Revue Française, Archives juives, and other journals. Most recently, she completed a digital collection of objects of memory for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s digital tool, Experiencing History.

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