Dora Bruder

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", 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.

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.

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