Dora Bruder by Patrick Modiano

Summary: Patrick Modiano opens Dora Bruder by telling how in 1988 he stumbled across an ad in the personal columns of the New Year's Eve 1941 edition of Paris Soir. Placed by the parents of a 15-year-old Jewish girl, Dora Bruder, who had run away from her Catholic boarding school, the ad sets Modiano off on a quest to find out everything he can about Dora and why, at the height of German reprisals, she ran away on a bitterly cold day from the people hiding her. He finds only one other official mention of her name on a list of Jews deported from Paris to Auschwitz in September 1942.

With no knowledge of Dora Bruder aside from these two records, Modiano continues to dig for fragments from Dora's past. What little he discovers in official records and through remaining family members, becomes a meditation on the immense losses of the period—lost people, lost stories, and lost history. Modiano delivers a moving account of the ten-year investigation that took him back to the sights and sounds of Paris under the Nazi Occupation and the paranoia of the Pétain regime as he tries to find connections to Dora. In his efforts to exhume her from the past, Modiano realizes that he must come to terms with the specters of his own troubled adolescence. The result, a montage of creative and historical material, is Modiano's personal rumination on loss, both memoir and memorial (Via Goodreads.com).

Pages:

Release Date: April 2nd, 1997

Rating: 4.5/5 Stars

Review:

I read Dora Bruder for a French and Jewish Studies class this semester that focused on France and the Holocaust. We spent the semester focusing on the experience of Jews in France as well as the lasting impact the Holocaust had on Jewish children in France. Dora Bruder focused on both of those aspects. Dora Bruder follows a narrator who was born around the time of liberation and explains how his childhood was impacted by his family's experience of the Holocaust. As an adult, he found an article about the disappearance of Dora Bruder, a Jewish teen in France, during the Holocaust and he goes on an exploration to discover what happened to her.

It was empowering to see how dedicated he was to finding out what happened to Dora. In class, some of my peers discussed that his motivations might not have been pure and he seemed almost obsessed with her, but I think that was beneficial. Without someone that cares so much about the lives of Holocaust victims, their stories and identities may never be known. The stories of Holocaust victims and survivors deserve to be known by the world. I did, however, think that he should have separated the narrated sections and Dora's story in alternating chapters. While he did bring Dora's story to life, I do agree that the narrator was using her story to tell his. I am glad that Dora's story inspired the narrator to write about his, but I think their stories should have been separated. I felt as though he took away from some of her story by telling his. The two stories needed to be told, but they should not have been intertwined because they were not in real life. He never knew Dora or knew of anyone in his family that knew her. I think he was trying to make connections to Dora that did not exist.

I liked the fact that he told Dora's story even though he knew he could never discover everything about her. Dora might have been murdered in the Holocaust and was never able to tell her story, but not having her story fully told is not necessarily a bad thing. She was able to take something away that her persecutors and executioners could not. They tried to take away her dignity and humanity, but she was able to take something with her to the grave that they could never take away from her.

I enjoyed Dora Bruder. It was an interesting and thoughtful book that I would highly recommend. I loved learning about her story as well as the narrator's. So many stories exist from the Holocaust, but many may never be fully known or known about. I hope other individuals will take this initiative and explore the stories of individuals that did not live to tell their own story. They deserve to have their story told as much as any one else does.