Dora Bruder Book

In 1988, the French novelist Patrick Modiano happened upon a notice in a 1941 Paris newspaper, placed by the parents of a 15-year-old Jewish girl, Dora Bruder, who had disappeared from the Catholic boarding school where she was being hidden. The notice stuck in Modiano's memory, and it launched him on a quest for information about the girl's life that resulted in this book: Dora Bruder. Modiano's long investigations turned up only tiny scraps of information about Dora Bruder's biography--but every scrap made the mystery of her disappearance more haunting. Most strikingly, Modiano found her name on a list of Jews deported from Paris to Auschwitz in 1942. "It takes time for what has been erased to resurface", Modiano explains. "It took me four years to discover her exact date of birth: February 25, 1926. And a further two years to find out her place of birth: Paris, 12th arrondissement. But I am a patient man. I can wait for hours in the rain". Eventually Modiano's search for information about Dora's life forces him to come to terms with his own difficult adolescence. Yet Modiano's book defies the categories of both history and memoir. It is something more complex, and harder--a poetic acknowledgement, and a philosophical refutation, of common and terrifying human fates: being isolated, being forgotten, and being lost. --Michael Joseph GrossRead More