Forgotten crimes?: Representing Jewish experience of the Second World War in French crime fiction

Gorrara, Claire Jacqueline ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0732-7666 2010. Forgotten crimes?: Representing Jewish experience of the Second World War in French crime fiction. South Central Review 27 (1-2) , pp. 3-20. 10.1353/scr.0.0078

Preview

PDF - Published Version Download (537kB) | Preview

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between French crime fiction and memories of the Second World War. It focuses on the late 1950s and early 1960s and representations of Jewish persecution and deportation in the work of Léo Malet and Hubert Monteilhet. For whilst these early post-war years are commonly supposed to have been given over to the repression of troubling wartime memories, selected French crime fiction offers an intriguing set of counter-narratives with which to challenge such notions of French historical amnesia. By examining Léo Malet's Du rébecca rue des Rosiers (1957) and Des kilomètres de linceuls (1955) and Hubert Monteilhet's Le Retour des cendres (1961), this article will show how representations of Jewish persecution and deportation in these fictions activate complex patterns of disclosure, displacement and disavowal of French wartime guilt and complicity. In so doing, these popular novels provide rich material for speculating on broader configurations of French wartime memories at a time of apparent forgetting.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Modern Languages
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PQ Romance literatures
Additional Information:	Pdf uploaded in accordance with publisher's policy at http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/issn/0743-6831/ (accessed 24/04/2014).
Publisher:	The Johns Hopkins University Press
ISSN:	0743-6831
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	30 March 2016
Last Modified:	07 May 2023 11:12
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/22172

Citation Data

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item