This course will focus on a short (124-page) book, Dora Bruder, by French Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano. Part investigation, part memoir, Dora Bruder is about a teenage Jewish girl who disappeared during the German occupation of France. This gentle, engaging read, set in wartime Paris and the early post-war years, blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction and offers alternative versions of reality. The book is a searching exploration of how the French understand (or imagine) their past, and of how all of us interpret our present.  

You don’t need to know anything about occupied France to participate actively in this group.  Each session will begin with a brief introduction, then together we will read the text very closely and parse “truth” from different perspectives. The intent is to spark nuanced conversations on the cat-and-mouse game between subjectivity and objectivity that has informed post-war sensibility in France (and here) as the French nation "deconstructed" reality to buttress the myth of collective Resistance and to survive the trauma of the genocide and the nation's participation in it.

Note: This course will not meet on Thursday, October 26 as King's Chapel Parish House is not available that day.  It will resume the following Thursday.