Synopses & Reviews
A year in Paris . . . since World War II, countless American students have been lured by that vision—and been transformed by their sojourn in the City of Light. Dreaming in French tells three stories of that experience, and how it changed the lives of three extraordinary American women.
All three women would go on to become icons, key figures in American cultural, intellectual, and political life, but when they embarked for France, they were young, little-known, uncertain about their future, and drawn to the culture, sophistication, and drama that only Paris could offer. Yet their backgrounds and their dreams couldnt have been more different. Jacqueline Bouvier was a twenty-year-old debutante, a Catholic girl from a wealthy East Coast family. Susan Sontag was twenty-four, a precocious Jewish intellectual from a North Hollywood family of modest means, and Paris was a refuge from motherhood, a failing marriage, and graduate work in philosophy at Oxford. Angela Davis, a French major at Brandeis from a prominent African American family in Birmingham, Alabama, found herself the only black student in her year abroad program—in a summer when all the news from Birmingham was of unprecedented racial violence.
Kaplan takes readers into the lives, hopes, and ambitions of these young women, tracing their paths to Paris and tracking the discoveries, intellectual adventures, friendships, and loves that they found there. For all three women, France was far from a passing fancy; rather, Kaplan shows, the year abroad continued to influence them, a significant part of their intellectual and cultural makeup, for the rest of their lives. Jackie Kennedy carried her love of France to the White House and to her later career as a book editor, bringing her cultural and linguistic fluency to everything from art and diplomacy to fashion and historic restoration—to the extent that many, including Jackie herself, worried that she might seem “too French.” Sontag found in France a model for the life of the mind that she was determined to lead; the intellectual world she observed from afar during that first year in Paris inspired her most important work and remained a key influence—to be grappled with, explored, and transcended—the rest of her life. Davis, meanwhile, found that her Parisian vantage strengthened her sense of political exile from racism at home and brought a sense of solidarity with Algerian independence. For her, Paris was a city of political commitment, activism, and militancy, qualities that would deeply inform her own revolutionary agenda and soon make her a hero to the French writers she had once studied.
Kaplan, whose own junior year abroad played a prominent role in her classic memoir, French Lessons, spins these three quite different stories into one evocative biography, brimming with the ferment and yearnings of youth and shot through with the knowledge of how a single year—and a magical city—can change a whole life. No one who has ever dreamed of Paris should miss it.
Review
"A fascinating group portrait of three different women from three different generations whose trajectories nevertheless converge in one surprising yet significant place: Paris. In this lively, original
biographie à trois, Alice Kaplan shows how time spent living in the French capital and learning about its culture gave each of these sui generis heroines 'her own ideas of what counted'—and how those ideas in turn became an indelible part of the American political and cultural landscape."
Review
"An eloquent, brilliant, and often moving portrayal of three remarkable women whose personal and intellectual engagement with France transformed them, and by extension America as well. These intimate narratives of Jaqueline Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis feel not only vital, but also necessary to our understanding of their moral, aesthetic and political development, and just as importantly, to our understanding of each as a remarkable, flawed, and complicated human being."
Review
"An enduring group profile of three influential yet completely different American women, for each of whom Paris played a short but transformative role, over three tumultuous decades. . . . The much-admired Kaplan focuses sharply on three women of successive generations, providing a keen feminist-cultural picture of Pariss enduring, if varied, impact."
Review
"Alice Kaplan's triple portrait of three iconic mid-century American women, dazzles beyond our evergreen fascination with the wildly disparate lives of Jacqueline Bouvier, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis. Her lens--the 'junior year abroad'--proves to be a brilliantly revealing cultural magnifying glass. With her meticulous scholarship, a novelist's gimlet eye for detail and the sheer grace of her writing, Kaplan has given us an original and now essential model of that enduring American narrative--the American in Paris." Patricia Hampl
Review
"The #1 nonfiction book to look out for this spring."
Review
"Superbly perceptive. . . . Kaplan is a master at . . . selecting just the right aspect of everyday experience to illuminate an important point she wants to make. . . . Some books are well-written on a sentence-by-sentence basis; you leaf back through the pages to find you've underscored choice lines. Dreaming in French is the sort of book where you (well, I) draw vertical lines next to entire paragraphs. Kaplan produces some exquisite lines, yes, but she is positively incandescent on the level of thoughts and observations."
Review
"Lively. . . . The links Kaplan makes between these cultures and these women deliver fascinating insight to the conditions and changes surging through not only these particular lives, but those of Americans in general."
Review
"Gossip is one of the key pleasures--but far from the only one--to be found in Alice Kaplans absorbing new book. . . . It's a book, to some extent, about the desirability of abandoning or attenuating ones Americanness."
Review
"Dreaming in French is, in essence a collection of three short, stand-alone biographies. But Kaplan is a talented historian, journalist, and storyteller, and so she's crafted a book greater than the sum of its parts. . . . An informative, well-written work of biographical nonfiction."
Review
"Alice Kaplan beautifully describes the intricate mixture of lust and embarrassment and voyeurism and submission and pride involved in immersing oneself in another language. . . . This girl's own story---of a daughter, a spy in the house of French, a teacher and scholar-is imbued with a sense of the multiplicity of identity, and it gracefully tells us what Kaplan says French has taught her: 'There is more than one way to speak.' "
Boston Globe
Review
"An uncommonly forthright and concise piece of autobiogra- phy. Kaplan has shown that university professors, too, can have a past worth telling, that the subjects they teach may mean far more to them than any student could begin to guess." Lisa Cohen - Voice Literary Supplement
Review
"This original, artful, engaging book belongs to an evolving genre of postmodern intellectual autobiography. Telling her story about a girl from the midwest who learned to speak perfect French, a student of deconstruction who became intrigued by fascism, Alice Kaplan writes insightfully also about language, memory, politics, and writing. Kaplan's father was a lawyer at the Nuremberg trials who died when she was only seven: she recalls the frightening photographs of concentration camp victims she found among his papers. The glamour of otherness and the allure of evil-as well as the characters of various mentors, meals, lovers, and students- are the subjects of this witty and insightful memoir." John Sturrock - London Review of Books
Review
"Born a Jewish daughter of the American Midwest, Alice Kaplan became a professor of French and an expert on the literature of French fascism. French Lessons is the story of her cultural odyssey, a brave attempt to articulate the compulsions that drove her to embrace foreignness in order to become truly herself. . . . Told in a 'staccato Midwestern style,' her story of becoming French is arrestingly all-American." Rachel M. Brownstein, author of Becoming a Heroine
Review
"Alice Kaplan has written a wonderful book, as accessible as light fiction and as polished and layered as poetry. . . . The precision and intensity of Kaplan's presentation of self in everyday life makes for an extraordinary literary achieve- ment." Arthur Goldhammer - Washington Post Book World
Review
"A lovely book. . . . From the childhood learning of words from her siblings, to her professorship at Duke, she has catalogued her desire to speak a foreign language and thereby to become something foreign and alluring herself." Graham Fraser - Toronto Globe and Mail
Review
"French Lessons captures the excitement Kaplan experienced as she fell into the French language: mastering the difficulties of French pronunciation, the forms of the French verb, the forms of French politeness."
Fred Turner - Boston Phoenix
Review
"This is the most engaging new bildungsroman I have read in years-and especially because the bildung in question, the learning of French by a young American woman, brings with it such an amazing range of personal drama of modern and contemporary political and cultural history." Thomas McGonigle - Chicago Tribune
Review
"An elegant and entertaining work." Boston Globe
Review
"In this well-written triple biographical bite of a magical time in the lives of three ambitious women, Alice Kaplan plumbs the cultural vein that enticed a debutante, an intellectual and a political activist to the same smoky streets of Paris." Minneapolis Star-Tribune
Review
"Lively. . . . The links Kaplan makes between these cultures and Laura Miller - Salon
Review
"American Nietzsche bills itself as a capacious history of the American reception of the philosophy of Nietzsche. But as she takes us through a cacophonous century of readers, hostile and generous alike, Ratner-Rosenhagen also tells the story of an America that cannot but see itself through European eyes--one European's in particular. . . . Ironic,then, this American passion for Nietzsche, who himself lamented the American fetish for Europe--even in his beloved Emerson, whom he faulted for drinking too much from the 'milk glass' of German philosophy. Nietzsche wished Emerson would instead be, as Ratner-Rosenhagen puts it, 'perhaps a little more American.'"" Examiner
Review
"Elegantly written." Examiner
Review
"Compelling and well-observed portraits." Jewish Chronicle
Review
"'We will always have Paris': Bogart's classic line from Casablanca could easily be applied to the three American women woven into a highly original triple micro-biography. Beyond their nationality, what could Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis have in common? Each of them spent a year studying in Paris and left the city transformed by it. Documented and written like a novel, this womanly and erudite walking tour is as gratifying as a Woody Allen movie set in Paris." Lauren Elkin - Daily Beast - Washington Post
Review
"Kaplan follows these women's singular trajectories in lively and brilliantly lucid prose."
L'Amour des Livres
Review
and#8220;Through charming anecdotes, Grenier blends his own history with that of photography, and explains how the medium has influenced his entire life. He begins with early photographic history and its practitioners and smoothly weaves these histories into his own memories. However, since Grenier developed film in his familyand#8217;s pharmacy-cum-photo lab, his connection to photography goes well beyond mere appreciation. . . . Recommended for those who practice or appreciate photography and its history.and#8221;
Review
"Delightful. . . . This short book--just over a hundred pages and illustrated with snapshots--contains multitudes."
Review
and#8220;Proust's relationship with his mother, like much else to do with this greatest of all novelists, was exceptional. . . . .Bloch-Danoand#8217;s admirable biography paints a vivid portrait of a sensitive, cultured, sometimes sharp woman. . . . Bloch-Dano confidently charts the rituals of the Parisian haute bourgeoisie which Madame Proust, as the wife of an eminent professor of medicine, observed, along with her part in the genesis of one of the glories of world literature.and#8221;--Angus Trumble,
IndependentReview
"It is one of the many merits of this admirable biography of Proust's mother that it invites one to return to the novel with perhaps a fuller understanding of Proust's heredity, hinterland, and upbringing. . . . This fascinating book is full of interesting social and cultural observation, of information about French Jewish life, the position of Jews in society and, of course, the Dreyfus case. But it is essentially a study of one of the most remarkable and fruitful of mother-son relationships. As such it is a book that every Proustian will want to read."
Review
and#8220;A vivid, if highly impressionistic, account of the life of Jeanne Weil Proust, a woman who outwardly lived the life of a typical Jewish bourgeoise of the Third Republic, but who succeeded in raising Franceand#8217;s unlikeliest literary giant. . . .
Madame Proust tempts us to read the big book in a new way: as the most fulsome possible answer to a motherand#8217;s wish to know what occupied her son.and#8221;
Review
"Serious readers of Marcel Proust are aware of how close the writer was to his mother. Now, through Bloch-Dano's touching biography of Jeanne Weil Proust, translated by National Book Award nominee Kaplan, his many fans can better understand that closeness. . . . Bloch-Dano's splendid book offers great insight into this loving pair and illustrates Jeanne's influence on her son as a writer. Highly recommended to those interested in Proust and 20th-century French literature."
Review
"Meticulously researched, Madame Proust offers a socio-cultural portrait of French and Jewish culture and how each intersected in Proust's lifetime. It not only explores Anti-Semitism, assimilation and naturalization of Jewish French Nationals, and theand#160;Dreyfus affair but also ably recreates the bourgeois milieu, familial and cultural context, and the physical layout of the Paris in which Marcel Proust lived. . . . Bloch-Dano's biography offers a sensitive, delicate evocation of the relationship Proust would describe as his life's 'only purpose, its only sweetness, its only love, its only consolation.' Madame Proust is a well-conceived and insightful tribute to a woman who lived quietly and whose ambitions and hopes centered fixedly on her family's well-being and her son's fulfillment."
Review
and#8220;Evelyne Bloch-Danoand#8217;s
Madame Proust provides a wealth of new details about Marcel Proustand#8217;s formative years and illustrates, as never before, the importance of his Jewish heritage. She does so by concentrating on the most important love relationship in Proustand#8217;s life: the great affection he had for his mother. Carefully researched, richly documented, and skillfully translated by Alice Kaplan, this book deserves to be read by all who are interested in the life and works of Marcel Proust.and#8221;andshy;and#8212;William C. Carter, author of
Marcel Proust: A LifeReview
and#8220;Using previously unknown documents, Evelyne Bloch-Dano has made a first-rate contribution to our understanding of Marcel Proustand#8217;s mother, her Jewish ancestors and her familyand#8217;s social environment. Highly recommended.and#8221;--Jean-Yves Tadiand#233;, author of
Marcel Proust: A LifeReview
and#8220;If the wealthy Weils hadn't married off their daughter Jeanne to Dr. Adrien Proust in 1870, our sense of the past would be very different. Jeanne's story, seen hereand#8212;inevitablyand#8212;through the scrim of her sonand#8217;s immortal evocation of lost time, evokes the richly upholstered interiors of Paris in the late nineteenth century.and#8221;
Review
"No one was more important in Marcel Proust's life than his mother. . . . By focusing on the mother, French scholar Bloch-Dano brings into relief the family's Jewish background, which the Prousts, like many French Jews at the time, downplayed in seeking assimilation into French society. . . . The limited number of sources available for the project . . . makes this book less an academic biography of Jeanne Proust and more a rich portrait of the bourgeois lifestyle in which Marcel Proust grew up."
Review
"It is crucial to get the cultural and social facts of Proust's Jewish background firmly in focus before making claims about how they might have affected his writing, and Evelyne Bloch-Dano's carefully researched biography of Jeanne Weil Proust performs this task admirably."
Review
"A welcome resource for Proust's many anglophile readers, and a useful companion to the several biographies of Proust."
Review
"Madame Proust shows how painstaking research of literary and cultural information, finally synthesized and carefully evaluated, can result in illumination. . . . The book is packed with information that ranges from detailed historical backgrounds of individuals or groups, through the general status of the Jewish population in France."
Review
and#8220;A fascinating read from start to finish following a true trailblazer of journalism as she covers a world in the dangerous depths of the Cold War.and#8221;and#8212;Martin Savidge, anchor and correspondent for CNNand#160;
and#160;
Review
and#8220;Pauline Frederick will forever be linked to the United Nations, a bold experiment for peace that she covered and loved; it assured her place in history as the first woman reporting news for a network broadcast. She didnand#8217;t think of herself as a pioneer, just someone who was doing a job that she loved, and that meant persevering despite condescending attitudes d women prevalent at the time and that still echo today. Author Greenwald has given us a compelling biography of a woman and an era.and#8221;and#8212;Eleanor Clift, political analyst for the
Daily Beast and author of Founding Sisters and the 19th Amendment
and#160;
Review
and#8220;Marilyn Greenwald has written an insightful and compelling book about a fascinating woman. The story of Pauline Frederick demonstrates the daily battles women faced in an industry that refused to take them seriously. Long before better-known celebrities such as Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer arrived on the scene, Frederick laid the groundwork with trustworthy, steady reporting on foreign affairs. Like Frederick herself, Greenwaldand#8217;s narrative is deeply humanand#8212;a richly contextualized, refreshingly readable story of perseverance and idealism in Americaand#8217;s Cold War years.and#8221;and#8212;Tracy Lucht, author of Sylvia Porter: Americaand#8217;s Original Personal Finance Columnist
Review
andquot;A must-read for journalism, womenandrsquo;s studies, and political science students, as well as for those interested in the history of the UN and the Cold War.andquot;andmdash;Library Journal
Review
and#8220;Impressiveand#8230;The very precision and extent of her research suggest an author whose dedication to her theme amounts to much more than an intent to document her acquaintance and proper use of archival sources. This is an extraordinary book.and#8221;and#8212;John Lukacs, Boston Globe
Review
and#8220;A brilliant account. . . . Inventive, moving, and beautifully written, this is a major contribution to investigative history. Highly recommended.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;A nuanced historical account that resonates with todayand#8217;s controversies over race and capital punishment.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;American racism could become deadly for black soldiers on the front. . . .
The Interpreter reminds us of this sad component of a heroic chapter in American military history.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;With elegance and lucidity, Kaplan revisits these two trials and reveals an appallingly separate and unequal wartime U.S. military justice system.and#8221;
Review
"A highly readable introduction to the underside of Allied/French relations at the Liberation."
Review
and#8220;Compelling. . . . [Kaplan] manages to weave a human story. . . . The two cases are so very different, however, that the conclusions Kaplan reaches appear somewhat tenuous.and#8221;
Review
"A fascinating analysis of soldiers, lawyers, commanders, and racial conditions in the Brittany area of France after the Normandy invasion. . . . Kaplan researches and writes well in creating a powerful book."
Synopsis
Most attempts to generalize about photography as a medium run up against our experience of the photographs themselves. We live with photos and cameras every day, and philosophies of the photographic image do little to shake our intimate sense of how we produce photographs and what they mean to us. In this book that is equal parts memoir and intellectual and cultural history, French writer Roger Grenier contemplates the ways that photography can change the course of a life, reflecting along the way on the history of photography and its practitioners.and#160;Unfolding in brief, charming vignettes, A Box of Photographs evokes Grenierandrsquo;s childhood in Pau, his war years, and his working life at the Gallimard publishing house in Paris. Throughout these personal stories, Grenier subtly weaves the story of a lifetime of practicing and thinking about photography and its heroesandmdash;Henri Cartier-Bresson, Weegee, Alfred Eisenstaedt, George Brassaandiuml;, Inge Morath, and others. Adding their own insights about photography to the narrative are a striking range of writers, thinkers, and artists, from Lewis Carroll, Albert Camus, and Arthur Schopenhauer to Susan Sontag, Edgar Degas, and Eugandegrave;ne Delacroix. Even cameras themselves come to life and take on personalities: an Agfa accompanies Grenier on grueling military duty in Algeria, a Voigtlander almost gets him killed by German soldiers during the liberation of Paris, and an ill-fated Olympus drowns in a boating accident. Throughout, Grenier draws us into the private life of photographs, seeking the secrets they hold for him and for us.and#160;A valedictory salute to a lost world of darkrooms, proofs, and the gummed paper corners of old photo albums, A Box of Photographs is a warm look at the most honest of lifeandrsquo;s mirrors.
Synopsis
Marcel Proustand#8217;s
In Search of Lost Time opens with one of the most famous scenes in literature, as young Marcel, unable to fall asleep, waits anxiously for his mother to come to his bedroom and kiss him good night. Proust's own mother is central to the meaning of his masterpiece, and she has always held a special role in literary history, both as a character and as a decisive influence on the great writerand#8217;s career. Without knowing much about her, we think of her as the quintessential writer's mother.
Now Evelyne Bloch-Danoand#8217;s touching biography acquaints Proust fans with the real Jeanne Weil Proust. Written with the imaginative force of a novel, but firmly grounded in Jeanne and Marcel Proustand#8217;s writings, Madame Proust skillfully captures the life and times of Proustand#8217;s mother, from her German-Jewish background and her marriage to a Catholic grocerand#8217;s son to her lifelong worries about her sonand#8217;s sexuality, health problems, and talent. As well as offering intimate glimpses of the Proustsand#8217; daily life, Madame Proust also uses the family as a way to explore the larger culture of fin-de-siand#232;cle France, including high society, spa culture, Jewish assimilation, and the Dreyfus affair. Throughout, Bloch-Dano offers sensitive readings of Proustand#8217;s work, drawing out the countless interconnections between his mother, his life, and his magnum opus.
Those coming to In Search of Lost Time for the first time will find in Madame Proust a delightful primer on Marcel Proustand#8217;s life and times. For those already steeped in the pleasures of Proust, this gem of a biography will give them a fresh understanding of the rich, fascinating background of the writer and his art.
Synopsis
On February 6, 1945, Robert Brasillach was executed for treason by a French firing squad. He was a writer of some distinction—a prolific novelist and a keen literary critic. He was also a dedicated anti-Semite, an acerbic opponent of French democracy, and editor in chief of the fascist weekly
Je Suis Partout, in whose pages he regularly printed wartime denunciations of Jews and resistance activists.
Was Brasillach in fact guilty of treason? Was he condemned for his denunciations of the resistance, or singled out as a suspected homosexual? Was it right that he was executed when others, who were directly responsible for the murder of thousands, were set free? Kaplan's meticulous reconstruction of Brasillach's life and trial skirts none of these ethical subtleties: a detective story, a cautionary tale, and a meditation on the disturbing workings of justice and memory, The Collaborator will stand as the definitive account of Brasillach's crime and punishment.
A National Book Award Finalist
A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
"A well-researched and vivid account."—John Weightman, New York Review of Books
"A gripping reconstruction of [Brasillach's] trial."—The New Yorker
"Readers of this disturbing book will want to find moral touchstones of their own. They're going to need them. This is one of the few works on Nazism that forces us to experience how complex the situation really was, and answers won't come easily."—Daniel Blue, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
"The Collaborator is one of the best-written, most absorbing pieces of literary history in years."—David A. Bell, New York Times Book Review
"Alice Kaplan's clear-headed study of the case of Robert Brasillach in France has a good deal of current-day relevance. . . . Kaplan's fine book . . . shows that the passage of time illuminates different understandings, and she leaves it to us to reflect on which understanding is better."—Richard Bernstein, The New York Times
Synopsis
Brilliantly uniting the personal and the critical,
French Lessons is a powerful autobiographical experiment. It tells the story of an American woman escaping into the French language and of a scholar and teacher coming to grips with her history of learning. Kaplan begins with a distinctly American quest for an imaginary France of the intelligence. But soon her infatuation with all things French comes up against the dark, unimagined recesses of French political and cultural life.
The daughter of a Jewish lawyer who prosecuted Nazi war criminals at Nuremburg, Kaplan grew up in the 1960s in the Midwest. After her father's death when she was seven, French became her way of "leaving home" and finding herself in another language and culture. In spare, midwestern prose, by turns intimate and wry, Kaplan describes how, as a student in a Swiss boarding school and later in a junior year abroad in Bordeaux, she passionately sought the French "r," attentively honed her accent, and learned the idioms of her French lover.
When, as a graduate student, her passion for French culture turned to the elegance and sophistication of its intellectual life, she found herself drawn to the language and style of the novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine. At the same time she was repulsed by his anti-Semitism. At Yale in the late 70s, during the heyday of deconstruction she chose to transgress its apolitical purity and work on a subject "that made history impossible to ignore:" French fascist intellectuals. Kaplan's discussion of the "de Man affair" — the discovery that her brilliant and charismatic Yale professor had written compromising articles for the pro-Nazi Belgian press—and her personal account of the paradoxes of deconstruction are among the most compelling available on this subject.
French Lessons belongs in the company of Sartre's Words and the memoirs of Nathalie Sarraute, Annie Ernaux, and Eva Hoffman. No book so engrossingly conveys both the excitement of learning and the moral dilemmas of the intellectual life.
Synopsis
Pauline Frederick Reporting is the biography of the life and career of the first woman to become a network news correspondent. After no less an authority than Edward R. Murrow told her there was no place for her in broadcasting, Pauline Frederick (1908and#8211;90) cracked the good old boysand#8217; club through determination and years of hard work, eventually becoming a trusted voice to millions of television viewers.
During Frederickand#8217;s nearly fifty years as a journalist, she interviewed a young Fidel Castro, covered the Nuremberg trials, interpreted diplomatic actions at the United Nations, and was the first woman to moderate a presidential debate. The life of this pivotal figure in American journalism provides an inside perspective on the growth and political maneuverings of television networks as well as Frederickand#8217;s relationships with iconic NBC broadcast figures David Brinkley, Chet Huntley, and others.
Although Frederick repeatedly insisted that she would trade her career, glamorous as it was, to have a family, a series of romances ended in heartache when she did indeed choose her work over love. At the age of sixty-one, however, she married and attained the family life she had always wanted. Her story is one for all modern women striving to balance career and family.
and#160;
Synopsis
No story of World War II is more triumphant than the liberation of France, made famous in countless photos of Parisians waving American flags and kissing GIs as columns of troops paraded down the Champs and#201;lysand#233;es. But one of the least-known stories from that era is also one of the ugliest chapters in the history of Jim Crow. In The Interpreter, celebrated author Alice Kaplan recovers this story both as eyewitnesses first saw it, and as it still haunts us today.
The American Army executed 70 of its own soldiers between 1943 and 1946and#8212;almost all of them black, in an army that was overwhelmingly white. Through the French interpreter Louis Guillouxand#8217;s eyes, Kaplan narrates two different trials: one of a white officer, one of a black soldier, both accused of murder. Both were court-martialed in the same room, yet the outcomes could not have been more different.
Kaplanand#8217;s insight into character and setting creates an indelible portrait of war, race relations, and the dangers of capital punishment.and#160;
and#8220;A nuanced historical account that resonates with todayand#8217;s controversies over race and capital punishment.and#8221; Publishers Weekly
and#8220;American racism could become deadly for black soldiers on the front. The Interpreter reminds us of this sad component of a heroic chapter in American military history.and#8221; Los Angeles Times
and#8220;With elegance and lucidity, Kaplan revisits these two trials and reveals an appallingly separate and unequal wartime U.S. military justice system.and#8221; Minneapolis Star Tribune
and#8220;Kaplan has produced a compelling look at the racial disparities as they were played outand#8230;She explores both cases in considerable and vivid detail.and#8221; Sacramento Bee
About the Author
Roger Grenier, an editor at Éditions Gallimard, has published over thirty novels, short stories, and literary essays and is the recipient of numerous prizes, including the Grand Prix de Littéature de l'Académie Française.Alice Kaplan is the author of French Lessons: A Memoir, The Collaborator, The Interpreter, and Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis, and the translator of OK, Joe, The Difficulty of Being a Dog, A Box of Photographs, and Palace of Books. Her books have been twice nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Awards, once for the National Book Award, and she is a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She holds the John M. Musser chair in French literature at Yale. She lives in Guilford, Connecticut.
Table of Contents
Translatorand#8217;s noteand#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Part One
1 A Daughter to Marry
2 Monsieur Proust and Mademoiselle Weil
3 Very French Israelites
4 At number 40 bis
5 Mother and Daughter
and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;Part Two
6 A Change of Regime
7 Mother and Son
8 Summers at Auteuil
9 The Goodnight Kiss
10 A Small World
11 Mistress of the House
12 The Sickly Child
13 Taking the Waters
14 A Model Couple
15 From Treble to Bass
16 A Woman of Forty
17 Vergiss mein nicht
and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Part Three
18 A Woman in Black at the Beach
19 The Broken Glass
20 On Guard!
21 The Soul of Venice
22 Jeanneand#8217;s Address Book
23 A Wedding and a Funeral
24 La Vie and#224; Deux
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Appendixes
and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; 1. Questionnaire Sent to the Jewish Elite in 1806
and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; 2. Napoleon and the Central Consistory
and#160;
Genealogical Charts
and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; The Weil Family
and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; The Berncastel Family
and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; and#160;Karl Marx and Marcel Proust
Notes
Bibliography
Index