Synopses & Reviews
Translated from the French by Benjamin Ivry, Simone Weil was one of the twentieth century’s most original philosopher-critics, and as a result her legacy has been claimed by many. This memoir by Weil’s niece is strong-willed and incisive and as close as we are likely to get to the real Simone Weil. Born into a freethinking Jewish family, Weil contributed many articles to Socialist and Communist journals and was active in the Spanish Civil War until her health failed.
In 1940 she became strongly attracted to Roman Catholicism and the Passion of Christ. Most of her works, published posthumously, continue to inform debates in ethics, philosophy, and spirituality surrounding questions of sacrifice, asceticism, and the virtues of manual labor. Massively influential, Weil’s writings were widely praised by such readers as Albert Camus, T. S. Eliot, Simone de Beauvoir, Pope John XXIII, Czeslaw Milosz, and Susan Sontag. Sylvie Weil recovers the deeply Jewish nature of Simone’s thinking and details how her preoccupations with charity and justice were fully in the tradition of tzedakah, the Jewish religious obligation toward these actions.
Using previously unpublished family correspondence and conversations, Sylvie Weil offers a more authentically personal portrait of her aunt than previous biographers have provided. At Home with André and Simone Weil illuminates Simone’s relationship to her family, especially to her brother, the great Princeton mathematician André Weil. A clear-eyed and uncompromising memoir of her family, At Home with André and Simone Weil is a fresh look at the noted French philosopher,mystic, and social activist.
Review
"A magnificent narrative which brings back to life the brother and sister, born three years apart yet very like twins, both superlatively gifted."—Le Monde
Review
"Sylvie Weil's memoir is simply one of the best books I've read in the past decade. At turns poignant, poetic, and deeply personal, Chez les Weil is a movingly honest exploration of her own identity and the exceptional influences that helped shape it, particularly her father, André, and his sister, Simone, her grandparents and ancestors, and the Holocaust." --Paul LeClerc, president, The New York Public Library
Review
"The missing link in the story of André and Simone Weil is Sylvie Weil, daughter of the great mathematician, niece of the legendary philosopher. In her memoirs, which are much more than that, the 'saints' are humanized, while the 'merely' personal is transformed into something rich and strange. One enters Sylvie's world to find André and Simone, and discovers there a hidden treasure: Sylvie herself. No student of André or Simone Weil can afford not to enter this captivating universe."
--Palle Yourgrau, author of A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel and Einstein
Synopsis
"It is quite incorrect to believe that the dead are gone forever and never return to speak to the living. They return to speak to the living all the time; indeed, it is their main activity." In this illuminating memoir by Sylvie Weil, contemporary readers can hear the voices of her famed philosopher aunt Simone and mathematician father Andr .
Born into a freethinking Jewish family in 1909, Simone Weil became one of the twentieth century's most original philosopher-critics, penning works of philosophy as well as politics. Inspired by the Bolshevik revolution, her work explored and advocated for workers' rights and, later, the Spanish Republican cause. In 1940 she became strongly influenced by Roman Catholicism. Though she declined to convert, she explored significant Catholic themes through her writing on the ethics, philosophy, and spirituality of sacrifice, asceticism, and the virtues of manual labor. Sylvie Weil recovers the deeply Jewish nature of Simone's thinking and details how her preoccupations with charity and justice were fully in the tradition of tzedakah, the Jewish religious obligation toward these actions.
In the decades since her death in 1943, Simone's writing has influenced thinkers like Albert Camus, T. S. Eliot, Simone de Beauvoir, Pope John XXIII, Czeslaw Milosz, and Susan Sontag. Using previously unpublished family correspondence and conversations, Sylvie Weil paints the most vivid, private portrait of her aunt in print. The book illuminates Simone's relationship with her family, especially with her brother Andr . Loving and unsparing, affectionate and incisive, Sylvie Weil's At Home with Andr and Simone Weil is an insightful memoir about an intellectual giant.
Synopsis
Translated from the French by Benjamin Ivry, Simone Weil was one of the twentieth century’s most original philosopher-critics, and as a result her legacy has been claimed by many. This memoir by Weil’s niece is strong-willed and incisive and as close as we are likely to get to the real Simone Weil. Born into a freethinking Jewish family, Weil contributed many articles to Socialist and Communist journals and was active in the Spanish Civil War until her health failed.
About the Author
Sylvie Weil is the niece of Simone Weil and the daughter of André Weil. She earned her degrees in classics and French literature at the Sorbonne. She was a professor of French literature, and is the author of several award-winning works of fiction for adults and for young adults. Her novels have been published in the United States:
My Guardian Angel (2007) and
Elvina’s Mirror (2009).
Benjamin Ivry’s previous books include biographies of Arthur Rimbaud, Maurice Ravel, and Francis Poulenc. He has translated French authors such as André Gide, Jules Verne, Balthus, and Witold Gombrowicz.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Plato or Diophantus
Phone Call
The Tunnel
A Normal Little Girl
The Saint's Tibia
Living with Her
Where to Find the Sugar Bowl
Who Are We Congratulating Here?
To Baptize Me or Not to Baptize Me?
The Nuns
Gelfilte Fish
A Beauty of Euclid
A Genuine Relic?
Choo-Choo
Do You Want to Come with Me?
A Two-Headed Genius
Family Portrait
Sterling Ancestors: From the Galician Side
Sterling Ancestors: From the Alsatian Side
The Wages of Sin
A Family Unglued
The Metamorphoses of a Kuckucksei
These Ruined Faces
The Garde-Meuble
Jerusalem
A Navy Blue Beret
Indestructible?
Japonaiserie
Pulling the Wool over Her Eyes
Tzedakah
The Old Horse
Visitation Rights
Revelation
Roots The Mirror's Eyes
Pale Petals
Epilogue