"It is a living museum of a long-gone Jewish life and, supposedly,
a testimony to the success of the French model of social
integration. It is a communal home where gay men and women are said
to stand in defiance of the French model of social integration. It
is a place of freedom and tolerance where people of color and
lesbians nevertheless feel unwanted and where young Zionists from
the suburbs gather every Sunday and sometimes harass Arabs. It is a
hot topic in the press and on television. It is open to the world
and open for business. It is a place to be seen and a place of
invisibility. It is like a home to me, a place where I feel both
safe and out of place and where my father felt comfortable and
alienated at the same time. It is a place of nostalgia, innovation,
shame, pride, and anxiety, where the local and the global intersect
for better and for worse. And for better and for worse, it is a
French neighborhood."-from My Father and I Mixing personal memoir,
urban studies, cultural history, and literary criticism, as well as
a generous selection of photographs, My Father and I focuses on the
Marais, the oldest surviving neighborhood of Paris. It also
beautifully reveals the intricacies of the relationship between a
Jewish father and a gay son, each claiming the same neighborhood as
his own. Beginning with the history of the Marais and its
significance in the construction of a French national identity,
David Caron proposes a rethinking of community and looks at how
Jews, Chinese immigrants, and gays have made the Marais theirs.
These communities embody, in their engagement of urban space, a
daily challenge to the French concept of universal citizenship that
denies them all political legitimacy. Caron moves from the strictly
French context to more theoretical issues such as social and
political archaism, immigration and diaspora, survival and
haunting, the public/private divide, and group friendship as
metaphor for unruly and dynamic forms of community, and founding
disasters such as AIDS and the Holocaust. Caron also tells the
story of his father, a Hungarian Jew and Holocaust survivor who
immigrated to France and once called the Marais home.
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