Rue Ordener, Rue Labat (Paperback)

Kofman, a prominent French philosopher, wrote this memoir of her life as a Jewish child under the German occupation in 1994, shortly before she committed suicide. This is a strangely detached recollection of what it was like to be a little girl in France during the traumatic days of the Occupation. Kofman's father, a Hasidic rabbi, was arrested on July 16, 1942, during the first large round-up of French Jews and sent to Auschwitz, where he was murdered by a kapo for refusing to work on the Sabbath. The author's recollections begin on the ill-fated day of that round-up and follow her life through her admission to the Sorbonne ten years later at the age of 18. All she retains of her father besides her memories is his fountain pen, which sat on her desk driving her to write her own books: "Maybe all my books have been the detours required to bring me to write about 'that.' "Kofman and her mother managed to avoid the Nazis, hiding with friends and acquaintances. Eventually, they settled in with a Gentile woman whom Kofman remembers as Meme. Meme gradually won the little girl over and at war's end tried to take custody of her. Because Kofman's relationship with her mother was a tortured one, the child carried a considerable weight of ambivalence at this turn of events. Finally, her mother was forced, literally, to kidnap Kofman in order to reclaim her. Kofman retells this story in short vignettes, dispassionately and coolly. The result is all the more powerful for its author's distanced voice. Smock's translation catches the tone quite successfully. At times almost painful to read, a different kind of Holocaust memoir and a book that, with hindsight, suggests the fate that the author had perhaps already chosen for herself. (Kirkus Reviews)

"Rue Ordener, Rue Labat" is a moving memoir by the distinguished French philosopher Sarah Kofman. It opens with the horrifying moment in July 1942 when the author's father, the rabbi of a small synagogue, was dragged by police from the family home on Rue Ordener in Paris, then transported to Auschwitz--"the place," writes Kofman, "where no eternal rest would or could ever be granted." It ends in the mid-1950s, when Kofman enrolled at the Sorbonne.
The book is as eloquent as it is forthright. Kofman recalls her father and family in the years before the war, then turns to the terrors and confusions of her own childhood in Paris during the German occupation. Not long after her father's disappearance, Kofman and her mother took refuge in the apartment of a Christian woman on Rue Labat, where they remained until the Liberation. This bold woman, whom Kofman called Meme, undoubtedly saved the young girl and her mother from the death camps. But Kofman's close attachment to Meme also resulted in a rupture between mother and child that was never to be fully healed.

This slender volume is distinguished by the author's clear prose, the carefully recounted horrors of her childhood, and the uncommon poise that came to her only with the passage of many years.

General

Imprint:	University of Nebraska Press
Country of origin:	United States
Series:	Stages
Release date:	August 1996
First published:	August 1996
Authors:	Sarah Kofman
Translators:	Ann Smock
Introduction by:	Ann Smock
Dimensions:	200 x 128 x 7mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback - Trade
Pages:	85
ISBN-13:	978-0-8032-7780-9
Categories:	Books > Fiction > General
LSN:	0-8032-7780-6
Barcode:	9780803277809

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