MEMORY

[question everything]

The Wall Street Journal

Bookmarks
February 29, 2008; Page W4

MEMORY
By Philippe Grimbert
(Simon & Schuster, 152 pages, $19.95)

"Memory" is imbued with the burden of a terrible past: the catastrophic deportation and murder of French Jews during the Nazi occupation. For the novel's circumcised but baptized narrator, born four years after the liberation, the ordeal of France's wartime years carries a personal weight. "The day after my fifteenth birthday," he writes, looking back from middle age, "I finally learned what I had always known": that, despite his parent's efforts to hide their past, his family was Jewish. "I too could have stitched the badge to my clothing... could have fled persecution like my parents... like their fellows, neighbors and strangers."

For the narrator, Philippe, this hidden-identity discovery is especially troubling because it is bound up with a family catastrophe and a terrible secret. It is only thanks to an old family friend -- goaded into reminiscence by the discovery of a lost childhood toy -- that Phillipe learns the details of his parents' earlier marriages and of the infidelity that ended them. Most important, he learns of their flight from the Nazis, including a bitter, terrible moment when his father's first wife -- in spite or rage or confusion -- deliberately betrays her Jewishness to Nazi officials and, Medea-like, sacrifices more than herself. The reverberations of this event are felt years later, as the narrator recounts. The denouement is shocking.

In the course of relating such events, Mr. Grimbert shows how private feelings can turn poisonous when political madness has taken hold. He illuminates the effects of individual guilt multiplying over time. He captures the distinct, private agony of a lonely childhood. And he brings a wonderful literary texture to a story that -- because the narrator and Mr. Grimbert share a name -- might otherwise be seen as mere fictionalized memoir. In France, "Memory" won literary prizes. It deserves special attention here as well.

--Martin Rubin
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