Proust, a Jewish Way

Compagnon (A Summer with Pascal), a comparative literature professor at Columbia University, provides a niche deep dive into how Jewish readers of the 1920s and ’30s responded to the works of French novelist Marcel Proust (1871–1922), whose father was Christian and whose mother was Jewish. Compagnon explains that contemporary scholars’ tendency to view Proust as a self-hating Jew can be traced back to critic Siegfried van Praag, who lamented in 1937 that In Search of Lost Time’s Jewish characters include an avaricious caricature and an actor undeserving of her success. Complicating such readings, Compagnon notes that Proust’s novel was enthusiastically received by French Zionists in the 1920s, who viewed Proust’s Jewish characters as complex and multifaceted. Compagnon also devotes two chapters to his successful efforts to uncover the origins of an oft-studied remark from Proust on his Jewish ancestry (“There is no longer anybody... to visit the little Jewish cemetery where my grandfather... went for so many years to lay a stone on his parents’ grave”), but the answer doesn’t reveal anything new about the author and the literary detective story ultimately feels like an unnecessarily extended footnote. Because Compagnon is more interested in what Jewish communities thought of Proust than in what Proust thought of Judaism, readers won’t get much insight into the writer’s personal beliefs, and there’s not enough historical detail for the book to serve as a window into French Judaism in the interwar period. This is best suited to scholars of French literature. (Nov.)