Writing Occupation: Jewish Emigré Voices in Wartime France
Speaker(s): Julia Elsky, Loyola University Chicago
"Writing Occupation: Jewish Emigré Voices in Wartime France" - A Roundtable Discussion with Julia Elsky, Loyola University Chicago
Hosted by The France-°®åú´«Ã½ Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, °®åú´«Ã½ Global Studies.
Co-sponsored by the French and Italian Department in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, °®åú´«Ã½
Among the Jewish writers who emigrated from Eastern Europe to France in the 1910s and 1920s, a number chose to switch from writing in their languages of origin to writing primarily in French, a language that represented both a literary center and the promises of French universalism. But under the Nazi occupation of France from 1940 to 1944, these Jewish émigré writers—among them Irène Némirovsky, Benjamin Fondane, Romain Gary, Jean Malaquais, and Elsa Triolet—continued to write in their adopted language, even as the Vichy regime and Nazi occupiers denied their French identity through xenophobic and antisemitic laws.
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Moderator
- France-°®åú´«Ã½ Center Director and Professor, Department of History, °®åú´«Ã½. Her research interests include early modern science, politics and culture and the history of scientific explanation. She is the author of Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2002), which won the American Historical Association's J. Russell Major Prize for best book in English on any aspect of French history, and the editor of Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life (University of Chicago Press, 2007) and, with Mario Biagioli, of Nature Engaged: Science in Practice from the Renaissance to the Present (Palgrave, 2012). Her latest book is The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Debate about What Makes Living Things Tick (University of Chicago Press, 2016).
Panelists
- Historian of European and Jewish history, specializing in the history of Jews in France. She is the author of Sacred Bonds of Solidarity: The Rise of Jewish Internationalism in Nineteenth Century France (2006), Colonialism and the Jews (2017) and The Archive Thief: the Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust (2015), which received the 2016 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish literature. She was named American University's 2017 Scholar-Teacher of the Year.
- Professor, Department of History, °®åú´«Ã½. Professor, by courtesy, of German Studies and Senior Fellow, by courtesy, at the Hoover Institution. He is the author of two books on the Russian and Polish revolutionary movements in the late nineteenth century. He has also edited or co-edited books and document collections on the nationality problems of the Soviet Union, on the outbreak of World War II on the eastern front, on politics and history in the Soviet Union, on relations between Moscow and the Soviet Military Administration in Germany, on the establishment of communist power in Eastern Europe, on the Soviet occupation of Austria, and on the war in former Yugoslavia.
Marie-Pierre Ulloa - Lecturer in the Comparative Literature Department, teaching French and Francophone cultural and intellectual history, with a focus on France, North Africa, and the American West. She is a faculty affiliate of the Taube Center for Jewish Studies, the Mediterranean Studies Forum, the Europe Center, and the EHESS in Paris (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales). She is the author of Francis Jeanson, a Dissident Intellectual from the French Resistance to the Algerian War (°®åú´«Ã½ Press, 2008, also published in French and Arabic), and of Le Nouveau rêve américain. Du Maghreb à la Californie, (CNRS éditions, Paris, 2019).
- Military historian and lecturer at °®åú´«Ã½'s History Department and International Relations Program, and visiting scholar at the °®åú´«Ã½ Center for International Security and Cooperation. She studies dynamics of change in military organizations, specifically how modern European armies evolved and adapted their doctrines and operational habits in the 20th century. She teaches courses and seminars on modern military history, and on the First and Second World Wars.
Laura Wittman - Professor, Department of French and Italian, °®åú´«Ã½. She primarily works on 19th- and 20th-century Italian and French literature from a comparative perspective. She is interested in how modernity articulates new relationships between religious experience, embodiment, mortality, health, and politics, and how these are mediated by literary and artistic creations.
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