Joyce Block Lazarus Knihy

Strangers and Sojourners demonstrates that there is a distinctive French Jewish literature today, characterized not by its authors' common nationality, but by their identification with a Jewish collectivity and with French language and culture. The six authors in this study, Memmi, Wiesel, Schwarz-Bart, Perec, Modiano, and Jacques, all writing after Auschwitz, engage in a quest for a modern Jewish consciousness. Torn between the opposing pulls of Judaism and French cultural values, they exhibit their tension and ambivalent feelings through the themes and structure of their fiction, and in their ambiguous relationship with the French language.

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, a judicial case involving the custody of two Jewish orphans mushroomed into a major crisis of Jewish-Christian relations in France. A New York Times journalist called this affair «the worst religious storm of post-war France». The Finaly Affair (1945-1953), which is best understood in the context of post-Vichy anti-Semitism, came about when Catholic fundamentalist beliefs came into conflict with France’s republican principles. This affair polarized the French nation and was transformed into a national crisis by the explosive power of the French press. It had lasting consequences for interfaith relations in France and for the French Jewish community. In the Shadow of Vichy captures this astonishing story of how the Church’s kidnapping of two Jewish children just after World War II helped to hasten the revolutionary changes of Vatican II.

An expression of the unique and dangerous times we live in. An account of youthful to mature love and the losses we all endure along the way. Lessons for love of country and all people in the world, who are desperately needing to hear that voice.