Proust, a Jewish Way

by Antoine Compagnon, Jody Gladding (translator)

Marcel Proust once wrote, “There is no longer anybody, not even myself, since I cannot leave my bed, who will go along the Rue du Repos to visit the little Jewish cemetery where my grandfather, following a custom that he never understood, went for so many years to lay a stone on his parents’ grave.” Investigating the origin and significance of this statement, Antoine Compagnon offers new insight into the great author’s underappreciated Jewish side.

Compagnon traces Proust’s ties to the French Jewish community, examining his relations with his mother’s successful and assimilated family, the Weils. He explores how French Jews read and responded to Proust’s masterpiece In Search of Lost Time in the 1920s and 1930s. Challenging contemporary critics who perceive self-hatred or even antisemitism in Proust’s work, Compagnon shows that many Jewish intellectuals and young Zionists admired and vigorously debated the novel, some seeing it as a source for pride in their Jewish identity. He also considers Proust’s portrayal of homosexuality and how it relates to notions of Jewishness. A work of remarkable erudition and deep research, Proust, a Jewish Way brings to light the vanished world of Proust’s first Jewish readers and shows how it can illuminate our reading of the great novelist today.

Genres: Nonfiction, Jewish

312 pages, Paperback

First published March 3, 2022

About the author

Professeur de littérature française à la Sorbonne, à l'université Columbia de New York et au Collège de France

Né le 20 juillet 1950 à Bruxelles, dans une famille de six enfants. Son père, le général Jean Compagnon fait la guerre de 1940 puis les guerres d’Indochine et d’Algérie. Orphelin de mère à quatorze ans, il passe son enfance à Londres, Tunis, Washington et fait sa classe de rhétorique dans un lycée militaire de la Sarthe.

Ancien élève de l'Ecole polytechnique, ingénieur des ponts et chaussées et docteur ès lettres, Antoine Compagnon est maître de conférences à l'Ecole polytechnique (1978-1985), professeur à l'Institut français du Royaume-Uni à Londres (1980-1981), à l'université Columbia à New York depuis 1985, à l'université du Mans (1989-1990) et à l'université Paris 4 (1994-2006). Il est également membre du Conseil national de l'enseignement supérieur et de la recherche (Cneser) de 2002 à 2007 et de la Commission Pochard sur la revalorisation du métier d'enseignant (2007).

Professeur de littérature française au Collège de France depuis 2006, il est membre, entre autres, du comité de rédaction des revues telles que Critique, The Romanic Review, Bulletin de la Société des amis de Montaigne, The French Review, Genesis, Cambridge Studies in French, L'Année Baudelaire, Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France, Les Cahiers du judaïsme.
Spécialiste de Montaigne et de Proust, il écrit de nombreux ouvrages sur la littérature.

En 2012, il reçoit le titre de Professeur Honoris causa d'HEC : « La littérature, ça paye ».

Antoine Compagnon est chevalier de la Légion d'honneur et commandeur des Palmes académiques.

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine_...

Reviews

[Alwynne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Marcel Proust was brought up as a Catholic in keeping with his father’s faith. But Jeanne Weil, Proust’s mother, hailed from a Jewish family. She never converted to any branch of Christianity, sustaining lifelong ties to Jewish traditions which then figured in Proust’s childhood. However, question marks surround Proust’s personal attitudes towards his Jewish ancestry, many stemming from specific (often clashing) readings of Jewish characters in À la recherche du temps perdu. Some interpretations of Proust’s text have even suggested his portrayal of Jewish characters verges on antisemitic. Academic Antoine Compagnon sets out to investigate these kinds of questions and assessments, he’s explicitly invested in countering notions of Proust as engaged in reproducing and circulating damaging portraits of Jews via his fiction.

Compagnon focuses on Proust’s initial reception by members of France’s Jewish communities: from Proust’s friends and literary contemporaries to prominent Jewish reviewers to younger Jewish readers exploring issues around identity. In 1923, not long after his death, Proust’s Jewish ancestry became more widely known. This began to have an impact on how his work was received: numerous Jewish literary critics embraced the notion of Proust as a Jewish writer; while antisemites pounced on this revelation, twisting their evaluations of his work to fit their racist prejudice. Antisemitic critiques of Proust’s novel labelled, for example, Swann the embodiment of a so-called ‘Jewish mind’ i.e. indecisive, weak-willed. However, many younger, Jewish fans thought Proust’s Jewish characters challenged negative stereotypes – such as the stock “fatalistic” or “tragic” Jew. They saw figures like Swann and Bloch as complex and conflicted, indicative of the alienation they themselves experienced as part of the Jewish diaspora. There were those too who sought to ‘segregate’ Proust’s work like French author André Gide. Gide believed Jewish literature and French literature should be considered separate entities. He viewed novels by Jewish-French authors like Proust as the equivalent of work in translation - even though Proust was French, influenced by numerous French authors, and, of course, writing in French about French culture and society.

Compagnon includes an examination of Proust’s wider allegiances - from his relationships with his maternal relatives to his reaction to the now-infamous Dreyfus Affair. Proust’s fierce, public defence of Dreyfus later prompted Hannah Arendt to characterise Proust as prepared to be visibly Jewish in times of emergency - Proust apparently produced a novel centred on the Dreyfus case which went unpublished. A number of eminent Jewish critics claimed that Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu effectively chronicled a segment of Jewish-French bourgeois society since lost. However, Proust detractors, particularly post WW2, positioned Proust as an over-assimilated "non-Jew," anxious to abandon or distance himself from his origins – although it’s interesting that the Dutch critic who sparked the backlash was apparently horrified that Proust traced connections between the discriminatory treatment of Jewish and/or queer people. More recently, responses to key characters in À la recherche du temps perdu, notably Swann and Bloch, have been further complicated by shifts in what is/isn't considered appropriate – certain references/concepts featured in À la recherche du temps perdu, then inoffensive enough to be freely employed by Jewish readers and critics during the 1920s and 1930s, now have largely negative connotations.

Compagnon’s scholarly study was frequently illuminating but it could also be overly dry and dense. Compagnon’s exhaustive research underlines his dedication to his subject but I wondered if he was, perhaps, a bit too close to it at times. The morass of detail – about Proust’s family, the backgrounds/biographies of critics – sometimes made it difficult to follow Compagnon’s underlying argument. There’s a tendency to foreground the descriptive rather than the analytical. But even so I think it’s a fascinating contribution to Proust studies as well as to literary/cultural history particularly Jewish literary history, and the history of racism - especially shifting historical manifestations of antisemitism. Translated by Jody Gladding.

Thanks to Netgalley and Columbia University Press for an ARC

[David Goldman · Rating 4 out of 5]

What does it mean to be a “Jewish writer”? Can Jews ever be fully accepted in liberal society? What does Jewish identity mean in such a world? How does anti-semitism impact these questions? These questions haunt the modern “liberal” Jew who wants to retain something of their Jewish identity and tradition while fully participating in society as a whole. These questions also haunted the Jews in the early 20th century who lived in France, a country that nominally fully accepted Jews but whose social mores and antisematism unearthed by the Dreyfus affair made the claim of equality suspect. Marcel Proust, and his era-defining modernist tome “In Search of Lost Time,” prove a fruitful lens to view these issues as explained by Antoine Compagnon’s Proust: A Jewish Way.

Compagnon reviews Proust’s connection to the Jewish community, Proust’s work in relations to Jews, and how the Jewish community received the author and his work. Proust was not a practicing Jew in any way that we would recognize. But his connections to the Jewish world will resonate with many contemporaries. Proust’s mother was Jewish (and never converted). Proust’s Jewish family was active in business and the arts. Proust spent much time with his Jewish relatives. While he wasn’t religious, Proust was a member of the Jewish intelligentsia, writing for Jewish journals. During life, Proust was “outed” as Jewish, defying his father and being a pro-Dreyfus, and much like the characters of his novels, become defined by this this. Proust, nearing death, wrote a letter remembering his trips to his great-grandfather’s grave and bemoaning that no one would be left to visit. Proust’s great work was populated with similar Jewish bourgeois and intellectuals, both living in and hiding from the Jewish world. As antisemitism is unearthed by the Dreyfus affair, the characters reengage with their Jewish identity.

Compagnon devotes most of the book to Proust’s reception by the Jewish world during his life and how that evolved over the years after his death. During his life, Proust was accepted among the Jewish community and was not condemned for portraying Jewish characters in an unflattering light. Immediately after Proust’s death, Jewish periodicals, particularly international ones, posted obituaries.
Jewish French critics claimed Proust as a Jewish writer and began interpreting his work through the eyes of its Jewish characters. They applauded Proust for presenting Jews who were not stock characters. Early Zionists claimed Proust for their own as he presented characters that broke from the “shtetl” past. By representing the conflicted Jew, these early Zionist saw Proust as pointing to the failure of assimilation for which a Jewish state was the only cure. In short, after his death, many in the Jewish community fought for Proust’s Jewishness.

Proust’s writing was often described by Jewish writers as being Talmudic. Denis Saurat noted Proust’s “long, complicated sentences, overloaded with parentheticals, ending in small, precious, just disjointed discoveries, and offering glimpses of another subject. It kind of sounds like a foreign language in truth. This was clearly the style invented….[by the Talmudic rabbis]… It is the thinking itself that takes these forms, the inevitable forms of commentary, added to which are repetitions and the apparent lack of any immediate plan." 101.
And the reading of Proust impacted how the Talmud was perceived by intellectual Jews. The Talmud is more or less constructed and conceived like Proust’s novels, a torturous, ornamented, disorganized mosaic. Because Proust’s book was an acclaimed masterpiece, "the French reader feels that he has left the country." Similarly, Proust allowed a new take on the Zohar, allowing entrance from a literary angle. (Note, this was about the time that Gershem Schlokens’s research was rehabilitating the study of Jewish mysticism.)

The post-WWII period saw a turn toward interpreting Proust’s characters as an argument against assimilation. This is the Van Praag interpretation, whose interest in Proust as “Half Jewish, was the model of the perfectly assimilated Western Jew… he was the greatest portrayer of assimilation, of that Jewish moment directed against the very existence of Jews. Proust was not only a profoundly French writer, he was also a totally Jewish writer. 155. An Pragg sees an ineluctable fatality of assimilation - with no way out.” This intellectual fatality would be picked up by Arendt, and has become the dominant view. (Unfortunately, without the restraint of Van Praag.)

Indeed, the author’s major theme is to redeem Proust from this post-war “consensus.” Compagnon returns to Proust’s comments about his grandfather, outlining the depth of his connection to the Jewish community, even as he remained independent. Compagnon reminds us of the Jews in Proust’s time and immediately after his death did not count Proust as an antisemite or self-loathing. Instead, they fought to claim him as their own— even coining the phrase “Proust Zionism.” Proust captured the imagination of the Jews of his time, and unlike many friends, he kept in contact with the Jewish community.

I do wish the book had spent more time on the details of Proust’s life. And I wanted more independent analysis of his work, as apart from reiterating the comments of others. Yet, Proust, A Jewish Way provided a transformative picture for me. Affirming, as long suspected, a deep connection between In Search of Lost Time and the Jewish people of France— a relationship verified by Proust’s friends and commentators at the time. Indeed, the reactions to Proust show the diversity of French Jewish attitudes towards Zionism, tradition, and assimilation. In short, Proust and the Jews of his time struggled with being vanguards in a community that had an underlying antisemitism that would not vanish. They struggled with how to fit in, while being Jewish, and whether they could ever be full members of society that may never accept them. In short, what Jewish Americans are struggling with today in the rise of anti=sematism, that we, much like the pre-dreyfus affair jews of France, had thought was on the wane.

[September Withers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Proust, a Jewish Way is a remarkable and deeply researched exploration of an often overlooked dimension of Marcel Proust’s identity and literary legacy. Antoine Compagnon offers a thoughtful examination of Proust’s connection to Jewish culture, family history, and the intellectual communities that shaped the reception of his work.

Through careful scholarship and engaging analysis, the book reveals how Jewish readers interpreted, debated, and connected with In Search of Lost Time during a transformative period in European history. Compagnon challenges simplistic interpretations while presenting a nuanced understanding of Proust’s relationship with Jewish identity, assimilation, memory, and belonging.

What makes this work especially compelling is its ability to connect literary criticism with cultural history, offering readers a richer appreciation of Proust’s world and influences. The research is extensive, yet the discussion remains insightful and accessible.

A valuable contribution to Proust studies, Jewish history, and literary scholarship, this book invites readers to reconsider one of the greatest writers of the modern era through a fascinating and meaningful perspective.

[Jax · Rating 3 out of 5]

Those who have read Proust’s In Search of Lost Time might feel entitled to bragging rights for completing the tome. Having committed the time and focus to read this work, does it make sense to commit yet more time on a deep dived into the a niche aspect of this author’s life? As it turns out, not for me. Others might delight in this. The subject matter is compelling—a focus on Proust’s maternal lineage, which is Jewish, and how Jewish readers of the 1920s and 1930s responded to his work. This book is well researched and interesting, but the exploration of this topic is a granular one. My engagement waned as the pages wore, but that is not the fault of the author and certainly not the topic. Perhaps the audience is academic or simply those passionate enough about the author, time period, or French literature in general.

Many thanks to Columbia University Press and NetGalley for providing this eARC.

[Erika P. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I knew very little about Proust before reading this book, so I appreciated this deep dive into his life, especially how Jewish audiences responded to his works. While this book is very informative, it is quite dry and academic. I don't know if I would recommend this for the average reader, unless you really want to get into the fine print details on Proust.

Thank you to NetGalley and Columbia University Press for an advance copy of this book.

[adeline Bronner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Auprès du prétendu antisémitisme de Proust qui effarouche aujourd’hui les belles âmes, celui qui extermina tant de ses parents, amis, connaissances et admirateurs, mérite certainement plus de vigilance.