Dora Bruder

 
Hello Gentle Reader,
 
Without a doubt there is an elegiac tenderness to the works of Patrick Modiano. Wistful and melancholic gazes review the past with apprehension rather then nostalgia. There is an attempt at scrying the past to gain insight into the present and foretell the future. The past is always in flux. It’s merely a collection of testaments, witness statements, recollections, questionable records, adulterated documents, revisionist perspective and glory, and the set standard of what is deemed acceptable of the historical account. In short: history is a layered state, one where the idea of truth exists to maintain a collective understanding of the events. Therefore, history is broad, a wide sweeping gesture that summarizes the events with both glory and sacrifice. There are no personal details within these narratives. They are lost, buried, denied, or considered contrary to the acceptable record of events. Therefore, they are unpublished and left neglected, tucked away on shelves in banker boxes between yellowed folders. Yet, records are produced everywhere, and are not exclusive to a singular format or housed within the institutional archives or libraries of authority. They can be transient and wayward, providing elusive information that echo into ellipses. Dead ends and nowhere that is where they lead. Despite this, they are enticing. Elusive and noteworthy, even if they are not substantial. Yet their cryptic overtones provide enough material to springboard off into the world of speculation and senseless searches. To the uninitiated this may appear self-indulgent, yet for Patrick Modiano it has been a career of exploration and exhumation of the personal and the national, as demands are made to acknowledge and reconcile the realities of then, contrary to the collective memory and imaginings that are steadfast to be believed in. In this, Modiano has made a career out of plunging into the depths of the black hole that is known as the Occupation. This amnesiac abyss of modern memory remains unacknowledged or deliberately left unexplored, as it holds national shame, regret, and misery of an otherwise dark time. The word collaborator becomes the highest grade of insult. In the wake of liberation and defeat there was an administrative reckoning. Purges and trails become shows of justice in the post-War wake. Afterwards the point in history became a redacted blind spot. Neither reviewed nor revered; mentioned only in passing of praise for the French Resistance. Yet for Modiano, the Occupation and the severance of acknowledge of this time became a symbol of the moral bankruptcy and hypocrisy of the failure of the governing to institutions to declare themselves authorities of justice. It is here in the shifting soft shadows of the historical blind spot Modiano’s narratives, characters, and novels spring forth as they ruminate on an era destinated for oblivion or obfuscation, while posing further questions regarding the nature and art of memory, the test of authenticity, and the corrosive touch of revisionism as erasure in the collective memory bank.  
 
The mature works of Patrick Modiano’s literary bibliography are noted for their languid legato style circumventing and waltzing with simple elegance, all the while moving with indirection, cloaked with cobwebs, gossamer, and fermented melancholy. Memory is crucial, yet answers and solutions are in finite supply, and always cause further apprehension then clarification. To read Modiano is to be enveloped in atmosphere: the sodium orange haze of streetlights glowing ominously down darkened streets, the sky low suffocating with light pollution, the forecast threatens rain, but only a breeze stirs in the air. The shops locked up, the windows dark and absent. There’s a search for someone, who is all but unknown. An enigma if we will, a passing thought or memory, which even then is brought into further doubt. Paris, the home turf of the majority of these novels becomes a mercurial no-mans-land, a place of shifting shadows, darker alleys, and backroom deals; where in other circumstances the times have caught up and progress is in full swing, expediting the process of expunging the past. An architectural gesture to literary wipe the slate clean. Leaving neither relic, sanctuary, or evidence of the darkest days of the republic, which makes any investigation all that more difficult to find trace evidence of the individuals who lived, conspired, and suffered during these times. Such is the real case of Dora Bruder, the 15-year-old Jewish girl whose story calls out specifically to Patrick Modiano from one of those dispossessed records, forgotten and circulating throughout Paris, providing a silhouette, a figment of a neglected era ringing out an otherwise mundane plea now aged with cryptic mystery. The announcement provides the introductory information regarding Dora Bruder and the circumstances to how the narrator (Modiano himself) came to research her:  
 

“Missing, a young girl, Dora Bruder, age 15, height 1 m 55, oval shaped-face, gray-brown eyes, gray sports jacket, maroon pullover, navy blue skirt and hat, brown gym shoes. Address all information to M. and Mme. Bruder, 41 Boulevard Ornano, Paris.”

 
The above passage was published in the now defunct newspaper Paris Soir, which ceased to be published as it became known as a collaborationist newspaper during the Occupation. There is a twisted irony that Ernest Bruder, Dora’s father would seek the public assistance with a newspaper sympathetic to the Vichy Regime, considering that they were Jews and considered persona no grata by the occupying forces and by extension the collaborating government and law enforcement. Yet in times of desperation there few options.
 
Throughout the autobiography/memoriam, Patrick Modiano does his best to scrape together a narrative regarding the life and circumstances of Dora Bruder and her family. As if he were one of his own characters, be a detective, investigator, journalist, or sleuth, Modiano combs through records and registries, providing commentary on what may be alleged as the systematic erasure of these records for existence, to further perpetuate a redaction of history, to sever the years from memory, especially that of an otherwise incriminating nature. Yet, as Modiano comments: traces still exist. Even when the eraser all but obliterates the scribblings, traces and phantoms persist.
 

“It takes time for what has been erased to resurface. Traces survive in registers, and nobody knows where these registers are hidden, and who has custody of them, and whether or not these custodians are willing to let you see them. Or perhaps they have quite simply forgotten that these registers exist.”

 
Through time, patience, and persistence Modiano pulls together enough information regarding the Bruders. There is little that can be remarked on in the essence of character or personality. Photos reveal the Bruders to be normal and average people. Ernest Bruder (Dora’s father) was an Austrian Jew, who worked as a general labour. His features are hawkish and handsome. Cecile Bruder is less angular than her husbands, her features are softer, refined with a hint of regality of the era, though she appears exhausted. Dora herself lacks her fathers sharp and handsome features but also the refined character of her mother. Her features are fuller, her eyes sharp, and a mischievous look crossing her face, with an air of being headstrong and determined. It’s a pity to contemplate the end they each met.
 
As for Patrick Modiano, he is able to sketch an idea of the timeline of events that led to the disappearance of Dora Bruder, and the fate of the entire Bruder family during the Occupation. What can be deduced is Ernest and Cecile sent Dora to a catholic boarding school within Paris, which can be assumed to avoid detection by the authorities and discriminated against for being a Jew. Dora inevitably ran away from the catholic boarding school, hence the notice by her parents’ seeking information regarding their daughter’s whereabouts. These two events become the undoing of Dora. Modiano is able to learn that both Ernest and Cecile have left her as unregistered in the Nazis and Vichy Government’s Jewish Registry system. When Dora Bruder ran away from the boarding school and her parents reported her missing, they were also forced to concede that she herself was Jewish and enter her into the Registry system. Ernest was deported to Drancy; while Dora was found and arrested in April of 1942, where she would also end up in Drancy. On September 18^th, 1942, with Transport 34, Dora Bruder would be sent to Auschwitz/Birkenau, where she would (presumably) be accounted amongst the others who fell victim to the genocide driven machine of the Holocaust.
 
As a work of literature or fiction (a term in this instance that should be used very lightly with discrete distance) “Dora Bruder,” is best described as an anti-novel of sorts. Its not a work of fiction; refuses to be called reportage or New Journalism; though it has components of Modiano’s own ruminations, wanderings, and reflections on the Parisian landscape, one in in which both he and Dora both inhabited:
 

“In another part of Paris, when I was twenty, I remember having the same sensation of emptiness as I had had when confronted by the Tourelles wall, and without really knowing the reason why.

 

[ . . . ]

 

Once again, I had sense of emptiness. And I understood why. After the war, most buildings in the district had been pulled down, methodically, in accordance with a government plan.”

 

 
Despite the real events that frame “Dora Bruder,” and the namesake individual and subject of the book, it falls flat. The details surrounding Dora Bruder are thin scaffolding, which have been henpecked and bleached. One can’t help but praise Patrick Modiano for his consistency in presenting the facts that he unearthed regarding Dora Bruder and her family without embellishment or speculation, ensures that the book is founded on the grounds of authenticity and recorded tangibility. Yet, it fails to encapsulate the poignancy of the times; the paranoia that hung over the city with an arrogant and oppressive prominence, the very same shadow that would turn Pétain from hero cum traitor.
 
In reading the presentation speech, Jesper Svenbro remarked on the evolution of Patrick Modiano’s writing style and singled out “Dora Bruder,” as a significant piece in his bibliography, going so far as call it a masterpiece within his oeuvre. Personally, I would hesitate to call “Dora Bruder,” (also known as: “The Search Warrant,”) as a masterpiece of Modiano’s literary canon. Patrick Modiano has shown his strength resides within his novels and their repetitive qualities providing ghostly inclinations regarding their intertextual relationships, but truly cementing his place as a writer concerned with place both geographically and historically, no different then James Joyce’s Dublin, or the Southwestern Ontario landscape of Alice Munro’s short stories, or the South of William Faulkner. As a book “Dora Bruder,” occupies a strange place refuting any literary classification, especially in Patrick Modiano’s literary oeuvre that is built on short novels, with the exception of his screen writing credits, and three (loosely defined) memoirs: “Pedigree,” “Such Fine Boys,” and “Family Record.” “Dora Bruder,” as memoriam fits in with this trilogy of outsiders, but also remains distant and elusive. The book itself maintains the motifs and characteristics of Modiano’s style that elusive waltz, languid and limpid maintaining the same tepid tone and temperament through the duration of the book, and yet provides real details and evidence of Dora Bruder as an individual, but it does not provide any testimony regarding who she was, or what her personality was like. In turn the book does not provide the same atmosphere of the times, beyond mentioning curfews, rations, and police patrons, one in which Dora herself would be caught up in. In all, “Dora Bruder,” is best described as a thin book. The details provided are henpecked, basic, and bleached. The notice provided by Ernest Bruder to Paris Soir soliciting information regarding his daughter’s whereabouts is as unique as the details get. In this Dora Bruder becomes a shadowy reminder of one of those individuals who were lost in the tides of time, unjustly persecuted by warped and twisted ideology as well as blatant antisemitism. The poignancy and tenderness of the book comes from the reminder that Dora Bruder was a real person who inevitably was caught up in the horrors of the Holocaust, and whose life is accounted for amongst all the others who found themselves exterminated in the concentration camps.
 

Thank-you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
 
M. Mary