Description: Antoine Compagnon brings to light the vanished world of Marcel Proust's first Jewish readers and shows how it can illuminate our reading of the great novelist today.
Review Quotes: Antoine Compagnon makes a poignant contribution to an already rich critical literature on Proust's complex relationship to his Jewish ancestors by Evelyne Bloch-Dano, Maurice Samuels, Pierre Birnbaum, and others. Compagnon's search for the letter where Proust evokes his grandfather laying a pebble on his own father's grave becomes, through his meticulous account, an allegory of the triumph of research against error and loss. The master of what he called, in his classic study of Montaigne, 'The Second Hand or the Work of Quotation' has surpassed himself in this, his fiercest search.--Alice Kaplan, author of Seeing Baya: Portrait of an Algerian Artist in Paris