Description: "Among the Jewish writers who immigrated 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 âemigrâe writers--among them Iráene Nâemirovsky, 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. In this book, Julia Elsky argues that these writers reexamined both their Jewishness and their place as authors in France through the language in which they wrote"
Review Quotes: "Writing Occupation is a welcome addition to a growing body of literature focused on the rich hybrid culture created by immigrant and first-generation Jews in early twentieth-century France. Julia Elsky's nuanced and perceptive book draws important parallels between immigrant Jewish and postcolonial francophone writers and will be of great interest to historians and literary scholars alike."--Nadia Malinovich, author of French and Jewish: Culture and the Politics of Identity in Early Twentieth-Century France