Příběhy deportovaných 1942–1944
To be published: Q3 2024
The Children of 209 Rue Saint-Maur, Paris Xe. The Stories of Deportees 1942–1944. At number 209 rue Saint-Maurus in the 10th arrondissement of Paris there is an apartment building where families of craftsmen and workers, immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, have lived since the 1850s. Generations have grown up here, love and friendships have been forged and daily life has been regularly interrupted by the disasters and violence of the 20th century. Among others, nine Jewish children were deported from here in the 1940s. Their fates are the key to the author’s magnificent novel’s testimony about the memory of places and the invisible threads that connect the living and the dead.
The house at number 209 comes alive in Ruth Zylberman’s narrative. It tells the stories of disappeared and returnees, children and adults, communards and resistance fighters, girls in love and women with bad reputations, Kabyles, Poles, Jews, Portuguese and Bretons, Moroccans and Italians, individual people whose lives were brought together by a single Parisian address.
