Georges Perec was the most playful and the most haunted of the postwar French novelists. He was a Holocaust orphan who turned the absence of his parents and the loss of his Jewish family in Poland into the silent centre of a body of writing that pretended, on the surface, to be about almost anything else.
Icek Judko Peretz, his father, a Polish Jewish jeweller’s apprentice from Łubartow, near Lublin, had emigrated to Paris in the 1920s. Cyrla Szulewicz, Perec’s mother, came from the same town. Georges was born in Paris in 1936. The father volunteered for the French army in 1939 and was killed by a stray German shell on 16 June 1940 at Nogent-sur-Seine, with Paris already lost. The mother stayed in Paris through the early occupation. In late 1941 or early 1942 she put six-year-old Georges on a Red Cross train to the unoccupied zone, where he was taken in by his father’s sister Esther in Villard-de-Lans. Cyrla was arrested in the round-ups of February 1943. She was deported to Auschwitz on Convoy 47, on 11 February 1943. Her death certificate records her death as 11 February 1943. She was thirty.
Perec was raised by his aunt and uncle, who had escaped to the Vercors and survived. He was educated in postwar France, settled in Paris, and worked for most of his life as an archivist for the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, the French national research foundation, in a hospital library. He wrote novels in the evenings.
The body of work is unusual. Perec was a member of the Oulipo, the Workshop of Potential Literature, founded by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. Oulipo writers worked under self-imposed formal constraints. Perec’s most famous experiment was La disparition, published in 1969, a three-hundred-page novel written without using the letter e, the most common letter in French. The English translation by Gilbert Adair, A Void, performs the same trick in English. The book reads as a clever exercise. It is also, on a second reading, a novel about absence, in which the missing letter is the missing parents, the missing family, the missing six million. The English title was chosen to preserve the wordplay; the French title is sharper, since disparaître is the verb the French still use for those who were taken in the deportations.
The autobiographical book, W, ou le souvenir d’enfance, published in 1975, alternates between two texts that have nothing visible to do with each other. One is a fragmentary memoir of Perec’s wartime childhood. The other is a fictional account of an Olympic-themed island society called W, that the reader gradually realises is a concentration camp. The two texts converge without ever meeting. The book’s last word in French is the date of his mother’s deportation. The form is the argument. He could write the camp only at one remove, in a book that he simultaneously refused to call a Holocaust book.
Perec also wrote La vie mode d’emploi, Life A User’s Manual, the immense 1978 novel that maps every flat in a Paris apartment building at a single instant, which won the Prix Médicis. He wrote film scripts, crossword puzzles, an essay on the spaces of the everyday. He died of lung cancer on 3 March 1982 at the age of forty five. He had become one of the most influential French writers of the late twentieth century and is now read widely in English. The Holocaust pages of the work are the quietest in the European literature of the catastrophe. They are also, by some way, among the most truthful.
See also
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards