Marcel Proust was brought up as a Catholic in keeping with his father’s faith. But Jeanne Weil, Proust’s mother, hailed from a Jewish family. She never converted to any branch of Christianity, sustaining lifelong ties to Jewish traditions which then figured in Proust’s childhood. However, question marks surround Proust’s personal attitudes towards his Jewish ancestry, many stemming from specific (often clashing) readings of Jewish characters in À la recherche du temps perdu. Some interpretations of Proust’s text have even suggested his portrayal of Jewish characters verges on antisemitic. Academic Antoine Compagnon sets out to investigate these kinds of questions and assessments, he’s explicitly invested in countering notions of Proust as engaged in reproducing and circulating damaging portraits of Jews via his fiction.

Compagnon focuses on Proust’s initial reception by members of France’s Jewish communities: from Proust’s friends and literary contemporaries to prominent Jewish reviewers to younger Jewish readers exploring issues around identity. In 1923, not long after his death, Proust’s Jewish ancestry became more widely known. This began to have an impact on how his work was received: numerous Jewish literary critics embraced the notion of Proust as a Jewish writer; while antisemites pounced on this revelation, twisting their evaluations of his work to fit their racist prejudice. Antisemitic critiques of Proust’s novel labelled, for example, Swann the embodiment of a so-called ‘Jewish mind’ i.e. indecisive, weak-willed. However, many younger, Jewish fans thought Proust’s Jewish characters challenged negative stereotypes – such as the stock “fatalistic” or “tragic” Jew. They saw figures like Swann and Bloch as complex and conflicted, indicative of the alienation they themselves experienced as part of the Jewish diaspora. There were those too who sought to ‘segregate’ Proust’s work like French author Andre Gide. Gide believed Jewish literature and French literature should be considered separate entities. He viewed novels by Jewish-French authors like Proust as the equivalent of work in translation - even though Proust was French, influenced by numerous French authors, and, of course, writing in French about French culture and society.

Compagnon includes an examination of Proust’s wider allegiances - from his relationships with his maternal relatives to his reaction to the now-infamous Dreyfus Affair. Proust’s fierce, public defence of Dreyfus later prompted Hannah Arendt to characterise Proust as prepared to be visibly Jewish in times of emergency - Proust apparently produced a novel centred on the Dreyfus case which went unpublished. A number of prominent Jewish critics claimed that Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu effectively chronicled a segment of Jewish-French bourgeois society since lost. However, Proust detractors, particularly post WW2, positioned Proust as an over-assimilated "non-Jew," anxious to abandon or distance himself from his origins – although it’s interesting that the Dutch critic who sparked the backlash was apparently horrified that Proust traced connections between the discriminatory treatment of Jewish and/or of queer people. More recently, responses to key characters in À la recherche du temps perdu, notably Swann and Bloch, have been further complicated by shifts in what is/isn't considered appropriate – certain references/concepts featured in À la recherche du temps perdu, then inoffensive enough to be freely employed by Jewish readers and critics during the 1920s and 1930s, now have largely negative connotations.

Compagnon’s scholarly study was frequently illuminating but it could also be overly dry and dense. Compagnon’s exhaustive research underlines his dedication to his subject but I wondered if he was, perhaps, a bit too close to it at times. The morass of detail – about Proust’s family, the backgrounds/biographies of critics – sometimes made it difficult to follow Compagnon’s underlying argument. There’s a tendency to foreground the descriptive rather than the analytical. But even so I think it’s a fascinating contribution to Proust studies as well as to literary/cultural history particularly Jewish literary history, and the history of racism - especially shifting historical manifestations of antisemitism. Translated by Jody Gladding.

Those who have read Proust’s In Search of Lost Time might feel entitled to bragging rights for completing the tome. Having committed the time and focus to read this work, does it make sense to commit yet more time on a deep dived into the a niche aspect of this author’s life? As it turns out, not for me. Others might delight in this. The subject matter is compelling—a focus on Proust’s maternal lineage, which is Jewish, and how Jewish readers of the 1920s and 1930s responded to his work. This book is well researched and interesting, but the exploration of this topic is a granular one. My engagement waned as the pages wore, but that is not the fault of the author and certainly not the topic. Perhaps the audience is academic or simply those passionate enough about the author, time period, or French literature in general.

Many thanks to Columbia University Press and NetGalley for providing this eARC.

Sadly not for me yet, so many fantastic detsils, I needing to complete Prousts 6 books first, so no spoilers & then come back to this, to reflect on Prout's own life & family background context.
Book looks fantastic and looking to reading it.