How I got here is a story of its own. I was in Rome for a week at the end of March. One night I went to a language and culture exchange meet-up. It was at this strange cafe in the basement of a large building. When you entered, it seemed like you were going into an underground garage, but when you got down there it was a huge space, with bookshelves all around and the books were free! I wasn't really looking at the books, but at some point in the evening I sat down at an out of the way table to eat my plate of pasta from the buffet (another odd feature of this cafe) and a glanced over and saw Patrick Modiano's name on a cover at the end of a nearby shelf, and then I saw it was a French edition. I read the first page to gauge my ability to read it and it seemed manageable to so I decided to take it.
When I got home from Rome and unpacked I put the book on my coffee table pending shelving and over the next few days I kept seeing it and feeling drawn to it, so that Saturday I decided to give it a try. I wondered if I was being crazy, or trying to find an excuse for not reading, but actually I found I could read it – albeit very slowly. I think I averaged about 15 pages per hour; it took me 9 days to finish the 145-page book, though only a couple of those days included long, concentrated stretches. The book has nice short chapters, and plenty of stopping places even within chapters, making it ideal for a slow read.
The titular Dora Bruder is a Jewish girl of 15 born in Paris in 1926 to an Austrian father and Hungarian mother. It's hard to know the extent to which this is a work of fiction. The narrator (who seems to be Modiano – he recounts some details of his life that (according to Wikipedia at least) are true to Modiano's and at a couple points he also refers to his own books) comes across a notice in an old newspaper from 1941 stating that Dora Bruder's parents are looking for her and providing an address for any information. He is struck by the notice because the address is familiar to him, and over a period of a few years he seeks to find whatever information he can about Dora Bruder. What he ends up with is very little, but aspects of her experience – being sent to a convent school, then later being arrested and interned in a series of camps in France before her eventual deportation to Auschwitz – are filled in by other materials and accounts that Modiano provides. The gap that he's never able to fill is her 3-month sojourn as a runaway during the winter of 1941-1942 (sa fugue in French, which I really liked – I don't think we have a word for this in English in the noun form). Mixed with what Modiano learns or assumes about Dora Bruder's life, are memories from his own youth (and his own fugue) in very different circumstances – he is 20 years her junior, and observations of the physical changes in Paris between the 1940s, the 1960s, and the 1990s, which is the present day of the book.
Dora Bruder's family lived in the 18th arrondissement, near the Porte de Clignancourt and the Marché aux Puces de Saint-Ouen. I visited that neighborhood when I was in Paris 2 years ago and went to that flea market. When I was walking back to the Metro, I came across a memorial to the deported Jews of Saint-Ouen. I spent a long time reading these names. When the book mentioned the Marché aux Puces, I immediately remembered this site (as well as a plaque on a nearby building indicating that it had been a depot for explosives and munitions used by the Resistance). Saint-Ouen is actually beyond the 18th, just outside the Boulevard Périphérique that separates central Paris from the banlieues, but it's a short walk away from the address given for Dora Bruder's parents. These would have been her neighbors, people she passed in the street.
