Rien où poser sa tête par Françoise Frenkel (review)

Reviews 217 Frenkel, Françoise. Rien où poser sa tête. Paris: Gallimard, 2015. ISBN 978-2-07010839 -8. Pp. 289. 17 a. In 1921 Berlin, Frenkel decides to open a bookstore specializing in French books and newspapers. She builds her clientele and attracts many intellectuals of the period, notably Vladimir Nabokov, one among the many corresponding facts Patrick Modiano reveals between the narrative and the author in his preface to this historical fiction. The edition being reviewed also contains a chronology delineating the key dates in the author’s life spanning 1889 and 1975. Another appendix provides photographed documentation linking the narrative to Frenkel’s known life. The author dedicates her memoir to those who did not survive the narrator’s experiences. Initially published as a story in 1945 in Switzerland, it was not widely read. Her narrative is now reprinted in this dossier organized by Frédéric Maria. The story’s historical setting is intriguing: an unnamed Polish Jewess brings her love of French taste and literature to Berlin after the Treaty of Versailles when the Nazi Party begins its anti-intellectual and anti-Semitic agenda. The woman, in her early thirties, enjoys bringing specific books to readers whose interests she has studied. When Hitler leads the Nazi Party to power in 1933, government censorship begins limiting what the French bookstore can have in stock. Increasingly, Nazi loyalists make her uncomfortable to be a stranger selling nonGerman products in the middle of the German capital.Then her Jewish origins become a stake for prejudicial and violent acts by the National Socialists. In 1939, she leaves Berlin and heads to Paris along with other Polish refugees escaping the Nazi government after the invasion of Poland. Her memories of the challenges refugees faced are vivid recollections of the fears about the oncoming German army and its reprisals upon the civilian population. She is nostalgic about her lost bookstore and the intellectual life it fostered in Berlin. The narrator never mentions the husband she had during her bookstore years. Nor does the reader learn the sources of the narrator’s income during her flight. Anxiety about the expected blitzkrieg spurs her moves to southern France, notably Nice. Her anecdotes are detailed reminders of what it was like to be a foreigner, and even worse a Jew, during this period in France. In Nice, for example, she speaks of the refugees seeking asylum and how the “Israélites” are subjected to the racial theories advanced by the Nazis. The Vichy regime promulgates a census to identify the Jews and round them up while the narrator is protected by the Marius couple in Nice and alternately betrayed by some French whose patriotism turns into virulent xenophobia. Because an Occupation refugee needs permission to leave the territory, the process of being constantly on the run is similar, for her, to being imprisoned from the world outside France. Like Clara Malraux, Hannah Arendt, and other Jewish women who wrote about their harrowing adventures escaping Collaborators in France, this narrator gives her readers memorable tales about the friendships responsible for the survival of war refugees. Trinity University (TX) Roland A. Champagne ...