Monsieur Batignole (France 2002) is a simple, deeply satisfying feature film about one man’s efforts, despite his otherwise unheroic life, to rescue three children from the Nazis. Batignole, a middle-class butcher in wartime Paris, hardly seems to care when his upstairs neighbours, the Bernsteins, are deported for being Jewish; after all, it was his own…
Tag: French
The model for Proust’s dandified Swann
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Swan’s Way, a book by French author Henri Raczymow that has been recently released in English translation (Northwestern University Press), is a probing literary inquiry into the once-celebrated Jewish dandy in late 19th-century French society upon whom writer Marcel Proust modeled Charles Swann, a major character in his famous novel Remembrance of Things Past. Raczymow,…
