French expressions

Berthe Turiansky always seemed artistically gifted. A young violinist caught in the upheavals of 1917, she fled Russia with her new husband, Alexander Bisk, a poet from a wealthy Belgian family. For years the couple and their young son - the narrator of this book - are buffeted from country to country. As Berthe's absorption in the arts gradually shifts to her only child, she becomes the object of his rage and contempt, his love and attraction, and not even the physical remove afforded by the young man's departure for war, not even his marriage and success as a writer, can relieve the tension between them. A gripping story of geographical and psychological displacement emerges as mother and son are tantalized and tormented - in each other's company, in letters, and in their dreams. . In this unforgettable novel the dissonance between Berthe and her son gradually intensifies to reveal a relationship so disturbing and complex, so brutally and delicately delineated, as to seem wholly familiar and enigmatic at the same time. At the core of A Russian Mother lies the profound ambivalence of two people who are chillingly remote yet obsessively attached. This painful symbiosis between a mother and son takes shape in fragments, as the narrative jumps back and forth in time until the late 1970s. The narrator provides the psychological threads that unify the haphazard chronology, the chaotic uprootings, and the conflicting emotions as he tries to come to terms with his mother - as blood relative and fictional character.

The prominence of Holocaust themes in the media testifies to their compelling grip on contemporary consciousness and memory, particularly for a younger generation of Jews who never experienced the Nazi genocide first-hand but were raised amid its ashes. Mathieu, the narrator of this novel, is one such person, drawn by his sister's suicide to confront the effects of his family's tragic past. Esther, the narrator's gifted older sister, a teacher and aspiring writer, was born in France to Polish-Jewish refugees in 1943, narrowly escaping the deportations that claimed the aunt after whom she is named. Growing up in the Jewish immigrant quarter of Paris, she is haunted by the Holocaust, obsessively reliving - in her fantasies, dreams, troubled behavior, and abortive struggle to write - the family trauma she has absorbed but not actually experienced. Born after the war, Mathieu is left to grapple with recovering his sister's memory - which he had resolutely tried to deny - and with it the meaning of his own identity, family origins, and historical predicament. . Piecing together other people's memories, conjecture, conversations, and eyewitness accounts, Mathieu attempts to write the book, and tell the tale, that Esther and his family failed to transmit. A result of his effort is the novel itself, which interweaves multiple layers of time, identity, memory, and experience. Mathieu's intense relationship with his sister is provocative for its deep psychological and moral resonance. Being neither victim, survivor, nor witness, does he have the right to give voice to the unlived and unimaginable? Or is he a voyeur or imposter, usurping the lives of the real victims? Placing in bold relief the hidden thoughts, obsessions, conflicts, and creative struggles of the second generation that has inherited the anger, sadness, guilt, and fear - but not the actual memory - of the Nazi genocide, Henri Raczymow gives an authentic and powerful voice to its grim legacy in our time.

The year is 1962. Algeria is engulfed by events in its struggle for independence from France; competing ideologies shatter families and ordinary people become caught between hope and despair, triumph and disillusionment. Fifteen-year-old Hassan has grown up in a Muslim world in violent conflict with the French culture that has controlled but not conquered it. In Hassan's village and the surrounding mountains the beliefs, superstitions and traditions of centuries persist in sharp contrast to life in Algiers. Hassan sees these cultural clashes at close range when he leaves his village for the city in the hope of finding a cure for his failing eyesight. Torn between the doctors at the hospital in Algiers and those who prescribe traditional treatments at home, Hassan feels increasingly estranged from both worlds. Gradually the failures of Western medicine are eclipsed by the painful and eventually disastrous attempts of the sorcerers, marabouts, and charlatans of the village. Hassan's rite of passage, however tragic, is ultimately a triumph of the spirit, for the young man's powers of observation increase as his physical powers disintegrate. He sees the greed, pettiness, and cruelty of his fellow countrymen as well as of the occupying colonials.