A Historian Traces Georges Perec's Family Back to Poland
Claire Zalc spent ten years investigating Lubartów, the Polish town where the writer's father was born, before its Jewish population was deported. Her book appears October 1st.
Claire Zalc, a historian specializing in the history of migration, is also a longtime admirer of Georges Perec's work, according to Le Monde. Over the course of a decade, she investigated Lubartów, the Polish town where the writer's father was born, whose Jewish population was massively deported.
The result of her research appears in a book to be published on October 1st, Le Monde reports. The newspaper's account does not give further details on the book's title, publisher, or contents beyond this outline of its subject.
Perec, born in Paris in 1936 to Polish Jewish immigrants, lost both parents to the war — his father killed in 1940, his mother deported to Auschwitz. His own work, notably W ou le souvenir d'enfance, returned repeatedly to the fractured, half-reconstructed memory of that family history. Zalc's project follows the physical and documentary traces of that origin back to the town itself.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.
