Patrick Modiano, Nobel Prize-Winning French Novelist of the Holocaust https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/uncategorized/2014/10/patrick-modiano-nobel-prize-winning-french-novelist-of-the-holocaust/

October 22, 2014 | Clémence Boulouque
About the author:

Patrick Modiano, recently awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, has made French Jewry, and the Holocaust, the main subjects of his four-decade literary career. Much of his work has been informed by the experiences of his own father, a Salonikan Jew who survived the war as a collaborator. Modiano’s work helped push France toward coming to grips with its own participation in the murder of its Jews, writes Clémence Boulouque:

With his hallucinatory debut and the two books that followed, also centered on the Occupation and first-person accounts of traitors or sons of collaborators, Modiano signaled a shift in the Zeitgeist and subsequent self-perception of France. La Place de l’Etoile came out a few months before Marcel Ophuls’s movie The Sorrow and the Pity, which dealt with the complex question of passivity and collaboration in the small town of Clermont-Ferrand—a microcosm of France. Robert O. Paxton’s Vichy France was published in 1972. France had embarked on a soul-searching journey about the country’s wartime past, and Modiano’s work was a key part of the ousting of the postwar myth of a “nation of resisters” and the ushering in of an era of gray zones and elusive moral clarity.

Read more on Tablet: http://tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/186307/modiano-nobel