A complicated relationship.

Charles Swann and Alfred Dreyfus.

Nikolai Freudenstein/Yuri Felsen.

In his final ailment, Marcel Proust’s great fictional character Charles Swann reveals a solidarity with the Jewish people greater than his attachment to French high society.

A German art historian offers a mesmerizing tour of the luminaries, many of them Jewish, at the heart of European culture before World War. . .