We told you five years ago about the beautiful tale by Jean-Claude Grumberg. Here it is beautifully reissued in an edition illustrated by director Michel Hazanavicius to whom we owe the cinema adaptation of this imaginary story… although not that much. It is enough to read the author to the end and understand that “ The Memorial to the deportation of Jews from France, established in 1973, represents, for many of us, children of deportees, a family vault“…. Below is a reproduction of our article on this book when it was released.
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A brief masterpiece? That’s it. Here is a tale, but one so modest, so tender, so dense, so strong, in short, moving, where the author of “The Workshop” concentrates his experience of the Shoah, but without ever naming it. The sober and strong playwright puts himself in the shoes of an Ashkenazi Perrault. He thus tells us the story of a poor woodcutter who dreamed of having a child and takes in a little girl abandoned in a cloth, or rather in a shawl, dropped from the tips of her fingers, from a cattle wagon which speeds through the countryside. Please note: we are in Poland in February 1943. We will not tell you any more. But know that there is an economy of words so strong, so captivating, that the reader, caught from the first lines, barely holds his breath and follows the painful and intersecting destinies of the woodcutter, of her husband , of the foundling of his lost family although not that much… But, shush, this brief tale is only told in small steps, only in hushed words. Guaranteed emotion and held morals.
The most precious of goods: a tale by Jean-Claude Grumberg, drawings by Michel Hazanavicius (Seuil, 132 pages, €21.50).
