Five after “Le Consentement”, Vanessa Springora returns with a new intimate book, “Patronyme”. A work that touches the heart, in which she tells the trying truth about her origins.
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“Surname” of Vanessa Springora (Grasset)
Five years ago, the publication of Consent, an autobiographical story in which the author revealed her affair, when she was a 14-year-old teenager, with the 50-year-old writer Gabriel Matzneff, had a great impact in France. in the #MeToo period. Her father, Patrick, separated from his mother, died on January 8, 2020, six days after the release of this book, without having seen his daughter for ten years. This is the starting point of this second intimate work. While emptying the apartment of this mythomaniac and angry man who had abandoned her, Vanessa Springora discovers documents, including two photos of her kind grandfather, Joseph, wearing Nazi insignia on a fencing outfit. A Czech deserter, was he forcibly conscripted into the German army, as family legend tells?
She decided to follow in his footsteps in the Czech Republic, in the Sudeten region, where Josef Springer, his real name, was from, then in Germany, where he lived before being sent to war in France . She thought about writing about her father, but her grandfather imposed himself on her, and with it a trying truth about his origins, which explains – and could excuse – the personality of the first. A name forges an identity, the writer demonstrates it with strength, courage and emotion. A…
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