Memory, Language, and Jewish Francophonie

This epilogue theorizes a Jewish Francophonie, looking at the question of Jewishness within the French language among the heirs to the writers in Writing Occupation including Myriam Anissimov, Hélène Cixous, and Cécile Wajsbrot. These writers demonstrate the lasting impact of Jewish multilingualism on writerly identity, in particular in relation to the memory and postmemory of the Shoah and histories of migration. These writers also relate to Yiddish in different ways, from lamenting the disappearance of Yiddish to resisting that trope and embodying what Samuel J. Spinner has called “reading Jewish,” which is related to Jeffrey Shandler’s concept of postvernacular Yiddish. Like the authors studied in Writing Occupation, Anissimov, Cixous, and Wajsbrot shift the paradigms of dominant and dominated cultures to one of immigration and transnational circulation.