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Among the Jewish writers who emigrated from Eastern Europe to France in the 1910s and 1920s, a number chose to switch from writing in their languages of origin to writing primarily in French, a language that represented both a literary center and the promises of French universalism. But under the Nazi occupation of France from 1940 to 1944, these Jewish émigré writers—among them Irène Némirovsky, Benjamin Fondane, Romain Gary, Jean Malaquais, and Elsa Triolet—continued to write in their adopted language, even as the Vichy regime and Nazi occupiers denied their French identity through x...

1:54 This week, I’d like to Spotlight an event organized by my own home department at Rhodes College—the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. We’ll be welcoming Julia Elsky, a professor of French at Loyola University in Chicago, who will be discussing her new book, “Writing Occupation: Jewish Émigré Voices in Wartime France.” In this book, Elsky asks important questions about language and identity in a time of oppression, and discusses Jewish writers who emigrated from Eastern Europe to France in the early 20th century. A number of these authors chose to switch from wri...