A01=Leon Werth
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Author_Leon Werth
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B10=David Ball
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Product details
- ISBN 9780190499549
- Weight: 590g
- Dimensions: 163 x 236mm
- Publication Date: 01 Aug 2018
- Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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Historians agree: the diary of Léon Werth (1878-1955) is one of the most precious--and readable--pieces of testimony ever written about life in France under Nazi occupation and the Vichy regime. Werth was a free-spirited, unclassifiable writer, the author of eleven novels, art and dance criticism, acerbic political reporting, and memorable personal essays. He was Jewish, and left Paris in June 1940 to hide out in his wife's country house in Saint-Amour, a small village in the Jura Mountains: his short memoir, 33 Days recounts his struggle to get there. Deposition tells of daily life in the village, on nearby farms and towns, and finally back in Paris, where he draws the portrait of a Resistance network in his apartment and writes an eyewitness report of the insurrection that freed the city in August, 1944.
From Saint-Amour, we see both the Resistance in the countryside, derailing troop trains, punishing notorious collaborators--and growing repression: arrests, torture, deportation, and executions. Above all, we see how Vichy and the Occupation affect the lives of farmers and villagers and how their often contradictory attitudes evolve from 1940-1944. Werth's ear for dialogue and novelist's gift for creating characters animate the diary: in the markets and in town, we meet real French peasants and shopkeepers, railroad men and the patronne of the café at the station, schoolteachers and gendarmes. They come off the page alive, and the countryside and villages come alive with them.
With biting irony, Werth records, almost daily, what Vichy-German propaganda was saying on the radio and in the press. And we follow the progress of the war as people did then, day by day. These entries make interesting, often amusing reading, a stark contrast with his gripping entries on the persecution and deportation of the Jews. Deposition is a varied, complex, piece of living history, and a pleasure to read.
Léon Werth (1878-1955) was a prominent French-Jewish writer, art critic, and close friend to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry . A prominent commentator on French society during both World Wars, Werth spent the years of the Second World War in hiding from the Nazis, composing Déposition.
About the translator: David Ball is Professor Emeritus of French and Comparative Literature, Smith College. His translations include the Henri Michaux anthology, winner of the MLA's prize for literary translation, and Diary of the Dark Years, 1940-1944, winner of French-American Foundation Translation Prize for Nonfiction.
