Stock CEUX QUI NE DORMAIENT PAS, Frans, Paperback

Rights sold to Italy! Ceux qui ne dormaient pas ("Those who didn't sleep") is the private diary of Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar (1909-1987), which she held from July 18 until August 24, 1944. It starts on the day her Jewish husband, who is involved in the resistance, is arrested by the Gestapo, and it ends with his escape from the train which was supposed to take him and his fellow members of the resistance to Auschwitz. At first, Mesnil-Amar confides to her diary her worries, and the immense love that binds her to her husband who, she fears, faces torture and death. Yet she also talks about the daily life of a French woman belonging to the Jewish middle class, who is very assimilated and cultivated, who spent her childhood in the better districts of Paris, and who discovers through the war that being a Jewish French woman is not quite the same as being a non-Jewish French woman. It is through this Paris of the Liberation - just before and just after - that she wanders, looking for refuge here and there, together with her daughter of about ten years old. She meets up with friends of the same network, recalls the time "before," before the wrench of the war. After the war, Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar published several articles in the Bulletin du service central des déportés israélites, one of which is about war children, and which is definitely the most heartrending. These articles are also included in the book. The most striking element in this book is the extraordinary quality of its writing, which is at the disposal of an emotion that is always withheld, though constantly present. The force of its style is alike no other, and grasps its reader from the very first words. This book was first published in 1957 by Editions de Minuit. It was too early, without a doubt, at a time when everyone wished to turn the page. Now it is published again, without any changes. Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar belonged to an ancient Jewish family which has its origins in the Lorraine region and which had by long been assimilated and secularised. She obtained a degree in Literature and married André Amar, a former student at the Ecole normale. She discovered Judaism through the persecution, and after the war she continued to work at the heart of the community, until her death in 1987.