Boris Schreiber

Boris Schreiber (born May 29, 1923 in Berlin , Germany ; died February 11, 2008 in Neuilly-sur-Seine , France ) was a French writer . His most important works were La Rencontre des absents (1963, Prix ​​Combat ), La Traversée du dimanche (1987, Prix ​​Sainte-Beuve ), Un silence d'environ une demi-heure (1996, Prix ​​Renaudot ).

biography

Boris Schreiber was born on May 29, 1923 in Berlin , where his parents, Wladimir Schreiber and Eugénie Markowitch, lived as refugees from the Russian Revolution. His father worked for the German-Russian Transport Corporation (Derutra) and later for a German import / export company - the family lived in prosperity. When his father lost his job six years later, the Schreibers left Berlin and found shelter in Antwerp , where they lived in extreme poverty. They were later taken in by Eugénie's family in Riga . In 1930 they moved to Paris , where Boris Schreiber, who had learned French from his aunt in Riga, was enrolled in various institutions.

In 1937 he began to record his life in a diary and tried to get in touch with various writers ( Romain Rolland , Georges Duhamel , Francis Carco ). He kept abreast of the latest movements in the literary world and discovered works by other Jewish authors who had immigrated from the East, including Irène Némirovsky and Jean Malaquais . In 1938 André Gide received him , to whom he read excerpts from his diary and a novella.

During the German occupation the family lived in Marseille . During this time Boris Schreiber visited Gide in Cabris , where he also met Roger Martin du Gard , Henri Thomas and Jean Schlumberger . After graduating from high school, he enrolled at the law faculty at the University of Aix-Marseille (1942–43). Although he was expelled as a Russian stateless person by the authorities in Vichy, he escaped anti-Jewish laws because the denomination stated was “ Russian Orthodox ”. In order not to have to do compulsory labor for young French people , he worked for the German organization Todt in 1944 . In the run-up to the liberation of Marseille, he joined the resistance group Forces françaises de l'intérieur and worked for the newspaper Rouge Midi . He later returned to his parents' home in Paris, where he met Simone, whom he married a few years later. He received French citizenship in 1947 and enrolled at the Sorbonne University to study literature and Russian.

During this time he began to write his first novel, Le Droit d'asile - a short story from his time in Marseille during the war. The novel was published in 1957. Boris Schreiber taught for several years. Thanks to the financial support of his parents, however, he was able to devote himself fully to writing again. In the meantime, his father had built up a successful oil business. Schreiber received the Prix ​​Combat for La Rencontre des absents (1963) and published a dozen novels with several publishers, which received a great deal of respect but never reached the general public. For La Traversée du dimanche (1987) he received the Prix ​​Sainte-Beuve .

In 1968 he separated from Simone in order to live with Lucienne from then on. The novel Le Cratère emerged from this separation in 1975 . A few years after his father's death (1976), he went abroad and lived temporarily in the United States in Long Island (NY). After the death of his mother (1985) he started the autobiographical part of his work and received the Prix ​​Renaudot for Un silence d'environ une demi-heure in 1996 . His last work, Faux titre , a collection of short stories, appeared a few weeks before his death.

Schreiber died on February 11, 2008 in the American Hospital in Paris .

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At the age of 13, Boris Schreiber began to record his life in a diary. An activity that he pursued until the end of his life. He presented himself as follows: "Stranger before the war, Jew during the war and rejected writer after the war". Be it the age, the man or his work - his suffering was based on these three components. His literary work always developed between two poles. On the one hand based on the literary genre of the novel, to which he drew on for the first time in 1957 with Le Droit d'asile and for the last time in 2008 with Faux titre , on the other hand on autobiographical works whose uniqueness is due to the refusal to use the first person singular, justified is: Le Lait de la nuit (1989), Le Tournesol déchiré (1991), Un silence d'environ une demi-heure (1996), Hors-les-murs (1998). These two poles flow into one another: life and fiction nourish one another; by means of a matrix, dull and deep like his diary (previously unpublished), and by processing the memories of the entirety of the events and feelings of a Jewish youth, which he had not been able to write down during wartime.

Schreiber lived only for literature and always had to fight for it: on the one hand against a father who viewed his passion with a critical eye, on the other hand against publishers, whose rejection he felt as humiliation. And yet his father gave him the means that would allow him to devote himself to writing. In addition, his mother supported him unconditionally, while he always kept his distance from the literary world, where he found few friends ( Alain Bosquet , Pierre Drachline ...). Although he ignored the contemporary trends in his works, the questions and literary production correspond to several of his contemporaries (Jean Malaquais, Romain Gary , Jean Cayrol ...). On the one hand because of the topics that preoccupied him (war, Judaism ...), on the other hand because of certain formal innovations (complex narrative schemes, unreliable narrators ...)

Aware of his worth, Schreiber liked to stage himself in his novels and autobiographical works as the damned writer who portrays himself as a megalomaniac and misanthropic author who only thinks about his works and the reputation they are supposed to give him. This image, which is sometimes taken into the grotesque, contributes to the fact that critics and readers turn away from his works. This man, whom history should have erased, who worked for a year for those who annihilated his people, has found no other way of survival than literature and writing. A literary work haunted by memories of the war, populated with characters whose identity is denied. Therefore, his work was the subject of his survival itself, but it also consists of stories of survival, as evidenced by the first sentence in his first novel Le Droit d'asile (1957): "The day I survived was an ugly day." With this sentence he broke the silence that had lasted a good five years. A silence that the Jewish youth was forced to under the German occupation. Schreiber's works are among the most haunting of his time - those who dared to put the darkest hours of the 20th century on paper.

Works by Boris Schreiber

• Le Droit d'asile , Denoël, Paris 1957.
• Les Heures qui restent , Denoël, Paris, 1958.
• La Rencontre des absents , Calmann-Lévy, Paris, 1962. Prix Combat.
• L'Évangile selon Van Horn , Belfond, Paris, 1972.
• Les Premiers jours de Pompéi , Belfond, Paris, 1973.
• L'Oiseau des profondeurs , Luneau Ascot, Paris, 1987. Repris sous le titre de La traversée du dimanche , Fleuve noir , Paris, 1998. Prix Sainte-Beuve.
• Le Cratère , Grasset, Paris, 1975.
• Les Souterrains du soleil , Grasset, Paris, 1977.
• L'Organeau , Jean-Jacques Pauvert, Paris, 1982.
• La Descente au berceau , Luneau Ascot, 1984.
• Le Lait de la nuit , F. Bourin-Julliard, Paris, 1989 (Gallimard, "Folio", Paris, 1991).
• Le Tournesol déchiré , F. Bourin-Julliard, Paris, 1991 (Gallimard, “Folio”, Paris, 1993).
• Un silence d'environ une demi-heure , Le Cherche-Midi, Paris, 1996 (Gallimard, “Folio”, Paris, 1998). Prix ​​Renaudot.
• Hors-les-murs , Le Cherche Midi, Paris, 1998 (Gallimard, “Folio”, Paris, 2000).
• L'Excavatrice , Le Cherche Midi, Paris, 2000 (Gallimard, “Folio”, Paris, 2001).
• La Douceur du sang , Le Cherche Midi, Paris, 2003 (Gallimard, “Folio”, Paris, 2004).
• La Mille et unième nuit , Sables éditions, Pin-Balma, 2005.
• Faux titre , Le Cherche Midi, Paris, 2008.

literature

• Cazenobe, Colette, La Passion juive selon Boris Schreiber , Travaux de littérature No. XIII, 2000, pp. 338-60.
• Clancier, Anne, Les Blessures du narcissisme: les œuvres autobiographiques de Boris Schreiber, Écriture de soi et narcissisme , sous la direction de Jean-François Chiantaretto, Erès, 2002, pp. 61–65.
• Pernot, Denis, Les Heures qui restent de Boris Schreiber: ratage et oubli, Romans exhumés (1910–1960). Contribution à l'histoire littéraire du vingtième siècle, EUD, 2014. ISBN 978-2-36441-082-4
• Pernot, Denis (editor), Boris Schreiber: une oeuvre dans les tourments du siècle , Editions Universitaires de Dijon, 2013. ISBN 978-2-36441-052-7
• Labouret, Denis, Littérature française du XXe siècle . Editions Armand Colin, Paris, 2013. ISBN 978-2-200-27601-0
• Drachline, Pierre, Borinka , Le Cherche Midi, Paris, 2010. [Novel with the author as the main character.]

Web links

• Boris Schreiber website
• Boris Schreiber: une œuvre dans les tourments du siècle sur Fabula