First love - last love

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First love - last love (in the original: La Promesse de l'aube , in German about "The promise in the dawn") is an autobiographical novel by the French writer Romain Gary from 1960. The book has been translated into many languages ; in German it was first published in many editions since 1961 and again in a new translation in 2008 under the title Early Promise (Schirmer Graf, Munich, ISBN 978-3-86555-049-1 ).

Jules Dassin filmed the book in 1971 under its English title Promise at Dawn . Another film adaptation followed in 2018 under the title Early Promise by Eric Barbier .

content

Romain Gary tells, largely fictional, of his childhood and youth. Born to a Russian-Jewish mother who used to be a theater actress, he first grew up in Moscow before his mother had to flee Russia with him. They can be in the then Polish city of Wilno (now the Lithuanian capital Vilnius ) down where the mother builds a profitable fashion salon after initial difficulties. The mother decided early on that her son would one day become someone great: a writer, musician, ambassador of France. To make this dream come true, the young Romain receives lessons from numerous private tutors. When the fashion salon went bankrupt, she emigrated with him to France. Once there, she is initially without any financial means and works hard to enable her son to go to school, to study law and to train as an officer. But Romain is denied the officer license because he has not been a French citizen long enough. He hides this fact from his mother. When the Second World War broke out shortly afterwards , he went to war as a simple caporal and left the seriously ill mother behind, knowing that he had little time to fulfill her dreams. She regularly writes him letters of encouragement and advice about his locations in the UK and Africa. During the war, Romain was promoted, he was awarded the Ordre de la Liberation by Charles de Gaulle and was invited to join the diplomatic service. When he returned to France at the end of the war, he found out that his mother had died three years ago and had written hundreds of letters before her death, which a friend sent to Romain at regular intervals.

Like almost everything that Gary writes in first person form, this information is to be understood as a novel.

Further editions

  • First love - last love in Reader's Digest , Stuttgart. Issue 1, 1965 (selection volume 165, abridged)
  • Book club editions at the clubs affiliated with the Bertelsmann Group (Europ. Educational Community, etc.) and at Ex libris , Zurich
  • As a paperback at dtv

literature

  • Mireille Sacotte: Mireille Sacotte comments "La promesse de l'aube" by Romain Gary. Foliothèque, 138. Gallimard, Paris 2006 ISBN 9782070302253

Web links

supporting documents

  1. Jump up ↑ Deutschlandradio Kultur : “The obedient chameleon”, review of the early promise , March 20, 2008
  2. ↑ http://www.fruehesversrechen.de/
  3. ↑ see z. B. Nancy Huston, Tombeau Romain Gary, Actes Sud, Arles 1999, and others. ö., on this novel and all the others
  4. ↑ esp. About first love, last love; General nightingale; You still have life ahead of you; Memory with wings and les enchanteurs