« De la situation faite à l'écrivain juif dans le monde moderne » : Jean-Richard Bloch, entre identité littérature et engagement

Résumé 0

Together with Edmond Fleg and André Spire, Jean-Richard Bloch belongs to the trend of « French Jewish writers » but his personal path cannot be separated from his ideological and aesthetic commitments. He can be defined as a child of the Jewish middle-class endeavouring to get assimilated, but marked, even if not directly, by the « affaire Dreyfus ». So that his first literary writings deal, it goes without saying, with Jewish themes. However, neither their contents, considering he is a writer who absolutly denies being a Jewish novelist, nor the appeal, intense though transient, Jean-Richard Bloch felt towards zionism after an impressive visit to Palestine in 1925, can clarify the links he tries to define between identity, litterature and commitment. Even if that was a failure in the end, Bloch planned and tried to carry out, on a strictly literary level, the re-appropriation and subversion of the « homeland of language », before he was caught in the emergency of events. This vision, that is being both a Jew and a French in his writings, could be worth being drawn closer to that of Albert Cohen, or, across many years, that of Patrick Modiano.