Marcel Proust

A founding figure of literary modernism and one of the great chroniclers of the modern condition, Marcel Proust was born near Paris to Jeanne (née Weil), the daughter of a prominent Jewish stockbroker, and the physician Adrien Proust. Raised in the wealth provided by his mother’s dowry, baptized and raised Catholic, per his father’s faith, Proust attended elite educational institutions, developed deep erudition and a keenly informed love of the arts, and moved easily in Paris’s refined, aristocratic salon society. Proust’s relationship to his Jewish background and to other Jews was complex (as was his relationship to his own homosexuality—a parallel that he thematized in his work). As a boy, he developed a deep sentimental connection to the Catholic culture, ritual, architecture, and annual cycle of the provincial France from which his father’s family hailed; on the other hand, the Jewish heritage of his mother, to whom he was very close, seems to have been of some importance to him as well. As a young man, he frequented social circles where anti-Jewish sentiment was pervasive. In all events, when the Dreyfus Affair divided French society, Proust took an active role as a Dreyfusard in stark opposition to many of his peers, organizing petitions in favor of the falsely accused Jewish officer. An early unpublished novel, Jean Santeuil, engaged directly with the Dreyfus Affair based on Proust’s own attendance at some of the judicial hearings. In 1909, Proust cut ties with his life as a social bon vivant and began work on what would become his seven-volume magnum opus, À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). Initially refused by several prominent publishers, the first volume, Du côté de chez Swann (Swann’s Way), appeared in 1913. In the great multivolume work that followed, Jewish characters and questions surrounding them are woven through the work, most notably in the character of the strangely tragic aesthete Charles Swann, for whom the first volume is named. Proust substantially expanded the novel during World War I, winning the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1919 and dying of pneumonia before he fully revised the last three parts of his masterpiece.