Une identité en éclats : écrire sa vie de Juif errant. Les écrivains juifs contemporains de langue française après 1945

This study draws from an analysis of a literary corpus of 300 works published by around 60 contemporary Jewish writers in the French language between 1945 and the 1980s, and is preoccupied with the modalities of writing about exile and the state of being uprooted. More specifically, this article will demonstrate how Jewish writers seek to recreate the territory they have lost through recourse to an extremely diverse set of materials (autobiographical souvenirs, the most significant episodes of Jewish history, and even legends susceptible to remobilisation). Jewish writers’ texts are, more often than not, impregnated with an intense level of nostalgia; memory is omnipresent and is manifest at two complimentary levels: the cult of origin and the obligation to perpetuate. The land of origin is, in this way, partly idealized a posteriori.This article additionally aims to elucidate the Judeo-centrism of these texts, which is especially notable for North-African-Jewish writers. A large body of these autobiographical texts is not so much dedicated to the land of origin but focus, instead, on Jewish life in the space of the ghetto. The literary representation of ghettos and Jewish lands around preserved and autarkical spaces, inhabited by peoples somehow different to those on the exterior, occurs after the events of exile. It is the very disappearance of the ghettos which has led the writers, and in particular the Ashkenazis, to produce these emotive-laden texts