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Patrick Modiano. Dora Bruder. Paris. Gallimard. 1997. 147 pages. 95 F. ISBN 2-07-074898-7.
"A lot of friends I never knew disappeared in 1945, the year of my birth." The pain of their absence can be read on Patrick Modiano's face-not on TV, where they do not invite him any more, his aphasia having given a cold sweat to the most experienced moderators, but on the front page of Le Monde, where the shy smile of the celebrated fifty-one-year-old author seems to reveal between the lines the face of Dora Bruder, a fifteen-year-old Jewish girl born in Paris in 1926, two years after the arrival of her parents in France. On 31 December 1941 Dora's parents placed an ad in the popular newspaper France Soir to inquire about their missing daughter, who had run away from her Catholic boarding school.
In 1988 Modiano read the ad in an old, faded copy of the newspaper and set up his investigation. He interviewed bureaucrats, examined archives and old pictures, called survivors who might have known Dora, and walked along the Ornano Boulevard and through the Picpus area, where Dora's school, the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie, had been located, and where Modiano himself used to go as a child with his mother and, later, as a student during the Algerian "events." He learned about the identity, the jobs, and the last known address of Dora's Austrian father, Ernest, and of her...