Emigré New York

Jeffrey Mehlman is University Professor at Boston University and the author, most recently, of Walter Benjamin for Children: An Essay on His Radio Years and Genealogies of the Text: Literature, Psychoanalysis, and Politics in Modern France.

• IntroductionChapter 1. Dress RehearsalChapter 2. The New Yorker Pétain and the 1870 ParadigmChapter 3. Endgame: Maeterlinck in ManhattanChapter 4. Denis de Rougemont: New York GnosticChapter 5. Simone Weil: Letters from HarlemChapter 6. George Steiner at the Lycée FrançaisChapter 7. Louis Rougier and the''Pétain-Churchill Agreement''Chapter 8. Saint-Exupéry: Between Breton and MaritainChapter 9. Saint-John Perse: Discontinuities Chapter 10. Lévi-Strauss and the Birth of StructuralismChapter 11. Coda: Normandie's ListIndex

One of modern European history's great stories. Jeffrey Mehlman tells the tale appealingly and persuasively... The individual stories-not least the symbolism of the ocean liner Normandie's tragic burning and capsizing at its Pier 48 berth-would be plenty to go on with, but Mr. Mehlman's theme is a larger one. He finds the French intellectuals in World War II New York not very different from the French aristocrats who found refuge in Kolblenz in the last decade of the 18th century, hoping for a reversal of the Revolution and restoration of the ancien regime. -- Colin Walters Washington Times Subtle, erudite, and often humorous. Previous attempts by literature professors to tackle culture have not always resulted in works as mind-stretching and entertaining as this account. -- Stanley Hoffman Foreign Affairs A series of elegant essays of cultural criticism. -- Kim Munholland American Historical Review Jeffrey Mehlman has written an intriguing, highly original work... [He] has succeeded in achieving a personal, yet erudite, series of insights about intellectual production of French writers and philosophers exiled in New York during the Second World War... Mehlman deftly and sometime humorously brings to life this motley cast of characters. -- Jonathan Gosnell French Review Mehlman's insightful book on French exiles in wartime New York City enriches the understanding of how very diverse political exiles reacted to the traumatic suffering of their homelands and other countries occupied by the Nazis. -- Edmund J. Campion Magill's Literary Annual Mehlman's greatest achievement... is neither the history he's opened up nor the reputations he's reclaimed. It is the quality of the close reading that is most admirable, tracing words and themes as they echo and resonate from one text to another. -- David Herman Jewish Quarterly