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La Shoah comme matière de fiction: Robert Bober
Among the literary works produced by Jewish Polish immigrants in France during the Second World War, the works of Robert Bober stand out in terms of style, rhetoric of understatement and their treatment of memory without fixing it too tightly to the historical event. This study, which includes unpublished statements from the writer, examines the complex play by which history and fantasy merge in a literary work. By integrating the event with a personal theme, Robert Bober brings out the horror of Nazism without polemic or pity. Bober’s aim is neither revenge nor provo- cation — even if his words are violent by association. The modus is not imperative, it is affirmative, performing only pragmatically. The narrator notes, reproduces without copying and develops memory. Therefore, the reader never feels confronted with an ideological discourse, he has no reason to think that the story is constructed with a certain purpose, as is the case in some tendency novels. Also, Bober’s novels respect the principle of intransitivity of suffering, because even if the text is a kind of object, the pain is never explained. The fragmentary nature of the narrative can be explained by resistance to putting things into a definite order, as though the description of the Holocaust deserved to stay unfinished.
