Encontre milhões de e-books, audiobooks e muito mais com um período de teste gratuito

Apenas $11.99/mês após o término do seu período de teste gratuito. Cancele a qualquer momento.

Dora Bruder
Dora Bruder
Dora Bruder
E-book118 páginas1 hora

Dora Bruder

Nota: 4 de 5 estrelas

4/5

()

Ler a amostra

Sobre este e-book

Dora Bruder foi inspirado por um anúncio publicado na edição de 31 de dezembro de 1941 do jornal Paris Soir, em que os pais da jovem Dora Bruder solicitavam notícias da filha desaparecida a quem pudesse ajudá-los. Comovido pelo drama daqueles pais condenados a passar a virada de ano em angustiosa expectativa pelo paradeiro da filha de apenas 15 anos de idade, Modiano iniciou em fins da década de 1980 uma pesquisa pessoal que resultou, oito anos mais tarde, em um livro único e inesquecível.
O autor acabou descobrindo que tanto Dora Bruder quanto seu pai haviam sido presos, com alguns meses de intervalo, e internados no Campo de Drancy, antes de serem conjuntamente deportados para o Campo de Concentração de Auschwitz em 18 de setembro de 1942. A investigação do destino de Dora Bruder se expande e se confunde com uma reflexão acerca do passado de todos aqueles que viveram o dilacerante período da Ocupação nazista da França.
Autor vencedor do Prêmio Nobel de Literatura 2014 e do Grande Prêmio de Romance da Academia Francesa (1972) pelo livro Les Boulevards de ceinture.
IdiomaPortuguês
Data de lançamento1 de dez. de 2014
ISBN9788581225043
Dora Bruder
Autor

Patrick Modiano

PATRICK MODIANO was born in 1945 in a suburb of Paris and grew up in various locations throughout France. In 1967, he published his first novel, La Place de l'étoile, to great acclaim. Since then, he has published over twenty novels—including the Goncourt Prize−winning Rue des boutiques obscures (translated as Missing Person), Dora Bruder, and Les Boulevards des ceintures (translated as Ring Roads)—as well as the memoir Un Pedigree and a children's book, Catherine Certitude. He collaborated with Louis Malle on the screenplay for the film Lacombe Lucien. In 2014, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy cited “the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the Occupation,” calling him “a Marcel Proust of our time.”

Leia mais títulos de Patrick Modiano

Autores relacionados

Relacionado a Dora Bruder

Ebooks relacionados

Biografia/Autoficção para você

Visualizar mais

Artigos relacionados

Categorias relacionadas

Avaliações de Dora Bruder

Nota: 3.786127100578035 de 5 estrelas
4/5

173 avaliações12 avaliações

O que você achou?

Toque para dar uma nota

A avaliação deve ter pelo menos 10 palavras

  • Nota: 5 de 5 estrelas
    5/5
    It was not until 1995 that France finally accepted responsibility for their treatment of Jews during the years of Nazi occupation. Patrick Modiano’s Search Warrant - Dora Bruder is a book of meta fiction of novella length, in which he once again picks at the sore that has troubled French consciences since 1945. Historical but not hysterical Modiano takes his readers on a kind of mystery tour, but one where the final destination soon becomes all too apparent - Auschwitz and the gas chambers.In 1988 the author is reading a 1941 edition of the newspaper Paris Soir and is struck by a small notice that appeals for information concerning Dora Bruder a young girl of 15 years, who is described as missing. Modiano has noticed that the address of Mr and Mrs Bruder is given as 41 Boulevard Ornano, Paris; an area of the city that he knows well: his mother took him to the flea markets there in the 1950’s when he was a child, in 1958 he remembers the area being deserted when a demonstration in connection with the Algerian war had effectively sealed it off and during the years 1965 to 1968 he had a girlfriend there. Modiano is writing his book in 1996 and since reading the missing persons notice in 1988 he has been trying to find out as much as he can about Dora Bruder; we learn that painstaking research is something that Modiano enjoys doing, he has the necessary temperament and aptitude for this kind of work; he tells us:“It took me four years to discover her exact date of birth: 25 February 1926. and a further two years to find out her place of birth: Paris 12th arrondissement. But I am a patient man. I can wait for hours in the rain.”Modiano’s research is not only through the scarce paper work, it is also among people who might have known Dora or her family and more significantly for this novel it is about an area of Paris: a neighbourhood. He revisits Boulevard Ornano, makes enquiries about buildings that would have been familiar to Dora as a child and young adult, he tries to build up a picture using his information and his own life experiences and the novel becomes a sort of palimpsest of a Paris neighbourhood, where if one looks hard enough one can almost see features from the past, a palimpsest of his connections with the city and a palimpsest of issues facing Jewish people. It is no surprise to discover that the author is Jewish and that his own father had a lucky escape when he was picked up by the Nazis in 1942. Modiano succeeds in painting a picture of the short, tragic life of Dora, he can fill in the gaps of the official records, he is able to portray the desperate situation for Jewish people caught in a net that tightened like a noose during the period 1941 to 1943 and without ever having to state the obvious he is able to show the shame of a city that was only too willing to hold the rope. He reflects on his own life; he was born in 1945 and how much safer it was for him growing up in the 1960’s, but the echoes from the past still resonate through the city, they still affect so many lives and Modiano thinks of some of the writers who but for the war might have been his friends. He has an idea of how the past shapes the future and how collectively a group of people can alter the very fabric of their town, the buildings or its culture. It is the echoes from the past that Modiano’s keen senses pick up. I get the feeling he loves the city of Paris, but he and the city are haunted by past events: In 1966 he remembers walking past the Tourelles barracks, where those people who had fallen foul of the nazi laws were taken in the first instance and still affixed to the old building was a sign: MILITARY ZONE, FILMING OR PHOTOGRAPHY PROHIBITED and he says:“I told myself that nobody remembers anything anymore. A no-man’s-land lay beyond the wall, a zone of emptiness and oblivion. Unlike the convent in the Rue de Picpus, the twin blocks of Tourelles barracks had not been pulled down, but they might as well have been. And yet, from time to time, beneath this thick layer of amnesia, one can certainly sense something, an echo, distant, muted, but of what, precisely, it is impossible to say. Like finding oneself on the edge of a magnetic field and having no pendulum with which to pick up it’s radiations. The sign had been put up out of suspicion and a guilty conscience.”The use of historical documents throughout the book gives it an authenticity that grounds Modiano’s own thoughts and conjectures about the fate of Jewish people in occupied Paris. None is more painful to read than a letter from a Jewish man, one Robert Tartakovsky who had been picked to go on a transport train to the German camps. Modiano says that he found the letter two years ago on one of the bookstalls along the Seine: today, fifty years late, on Wednesday 29 January 1997, I reproduce his letter. This is a quiet, softly spoken book that trades on atmosphere and echoes from the past, but the underlying horror of those years is born out by the extracts from documents and by Modiano’s claustrophobic description of desperation for Jews caught up in the Nazi machine. I rate this as 4.5 stars. Footnote: I read this last week on the beach when I was on holiday in Collioure a small French town on the Mediterranean coast not far from the Spanish border. On page 91 of my English translation I read:“In July 1942, on her way back from the beach at Collioure, in the Free Zone, his friend Ruth Kronenberg was arrested. She was deported in the transport of 11 September, a week before Dora Bruder “Those echoes from the past.
  • Nota: 5 de 5 estrelas
    5/5
    I had not heard of Patrick Modiano before he won the Nobel Prize in Literature last year. He was born outside Paris in 1945 to a Sephardic Jewish family with roots originally in Italy, although his ancestors, longtime inhabitants of Thessaloniki, Greece, included eminent rabbis. While he is apparently quite popular in France he is not well-known in the United States. Our Thursday evening reading group chose to read his novel, The Search Warrant (also known as Dora Bruder), this month.At the core of this poignant novel, published in 1997, is Modiano's real-life investigation into the disappearance of a young Jewish girl-Dora Bruder, announced in a newspaper—back in 1941. Struck by this discovery, haunted by the legacy of this mysterious teenager, the author seeks out any tiny scraps of information in an effort to finally come to terms with his own lost adolescence.What first impressed me was the economical, straightforward, journalistic style of the narrator; basically a stand-in for the author. Yet this was not journalism but rather a sort of fictional historical memoir. The narrative blends both the search for information about Dora with reminiscences of the narrator's own youthful memories. There is so little true information about Dora that the narrator tries to compensate with details about the events and places of the time that Dora was alive. Searching for documents, he describes those that may still exist, that may be remembered or may yield memories of her life and his own. The result is the gradual recreation of the world as it was then with fascinating details that bring the narrative to life.Among the few specifics about Dora the narrator scatters speculation like this moment:"My father had barely mentioned this young girl when, for the first and only time in his life, one night in June 1863, he told me about his narrow escape as we were dining in a restaurant off the Champs Elysees almost opposite the one where he had been arrested twenty years before. He gave me no details about her looks or clothes, and I had all but forgotten her until the day I learned of Dor Bruder's existence. Then, suddenly remembering the presence of this young girl among the other unknowns with my father in the Black Maria on that February night, it occurred to me that she might have been Dora Bruder, that she too had just been arrested and was about to be sent to Tourelles."(pp 57-8)This is noted more than one third of the way through the novel following tidbits from documents, gleanings of register entries, and a brief history of her family. One of the pieces of data is the presence of her name on a list of Jews deported to Auschwitz in September 1942. The book is part meditation on this loss and the greater loss of humans, their stories and their history. There were further moments in the narrative where the subjunctive is suggested with events that could have taken place but about which we do not know anything. Thus we have another theme of this work, the problem of knowledge, that is demonstrated with the blending of bits of historical data with suggestions about what or where Dora fits into the story.There is also the narrator's own story exemplified by his own youthful episode of running away from boarding school; the intensity about which he writes:"I remember the intensity of my feelings while I was on the run in January 1960 -- an intensity such as I have seldom known." (p 71). He goes on to compare this personal episode to Dora's experience suggesting that it must have been harder for her in a world dominated by Nazi occupation and the war. The fate of Dora is thus intertwined with that of French Jews as well. Sometimes a whole chapter is spun out of a speculation on the simple question of what happened to Dora at such and such a time. Somehow the speculation, the bits of data, the mix of authorial reflection with Dora's story all combine to create a fascinating and inexplicably suspenseful novel.It is short and intense and rewards the reader with the urge to start rereading it almost immediately to see if the intensity of the experience might be heightened by doing so. Alice Kaplan, who teaches Patrick Modiano's work at Yale, said that after her first experience of reading him she "devoured all of his books." (Alice Kaplan on Patrick Modiano) This was my first excursion in the writing of Patrick Modiano. It will not be my last.
  • Nota: 3 de 5 estrelas
    3/5
    Interesting and short. If it were longer, it would lose interest as Modiano is not an effective researcher. He researches by intuition and serendipity, not with any effective plan or framework.
  • Nota: 3 de 5 estrelas
    3/5
    A slight, matter of fact but moving story of the author's quest to recreate the story of a Jewish teenager in Paris during the German occupation from the few archive fragments which remain.
  • Nota: 4 de 5 estrelas
    4/5
    In Dora Bruder Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano uses the few surviving traces of a single lost life to tell the story of Paris during the German Occupation.Little can be known about the real Dora Bruder, except that she was not much like Anne Frank. A rebellious teen from a poor Jewish refugee family, Dora inexplicably ran away from the convent school that could have been her shelter until the end of the war. She was found and returned, then she ran away again. The last mark of her existence was a notation on a list of Jews deported to Auschwitz in September, 1942. Modiano, who was born in 1945, first learns about Dora through a brief "missing" notice in a wartime newspaper. He searches for the lost girl on the streets of modern-day Paris, and feels her presence still, despite France's efforts to forget about its shameful collaboration with the Nazis. Some of the streets and buildings Dora would have known still stand and some have been torn down or renamed. "They have obliterated everything in order to build a sort of Swiss village in order that nobody, ever again, would question [Paris's] neutrality." (p. 113).This is a very sad, yet beautifully written book. I recommend it.
  • Nota: 3 de 5 estrelas
    3/5
    3.5 stars, GR does not have a half star option.

    I did like it, but it was too thread bare for me. What he found out about this young lady is next to nothing and I was thinking he turned Paris upside down interviewing every gov't worker and investigation every office to put together a very complex 'who done it ' or jigsaw puzzle. It was not that way, what he was able to uncover ( whether because truly there was nothing else to find or lack of skill on his part, I don't know ) was next to nothing, so you really know so little about Dora by the book's end.

    I had hoped for much more.
  • Nota: 5 de 5 estrelas
    5/5
    This is a different type of novel. It's not a novel really, but a semi-documentary narrating the biography of the girl whose name is the title of the book- Dora Bruder. In a nutshell, Dora was a young French girl of Jewish parents who disappeared (ran away) in Paris, was captured and a few months later ended up being sent to Auschwitz. But her story, tragic as it is, is no different than that of million others who suffered the same fate; but I don't wanto to minimize them. What is different, very different, is the manner in which Modiano builds up her story.Modiano became attracted to Dora's story when, in the late 80s, he saw a small notice in a 1941 Paris newspaper saying that Dora Bruder was missing. The note gave a brief description of her. From that moment, Modiano becomes obsessed to find everything he can about Dora. He reconstructs a few events from Dora's life, and he imagines a lot. What makes this a very remarkable book is that throughout Modiano also rediscovers his self, his memories that had been lost. Also, realizes that so much of a person's life, such as Dora's, goes unrecognized and is lost to memory, as if she didn't exist.Of the many books that I've read about the Holocaust and the treatment of the Jews in the 30s and 40s in Europe, this is one of the most troubling (to me at least). The writing is slow-paced and not sensational at all. But somehow it brings a constant suspense and expectation that made me think of the despair that those poor people had to live through.I highly recommend this book.
  • Nota: 5 de 5 estrelas
    5/5
    Just wonderful. I expected a writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014 and who has been lauded as "a modern Proust" would offer la long, turgid and tiresome book. Au contraire, mes amis!! "The Search Warrant" (in French it carries the name of the main person of interest, namely "Dora Bruder") is novella length, thoroughly readable, perfectly paced and plotted. Simply, a delight.Not to say it is a FUN book. The subject matter, a 15 year old Jewish girl who disappears during the German occupation of Paris, is dark and tragic. Yet Modiano finds the way for us to engage with his subject at the human level. So many stories from World War II are about tactics, politics, and the mechanics of evil. This book is about people and place. And Modiano reaches into our hearts in a way that somehow is healing and hopeful.
  • Nota: 3 de 5 estrelas
    3/5
    Je kan dit dunne boekje (140 bladzijden) in enkele uren uitlezen, en de inhoud kan je samenvatten in enkele regels. Maar ik heb geleerd op mijn hoede te zijn bij Modiano. Achter zijn ogenschijnlijk simpele verhalen, geschreven in een gepolijste, vlotte taal, schuilen meerdere lagen, en de intensiteit van het verhaalde kan best wel heftig zijn. In dit boek bijvoorbeeld is er de verhaallijn van Dora Bruder, een joods meisje van 15, wonend in het door de Duitsers bezette Parijs in 1941; ze rebelleert tegen haar omgeving, maar wordt evengoed meegetrokken in de holocaust en afgevoerd naar Auschwitz. Modiano brengt dit verhaal in stukken en brokken, waarbij hij zeer nauwkeurig plaatsen en namen noteert en opvallend inzoemt op de Franse medeplichtigheid aan het oppakken en samendrijven van de joodse bewoners van Parijs (net als dat trouwens ook het geval was in Antwerpen of Amsterdam). Ook de vertwijfelde houding van de joden (en enkele niet-joden) die de terreur moeten ondergaan wordt subtiel, en daardoor des te sterker, onder woorden gebracht; hartverscheurend is de brief van de geïnterneerde man (op het einde van de roman) die op het punt staat op een konvooi gezet te worden.Een tweede laag is die van de auteur zelf, we veronderstellen dat Modiano met de ik-figuur echt over zichzelf spreekt. We zien hem geïntrigeerd geraken door het krantenknipsel uit 1941 waarin de ouders van Dora vragen om hulp bij de zoektocht naar hun weggelopen dochter. Hij trekt parallellen tussen zijn leven en dat van Dora: de buurten waar ze allebei gewoond hebben, hun rebellerende fase, hun ervaringen met de politie, hun houding tegenover hun ouders, enzovoort. Obsessief grijpt hij elke strohalm aan om iets meer over haar te weten te komen. En zo komen we bij de derde laag: die wanhopige poging een leven dat voorbij is, in rook is opgegaan, te reconstrueren, of beter, te 'vatten', want dat is wat Modiano echt wil doen: weten wat er in Dora omging, hoe ze het beleefde. Hij is daarbij best inventief en gaat niet alleen getuigen en archiefdocumenten opzoeken, maar spreekt ook de "historische verbeelding" aan: hij probeert in de voetstappen van Dora te lopen, letterlijk in dezelfde straten, en zich in te beelden wat ze zag en voelde. En met Modiano moeten we vaststellen dat dit ultiem niet lukt, dat het een illusie is om dit 'vatten' echt te realiseren. Dit fundamenteel pessimisme is me al in andere werken van hem opgevallen. Het is volgens hem één van de kern-elementen in "het menselijk tekort": je kan het verleden niet vatten, je kan anderen niet vatten, je kan eigenlijk zelfs je eigen bestaan niet vatten. Persoonlijk deel ik dit pessimisme helemaal niet. Het ligt eraan wat je zelf verwacht: ik heb de indruk dat Modiano met dit "vatten" de lat te hoog legt en teveel in de richting van vastgrijpen (en daardoor versmachten) gaat. Want wat hij met Dora Bruder heeft tot stand heeft gebracht, gereconstrueerd heeft, mag er best zijn, is een prestatie op zich, alsof hij haar opnieuw tot leven heeft gebracht. Of hij er in geslaagd is de echte Dora te bereiken, doet niet ter zake.
  • Nota: 5 de 5 estrelas
    5/5
    Modiano’s favorite themes are the past, disappearance, searching for answers. They are all here. In Dora Bruder he researches the mystery of a Jewish girl who disappeared in Paris in 1941, a victim of the holocaust. While knowing what likely happened to her, he searches for traces of how it happened, why, always this question lingering in the background: “Why, I wonder, does the lightning strike in one place rather than another.”No detail is too small in his search. Modiano mourns that fact that an office number is obscured in a photo. “We shall never know the number of this door.” And the sense of loss permeates the book. “So many friends whom I never knew disappeared in 1945, the year I was born.”
  • Nota: 4 de 5 estrelas
    4/5
    An advert in a 1941 newspaper asking for information about a missing teenage girl sets Modiano off doing what he does best, digging around in half-forgotten memories of the German occupation and the deportation of French Jews. The result is a very powerful and emotionally engaging little book, in which Modiano uses the ordinariness of the suburban Paris streets to focus our attention on the horror of what was going on. Anne Frank for grownups.
  • Nota: 4 de 5 estrelas
    4/5
    The past, even the relatively recent past, is as ephemeral as swamp mist. How then does one reach out to the past to engage with it, to interrogate it, to bring it into the light? And when nearly all evidence of the past has been systematically erased, or carelessly expunged, or judiciously demolished to make way for a future that may wish to pretend the past never was — what then? Patrick Modiano uses the disappearance of single young girl in 1941 as his touchstone to the past. Dora Bruder’s absence from her boarding school in Paris and the note in the New Year’s Eve edition of Paris Soir providing her description activate Modiano’s full novelistic powers of speculation and creation. From excruciatingly small bits of evidence pieced together over the course of decades, he constructs a life for this young woman, tracing her through to her eventually deportation to Auschwitz in September 1942. In the process, Modiano unearths the still mouldering remains of the suffocating occupation of Paris by the Nazi Reich and the dehumanization of its Jews, often with collusion of French workers, and the stench that still lingers over this period of French history, no doubt in part because so many of its chorus of dispossessed entered the atmosphere as smoke from the ovens of Auschwitz.Dora Bruder’s story is by no means unique. By focussing on it, Modiano works against the inertia that overwhelms us when the past is painted by numbers: 1000 arrested on this date, 15000 deported on that date, tens of thousand gassed on some other date. Instead, Modiano seeks to concentrate on Dora as an individual, admittedly one of whom he knows very little. So he supplements his evidence and his speculations with his own tangentially related history as a child himself of Parisian Jews. Perhaps the most affecting moment in his story is when he wonders whether his own father shared a police van with Dora Bruder when he too was rounded up in early 1942. Of course he can never know. There is so much he can never know. And his experience of this loss is what brings Dora’s story fully to life.This is a very short book and it drifts at times. The first half is more focused than the latter half. But it successfully generates a disquiet that will not be easily satisfied. And it opens your eyes to a Paris that, perhaps, many have wanted to forget, or pretend never existed. Gently recommended.

Pré-visualização do livro

Dora Bruder - Patrick Modiano

Créditos

Há oito anos, folheando o velho jornal Paris-Soir, de 31 de dezembro de 1941, encontrei esta chamada: De ontem a hoje. Embaixo, estava escrito:

"PARIS

Procura-se uma jovem, Dora Bruder, 15 anos, 1,55m, rosto oval, olhos marrom-acinzentados, casacão cinza, suéter bordô, saia e chapéu azul-marinho, sapatos marrons. Qualquer informação dirigir-se ao Sr. e à Sra. Bruder, bulevar Ornano, 41, Paris."

Conheço bem este bairro do bulevar Ornano. Quando eu era criança, minha mãe me levava ao Mercado das Pulgas de Saint-Ouen. Descíamos do ônibus na entrada de Clignancourt, às vezes em frente à prefeitura do XVIIIe arrondissement. Era sempre sábado ou domingo, de tarde.

No inverno, sempre encontrávamos o gordo fotógrafo e sua máquina com tripé, na calçada em frente ao quartel Clignancourt. Misturado à leva de passantes de domingo, lá estava ele, com seus óculos redondos e seu nariz de espinhas, chamando a todos para uma foto suvenir. No verão, instalava-se nas pranchas de Deauville, em frente ao bar do Sol, onde conseguia clientes. Era diferente em Clignancourt: ninguém parecia gostar de ser fotografado. Usava sempre o mesmo sobretudo gasto, e tinha um dos sapatos furado.

Lembro-me de como estavam desertos o bulevar Barbès e o bulevar Ornano, num domingo de sol à tarde, em maio de 1958. Em cada esquina, membros da guarda civil, devido aos acontecimentos na Argélia.

Frequentei o bairro no inverno de 1965. Tinha uma amiga que morava na rua Championnet, Ornano 49-20.

Já nessa época a leva de passantes de domingo deveria ter arrastado o gordo fotógrafo. Mas não fui lá verificar. Para que servia o quartel?

Janeiro de 1965. Às seis horas já estava escuro no cruzamento do bulevar Ornano com a rua Championnet. Eu não era nada, eu me confundia com esse crepúsculo, com essas ruas.

No final do bulevar Ornano, o último café do lado par se chamava Verse Toujours. Na esquina do bulevar Ney, à esquerda, um outro café com uma vitrola automática. Na esquina Ornano-Championnet, uma farmácia, dois bares, sendo um mais antigo, no ângulo da rua Duhesme.

Tudo o que consegui esperar nesses cafés... Muito cedo de manhã, quando ainda era noite. No final da tarde, ao escurecer. Mais tarde, na hora de fechar...

Domingo à noite, um velho automóvel preto, esporte – parecia um Jaguar – estacionado na rua Championnet, na altura do jardim de infância. Atrás, uma placa branca: G.I.G. Grande inválido de guerra. A presença desse automóvel no bairro me perturbou. Que rosto teria seu proprietário?

Depois das nove, o bulevar ficava deserto. Ainda vejo a luz na boca do metrô Simplon e, quase em frente, a da entrada do cinema Ornano, no 43. O edifício do 41, que precedia o cinema, nunca me chamou a atenção, e no entanto passei por ele durante meses, anos. De 1965 a 1968. Qualquer informação, favor enviar ao Sr. e à Sra. Bruder, bulevar Ornano 41, Paris.

De ontem a hoje. Ao recuar no tempo, as lembranças se embaralham, os invernos se confundem. O de 1965 e o de 1942.

Em 1965, eu não sabia nada de Dora Bruder. Mas hoje, depois de passados trinta anos, acho que essas longas esperas nos cafés do bulevar Ornano, certos itinerários, sempre os mesmos – subia a rua Mont-Cenis, para chegar aos hotéis da Butte Montmartre: o Roma, o Alsina ou o Terrass, na rua Caulaincourt –, e as impressões fugidias que guardei: uma noite de primavera, quando se ouviam as vozes entre as árvores da praça de Clignancourt, e no inverno novamente, a descida para Simplon e o bulevar Ornano, tudo isso não aconteceu somente por acaso. Talvez, mesmo que eu não tivesse ainda consciência do fato, eu já estivesse na pista de Dora Bruder e seus pais. Eles já estavam lá, em filigrana.

Tento encontrar pistas, as mais distantes no tempo: há doze anos, quando eu acompanhava minha mãe ao Mercado das Pulgas de Clignancourt, um judeu polonês que vendia malas, à direita, ao final de uma dessas alamedas cheias de barracas, mercado Malik, mercado Vernaison... Malas luxuosas, de couro, de crocodilo, outras de papelão, bolsas de viagem, malas grandes, com as etiquetas das companhias de navios – todas empilhadas, umas por cima das outras. Sua barraca ficava a céu aberto. Ele estava sempre com um cigarro no canto dos lábios, e, uma tarde, ofereceu-me um.

Fui algumas vezes ao cinema no bulevar Ornano. Ao Clignancourt Palace, no final do bulevar, ao lado do Verse Toujours. E no Ornano 43.

Mais tarde, soube que o Ornano 43 era um cinema muito antigo. Foi reconstruído nos anos 1930, ficando com essa aparência de navio. Voltei a esses lugares em maio de 1996. Uma loja substituiu o cinema. Atravessando a rua Hermel chega-se em frente ao prédio do bulevar Ornano 41, o endereço indicado no anúncio de busca de Dora Bruder.

Um edifício de cinco andares do final do século XIX. Junto com o 39, forma um bloco cercado pelo bulevar, o final da rua Hermel e a rua Simplon, que passa atrás dos dois edifícios. Eles são parecidos. O 39 traz uma inscrição indicando o nome do arquiteto, um tal de Richefeu, e a data da sua construção: 1881. Certamente, isto vale também para o 41.

Antes da guerra, e até o início dos anos 1950, o 41 do bulevar Ornano era um hotel, assim como o 39, que se chamava Lion d’Or. O 39, antes da guerra, era um restaurante administrado por um tal de Sr. Gazal. Não encontrei o nome do hotel do 41. No início dos anos 1950, nesse endereço está a Société Hôtel et Studios Ornano, Montmartre 1254. E também, como antes da guerra, um café cujo dono se chama Marchal. Este bar não existe mais. Ficaria à esquerda ou à direita da portaria do 41?

Esta deixa entrever um amplo corredor. Ao fundo, uma escada dobra à direita.

Precisamos de tempo, para que venha à luz o que estava escondido. Nos registros há pistas, mas não sabemos onde eles estão escondidos, quais são os seus guardiães, se estes vão permitir nossa intromissão. Ou, quem sabe, esqueceram-se simplesmente de que os registros existem.

É preciso paciência.

Finalmente soube que Dora Bruder e seus pais moraram no hotel do bulevar Ornano, em 1937 e 1938. Ocupavam um quarto com cozinha no quinto andar, lá onde se vê uma varanda cercada por uma grade de ferro que se estende pelos dois imóveis. Há umas dez janelas, no quinto andar. Duas ou três dão para o bulevar, as outras para o final da rua Hermel, e, atrás, para a rua Simplon.

Quando voltei ao bairro nesse dia de maio de 1996, as persianas enferrujadas das duas primeiras janelas do quinto andar, que davam para a rua Simplon, estavam fechadas e, em frente às janelas, na varanda, havia um monte de objetos jogados, talvez há muito tempo.

Durante os dois ou três anos que precederam a guerra, Dora Bruder devia estar matriculada em uma das escolas do bairro. Escrevi uma carta ao diretor de cada uma delas, pedindo que investigassem seu nome nos registros:

8 rua Ferdinand-Flocon

20 rua Hermel

7 rua Championnet

61 rua de Clignancourt

As respostas foram gentis. Nenhum deles encontrou esse nome na lista dos alunos das turmas de antes da guerra. Por fim, o diretor da antiga escola de moças, na rua Championnet 69, propôs que eu fosse pessoalmente consultar os registros. Irei, um dia. Mas hesito. Prefiro imaginar que seu nome esteja lá. Era a escola mais próxima de seu domicílio.

Levei quatro anos para descobrir a data exata de seu nascimento: 25 de fevereiro de 1926. E levei mais dois anos para conhecer o lugar onde nascera: Paris, XIIe arrondissement. Mas sou paciente. Posso esperar horas sob a chuva.

Numa sexta-feira de tarde, em fevereiro de 1966, fui à administração do XIIe arrondissement, ao serviço de registro civil. O encarregado deste serviço – um rapaz jovem – me entregou uma ficha para preencher:

"Requerente no guichê: Coloque seu

Sobrenome

Nome

Endereço

Peço a cópia integral

Está gostando da amostra?
Página 1 de 1