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This essay examines the father-daughter relationship and the dynamics of mourning in the biofiction of Quebec author Régine Robin, born Rivka Ajzersztejn in 1939 in Paris. Focusing on her first work of biofiction, Le Cheval blanc de Lénine (1979), as well as the short text “Manhattan Bistro” (1992), I argue that Robin presents the daughter’s tale as both an act of defiance against paternal authority and her Communist father’s veneration of the great men of history—incarnate in the vision of Vladimir Lenin on a white horse—and homage to her father’s role as inventive and passionate chronicler of family history. The daughter recounts her father’s struggle with the refusal to say the Kaddish for his own father, an impossible act of mourning mirrored by the Kaddish that could not be recited for the fifty-one members of her family lost in the Holocaust. Robin’s biofiction is an unceasing iteration of the grieving process, an examination of the vagaries of memory and history, and the arbitrary accidents in time that led to deportation to the Nazi death camps for some and survival and a future life in North America and elsewhere for others.

This article analyses how Nazi Germany exploited France, which — from an economic point of view — was the most important occupied country during the Second World War. We can show that, in contrast to the conventional wisdom, there was no clear-cut caesura in Germany's policy of exploiting occupied France — not in the extent of the exploitation in real terms or in the kind of policy toward occupation funds. Although the war in the East and preparations for the invasion made it necessary for Germany to reduce wasteful spending of occupation funds and combat French inflation more consistently, its occupation policy did not shift radically but gradually between mid 1942 and the end of 1943. However, it was not Albert Speer's Armament Ministry, but other German institutions, especially the Reich Finance Ministry, which played a decisive role in this process. Without this policy Germany would not have been able to increase the French contribution to the German warfare all over Europe, especially on the Eastern front.

Amid severe shortages of raw materials, labor, and transportation, companies in occupied France (1940–1944) sought alternative paths to what is commonly called “economic collaboration.” They worked to find substitute supplies, convert to new product lines, alter their manufacturing methods, and even adapt to the black market. But few businesses could avoid the question of whether to provide goods and services to the occupier. The opportunities to do so were widespread, though they varied according to occupation, economic branch, and the passage of time during the Occupation. The German occupiers thus benefited from the French economy. With decisive help from the Vichy regime, the occupiers managed to force, induce, or entice French enterprises into their war economy—be they large industries formerly mobilized for French national defense, small and medium-sized firms, or agricultural producers. Dans un contexte de graves restrictions (matières premières, maind’œuvre, moyens de transport), les entreprises de la France occupée (1940–1944) sont à la recherche d’alternatives à ce qu’on appelle communément la « collaboration économiqÏue » : utilisation de produits de remplacement, reconversion des activités, réadaptation de l’appareil productif, essor des pratiques illicites (marché noir). Mais rares sont les patrons à ne pas devoir se poser la question de l’opportunité de proposer une offre de services à l’occupant. Cette offre est largement répandue, mais variable selon les métiers, les branches et les temps de l’Occupation. Les occupants tirent ainsi profit des atouts du tissu économique national, puisqu’ils parviennent, avec la collaboration décisive du régime de Vichy, à insérer à leur économie de guerre par différentes manières (forcée et induite), à la fois les grosses industries anciennement mobilisées pour la Défense nationale, les petites et les moyennes entreprises et les richesses tirées du sol français.

This chapter focuses on the career and work of Merleau-Ponty. During the 1930s he worked with Gurwitsch and was also responsible for publicizing some of the late work of Husserl which, during the war, was held in archives in Louvain. He was involved, with Sartre, in attempting to conceptualize post-war social construction. He tried to integrate his phenomenological thinking with political engagement in a way which had not been done by either Schutz or Gurwitsch but, finally, commitment to philosophy prevailed. Consideration of the work of Merleau-Ponty provides a link between the a-political orientation of the productions in America of Schutz and Gurwitsch, and Bourdieu’s transposition of Merleau-Ponty’s thinking from the field of philosophy to that of sociology.

Caroline Moorehead's \"A Train in Winter\" tells the story of 230 French women who stood up to the Nazi occupation of their country during a time when most of their fellow citizens either collaborated with the Germans or silently endured their presence. Obsessed with bringing Nazi criminals to justice, she testified against the Auschwitz doctors after the war but declined to be recognized as one of the Righteous Among the Nations by the state of Israel because, as she saw it, her actions were simply part of her moral obligation.

THE MAIN ROAD FROM Nice to Saint-Martin-Vésubie does not end at the village. Instead, the mountains separating France from Italy, only about ten kilometers away at this point, force it to veer sharply to the west. North and east of Saint-Martin-Vésubie, two smaller paved roads twist insistently on toward the frontier, following the valleys of the mountain streams known as the Boréon and the Madone de Fenestre. These roads are postwar creations; before the war, they were mere tracks for shepherds and smugglers. The northern road ends just beyond the hamlet of Le Boréon, eight kilometers from Saint-Martin-Vésubie and 1,473

Moorehead has a soft spot for the French communists - they were \"resilient, energetic and prepared to sacrifice themselves,\" and \"it was no accident that all but a few of the survivors had been active politically, committed to shared beliefs in a better future, and accustomed to hardship and discipline\" - but she indulges this only a few times, and it does not seriously affect her narrative.

The first half of the book focuses on the French Resistance and the women who made up the army of writers, printers, ammunition makers, and couriers who risked their lives and their families' well-being in response to their ever-decreasing freedom and quality of life under German occupation.

RESISTANCE A Woman's Journal of Struggle and Defiance in Occupied France By Agnes Humbert Translated from the French by Barbara Mellor Bloomsbury. 370 pp. $26 A middle-aged divorcee with two grown-up children and a respectable job as an art historian, Agnes Humbert hardly fit the profile of a typical French resistance hero. The paper's main aim was to counter Nazi propaganda, notably by providing evidence that food shortages in France were being caused not by the British blockade but by wholesale looting by the Germans.

For a time, since he knew no French, [Roy Allen] pretended he could neither speak nor hear. His saviors even managed to get him some badly needed care in a Parisian hospital. But Allen was betrayed by two Belgian collaborators, \"Captain Jacques,\" a double agent, and his assistant. We feel Allen's mounting horror as the car in which he has been placed heads for the Avenue Foch, Gestapo headquarters. It was July 1944. This is a good book, well worth reading. However, readers may feel like Allen when he suddenly found himself in the French countryside, if they do not know much about the French resistance and the Vichy years. [THOMAS CHILDERS HOLT] has to work in some basic context, as when [Colette Florin] informs Allen, that Pierre Laval is \"the prime minister of Vichy. He is the most reviled of all the collaborators, the most evil. He works hand-in-glove with the Germans.\" The brief description of the dreadful Laval hardly does him justice. But it could not really have been otherwise, or the reader would know more than Allen knew. Women like Florin, who would receive the right to vote only after the war, were for decades forgotten figures in the movement's history. Besides being founding members of several important resistance groups, women were ideal carriers of messages, less likely to be stopped and searched. Teachers like Florin - and, in some places, village priests - could also be pivotal figures in resisting the Nazis. People like Florin helped preserve the values of the French republic during the awful Vichy period, as well as the lives of people like Allen.