Wווייכערט מיט : A propos du roman inédit de David Vogel en yiddish

Abstract

At the beginning of the 1940s, Hebrew writer David Vogel (1891-1944) started to write a Yiddish novel for the first time. As an Austrian citizen living in France, he had been held in a camp for suspicious foreigners. His narrative, inspired by this experience, remained untitled after he was captured and sent to death by the Gestapo at the beginning of 1944. Its original version has never been published.This article gives an overview of critical approaches to this text that have been published up to now. It proposes an analysis based on Merleau-Ponty’s linguistic thought and on the principles of literary genetics. The manuscript, with its deletions and additions, is approached in the light of all the languages in which the author could have written in and that leave their mark on the narrative. The author of this article argues that the poetics of foreign language is more central than the question of Vogel’s linguistic identity. His writing in Yiddish thus poses the problem of the status of this language in a world where things are no longer called what they were.