MICHÈLE SARDE
Michèle Sarde is a French writer and professor emerita at Georgetown University, where she taught French literature, gender studies and intercultural studies. She presently resides in Chile and France. Her writings reflect this experience, at the intersection between three of the world’s regions and drawing inspiration from them. The key themes of her work, for which she has won several literary awards, are women’s cause, intercultural issues, the interaction between history and individual destinies and twentieth century totalitarian systems, and the interweaving of personal and historical memory. Her books have been translated into several languages and given rise to academic studies, in particular her novel Histoire d’Eurydice pendant la remontée (Eurydice rising), a re-visioning of woman’s status in myth. She holds the Palmes académiques, the Order of Arts and Letters, and the Order of National Merit, decorations awarded by the French Government.
Michèle Sarde has written biographies of Colette and Marguerite Yourcenar, and is co-editor of the latter’s correspondence. She has also written a biography of Jacques Rossi, a survivor of the Soviet Gulag. As an essayist, she is the author of two volumes on the history and sociology of women in France as well as numerous academic articles. As a novelist, her most recent work is a cycle of remembrance devoted to her Sephardi family—from the Ottoman Empire to the Holocaust—aiming to bring back to this world the Lost who have marked her life and left traces of themselves in her books.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mich%C3%A8le_Sarde
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COLETTE
Original title: Colette libre et entravée
Michèle Sarde sets out to “prove that genius is not a gift, but rather the way out one invents in desperate situations.” Letting Colette speak for herself; we see before us the daughter of Sido, the wife of three husbands; Colette sad, disabused, jealous, monogamous, independent. And we see it all against Paris of La Belle Époque, Lesbos, the Dreyfus Affair and two world wars.
JACQUES THE FRENCHMAN
Original title: Jacques le Français
Jacques Rossi, a Franco-Pole, was one of Stalin’s most well-known victims, spent twenty years in interrogation, prison, and Gulag detention. This book represents a conversation between Jacques Rossi and Michèle Sarde, and weaves together personal reflections, anecdotes and historical analysis.
REVENIR DU SILENCE
Revenir du Silence (Returning from Silence) seamlessly interweaves the personal history of Jenny, Michou and their Judeo-Hispanic family with acutely contemporary themes of concealed identity, assimilation and persecution, women’s struggle for emancipation, the German Occupation of France, all told poignantly, with flashes of dark humor.