Henri Raczymow, a major contemporary French novelist, is a member of the "second generation" of Holocaust writers--those born after the Holocaust to parents who were survivors and transmitted their experiences to their children. He acknowledged in an unpublished May 2002 interview that his biography has filtered into the characters and stories in his novels: "Tout ce que je suis et écris prend sa source dans ma situation biographique personnelle" (Everything I am and I write is rooted in my personal biographical situation).

Henri René Raczymow was born in Paris on 15 April 1948 and spent his childhood in the predominantly Jewish immigrant district of Belleville. As he describes it, during the postwar years Belleville was "un shtetl et une yiddishkeit pleins de trous, d'absences, de cases manquantes: le nom des morts" (a shtetl and a heritage full of holes, absences, with missing links: the names of the dead). His...