A contemporary French Jewish novelist, Myriam Anissimov shares the "horrible peculiarity" of having survived a collective death sentence; as she wrote in the original French version (Pardes, 1995) of her essay "A Yiddish Writer Who Writes in French" (2001), "J'appartiens à une civilisation engloutie, anéantie, assassinée, et j'ai conscience d'être une des dernières à penser comme si ce monde était encore là" (I belong to an engulfed, annihilated, assassinated civilization and I am aware of being one of the last to think as if that world were still here). By the time she was three years old, almost all of her extended family had been killed in Treblinka and in the Hugo Schneider weapons factory in Skarzysko Kamiena. In Sa Majesté la mort (His Majesty Death, 1999) Anissimov refers to her inheritance in visceral and psychological terms as "la peur...