Biography

Goncourt Grant for a first novel.
The first book of Frederic Brun begins almost like a fairy tale, with its surprisingly light sweetness when he speaks of his mother, Perla, deported to Auschwitz and who came back, yes, but suffering from an "incurable anguish" of which the child becomes the only depositary: "I remain as Perla, lost in the haze without answers." "How could humanity have produced Auschwitz and Novalis?" The question emerges from this haze, written across the pages where mingles together all that Germany has produced, both the best and the worst.

In love with German culture, Brun alternates talented descriptions of portraits of poets and paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, reproduced here, with the calm prose that he uses when talking about the mother whom he so loved and punctuated with photos of death camps. Faced with these places, the author however doubts the legitemacy of the words about the things that he did not live, but the empathy with which he describes what his mother could never tell him, in a poignant page and a half, is enough to prove the contrary. At the risk sometimes of being naieve, he watches himself change as he writes this book deeply moving with sincerity.

Readings, documents, family histories are convoked in this meditation on death, while life tumbles on in the present. Between cry and whisper, this fruit, ripe with Frederick Brun's pain which he was able to make sensible in entrusting his legacy to these pages, is not just another book about a survivor's son, but of the son of Perla, made by and for him into literature.

(Valérie Marin La Meslée, Le Point, March 29th, 2007)

By opening this short story both disenchanted and laconic, we immediately think of the first sentence of "L'Etranger" : "Today, Mother died". Frederick Brun's mother, 46 years of age, was called Perla. She should have died in 1944. As fate would have it, she survived. But it was a long and painful delay. Seized by terrible convulsions and suffering from a depression that lasted half a century, she eventually died and, for the first time, her face seemed peaceful.A Polish Jew, Perla was born near Cracovie, in the same place where she was going to suffer hell. Meanwhile, she became French. 31st July 1944, she was deported to Auschwitz. Half of her convoy was gassed upon arrival. Tattooed and shaven, Perla was spared by Mengele. She never wanted to talk about the seven months she spent behind barbed wire. Depression was then her only way of expression. Now that she is buried, her son, who is expecting a child, makes a final tribute to her.

"To the photos of Auschwitz taken by Perla during a visit in 1984, Frederick Brun added a few pictures by Caspar David Friedrich, as if he wanted the german romanticism to overcome nazism and Hölderlin, of Hitler. Because a certain kind of candor adds to the emotion of this first text in which an adult returns to childhood and facing a sea of clouds, kisses his eternal mother." (Jerome Garcin, Le Nouvel Observateur, 22 February 2007)