Dora Bruder (Folio (Gallimard)) (French Edition)

In December 1941, a personal ad was placed in the Paris Soir newspaper by the parents of a 15-year-old Jewish girl named Dora Bruder, who had run away from her convent school just before New Year's Eve. The ad described Dora as being 15 years old, five feet tall, with a round face, gray-brown eyes, and wearing a gray sportscoat, burgundy pullover, navy blue hat and skirt, and brown athletic shoes. It requested that any information about Dora be sent to her parents at their address on Boulevard Ornano in Paris.

In 1988, the author Patrick Modiano stumbled across this ad while reading between the stock market report and a story about a school visit to Maréchal Pétain. This ad set Modiano on a quest to find out everything he could about Dora Bruder and why she had run away from the Catholic boarding school that had been hiding her. Aside from the ad, Modiano found only one other official mention of Dora's name: on a list of Jews deported from Paris to Auschwitz in September 1942.

With these meager clues, Modiano continued to dig for fragments from Dora's past. What little he found in official records or through remaining family members, he transforms into a meditation on the immense losses of the period - lost people, lost stories, and lost history. As he tries to find connections to Dora, Modiano delivers a moving account of the ten-year investigation that took him back to the sights and sounds of Paris under the Occupation and the paranoia of the Pétain regime.

In his efforts to exhume Dora from the past, Modiano realizes that he must come to terms with the specters of his own troubled adolescence. The result is a montage of creative and historical material that unfolds as a moving rumination on loss.

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