Marceline Loridan-Ivens was born in 1928. She has worked as an actress, a screenwriter, and a director. She directed The Birch-Tree Meadow in 2003, starring Anouk Aimée, as well as several documentaries with Joris Ivens.
Sandra Smith is the translator of Suite Française and eleven other novels by Irène Némirovsky, as well as a new translation of Camus's L'Etranger. She has been awarded the French-American Florence Gould Foundation Translation Prize and the PEN Translation Prize. She lives in New York.
Praise for But You Did Not Come Back: Named a Book of the Year by
the Economist
Winner of the National Jewish Book Award (Biography, Autobiography
and Memoir)
Named a Memoir of the Year by the Times (UK) "A profoundly moving
testimony of the challenges of survival, a wake-up call to those
who ignore the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe, and a stunning
tribute to her late father, But You Did Not Come Back is
heartbreaking, important, and unlike anything that has preceded
it."--André Aciman "I read this book in one sitting, it was
unputdownable, an astonishing account of a family caught up in the
Holocaust's turbulent wake, so deeply sad and very, very moving.
Most striking to me was the brutal honesty and clarity of her
relationship with her father who, despite his murder by the Nazis,
is still very much with her more than fifty years later, and the
question, so troubling, as to whether it would have been better if
he had come back instead of her."--Thomas Harding, author of Hanns
and Rudolf "In tight, unsparing prose, [Loridan-Ivens] confronts
the delusions her father held, and the lies she told herself. A
small book with a big voice."--Economist (Books of the Year 2016)
"Profound and moving . . . elegantly rendered into English by
Sandra Smith . . . [This] slim but powerful book is both a vital
account of her survival and a tender reply to her father . . .
Seldom do such short books make so big an impact . . . Her
important and miraculous testimony will endure."--Minneapolis Star
Tribune "Extraordinary, unflinching and deeply moving . . .
[Loridan-Ivens] describes her experiences with a resolute
commitment to detail; there is the brutal, visceral truth . . . and
there are harrowing stories . . . But there is no room for
sentimentality in Loridan-Ivens's honest and self-aware prose: the
facts of her incarceration speak emotively enough . . . Very
occasionally a book comes along that demands to be published, to be
read, to be talked about. A book about pain and suffering, about
cruelty and humanity, about grief and love. But You Did Not Come
Back is an exquisitely written, beautifully translated and
unwaveringly honest testimony; a story we will all do well never to
forget."--Guardian "In this powerful book [Marceline Loridan-Ivens]
tells of her harrowing experiences in the extermination camp, of
her intense desire to go on living and how to bear the pain of
surviving when her father did not."--Daily Express (Best Memoirs of
the Season) "In simple language, without frills or excessive
descriptions, [Loridan-Ivens] brings the atrocities of the
Holocaust to light as lived by a teenage girl."--Key Peninsula News
"Loridan-Ivens brings the clarity of an adolescent's lucid memory
to her writing--subtly translated by Sandra Smith . . . woven into
her story is such a lucid, life-giving spirit infusing the tales of
heroism she casually tells, as well as the guilty secrets she
discloses, that this reader, for one, wants to thank this
courageous, honest woman for her transformative story."--Jewish
Chronicle "Who is a survivor? What does a survivor remember? How
does a survivor continue to struggle throughout his or her life?
Marceline Loridan-Ivens powerfully and honestly answers these
questions in her short but graphic volume of painful remembrance .
. . Marceline presents her struggle to survive in personal,
forthright, and raw prose . . . An important and piercing
first-hand testimony."--Jewish Book Council "A brief, unforgettable
memoir."--Jewish Week "Loridan-Ivens' memoir is an instructive
presentation of camp experience and its aftermath . . . But You Did
Not Come Back . . . pushes our understanding of the war and its
aftermath into new territory."--Canadian Jewish News "[A]
devastating memoir. [Loridan-Ivens] refuses all pity in this slim
but intense testimony . . . Her great achievement is to articulate
the astonishing camaraderie and love among the incarcerated, and
later the attritional shadow of war, as her family, and she
herself, fractures, yet keeps surviving. Profound."--Times (UK)
(Memoirs of the Year) "Despite its gruesome subject matter, the
book has moments of bleak humour and its affirmation of human
tenderness instils a kind of joy in the reader . . . In just 100
pages, Loridan-Ivens goes to the heart of father-daughter
relations; the result is a masterpiece of restraint and luminous
precision . . . Exquisitely translated by Sandra Smith, But You Did
Not Come Back is a human chronicle of rare power."--Financial Times
"[A] searing, profoundly moving memoir . . . Smoothly translated by
Sandra Smith . . . But You Did Not Come Back is a beautiful
testimony to filial love that sounds a powerful, dire alarm. It is
also a reminder that forgetting atrocity isn't an
option."--Christian Science Monitor "Loridan-Ivens writes in a
plain, conversational style . . . that flows as memory does,
observation and recollection in balance. It can be read at a
sitting; and then asks to be read again. For even at this distance,
when we think we know what happened, and what history tells us, the
truth, as seen through Marceline's clear-eyed gaze, astonishes and
horrifies . . . There is kindness, too, and courage in this book:
not least the author's courage in choosing to live."--New Statesman
"[A] deeply moving account . . . The death camps are evoked in
their full horror . . . This is a haunting and beautiful book,
valuable not only for the first-hand experience of the worst
atrocity in living history, but also for its illustration of the
long-term effects of trauma, the persistence of anti-Semitism and
the enduring power of love."--Independent (UK) "The year has barely
started but already one of the most beautiful books of the year has
been published. Short, dense, powerful, in a word: overwhelming,
with a simplicity of expression and a skill for creating an image.
. . . you will read it in one sitting."--Le Parisien "In this
tormented time, this troubled period where the extreme right is
showing its teeth all over Europe, Marceline Loridan-Ivens gives us
a valuable lesson. . . . You read this with tears welling up in
your eyes. . . . I'll say it again: read it. . . . [An] important
book, [one] book you'll never forget."--Challenges Magazine "A
final, poignant address . . . In the pages of this book . . . words
are spoken which have not been spoken before."--Le Monde des Livres
"In literature, every so often, there comes a miracle, a book, a
text, an author, a writing style, a way of recounting something,
refusing any pathos and any exposition, that says things about life
and death. I'm evoking But You Did Not Come Back. . . . [A] brief
and marvelous opus."--Le Magazine Littéraire "Her testimony is of
an extraordinary force . . . The reasons for the wonderful success
of this book in France are many. The book owes its reception in the
first instance to the quality of the story. Marceline
Loridan-Ivens, in spite of the darkness of the events described,
avoids any kind of pathos. In radio and television interviews after
publication, she has shown an extraordinary pugnacity . . . Now
more than ever, it is necessary that we listen to the testimony of
this survivor."--Le Figaro "Film-maker, writer, activist, Marceline
Loridan-Ivens was deported at the age of 15, together with the
father. She survived, but he did not. Seventy years after the
liberation of Auschwitz, she takes up a dialogue with him, in But
You Did Not Come Back . . . You can still very clearly see a little
girl in the rebellious, cheerful, and slightly cloaked face of this
petite woman of eighty-six."--Elle (France) "A precious story,
seventy years after the liberation of Auschwitz. . . .
[Loridan-Ivens] is speaking about the France of today, the country
where [in January, after the Charlie Hebdo attacks] four people
were killed in a grocery store because they were Jews. Her
testimony is perhaps one of the last, and more than ever it
deserves to be read and heard."--Les Inrockuptibles "The words of
Marceline Loridan-Ivens . . . have an exceptional force. You have
to read these words surrounded by a reverence which is appropriate,
but in fact from the very first line, a silence descends, and
nothing matters until you have read the last line, and no one could
forget those words. You might think that after Primo Levi, Robert
Antelme, Claude Lanzmann, there was nothing left to say. But
Marceline Loridan-Ivens proves the opposite. Her book gets its
force from her anger and her pain, which are still completely
intact, even amplified by this 'time that doesn't pass.'"--Le
Journal du Dimanche "A dry, tough, violent book . . . The era of
the first-hand witnesses of victims of this genocide is drawing to
a close and this testimony, which is absolutely singular, will stun
and chill the reader."--Le Banquet des Mots "This book shook
France, and it will shake Germany too . . . A declaration of love
to the father she lost in the camps that will leave no-one unmoved.
Above all, But You Did Not Come Back is the testimony of a
relentless fighter, describing in hard-to-bear detail her survival
of the barbed wire, the railway platforms, the crematoriums, and
also what came after that: the life as someone who survived. The
arc that Marceline Loridan-Ivens traces in her book reaches from
the early postwar period to the Paris of 1968 to post-Charlie-Hebdo
France . . . That her return from Auschwitz did not bring her peace
is the dark core of her account."--Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
(Germany) "Marceline Loridan-Ivens has lived with harrowing
memories of Auschwitz for seven decades. And she insists that the
fight against anti-Semitism is far from over . . . [A] poignant
memoir."--Sunday Times (UK) "Simultaneously cynical and ardent . .
. hypnotic."--Globe and Mail "Is there anything else to say about
the Holocaust that hasn't already been said? The disturbing answer
is yes . . . [A] stark, brief memoir (in a beautiful translation by
Sandra Smith) . . . An incredible indictment of France's complicity
with the Nazis . . . But You Did Not Come Back is as disturbing an
account of what it was like to return from the extermination camps
as anything I have read."--CounterPunch "In contrast to similar
extermination-camp memoirs, which necessarily relate familiar
instances of Nazi brutality and the same strokes of pure luck that
kept a few prisoners form the gas chambers, But You Did Note Come
Back focuses on the affliction of women. The effects of suffering
and depravation were devastating and sometimes permanent . . . It's
also tragically true that anti-Semitism and religious conflict, as
she points out, once again represent major threats to contemporary
France. The book ends with a question as harrowing as it is
fundamental."--Arts Fuse
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