Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen (52 page)

Readers who want true biography can turn to either of the standard English texts: George D. Painter’s
Marcel Proust
(Chatto and Windus, 1959, 1965, 1989) and Ronald Hayman’s
Proust: A Biography
(HarperCollins, 1990.) Also, Jean-Yves Tadié’s exhaustive
Marcel Proust: A Life
is now available in English, translated by Euan Cameron (Penguin 2000.) The English translation of Proust’s novel by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin with further revisions by D. J. Enright is published by Random House/Chatto and Windus (1981, 1992) and now appears under the title
In Search of Lost Time
.

In her diary entry for June 6, 1905, Mme Proust is reading from her son’s actual introduction to his translation of
The Bible of Amiens
. The English translation of that
introduction appears in
On Reading Ruskin: Prefaces to
La Bible d’Amiens
and
Sésame et les Lys
with Selections from the Notes to the Translated Texts
by Jean Autret, William Burford, and Phillip J. Wolfe and is quoted with permission from the Yale University Press.

The rest of this novel is pure fiction, and often makes free with historic and geographic fact. In describing the Marcel Proust archive in France’s Bibliothèque Nationale, I have simplified the holdings and the cataloguing system, moved the microfilm out of the manuscript room, given the readers fictional white gloves, and turned perfectly helpful librarians into impediments. Meanwhile, there are no plans to move the manuscript collection to the new Bibliothèque François Mitterrand. The remains of the transit camp at Drancy, the Museum of Jewish Art and History in the Marais, and the church of Saint-Roch are largely as I describe them, although I have relocated the confessional booths of the latter just as I have moved the Rue de Musset more than a kilometre north of its actual location in the Sixteenth. The Proust family is buried in Père Lachaise but the old Jewish section is at the opposite end of the cemetery from those graves, while Henri Bergson is buried elsewhere.

In Canada, both Notre-Dame-des-Douleurs and the Don Hospital are fabrications, although the latter does share its location and its history as an isolation cottage with Toronto’s Riverdale Hospital. The Workers’ Benevolent Association is also an invention based on the sick-benefit societies that did exist in Toronto before the war. It was the real Jewish Immigrant Aid Society that helped the few who did make it to Canada, but Sarah Bensimon would indeed have been unusually lucky to
reach Toronto: Canada accepted less than five thousand Jewish refugees between 1933 and 1945. Readers who want to know more about that sad historical reality can turn to
None is Too Many
, by Irving Abella and Harold Troper (Lester and Orpen Dennys, 1982).

Many individuals have helped me in the preparation of this novel by providing historical information or literary advice. Thanks to Katherine Ashenburg, Kateri Lanthier, and Mary Taylor for their thoughts on publishing; Sabrina Mathews reflected on bilingualism and remembered French nursery rhymes while Marie Boti described her job as a conference interpreter; Bill Seidelman and Edward Shorter spoke with me about medical education and research in Toronto; Anthony R. Pugh discussed Proust’s manuscripts, and Raymond Corley, retired superintendent of vehicle development with the Toronto Transit Commission, explained to me how you build a subway. Thanks also to J. H. Taylor, Doreen Sears, and Henry Sears for many historical titbits, to the Toronto Public Libraries, where I did much of my research, and to the Toronto Arts Council, which provided me with a writer’s grant.

I am specially grateful to Louis D. Levine who read sections of the manuscript with an eye on Jewish custom and Rena Isenberg who did not only that but also lent me her family wedding videos. My agent, Dean Cooke, provided crucial advice about the structure and pace of the novel and showed unwavering faith that it would find an audience. My ever-enthusiastic and always discerning editor, Martha Kanya-Forstner, believed in the characters and understood their stories, working tirelessly to ensure that their creator did not stand in their way. Always alert to error or inconsistency, copy editor Bernice Eisenstein ruled on questions of
style in English, French, and Yiddish, while debating with me fiction’s obligations to history.

Finally, I owe my largest debt to my first three readers, Andrew Taylor, Teresa Mazzitelli, and Joel Sears, whose criticism and encouragement have propelled me forward.

KATE TAYLOR
is a Toronto writer and cultural journalist, born in France and raised in Ottawa. Until 2003, she served as theatre critic at
The Globe and Mail
, winning two Nathan Cohen Awards for her reviews, and now writes an arts column for that paper.