Marcel Proust’s Unpublished Manuscripts Address Jewish Themes with Surprising Frankness

While the celebrated French novelist Marcel Proust was baptized as an infant and raised a Catholic, his mother was born a Jew, he had much contact with his Jewish relatives, and numerous critics have commented on the Jewish themes and characters in his masterwork, Remembrance of Things Past. But recently published drafts and notes for the novel, long thought to have been lost, show these themes in a different light. Mitchell Abidor points to one especially striking deviation: in the manuscripts, the anonymous narrator of Remembrance of Things Past is “Marcel,” his unnamed mother is “Jeanne” (the name of Proust’s actual mother) rather than simply “mother,” and so forth. And this reveals something deeper: