A Film-star’s origins

Press, 14 March 1987, Page 23

A Film-star’s origins

Adieu Volodia. By Simone Signoret. Treneleted from French by Stanley Hochman. Macmillan, 1986. 406 pp. $39.95. The author may be remembered for her early films as playing the part of a sophisticated, chic seductress, and her final role in 1977 as "Madam Rosa,” a grotesquely swollen old woman caring for homeless children. This is her only novel, published towards the end of her life, and is an account of a group of Polish and Russian Jewish immigrants to Paris and their joys and tragedies, from the end of the First World War to the completion of the Second.

The original young men and women, who escaped persecution in the Ukraine and Poland, remember their persecutors in hushed tones and greet

with awe their own children qualifying with bachelors’ degrees from the Paris University. They wanted children who would never be afraid, as they had constantly been, but the march of events overcomes the families, with the occupation of France designating them once more as Jews and not French citizens. The book has characters tumbling over each other and difficult to remember in their different decades, with numerous interesting little incomplete thumbnail sketches of eccentricity, burning and dimming loves, and acts of heroism. The whole is, however, so tangled as to suggest an old woman remembering episodes from her past and now unable to organise them into a comprehensible segment of historical development.— Ralf Unger.