The plausible minimalist view of Proust’s Jewishness is that, attenuated as it was, it predisposed him to perceive more sharply than he might otherwise have done the hypocrisy and the hidden wellsprings of hostility toward Jews that were exposed in the fierce debates over Captain Dreyfus’s alleged treason.
In The New Republic (linked by way of Powell’s Books because the original article is only for subscribers), Robert Alter reviews Evelyne Bloch-Dano’s Madame Proust.
