Dora Bruder’s Paris: A Psycho-Geography of Jewish Absence

Dora Bruder is an intensely geographic story, one that follows not a random path nor an entirely unfamiliar one, but one organized by traces in insignificant places that become part of a speculative topography and an emotional geography. Two details of a Paris map, at different scales, of the 12th and 18th arrondissement serve as the paratextual introduction to the English translation of Dora Bruder, presumably providing a frame of reference for English readers who cannot readily provide their own phenomenological experience of standing at the crossroads of Boulevard Ornano and Rue Championnet. Yet they fuel another urge, something we might call “reverse ekphrasis,” a very common impulse to map the places Modiano describes back onto a visual or physical referent. In this visual essay I plot the four axes of place, time, memory and emotion in three-dimensional slices of the maps, a psychogeographic palimpsest in layers of time.