In her new novel, Olivia Elkaim sets out in search of Cyrla Szulewicz, known as “Cécile,” Georges Perec’s mother.
Stock, 2026. In her new novel, Olivia Elkaim sets out in search of Cyrla Szulewicz, known as “Cécile,” Georges Perec’s mother. In November 1941, in Paris, she entrusts her 5-year-old son to the Croix-Rouge before being deported two years later to Auschwitz, from which she will never return. His mother’s disappearance will secretly permeate Perec’s entire body of work. With no archives to draw on, the author, guided by her own ghosts, searches for Cécile in her son’s books, brings her back to life in imagined scenes, and questions the writer’s last surviving friends. With the author in attendance. In conversation with Marie ‑ Madeleine Rigopoulos, journalist. Reading by Clément Bresson, actor and company member of the Comédie‑Française. Book
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Source: paris.fr — photo: Olivia Elkaim ©Philippe Matsas