I have been thinking about Marcel Proust and the Jews. Several weeks ago, in the doldrums of the second winter of my retirement, the memory of a friend's question about my plans to keep myself occupied, a question perhaps posed half-facetiously considering the cliché it contained—did I have a plan, such as reading Proust?—came to mind and suddenly struck me as the kind of plan for which winters in retirement are most suitable, and it inspired me to plot my mental escape from that dark and unusually damp season into Belle Epoque France (roughly the period between the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914), 4,000-plus pages of it, rendered in Marcel Proust's prose, which very often consists of sentences packed with similes and digressions within digressions, sentences typically running longer than even this one. So here I am, roughly midway through the seven-volume novel whose title is now translated as In Search of Lost Time (as of this writing I am in volume four, Sodom and Gomorrah), having prolonged the experience by reading books about Proust while advancing through his magnum opus.
The narrator of Lost Time is a writer, also named Marcel, whose author makes some critical distinctions between his fictional protagonist and himself. Although Proust was baptized, his mother was Jewish, born into the Weil family of bankers; the Marcel of the novels has no Jewish parent. Proust was gay (to use his preferred word, he was "an invert"); Marcel seems to be one of the few major characters in the novel who is not. Like the real-life Proust, Marcel the fictional adolescent and young adult is a social climber of Himalayan ambition. Having wormed his way into the salons, dinners and galas of the titled aristocracy of Paris, he makes the disappointing observation that, for all their beauty and pedigree, they are a dim lot and narrow-minded to boot.
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