Book Review: French Seduction by Eunice Lipton — An American's Encounter with France, Her Father, and the Holocaust

Ilsa: What about us?
Rick: We'll always have Paris. We didn't have it, we'd lost it until you came to Casablanca. We got it back last night.

These lines from Michael Curtiz's Casablanca, a powerful and beautiful film about the complexities and contradictions surrounding France's role in World War II, evoke a nostalgic view of the past. In the midst of all the horror and loss, at least we´ll have Paris. Yet, between these lines other questions lurk: Who will always have Paris? And which Paris will they always have?

Eunice Lipton's disturbingly delicious book French Seduction brings such questions to the surface through a story about her own equivocal love affair with France. With a meditation on seduction, betrayal, and loss, Lipton takes the reader on an aesthetic and emotional odyssey in a book that is part memoir, part travelogue, part art history, and part ethnography. Descending into the caverns of memory, Lipton explores the desires, tactile pleasures, and rich sensualities that make her love of places and people and things at once compelling and frightening.

“Darling go to Paris. You'll be happy there, you'll see,” her father says, setting young Eunice's fantasy in motion. Already smitten with her father, an opinionated, arrogant man given to unpredictable rages, whose own fantasies about Paris began at fifteen when he left Riga, Latvia for America a decade before other Eastern European Jews disappeared into what Hannah Arendt once called “holes of oblivion” — the concentration camps of the Holocaust's Final Solution — Lipton takes up his suggestion. “My Dad loved conversation and nice clothes and Paris, and I loved him. So when I am nineteen, I save my money and board a student ship to France.” And so begins a journey of many decades, a ronda of an affair with France that circles and repeats and descends and circles again until, almost from exhaustion, it reaches a moment of bittersweet reconciliation.

She puts Paris in her mouth with the first flaky croissant she consumes “in a room near the Boulevard St. Michel” and devours Paris with her eyes, gazing with forbidden pleasure at the stained glass windows of Notre Dame. With each bite and sly look she begins to possess something longed for, without quite knowing yet what to call it. “My father hates churches. `Anti-Semitism,’ he spits out. But Notre Dame is one of the great sights of Paris. I can't not go in... France, as something of my very own, begins in the sweet beauty of this church.”

Article Author: Kathy Jones

Kathleen B. Jones is a writer and former professor of women’s studies at San Diego State University, where she taught for nearly a quarter century. In addition to four scholarly books on feminist politics, she published one memoir, Living Between Danger …

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