Marcel Proust’s Jewish Point of View

Filling seven volumes, the French novelist Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is widely considered one of the great masterpieces of the 20th century. Several of the work’s characters, including one of the most important, Charles Swann, are Jews, and Proust himself was the baptized son of a Catholic father and Jewish mother. According to one of his biographers, notes Joseph Epstein, he “never thought himself a Jew, though he did not protest being called one—and yet this did not, of course, stop others from considering him a perfect example of the Jews of that day.”