Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Modiano’s terse memoir contains a kind of shadow book. Behind the story of how he became a writer, beneath the sad, and often bitter recollections of his childhood, are traces of the other stories he has felt compelled to write: stories in which he seems to imagine himself alive during the Occupation, implicated in his father’s shady black market dealings, his mother’s wartime liaisons with influential people � Belgian collaborators, German officers � whom she cultivated in the hopes of advancing her acting career.

It’s all here, in shorthand, if you know your history.

Genviève Vaudoyer and her father, Jean-Louis Vaudoyer, were the first French bourgeois family to invite my mother to their home. Genviève Vaudoyer introduced my mother to Arletty, who also lived on the Quai de Conti in the building next door to number 15. Arletty took my mother under her wing.

Arletty, if you didn’t know, was a renowned French actress. She was luminous in Marcel Carnés (1945), considered by many critics the best French film of the twentieth century. After the war she was tried for treason, owing to her romance with a German Luftwaffe officer. (“My heart is French but my ass is international,� she said in her defense.)

The world in which Modiano’s father circulated, he notes a few pages later, included

the actress Dita Parlo, who had starred in L’Atlante, and her lover Dr. Fuchs, one of the directors of the so-called Otto Bureau, the most important of the black market “purchasing services,� located at 6 Rue Adolphe-Yvon in the 16th arrondissement.

Just to expand a bit, the Otto Bureau specialized in buying up from black market dealers the property of Jews who had been deported and selling it at a profit in Germany. One of the largest buyers was the Abwehr (German Intelligence) and at the height of the Occupation, the Otto Bureau employed some 400 people.

It goes without saying that Modiano’s sympathies reside not with his father’s associates, “people on whom you can’t dwell at length. Shady travelers at best,� as he puts it, “passing through a train station concourse without my ever knowing their final destination, supposing they even had one,� but with the Jews and Résistants rounded up and murdered by the Nazis. Still, he can’t resist sharing a few details, the interesting coincidence of his father’s Ford, for example,

which he’d stashed in a garage in Neuilly. [It] had been commandeered in June by the Vichy militia, the Milice, and it was in that Ford, its bullet-riddled body impounded as evidence by the investigating detectives, that Georges Mandel had been assassinated.

Called “the first resister� by Winston Churchill, who would have preferred him to Charles de Gaulle as the leader of the Free French, Mandel had chosen to continue the fight against the Germans from North Africa (as opposed to London) after the Fall of France. Arrested with several others in Morocco in 1941, he was deported to a German concentration camp and subsequently returned to Paris as a hostage. The Milice got hold of him during a transfer from one prison to another and executed him in the Forest of Fontainebleau in 1944.

Modiano aims for a dispassionate tone in this short narrative, but he cannot keep the disdain from his voice. Here’s how he introduces his mother:

She was a pretty girl with an arid heart. Her fiancé had given her a chow-chow, but she didn’t take care of it and left it with various people, as she would later do with me. The chow-chow killed itself by leaping from a window. The dog appears in two or three photos, and I have to admit that he touches me deeply and that I feel a great kinship with him.

His father hung out on the Boulevard Saint Michel in the Latin Quarter, but he was not a student. “His Latin Quarter was the one of Violette Nozière. He must have run across her many times on the boulevard.� Violette Nozière was a dissolute schoolgirl in the 1930s who supported herself and her ne’er do well boyfriend through prostitution and petty thefts. Her parents caught on, so she poisoned them, but somehow managed to avoid the guillotine and ultimately married and raised a family. Claude Chabrol made a film about her, Violette, starring Isabelle Huppert.

If you’re familiar with Modiano’s work, you’ll find the source of some of his recurring motifs in Pedigree. The ubiquitous Black Maria. A pastel-colored bumper car (“Street carnivals: the one in Versailles with bumper cars painted mauve, yellow, green, navy blue, pink . . .�), one of the last happy times he shared with his younger brother, who died when Modiano was twelve.

Writing enabled him to surmount his family history, the taint of his parents� associations. On the afternoon in June when he learned, at age twenty-one, that they’d accepted his first book, he announces on the last page,

I felt unburdened for the first time in my life. The threat that had weighed on me for so many years, kept me on edge, had dissolved in the Paris air I had set sail before the worm-rathe wharf could collapse. It was time.