François Proulx, author of Victims of the Book: Reading and Masculinity in Fin-de-Siècle France:
Compagnon, a world-renowned Proust scholar for the past four decades, reveals the history of the maternal side of the novelist’s family and explains how Proust was read and appropriated by Jewish critics after his death in France and elsewhere. The book unfurls like an investigation and is a highly enjoyable read.

Michael Wood, professor emeritus of English, Princeton University:
In this delicate, detailed account of certain readings of Proust, Compagnon evokes a double destiny: that of Proust as a Jewish writer and that of France as a country where Zionism and assimilation clash and where antisemitism seems to fade only to rise again with a vengeance. The story, which takes us from the 1920s to World War II, is fascinating, troubling and haunted by a discreet, difficult hope of understanding. A masterpiece of historical re-creation.