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WORK TITLE: Exile, Writer, Soldier, Spy
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Williamstown
STATE: MA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
Phone: 413-597-2233
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2006048957
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2006048957
HEADING: Fox, Soledad
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010 __ |a n 2006048957 |z no2009135199
040 __ |a DLC |b eng |e rda |c DLC |d DLC
100 1_ |a Fox, Soledad
400 1_ |w nne |a Fox Maura, Soledad
400 1_ |a Maura, Soledad Fox
670 __ |a Fox, Soledad. Constancia de la Mora in war and exile, 2007: |b ECIP t.p. (Soledad Fox)
670 __ |a Constancia de la Mora, 2008 : |b t.p. (Soledad Fox Maura)
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PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:City University of New York, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Williams College, professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature. Worked formerly as a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Soledad Fox Maura is a writer and professor. She received her Ph.D. in comparative literature from the City University of New York and is a former Fulbright Senior Research Scholar. She has written widely on Spanish culture and history and the Spanish Civil War. She teaches Spanish and comparative literature at Williams College.
Exile, Writer, Soldier, Spy: Jorge Semprun examines the life and legacy of Jorge Semprun, one of Spain’s most celebrated intellectuals and patriots. Maura has taught about Semprun’s life for over fifteen years, and is even a distant relative of the man. Exile, Writer, Soldier, Spy is the first English-language biography of the impressive figure. Semprun is a difficult individual to put in a box, as he accomplished much throughout his life. He is famous for being a Spanish Republican, a Resistance fighter in occupied France, a Buchenwald survivor, a Communist undercover spy in Spain while it was under Franco’s rule, an author, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter, and a Spanish culture minister.
Semprun was born into the lineage of Antonio Maura, his maternal grandfather. Antonio Maura was a five-time Spanish prime minister, known for instituting political reforms that helped transform the country into a constitutional monarchy. As such, Semprun was raised in an aristocratic household with privilege and fortune. This changed when Semprun’s mother died when the boy was nine-years-old, effectively cutting off ties from his maternal side of the family. Another major change occurred in 1939, with the rise of Francisco Franco, the leader of the nationalist movement in Spain. After Franco won the Spanish Civil War in 1939, Semprun’s family was driven into exile. Semprun, his diplomat father, and his father’s authoritarian new wife fled to France. Although they experienced a more frugal standard of living than they had enjoyed in Spain, Semprun was still able to attend an elite high school in Paris. There he learned to speak and write in French, the language in which he would ultimately write most of his books. In 1940, while Semprun was in school studying for the baccalauréat, the French qualifying exam taken after high school, Paris was invaded by the Nazis.
Semprun decided to join the underground French resistance against the Nazis, known as Jean-Marie Action. His job was to secretly collect weapons that had been dropped by parachute at night. Semprun was active in the resistance until 1943, when he was caught by the Gestapo. He was then sent to Buchenwald, a concentration camp near Weimar Germany. He remained in the concentration camp until the end of the war. This period of time was very influential on Semprun, and was the inspiration for much of his later literature.
Semprun’s first book, The Long Voyage, published eighteen years after he left Buchenwald, described a grim picture of the concentration camp. While some readers of the book admire Semprun’s realistic depiction of the horrific camp, Maura believes that the author’s work is mostly fictitious. She notes that Semprun himself stated that horror is more palpable when delivered as fiction, and she suggests that Semprun followed his own advice in writing the book. Semprun rose to fame from the popularity of his literary works. Later in his life, he remained in the public eye when he returned to Spain as Minister of Culture for the new Socialist Party.
A contributor to Publishers Weekly wrote: “Spanish history and literature specialists may find her research into Semprun’s life a useful addition to previous scholarship.” Colin Harrington in Berkshire Eagle Online described the book as “a complete and celebratory tribute to one of Spain’s most important intellectuals and patriots,” adding, “Maura’s examination of [Semprun’s] life is reverent, as well as honest, in revealing the many-sided aspects of a man.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly May 14, 2018, review of Exile, Writer, Soldier, Spy: Jorge Semprun, p. 47.
ONLINE
Berkshire Eagle Online, https://www.berkshireeagle.com/ (September 8, 2018), Colin Harrington, review of Exile, Writer, Soldier, Spy.
Wall Street Journal Online, https://www.wsj.com/ (June 29, 2018), Tobias Grey, review of Exile, Writer, Soldier, Spy.
Soledad Fox Maura is a Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Williams College. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature from the City University of New York, is a former Fulbright Senior Research Scholar, and has published two books and many articles on Spanish culture and history, and the Spanish Civil War.
Exile, Writer, Soldier, Spy: Jorge
Semprun
Publishers Weekly.
265.20 (May 14, 2018): p47+.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Exile, Writer, Soldier, Spy: Jorge Semprun
Soledad Fox Maura. Arcade, $25.99 (328p) ISBN 978-1-62872-917-7
At first glance, all the elements seem to be in place for Maura, a professor of Spanish and comparative
literature, to write a fascinating biography--cum--real life spy thriller about French Resistance fighter turned
writer and politician Jorge Semprun. Born in 1922 into an influential Madrid family that fled to France
during the Spanish Civil War, Semprun joined the Resistance as a student during WWII, and was arrested
by the Gestapo and sent to Buchenwald. Following the war, he returned to Spain as an undercover
Communist Party operative, and then escaped back to France, becoming a literary celebrity with his novels
(most famously, The Last Voyage) and screenplays (earning Oscar nominations for La Guerre Est Finie and
Z). In 1988, he became a minister in Spain's newly democratic government, and died in 2011 a respected
public intellectual. Yet, in Maura's pedestrian, if serviceable, retelling of this colorful life, all the colors are
muted. She asks many questions about the elusive, self-mythologizing Semprun, including about
inaccuracies in his account of Buchenwald, but answers few of them convincingly. Her reliance on large
block quotes does not help the book's lack of momentum. Nor does her plodding style propel it into the
realm of general interest, although Spanish history and literature specialists may find her research into
Semprun's life a useful addition to previous scholarship. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Exile, Writer, Soldier, Spy: Jorge Semprun." Publishers Weekly, 14 May 2018, p. 47+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A539387449/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=efa95e89.
Accessed 29 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A539387449
Newsletters
Book Review: Williams prof's biography is high adventure at its true-life best
Posted Saturday, September 8, 2018 3:27 pm
Read it
"Exile, Writer, Soldier, Spy: Jorge Semprun"
By Soledad Fox Maura
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
270 Pages
By Colin Harrington , Eagle correspondent
In "Exile, Writer, Soldier, Spy, a biography of the storied life of Jorge Semprun," by Soledad Fox Maura, professor of Spanish and comparative literature at Williams College, we have a complete and celebratory tribute to one of Spain's most important intellectuals and patriots. Semprun's extraordinary life in war, literature, political intrigue and film is a gripping true-life tale of survival, espionage, glamor and fame.
Semprun, born into the aristocratic family of Prime Minister Antonio Maura, was active in the French Resistance after Francisco Franco won the Spanish Civil War in 1939 and his family was driven into exile. He was arrested and sent to Buchenwald by the Nazis, but afterward he was a legendary spy for the Partido Comunista Espanol (PCE), the Communist Party of Spain. He made his mark in the world of literature and film, and finally, toward the end of his life, returned to Spain as Minister of Culture for the new Socialist Party in Spain.
This biography is expertly written in a detailed flowing part-by-part telling of Semprun's life as it happened with many references and excerpts from those who knew and worked with him and were deeply affected by him. There are also the carefully researched intimate facts of his life that read much like a thriller espionage novel as his life was nothing short of heroic in its intensity, fateful encounters and circumstances. His clandestine life of danger as a glamorous secret agent, his presence as an international literary and film sensation, and perhaps most importantly, the impact of his writing on the political world of modern Spain is high adventure at its true-life best. Maura's examination of his life is reverent, as well as honest, in revealing the many-sided aspects of a man, who because of circumstance and a strong devotion to his native Spain, lived several different lives, constantly reinventing who he must be.
Semprun's first book, "The Long Voyage" (1963) was a novel about what it was like to be a deportee and it won the prestigious Prix Formentor prize. His many novels, plays and screenplays went on to win other illustrious literary prizes. In 1966, Semprun met French filmmaker Alain Resnais who asked him to write a screenplay for his autobiographical novel, "Las Guerre est finie." Sempr n's close friend, actor Yves Montand, played Sempr n's fictional alter ego in the story, Diego. By 44-years-old, Sempr n had become a prize-winning novelist and screenwriter. His screenplay for "Las Guerre est finie," was nominated for an Academy Award and his very next screenplay in 1970 for the film, "Z," co-written and directed by Constantin Costa-Gavras, was also nominated for an Academy Award. In 1972, Semprun directed his own film, Le deux memoires, a "portrait of Spaniards from across the political spectrum and their views on the Spanish Civil war," introducing an important commentary on Franco's decline. Semprun's writing and films are a singular and revelatory history of the complicated political and cultural phenomenon of modern Spain under the Franco regime and after his dictatorship. This biography by Maura is powerful in bringing to life every aspect of this important man's complicated, enigmatic, but heroic adventures that have shaped the way we know Spain and 20th-century Europe.
Colin Harrington is the events manager at The Bookstore & Get Lit Wine Bar in Lenox. He welcomes reader comments at charrington686@gmail.com.
‘Exile, Writer, Soldier, Spy’ Review: A Man of Many Lives
As a subject for biography, Spanish writer Jorge Semprún is as hard to pin down as the Scarlet Pimpernel.
Jorge Semprún in 1998.
Jorge Semprún in 1998. PHOTO: RAPHAEL GAILLARDE/GAMMA-RAPHO VIA GETTY IMAGES
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By Tobias Grey
June 29, 2018 4:20 p.m. ET
As a subject for biography, Jorge Semprún is as hard to pin down as the Scarlet Pimpernel. He was a man of many facets: a Spanish Republican, a Resistance fighter in occupied France, a Buchenwald survivor, a Communist undercover agent in Franco-era Spain, a garlanded author, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter (“The War Is Over” and “Z”) and a Spanish culture minister. One can only sympathize with author Soledad Fox Maura for wondering whether she was going to “spend the rest of [her] life writing this book.”
Ms. Fox Maura, a professor of Spanish and literature at Williams College, has been teaching Semprún’s work for over 15 years. She is distantly related to her subject, who died in 2011, age 87. It is debatable whether this first English-language biography, which grapples dauntlessly with Semprún’s “poetic license” as a memoiristic writer, will awaken American interest in an author whose fame was, and still is, far greater in Europe.
“What was exceptional about Semprún’s life is not that it coincided with so many of the historical convulsions that defined his era,” writes Ms. Fox Maura, “but that he involved himself so assiduously in all of them.” To begin with, Semprún grew up in the lap of Spanish luxury. His maternal grandfather, Antonio Maura (1853- 1925), was a five-time Spanish prime minister whose political reforms helped to entrench the country’s constitutional monarchy.
Semprún’s privileged childhood was turned upside-down at age 9, when his mother died, and again four years later, when the Spanish Civil War erupted. Like many Spanish Republicans opposed to Franco, Semprún’s diplomat father and his strictly authoritarian new wife gathered their family and fled to France. The hand-to-mouth life they led there did not preclude Semprún’s attending one of Paris’s elite high schools. It was at the lycée that he mastered French, the language in which he would write most of his books.
EXILE, WRITER, SOLDIER, SPY
By Soledad Fox Maura
Arcade, 299 pages, $25.99
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In 1940, while Semprún was studying for the baccalauréat, the Germans occupied Paris. This led him to join the communist French Resistance group Jean-Marie Action, for which he collected arms dropped by parachute at night. According to Semprún’s later boss Felipe González, who was Spain’s longest-serving prime minister (from 1982 to 1996): “The sole reason” that Semprún joined the Communist Party was because it was “the most committed group willing to fight in the Resistance movement.”
Semprún’s work for the Resistance ended when he was arrested by the Gestapo in October 1943. His subsequent deportation to Buchenwald, where he remained until its liberation at the end of the war, became the defining event of his life and the inspiration for much of his work. It is here that Ms. Fox Maura’s sleuthing really comes into its own. Many who have read Semprún’s Buchenwald books, including “The Long Voyage” (1963), “What a Beautiful Sunday!” (1980) and the best-selling “Literature or Life” (1994), will have wondered whether these are works of testimony or if they contain elements of fiction.
From her years of research, Ms. Fox Maura is convinced of the latter: “Semprún has been misclassified as a testimonial author, when what he in fact writes is a sophisticated autobiographical fiction most akin to the picaresque.” It is not as though Semprún made a secret of his technique. He himself said that “the only way to make horror palpable is to construct a fictional body of work.” But what he does not provide his readers with is any kind of road map demarking where testimony ends and fiction begins.
Semprún’s first book, “The Long Voyage,” which was published 18 years after his liberation from Buchenwald, paints a very muddy picture. Ms. Fox Maura calls Semprún out here for “co-opt[ing] the most well-known representations of the Holocaust.” For a start he describes Buchenwald as a “death camp,” which it patently was not. Despite thousands of people dying there, no gas chambers were ever built on the site. Semprún also writes lyrically about the significance of the sign above the Buchenwald entrance gates. The only problem: The sign he describes, with the motto “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Sets You Free), was used at Auschwitz and elsewhere but not at Buchenwald.
In one of the novel’s most moving scenes, Semprún, who was not Jewish, recalls a Jew singing the Kaddish in Yiddish. Ms. Fox Maura notes that this was yet another example of “poetic license,” as the Kaddish was habitually recited in Aramaic. Far more damning was Semprún’s depiction of Ilse Koch, the sadistic wife of Buchenwald’s commandant Karl-Otto Koch, whom he luridly imagines collecting the tattooed skins of inked inmates to cover the lampshades of her living room. Not only was Ilse Koch gone by the time Semprún arrived in Buchenwald, but the scene is pure kitsch.
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None of this escaped the attention of the Hungarian Nobel laureate Imre Kertész, a fellow Holocaust survivor who criticized Semprún for choosing “the wrong technique, narrating only the most spectacular of events and mangling temporality in the process.” While there is no doubt that Semprún was a deeply cultivated writer, one has to wonder at his motivations.
His champions celebrate him for having kept the flame of Holocaust memory alive in both his literature and his numerous public pronouncements. But there is something jarring about how Semprún frames himself in his work. “His camp narratives, in general, avoid any kind of self-portrayal as a victim,” Ms. Fox Maura writes. “On the contrary, he retains an unusually healthy sense of vanity, humor, irony, and a kind of literary showmanship that other survivors have found disquieting.” What, she asks, was this seducer’s “personal relationships to trauma, memory, and forgetting?” The mystery remains.
—Mr. Grey is a writer and critic living in Paris.