My cousin’s book was just published by Indiana University Press: Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France: Rebuilding Family and Nation.

The book description:

“At the end of World War II, French Jews faced a devastating demographic reality: thousands of orphaned children, large numbers of single-parent households, and families in emotional and financial distress. Daniella Doron suggests that after years of occupation and collaboration, French Jews and non-Jews held contrary opinions about the future of the nation and the institution of the family. At the center of the disagreement was what was to become of the children. Doron traces emerging notions about the postwar family and its role in strengthening Jewish ethnicity and French republicanism in the shadow of Vichy and the Holocaust.”

Cover of Daniella Doron’s new book Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France

The author Daniella Doron and I share great-grandparents; her father’s mother was the sister of my mother’s mother. We started corresponding after I discovered her parents live twenty miles from where I grew up. It’s interesting how our scholarly interests have converged even though our family connection was broken until just a couple of years ago.