Dora Bruder Read Online Free

Cécile
Bruder in front of what appears to be a suburban house. The
lefthand wall in the foreground is covered in a mass of ivy.
She is sitting on the edge of three concrete steps. She wears
a light summer dress. In the background, the silhouette
of a child with her back to the camera, her arms and legs
bare, wearing either a black cardigan or a bathing suit.
Dora? And behind a wooden fence, the facade of another
house, with a porch and a single upstairs window. Where
could this be?
    An earlier photograph of Dora alone, aged nine or ten.
Caught in a ray of sunshine, entirely surrounded by shadow,
she might be on a rooftop. Dressed in a white blouse and
ankle socks, she stands, hand on hip, her right foot placed on
the concrete rim of what appears to be a large cage or aviary,
although, owing to the shadow, you can’t make out the
animals or birds confined there. These shadows and patches of
sunlight are those of a summer’s day.
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Dora Bruder with her mother
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Dora Bruder with her mother and grandmother

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    O THER SUMMER DAYS WERE SPENT IN CLIGNANCOURT .
Her parents would take Dora to the Cinéma Ornano 43.
It was just across the street. Or did she go on her own? From
a very young age, according to her cousin, she had been
rebellious, independent, with an eye for the boys. The hotel
room was far too cramped for three people.
    As a child, she would have played in the Square
Clignancourt. At times, this part of town seemed like a village. In the
evenings, the neighbors would place their chairs outside and
sit on the sidewalk for a chat. Or take a lemonade together on
the café terrace. Sometimes men who could have been either
real goatherds or else peddlers from the fairs would come by
with a few goats and sell you tall glasses of milk for almost
nothing. The froth gave you a white mustache.
    At the Porte de Clignancourt, the toll house and gate. 1 To
its left, between the flea market and the tall apartment blocks
of the Boulevard Ney, an entire district of shacks,
warehouses, acacias, and low-built houses, since pulled down. This
wasteland had impressed me, aged fourteen. I thought I
recognized it in two or three photographs, taken in winter: a kind
of esplanade, a passing bus in sight. A truck at a standstill,
seemingly forever. Waiting beside an expanse of snow, a
trailer and a black horse. And in the far background, the dim
masses of high buildings.
    I remember experiencing for the first time that sense of
emptiness that comes with the knowledge of what has been
destroyed, razed to the ground. As yet, I was ignorant of the
existence of Dora Bruder. Perhaps—in fact, I’m sure of it—she
explored this zone that, for me, evokes secret lovers’
trysts, pitiful moments of lost happiness. Here, reminders of
the countryside still surfaced in the street names: Allée du
Puits, Allée du Métro, Allée des Peupliers, Impasse des Chiens.
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    1. One of the 18th-c. gates ( barrières ) in the fortifications of Paris; originally
control points for game, later also used for goods subject to excise tax, they were
abolished in the late 1920s.

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    O N 9 MAY 1940, AT THE AGE OF FOURTEEN, DORA BRUDER was enrolled in the boarding school of the
Saint-Coeur-de-Marie, run by the Sisters of the Christian Schools of Divine
Mercy 1 at 60–62 Rue de Picpus in the 12th arrondissement.
    The school register contains the following entry:
Name, last and first: Bruder, Dora
    Date and place of birth: 26 February 1926, Paris 12
    Parents: Ernest and Cécile Bruder née Brudej
    Family status: legitimate
    Date and conditions of admission: 9 May 1940. Full boarder
    Date and reason for departure: 14 December 1941. Pupil
has run away
    What were her parents’ reasons for sending her to this
religious school? No doubt it was difficult living three to a room
in the Boulevard Ornano hotel. I wonder if Ernest and Cécile
Bruder, as ex-Austrians and “nationals of