French Seduction — Eunice Lipton

In this passionate blend of autobiography and cultural history, love and sex and art collide with hatred, withering French xenophobia, and death. How does Paris, with all its faults, remain not only the world's most visited tourist destination, but also the locus of endless sexual fantasy and the very image of the good life for Americans, and for writer and art historian Eunice Lipton? In sensual and intellectually thrilling prose, Lipton explores how her Eastern European father lured her to France across his fantasies, and then how she surrendered to the food, the textures and smells, the art, and the astonishingly maternal French state. But she is also forced to confront the anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus Affair that lay beneath the dazzling light of Impressionism; the racial disdain of France's Roaring Twenties; and the unspeakable poverty of peasant life that paid for the luxury of eighteenth-century Versailles. And how can a Jewish woman forgive France for its betrayal of its Jews to the Nazis? Lipton, one of our most respected cultural historians, deftly dissects her love-hate relationship with France, transporting the Francophile in all of us back to that first love, and then way beyond to something startlingly new.