Le cimetiere juif - lieu absent de l'espace urbain et habitable
The Jewish cemetery - a place absent from urban and habitable space

Summary/Abstract: This paper proposes to examine the spatial representation of the Jewish cemetery in the literary works of the French and Luxembourgish writers Henri Calet and Paul Palgen, who are either unknown or forgotten today. Written during the years of the Occupation or in the immediate post-war period, these texts present the Jewish cemetery as a place of annihilation, outside space and territory. Space is understood here in the Lefebvreian sense, having a social character and being a social product. The collage by the Belgian writer and artist Max Servais, Les Reveries du promeneur solitaire, provides a parallel reading that is divided between text and image and allows the spatial dimension of the Jewish cemetery to be understood in relation to both temporality and memory. The works presented here thus question, through various forms (narrative, poem, collage), this undertaking of plural effacement - of History, but also of men - by modern barbarities. The space of the Jewish cemetery, unveiled here afrom a bird's-eye view or in close-up, is one that can be shaped, and which remains in permanent "production" (a Lefebvrean word) in the present in which it is inscribed, despite the gap it marks with the past to which it simultaneously refers (the Holocaust).

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