Truth

by Emile Zola

Overview

In a quiet rural village in late 19th-century France, an eleven-year-old boy is found dead in his room, sexually molested and strangled by an unknown assailant. The shocked townsfolk erupt in outrage: Who could have committed this horrible crime? Rumors immediately begin to fly and suspicions shift from one person to another as ignorant conjecture begins to feed on itself.At first a vagrant is suspected; he could have come in through the open window while passing through the town at night. But in a matter of days another story begins to circulate: the culprit must be Simon, the Jewish schoolmaster, and the murdered boy's uncle and guardian. Did he not, it is rumored, resent the fact that the boy was the product of a mixed Catholic-Jewish marriage and was raised Catholic by his now deceased mother? Despite the total lack of evidence against him, as a Jew in the midst of a predominantly Christian community, Simon is completely vulnerable to these vicious allegations. The web of mendacity that is quickly spun around him is the product of centuries of entrenched anti-Semitism and the long-standing bitter rivalry between the Catholic majority of the town and an emerging secular minority. Through political pressure by influential Catholic clergymen and the manipulation of public opinion, the Church deftly deflects the suspicions of some that the murderer is actually one of the Christian Brothers and succeeds in gaining advantage against the threat of encroaching secularism in the town.Based on his experiences with the infamous Dreyfus case, this powerful last novel by Emile Zola about the scape-goating of a Jewish schoolteacher is a chilling depiction of anti-Semitism fully embedded in European society and an eerie presentiment of the Holocaust that would sweep across the Continent only forty years later. But this is not the whole story, for Zola also brilliantly demonstrates how truth, though suppressed for a generation, slowly but inexorably comes to light through the dedication and perseverance of a few humble defenders, who remain unswerving in their demand for justice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783732617944
Publisher:	Salzwasser-Verlag Gmbh
Publication date:	12/04/2017
Pages:	526
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x 1.17(d)

About the Author

Émile Zola (1840-1902) was a French novelist, journalist, and playwright. Born in Paris to a French mother and Italian father, Zola was raised in Aix-en-Provence. At 18, Zola moved back to Paris, where he befriended Paul Cézanne and began his writing career. During this early period, Zola worked as a clerk for a publisher while writing literary and art reviews as well as political journalism for local newspapers. Following the success of his novel Thérèse Raquin (1867), Zola began a series of twenty novels known as Les Rougon-Macquart, a sprawling collection following the fates of a single family living under the Second Empire of Napoleon III. Zola’s work earned him a reputation as a leading figure in literary naturalism, a style noted for its rejection of Romanticism in favor of detachment, rationalism, and social commentary. Following the infamous Dreyfus affair of 1894, in which a French-Jewish artillery officer was falsely convicted of spying for the German Embassy, Zola wrote a scathing open letter to French President Félix Faure accusing the government and military of antisemitism and obstruction of justice. Having sacrificed his reputation as a writer and intellectual, Zola helped reverse public opinion on the affair, placing pressure on the government that led to Dreyfus’ full exoneration in 1906. Nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901 and 1902, Zola is considered one of the most influential and talented writers in French history.