Jonathan Littell

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Jonathan Littell
Jonathan Littell in 2007
Born	October 10, 1967 (1967-10-10) (age 40) New York City, New York, U.S.
Occupation	Novelist

Jonathan Littell (born 10 October 1967 in New York) is an American-French writer who now lives in Barcelona.^[1] His first novel written in French, Les Bienveillantes (2006), won two major French awards.

1 Works
2 Biography
3 On Israel
4 Bibliography
5 Awards
6 References

[edit] Works

Littell's novel Les Bienveillantes ('"The Kindly Ones'") ("Die Wohlgesinnten") was written in French and was published in France in 2006. The novel is the story of World War II and the Eastern Front, through the fictional memories of an articulate SS Obersturmbannführer named Maximilien Aue.^[2] The English translation will be published by HarperCollins in 2008.

Littell said he was inspired to write the novel after seeing a photograph of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, a Soviet partisan executed by the Nazis. He traces the original inspiration for the book from seeing Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah, an acclaimed documentary about the Holocaust, in 1989. He began research for the book in 2002 and wrote the first draft by hand in 112 days. Littell claims that he undertook the creation of his main character, Aue, by imagining what he himself would have done had he been born in pre-war Germany and had become a Nazi. ^[3]

Les Bienveillantes won the 2006 Prix Goncourt and the grand prix du roman of the Académie française and is a contender for several other French literary prizes. Reviews in France were generally good. The book sold 280,000 copies in its first six weeks.^[4]

Littell's only previously published book, the cyberpunk novel Bad Voltage (1989), tells the story of Lynx, a "half-breed" who lives in a futuristic Paris. Many scenes in the novel take place in the Paris Catacombs. Littell has also published a detailed intelligence report about the security organs of the Russian Federation.

[edit] Biography

Littell is the son of author Robert Littell. While his grandparents were Jews who emigrated from Poland to the United States at the end of the 19th century, Littell does not define himself as a Jew "at all", and is quoted as saying, "for me Judaism is more [of] a historical background." ^[5] He attended Yale University and graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1989.^[6]

Littell arrived in France at age three, then completed part of his education in his native country from age 13 to 16, before returning to France to achieve his baccalauréat. He returned again to the United States for college. From 1994 to 2001, he worked for the international humanitarian organization Action Against Hunger. He headed the agency’s mission in Chechnya. In January 2001 he was victim of an ambush there, during which he was slightly wounded and Kenny Gluck from Médecins Sans Frontières was kidnapped.^[7]

Littell obtained French citizenship (being able to keep the US one) in March 2007 after French officials made use of a clause stating that any French speaker whose "meritorious actions contribute to the glory of France" are allowed to become citizens, despite not fulfilling the requirement that he live in France for more than 6 months out of the year.^[8]

[edit] On Israel

In a May 2008 interview with Haaretz, Littell accused Israel of using the Holocaust for political gain and likened Israel's behavior in the occupied territories to that of the Nazis prior to World War II: "If the [Israeli] government would let the soldiers do worse things, they would. Everyone says, 'Look how the Germans dealt with the Jews even before the Holocaust: cutting the beards, humiliating them in public, forcing them to clean the street.' That kind of stuff happens in the territories every day. Every goddamn day." However, he also said that "[w]e really cannot compare the two" and did not specify in what ways he feels the Israeli government uses the Holocaust for political gain. Littell speaks neither Hebrew nor Arabic and once visited Israel at the age of 11. ^[9]