My Father and I: The Marais and the Queerness of Community

A brilliant, insightful, and moving study.... A compelling combination of personal memoir, urban history, literary analysis, and critical theory.... A detailed, expansive, and ground-breaking book. In his role as one of America's leading French scholars of both Queer and Jewish identities, Caron will undoubtedly be in great demand to offer his further thoughts on these (among other) places where French and American Queers and Jews intersect.

A fascinating and moving study.... Combining biography, memory, history, and theory, Caron offers a stirring meditation on and radical critique of the notion of community.... Undeniably bold.

A sophisticated treatment of the relationship between homosexuality and urban space.

An excellent, touching memoir.... No lover of Paris can fail to be touched by Caron's book. Yet just as importantly, it is a fascinating analysis of community and its affect, an illustration of what it means to belong, and what it means to be separated, to return, or to fail to return.

Caron's insightful book offers a poignant exploration of issues of otherness and belonging.

David Caron is one of those rare intellectuals who manage to enliven debates about subjectivity, sexuality, and temporality. This volume, at once a personal memoir, a paean to the global capital of love, a belated letter to his father, and an essay on grief and the Holocaust, is peppered with witty excogitations about a gay man's life. An easy first read, it enthralls the reader and makes sure they will want to reread it.

David Caron's book is engaging and erudite, intellectually ambitious and historically varied. The author's elegant style and self-deprecatory wit keep us entertained through some pretty heavy subjects.

I loved this book! It made me cry, think, and once I even threw it down saying, 'This is bullshit!'.... It is a brilliant piece of cultural analysis.

In this engaging work, David Caron invites us on a journey that blends personal narrative with academic pursuit.... Caron poses the question of what makes a neighborhood... [and] questions the narrative of progress and authenticity and the limiting powers these discourse have on those who do not fit into nineteenth-century bourgeois norms of development.... Weaving in historical and literary analysis with ethnographic fieldwork, Caron crafts a wonderfully compelling book. Written in an accessible style that does not shy away from dense theoretical discussions, his work speaks to many research fields (film studies, Jewish studies, queer studies, urban studies, etc.).

My Father and I... is a beautifully written, cunningly shaped work.... Caron is cruising, as it were, two different readerships: one of them academic yet not necessarily queer; the other both gay and non-academic. I think, and hope, that he'll reach both.

My Father and I is beautifully written and often quite moving. David Caron's superb book uses the private as a template to analyze the public: his own story intersects with history and the result is a critical tour de force.

David Caron's absorbing book about the historical Parisian coincidence between Jews and queers in the Marais contains a provocative blend of history and theory bound together with autobiography. My Father and I is smart, original and compelling. Anyone interested in queer studies, Jewish studies, or the history of Paris should read this book.

This is an extraordinary achievement and one of the most moving and exciting books I've read in quite some time. David Caron draws on personal, historical, literary, theoretical, geographical, and ethnographic narratives to paint a complex picture of a 'queer community' in twenty-first-century France. Caron skillfully weaves a story about collective identity, loss, and transformation that includes his own life as a queer son, the very different life of his Jewish father, and the multiple narratives in which those two lives are historically inscribed. Caron's book is a paradoxical affirmation of the failed encounter that is community on the model of the 'disaster' that defines the relationship between father and son. In Caron and his father, who always just missed each other in their attempts at connection, we find, if not a model, perhaps an exemplum of a being-together as copains: what Caron calls in the final chapter the 'queerness of group friendship.' The result is a brilliant meditation on the modalities of existence of French communities and, more generally, on what it ultimately means to be in community: to be with other people.