THE NEW INTERNATIONALS

After World War II, a young French Jewish woman has romantic liaisons with two very different Black men.

Faladé’s second historical novel, after Black Cloud Rising (2022), is set in Paris and its suburbs and revolves around a young woman named Cecile Rosenbaum, whose experiences mirror those of the author’s mother, which he described in the New Yorker in 2022. The book opens with a chapter set in 1943; while the family is completely secular, Cecile’s grandparents and other Jewish neighbors are lost to the purge and she herself is hastily confirmed and enrolled in Catholic school. The second chapter jumps ahead to 1947, when Cecile meets a Senegalese French girl named Minette on the bus to the Communist Youth Conference. Through Minette, Cecile will connect with a young West African man named Sebastien. Both are acutely aware of politics and their relationship is plagued by ideological questions, laid out rather pedantically. “Yes, she was white and he black, her of the colonizers and him the colonized, but what was each one willing to give, and to give up, in order to be together?" As Cecile and Seb struggle to find their way, she meets an African American GI in a jazz club. Mack Gray is from “KC, Baby!” He calls her Baby exclusively rather than her name, speaks in a Southern dialect, and introduces her to soul food, but is also eager to understand her situation and background. He concludes, “She was white and from money, but the money long gone...both of them easy targets as a result, yet neither lying down for nobody—not for nobody.” Though the characters and settings of this novel are well-researched and carefully drawn, the memoir version of this story in the New Yorker is more compelling than the fictionalized one.

Vividly dramatizes issues of race and politics in turbulent post-war Paris.