Search -
Education Europeenne (A European Education) (French Edition)
Education Europeenne - A European Education - French Edition Author:Romain Gary French Description: — "L'Education Européenne" est un conte moral, cruel et optimiste. Janeck, jeune polonais, prend conscience des difficultés de l'existence en cet hiver rigoureux de 1942. Un adolescent de 14 ans, Janacek se joint aux partisans des forêts polonaises sur les conseil... more »s de son père. "Des hommes affamés et affaiblis vivaient tapis au coeur de la forêt. On les appelait "partisans" dans les villes, "verts" dans les campagnes ... Ils vivotaient par petits groupes de six ou sept dans les cachettes creusées dans la terre, dissimulées sous les broussailles, pareils à des bêtes traquées".
Comme les partisans, Janeck connaîtra le froid, la faim, la trahison, la lutte et la mort. Comme tout adolescent, il connaîtra l'amour auprès de Zosia. Zosia, de Wilno, qui "va avec les soldats", comme elle dit. Petit être fragile et gracile, meurtri par la violence de la vie. Janeck trouvera auprès de Zosia la chaleur et le réconfort d'un coeur resté pur, malgré les forfaitures de l'existence.
English Description:
Romain Gary started winning prizes even with his first novel, A European Education, hand-written, with his knees for a desk, while he was flying with Free French Forces over Europe. It tells the story of a young Polish boy, Janek, whose father hides him in a dugout in the forest when the Germans are coming. Raised on the books of Karl May, Janek begins by imagining himself part of an Old Shatterhand advanture. But, over the next few years, as he struggles to survive, joins a band of partisans, falls in love with a teen prostitute, and learns to kill he receives the education of the title:
"In Europe we have the oldest cathedrals, the oldest universities, the greatest libraries and the best education. But in the end, what this European education comes down to is to teach you how to find the courage to shoot a man who sits there with lowered head ..."
It's an inevitably dark view of the continent, from a man whose Jewish family had fled Vilnius, but in the resistance of Janek and the Poles and their battle for freedom we also get the idealism with which Gary offset his dim take on the times.« less