At Home with André and Simone Weil

Sylvie Weil

Oct 2010 · Northwestern University Press

About this ebook

“It is quite incorrect to believe that the dead are gone forever and never return to speak to the living. They return to speak to the living all the time; indeed, it is their main activity.” Thus writes Sylvie Weil in this illuminating memoir, in which contemporary readers can hear the voices of her famed philosopher aunt Simone and mathematician father André.

Born into a freethinking Jewish family in France in 1909, Simone Weil was one of the twentieth century’s most original philosophers, influencing Albert Camus, T. S. Eliot, Simone de Beauvoir, Pope John XXIII, Czesław Miłosz, and Susan Sontag. She fought for workers’ rights and, later, the Spanish Republican cause. Before her death at age thirty-four, Simone Weil turned increasingly to mysticism and religion, especially Roman Catholicism, exploring themes of sacrifice, asceticism, and the virtues of manual labor. She never converted, however, and Sylvie Weil writes from a Jewish perspective, emphasizing Simone’s Jewish heritage.

Using previously unpublished family correspondence and conversations, Sylvie Weil paints the most vivid, private portrait of her aunt in print. The book illuminates Simone’s relationship with others, especially with her brother, André. Loving and unsparing, affectionate and incisive, At Home with André and Simone Weil is an insightful memoir about a family of intellectual luminaries.

About the author

SYLVIE WEIL earned degrees in classics and French literature at the Sorbonne. She was a professor of French literature and is the author of several award-winning works of fiction for adults and for young adults, including two novels published in the United States: My Guardian Angel and Elvina’s Mirror.

BENJAMIN IVRY has written biographies of Arthur Rimbaud, Maurice Ravel, and Francis Poulenc. He has translated such authors as André Gide, Jules Verne, Balthus, and Witold Gombrowicz.