Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.
As the authorized biographer of Professor Justus Rosenberg, who, as a young man, functioned as a courier in Varian Fry’s Emergency Rescue Committee, and thus facilitated the escape of émigrés from Vichy France, I experiment in this project with a form of storytelling that juxtaposes his classroom dialogues about twentieth century novels with my account of his experiences as a guerrilla fighter during the French Resistance.
By analyzing archival material, interviewing Professor Rosenberg and retracing his journey across Europe during World War Two, while simultaneously learning French and exploring the Pyrenees, I have gradually discovered, under the tutelage of biographer Elizabeth Frank, the art and the craft of biography.
My storytelling mode, which has emerged from the dialogic interplay between my subject as a member of the Resistance and his subsequent career as a Professor of languages and literature, seeks to deviate from the biographical cannibalism that not only reproduces works on well-trodden lives but also pastiches the form of previous biographers
