BLOCH–MICHEL, JEAN

BLOCH–MICHEL, JEAN (1912– ), French novelist and essayist. Bloch-Michel was influenced by his experiences during the Nazi occupation of France and by the moral confusion and crises of conscience affecting his country after World War II. Both his fiction and his essays show him to be a moralist in the French classical tradition with notable psychological insight. Among his best-known works are Le témoin (1949; The Witness, 1950); a book of war memoirs, Les grandes circonstances (1949); La fuite en Egypte (1952; The Flight into Egypt, 1957), and Frosinia (1966). He also wrote a study of French politics, Journal du désordre (1955), and an essay on the contemporary novel, Présent de l'indicatif (1963). Bloch-Michel was a contributor to a collective work on capital punishment, Reflexions sur la peine capitale (1957). Although culturally assimilated, Bloch-Michel expressed his solidarity with Russian Jewry and the State of Israel. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: E.P. Hazard, in: Saturday Review of Literature (Feb. 11, 1950); Évidences, no. 30 (1953), 8–9. (Arnold Mandel)