At the time of the centenary of the birth of Joseph Bialot, tribute to the writer, born in 1923 in Warsaw, settled in France in 1930, survivor of the Auschwitz camp in 1945, who became an author of crime fiction at the age of 55 years old, and died in 2012. On the occasion of his 100th birthday, close-up on the reissue of two major books: “Le Salon du Prêt-à-Bleed” (Série Noire) and “It’s in winter that the days lengthen” (La Manufacture de Livre)
Born in 1923 in Warsaw, Joseph Bialot left Poland at the age of 7 to follow his family who moved to France in 1930. During the Second World War, he was arrested in 1944 and deported to Auschwitz, an experience which marks him forever.
So much so that on his return from the camps in 1945, he initially kept silent, took over the family business, his father was a tailor in Paris, until the end of the 70s when he left. He started writing and launched into crime fiction at the age of 55.
Joseph Bialot published his first thriller in 1978, and it was immediately a masterstroke, the book entitled The ready-to-bleed show wins the grand prize for detective literature and it is this title that the collection “Black sequence” decided to reissue to pay tribute to him. An emblematic novel which takes place in Paris, in the Sentier district, long a mecca for clothing with a strong Jewish community, where Joseph Bialot leads us on an intrepid investigation into the traces of a serial killer, against a backdrop of racketeering, mafia, immigration with a team of police officers who bear the names of metro stations. And this is all the added value of this thriller, a priori classic, the humor of Joseph Bialot which irrigates this novel like the title “The salon of ready to bleed”, in short a writing that we recognize right away
A first publication which will be followed by around twenty titles, but above all which will trigger in Joseph Bialot a taste for writing and which will lead him to testify about the Auschwitz camp.
After many years, Joseph Bialot allowed himself to write about the unspeakable, although with anger still intact towards the executioners; he had also long refused to return to Germany until a trip in 1974. But he published in 2001 a major story It’s in winter that the days get longer reissued on this centenary of his birth in The Book Manufacture. An essential document where the writer remembers with striking acuity this dehumanization which he witnessed, but without losing his incisive writing and his art of telling unpublished scenes with an unstoppable style.
Tribute to Joseph Bialot with Stéfanie Delestré director of the “La Série Noire” collection at Gallimard and Pierre Fourniaud founder of the publishing house La Manufacture du Livre.
LISTEN TO THE FULL MEETING HERE
COMPLETE TRIBUTE TO JOSEPH BIALOT WITH STEFANIE DELESTRE AND PIERRE FOURNIAUD