In her first book, “our uprooted hearts” (Grasset), journalist Marie Drucker plunges into the history of her family, questioning her Jewish identity.
She goes around the trays at the moment, and not to present or even promote a new program. Marie Drucker has been presenting her first book for a few days, “our uprooted hearts” (Grasset), an intimate and poignant work on her career and, beyond, that of her family. Far from the biography with people accents, the former journalist, withdrawn from screens for a few years, goes up the thread of the history of his family, from his great-grandparents whose lives were marked by exile, deportation and clandestinity, until today.
Coming from a famous journalists’ dynasty, Marie Drucker, 49, began her career in France 2 before joining France 3, then Canal+. Host of television and political newspapers, she is now a producer and director of documentaries. Now adding the writer’s cap to her palette, she seeks, through this introspective story, to transmit the history of her ancestors, but also that of many French people who have crossed chaotic integration courses.
Because if she has never mentioned her Judeity, her relations with religion, nor was personally victim of anti -Semitism, Marie Drucker recently resolved to evoke this part of her identity, “terrified to the idea that the period of the Shoah sinks into oblivion”, as she explained in several media as France Info. Aware of the urgency in the face of the gradual disappearance of the last direct witnesses to this genocide, she wants to take advantage of her notoriety to work for “duty of memory”.
The one who says they benefit from the “immense privilege of having the opportunity to be published, to be heard, to be listened to” wants “absolutely, for mine, for others, to take this place”. But there was also a click in the journalist’s mind. In the first pages of the book, which she wrote spontaneously, as a necessity, immediately after the attack on Hamas in Israel on October 7, 2023, Marie Drucker confides that this event acted as a trigger in her reflection. “At one point, something bidded me head on. And I said to myself, ‘you have to take it up by the corps’, I wanted to stir the earth with my hands,” she explains.
After having left his first writings aside, without idea to make a book of it, the project finally appeared to him as clear thanks to a somewhat fortuitous rereading a few months later. “It was imposed on me in a few weeks and the text was released almost as it was published,” she explains.
By taking the pen with great sincerity, Marie Drucker therefore decides to engage in a crucial fight, at a time when anti -Semitism is still making new victims. “It is not because myself, I have never been the victim of anti-Semitism, that I live on another planet and that I am not aware of the daily life of other Jews in France”, she justifies.