Liliane Atlan was a French Jewish writer whose work often focused on the psychological effects of the Holocaust. She was the recipient of many literary awards.
Background
Liliane Atlan was born on the 14th of January, 1932 in Montpellier, France, to parents Elie and Marguerite Cohen. Elie had been born in Thessaloniki, Greece, in 1907 and immigrated to France with his parents as a child. Marguerite was from Marseilles, born in 1905. Liliane was the second of the couple's five daughters. In 1939, she and her sisters were sent into hiding in Auvergne and Lyon to avoid anti-Semitic persecution. The sisters were reunited with their parents in 1945 after the end of the Occupation, where they learned that their maternal grandmother and their mother's brothers had all been killed in the Holocaust.
Education
Atlan had a Certificate of aptitude for secondary school teachers, CAPES in Modern Letters. She also studied philosophy at the Sorbonne from 1952 to 1953, where her thesis on "The Arbitrary and the Fantastic Since Nietzsche" was advised by Gaston Bachelard.
Career
Liliane Atlan worked as a teacher. She published theater pieces: Mister Fugue of Earthsick, The Messiahs, The Chariot of Flames and Voices, Les Musiciens, Lessons in Happiness. Liliane Atlan wrote such novels as The Dream of the Rodents, The Passerbay. She also wrote poetry, articles, broadcasts on French Radio France-Culture.
Liliane Atlan also spent two years in California teaching French and was a writer-in-residence at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.
Liliane Atlan died of cancer on February 15, 2011, in Kfar Saba, Israel.