Paris, 1947. The city, recovering from the war, is brimming with young international students – African, Indochinese, Arab, as well as American and French – balancing on the precipice of a new world. Cecile Rosenbaum, a young Jewish girl quickly developing her own intellectual and political ideals, meets Minette – a feisty, French-born girl of Senegalese descent – on the bus to a Communist Youth Conference. There, she meets and begins to fall in love with Seb, who arrived from West Africa with his sister at just seven years old.
As Seb toils for the exams that will permit him to study French architecture at the Parisian university Beaux-Arts, he also begins to dig into his roots in Dahomey, the West African kingdom where he came from. Cecile struggles at her job at the Louvre, clashes with her white, Jewish family, and reckons with her memories of a childhood under Nazi occupation and her fierce dedication to her new political ideologies. Seb and Cecile find themselves entangled, and along the course of the novel they lose and find each other again – in the corners of jazz clubs, at a Louis Armstrong concert, in the square where Seb’s exam scores will be posted, and, finally, at a protest that turns shockingly violent.
Nuanced, powerful, and sharply realized, David Wright Faladé‘s new book The New Internationals is a brilliant work of historical fiction that celebrates the awakening of the post-colonial movements of the 20th century and international youth population in Paris who rose up – and came together – in the beginnings of a vibrant political moment.Faladé will be in conversation about the book with literary scholar and cultural critic Donald Weber.
David Wright Faladé, a professor of English at the University of Illinois, is the author of the novel Black Cloud Rising, a New York Times Critics’ Pick and one of the New Yorker’s Best Books of 2022, and co-author of the young adult novel Away Running and the nonfiction book Fire on the Beach: Recovering the Lost Story of Richard Etheridge and the Pea Island Lifesavers, which was a New Yorker notable selection and a St. Louis-Dispatch Best Book of 2001. The recipient of a Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award, he has written for the New Yorker, the Village Voice, the Southern Review, Newsday, and more.
Donald Weber is a literary scholar and cultural critic specializing in Jewish American literature and popular culture. He is the author of Haunted in the New World: Jewish American Culture from Cahan to “The Goldbergs.” His reviews have appeared in The Forward, the Chronicle Review, the Chicago Tribune, the Jewish Book Council, among other publications. His most recent essay is “Sid Caesar’s Comedy of Excess and the Jewish American 1950s” (in the journal Jewish Film and New Media). He divides his time between Brooklyn and Mohegan Lake, NY.