Liliane Atlan

Liliane Atlan, née Cohen, was one of five daughters in a middle-class Jewish family in Montpellier, France. Her father Elie Cohen and his family were emigrants from Greece, and her mother Marguerite was born in France. Liliane was seven years old when the Nazis invaded her country in World War II. The family went into hiding in the Auvergne region. Unable to attend school for fear of being recognized as Jews, Liliane and her older sister Rachel stayed at home and wrote plays that they performed in the attic. Their immediate family survived, but their mother's family were all killed. After the war, Liliane returned to school in Montpellier and later attended lycée in Marseille. The Cohen family adopted a young Holocaust survivor, and he eventually told his story to 14-year-old Liliane. She developed anorexia and was treated at a clinic in Switzerland. Later, she went to Paris to study at a Jewish school founded to help young European Jews recover from the traumatic shock of the Holocaust. She then earned a degree in philosophy at the Sorbonne. In 1952, she married Henri Atlan, a fellow student who became an internationally known scientist and philosopher, with whom she had two children. Her first play, Monsieur Fugue ou le mal de terre (Mr. Fugue or Earth Sickness), inspired by the life and work of Janusz Korczak, was produced at the Comédie Saint Etienne in Paris in 1967. Shortly afterwards, she and her family went to live in Israel for three years. There she organized an Israeli/Arab theater group that performed in Hebrew and Arabic. In 1968–1970, she lived near San Francisco and taught French to American college students. In the wake of the tumultuous events in France in May 1968 and a new wave of French feminism, she wrote the plays Les Messies ou le mal de terre (1969) and La petite voiture de flammes et de voix (1971). During the 1980s and 1990s, she returned to the theme of the Holocaust with Les passants (The Passersby, 1989), an autobiographical narrative; Un opéra pour Terezin (1997); and Je m’appelle Non (1994). She has been awarded several prestigious international literary prizes, including the Prix Mémoire de la Shoah in 1999 for her body of work.