Mitchell Abidor

Tablet’s French literary ancestor was founded by three Warsaw-born brothers who were high school friends and classmates of Marcel Proust, and who published everyone from André Gide to Paul Claudel. Then came the Dreyfus affair.

The friendship of James Joyce and his student and instructor in Jewish customs, the Italian businessman Ettore Schmitz, better known as the novelist Italo Svevo, gave birth to one of literature’s greatest characters. It also unites the giant of literary modernism with the founder of psychoanalysis.

With his ability to control his own narrative, the one-man show is a symptom of the Americanization of French politics