Canadian Middle Grade Book, The Prisoner And The Writer, Tells About The Dreyfus Affair

The Prisoner And The Writer is inspired by the story of Émile Zola and Alfred Dreyfus. (Image: Shopify)

This is the story told in Heather Camlot’s picture book recommended for children aged 9 to 12, written in free verse and deftly illustrated by Sophie Casson with drawings that suggest both the emotion of the story and the historical era.

This surely is a story everyone should know – about a writer lending his pen to a fight for justice and against prejudice – and doing so at great personal risk to himself. Indeed, it’s suspected that Zola’s eventual death from smoke inhalation was no accident – that an anti-Dreyfusard had blocked his chimney in order to murder him.

But I cannot help but mourn that the most significant historical effect of the Dreyfus Affair is missing from Camlot’s story and her Afterwards: It was the Dreyfus Affair that convinced Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, that Jewish life in Europe was a dead-end – that the only hope for Jews was for us to create our own state. 

Tragically, Herzl was right. The triumph of the Dreyfusards in France did not mean the end of French antisemitism. Some decades later when the Nazis occupied France, there were plenty of French citizens to assist the Nazis in shipping Dreyfus’s granddaughter Madeleine Levy, along with tens of thousands of other French Jews, to Auschwitz to be gassed to death.