Proust’s Jewish Question

At some point in his later years, Marcel Proust wrote to a friend that he had stopped visiting the graves of his maternal ancestors:

There is no longer anybody, not even myself, since I cannot leave my bed, who will go along the rue du Repos to visit the little Jewish cemetery where my grandfather, following a custom that he never understood, went for so many years to lay a stone on his parents’ grave.

This enigmatic sentence has been cited by dozens of scholars as evidence of something essential about Proust’s relationship to his Jewishness. But what exactly does it indicate? Does it reveal his desire to sever connections with his family’s Jewish past? Or does it show a nostalgia for Jewish ritual and a regret about the factors—illness, assimilation, the passage of time—that led to its loss? Maurice Samuels, The New York Review of Books