initial drafts based on Paul Léon in German-language wikipedia

Draft

Paul Léopoldovitch Léon (born in 1893 in the Russian Empire; died in early April 1942 in Auschwitz) was a Polish-French sociologist and lawyer. He was a friend, secretary, and assistant to James Joyce.^[1]

He came from the Polish part of the Russian Empire. He studied sociology and philosophy and became a professor.^[2]

He fled Russia in 1918, went to London,^[3] and moved to France in 1921. He was of Jewish descent, spoke seven languages,^[4] and did research on Rousseau and Benjamin Constant. He married Lucie Noël^[5] and in 1925 they moved into a bourgeois apartment on rue Casimir-Périer in Paris, shortly before the birth of their son Alex.Cite error: A <ref> tag is missing the closing </ref> (see the help page).^[1]

Joyce also came and went to Léon's apartment, where he was more likely to do his correspondence, while he worked on his "Work in Progress" (which later became Finnegans Wake) at his own flat, often in the company of Léon, whose enormous language skills were needed. When Finnegans Wake appeared in 1939, Joyce gave him a copy with this dedication:^[6]

To the Eurasian knight, Paul Léon,
with a thousand and one thanks
from this most unfortunate writer,
James Joyce Paris, May 4, 1939

After the German invasion of France in 1940, Léon and his wife Lucie, like the Joyce family, fled to Saint-Gérand-le-Puy in the Canton of Saint-Pourçain-sur-Sioule . With Joyce he looked through the first edition of Finnegans Wake for printing errors. Since the Léons had largely left their personal belongings in the apartment on Rue Casimir-Périer, Lucie, who still worked for the New York Herald Tribune, went back to Paris in Nazi-occupied France. When they ran out of money, Léon and Alex followed them back there on September 4, 1940.^[7]

Leon took care of securing Joyce's personal belongings. He stuffed his own correspondence with Joyce in 19 brown envelopes and gave them to Gerald O'Kelly de Gallagh (1890–1968), the deputy Chargé d'Affaires of the Irish Mission. The envelopes remained there in (relative) security until 1946 and then ended up in the National Library of Ireland as intended. When on May 7, 1941 the landlord of Joyce’s apartment, forced the furniture to be auctioned because of the rental debts, Léon was able to buy most of the family’s important belongings with 20,000 francs which he had borrowed. By the end of 1941, Lucie and Paul Léon stored most of the suitcases and packages with the Joyce books and papers with friends and lawyers.

Léon own apartment on rue Casimir-Périer has now been searched repeatedly by the Gestapo and the collaborationist police. In August 1941 Samuel Beckett came to see him and urgently recommended him to flee, which he refused on the grounds that Alex was doing his Baccalauréat.^[8] That same month Léon was imprisoned in the Drancy internment camp^[9] and transferred to the Royallieu-Compiègne internment camp in December. The Irish government refused Giorgio Joyce's request to intervene on Paul Léon's behalf. ^[4] On March 27, 1942, he was transported to the Auschwitz camp where he was murdered. Lucie Léon-Noel and Alex survived the persecution in Monaco,^[4] and they continued to live in the Paris apartment afterwards when Gisèle Freund visited them there in 1964.^[10]

Sources

• Lucie Noel, Fashion Writer. The New York Times, May 4, 1972, p. 48.
• Noël, Lucie, James Joyce and Paul Léon. The Gothic Book Mart. 1948.
• Thirlwell, Adam, The Delighted States. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2008. isbn 978-0-374-13722-9

• In an undated note for his biographer, Herbert Gorman, kept in the Special Collections, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, James Joyce wrote about Paul Léon: »The allusion to him should be gr[e]atly amplified. For the last dozen years, in [s]ickness, or health, night and day, he has been an absolutely disinterested and devoted friend. I could never have done what I did without his generous help.«

—Jürgen Schneider, in http://juergen-schneider.org/JS/james-joyce-paul-leon/