The United States is a recurring setting in the novel’s family histories, linked to childhood, education, professional opportunity, migration, and separation. For Claire Farel, it is both the country of her early life and the place where an academic path opens into a White House internship and a meeting that changes her future. For Adam Wizman and his family, the decision to leave France after antisemitic violence leads to a difficult attempt to settle in Israel, not to a lasting American homecoming; their later arrangements nonetheless extend across the United States and France. These separate trajectories make the country part of a wider story about belonging that cannot be reduced to safety or origin alone.

Claire Farel’s American Childhood and Education

Claire is the daughter of Dan Davis, a Harvard law professor, and Marie Coulier, a French translator of English. Her parents’ family story begins with their meeting in Paris and marriage in the suburbs of Washington, where they led a quiet life. Claire grew up in Cambridge with her father. When he died of cancer, she was thirteen; she returned to France to live with her mother in a mountain village near Grenoble. The move made the United States the setting of her childhood, while her father’s death marked the point at which that childhood ended and her life with Marie began anew.

Claire’s American experience also helped shape her education and early career. After studying at the École normale supérieure, she joined Columbia University’s philosophy department in New York. There she reconnected with people who had known her father, and those connections helped her secure an internship at the White House. The opportunity placed her within American public life at a formative moment, before she chose a different future in France.

A Meeting and a Change of Direction

In Washington, Claire met Jean Farel at a dinner hosted by mutual friends. He was a celebrated French political journalist, twenty-seven years older than her, recently divorced, and at the height of his media success. His prominent television program and daily radio interview made him an influential public figure. The encounter in the United States connected Claire’s American professional opportunity to the relationship that would redirect her life.

A few months later, Claire gave up the prospect of a career in the American administration, returned to France, and married Jean. The contrast is consequential: the country that had offered her education, connections, and a route into government became the place she left for marriage and a new life elsewhere. Her departure does not erase the importance of her American formation; it shows how a professional trajectory can be altered by an intimate choice.

Adam Wizman’s Family and the Search for Safety

For Adam Wizman and his family, the United States is associated with the life they leave behind when antisemitic violence in France intensifies their fears for their daughters’ safety. After the attack, they took the girls out of school and, like many people close to them, decided to leave France. Their conversations returned to the danger posed by antisemitism in Europe and the possibility that they or their children might eventually have to emigrate. The novel presents migration here as a response to a real fear, but also as a decision made under the pressure of uncertainty about what safety can guarantee.

The family’s attempt to find a new home did not settle the question of belonging. They rented an apartment in a community in northeastern Israel, where many immigrants lived, including French Jews. Adam felt a profound attachment to the country, yet concluded that integrating there would require a distortion of himself. He was uneasy with the demands of everyday life and with the unfamiliar experience of living among Jews rather than as a member of a minority. The closeness he could feel toward Jewish strangers while travelling abroad did not translate into a sense of connection with anyone in Israel.

Adam was also troubled by the political outlook he encountered among people who had emigrated for reasons similar to his own. He felt that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had become an abstract reality that people denied or accepted as inevitable in the name of personal security and tranquillity. In his view, that resignation contradicted the humanist Judaism he identified with. The family returned to France, saddened by the failure of the move. Their experience complicates any simple equation between Jewish safety, national belonging, and political conviction.

Transnational Family Ties and Lasting Consequences

After returning to France, Adam took a position teaching French at a Jewish school and lived with his family within a close communal world. The move back did not undo the fear that had prompted departure, nor did it resolve the tensions Adam had encountered abroad. Instead, the family’s migration became part of the circumstances in which its members made later choices about home, religion, and one another.

Mila’s family history makes those consequences especially intimate. Her mother, Valérie Berdah, lives in Brooklyn with a new partner from an Orthodox Jewish background; they have a young son, and Mila’s younger sister lives with them. Mila has little contact with her mother. She connects the estrangement to her parents’ separation and to her own decision to join her father in France: her mother has told her that, had Mila stayed in the United States, the later events would not have happened. Valérie was visiting Paris when those events took place. The United States thus remains present in Mila’s life through a divided household and a painful counterfactual, not simply through memory or geography.

Narrative Significance

Across these stories, the United States carries different meanings for different generations and characters. For Claire it is a place of childhood, education, and professional possibility, but also the point of departure for a marriage and career built in France. For Adam’s family, it belongs to a broader map of diasporic choices shaped by danger and the search for a livable political and religious identity; the attempted move to Israel, rather than a settled return to America, exposes the limits of treating any destination as an uncomplicated refuge. For Mila, Brooklyn anchors a family separation whose emotional consequences cross the Atlantic.

The novel’s geography therefore resists a fixed distinction between homeland and elsewhere. Movement across the United States, France, and Israel changes opportunities and family arrangements without guaranteeing belonging or repairing divisions. The United States matters as one node in those intersecting lives: a formative setting for Claire, a continuing point of reference for Mila, and part of the larger transnational frame through which the characters confront safety, identity, and the costs of leaving.