In my paper I explore how immigrants in the twentieth century have contributed to the construction of French urban memory by writing down recollections of the city that draw on their own experience of newcomers and marginalized individuals. The focus will be on several accounts from Russians/Russian Jews, one of the largest foreign groups in France after the influx of Jewish refugees in the 1880s-1890s and the flight from Soviet power in the early 1920s. These immigrants, most of whom settled in and around Paris, emerged as faithfulobservers of the city, specifically in bringing renewed appreciation of the symbolism and beauty of its architectural monuments. Thus, Marc Chagall recorded his private admiration for the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower in his memoir My Life (1922), and then made a public display of their images when commissioned to paint the ceiling of the Opéra Garnier in 1963. Immigrant writers have likewise acted as attentive record-keepers of urban life, predisposed by their outsider position to discover its hidden side. Nina Berberova’s autobiographical book The Italics Are Mine (1969) features records of conversations overheard in Parisian cafés at the time of the Nazi Occupation, which function as proof of the tremendous
ambivalence and deep divides in French society, prefiguring the revelations of the "Vichy syndrome" generation. A related characteristic of immigrant memory has been its privileging of the unexpected, revealing the city as the site of mixing across class, gender and occupation lines. The recently published manuscript Memoirs of a Paris Taxi Driver from the archive of ex-navy officer Vladimir Uspenskii centers on this ultimate urban witness’ recurring fooled expectations, where his passenger is seldom what he or she appears to be. My paper thus establishes Parisian immigrants as conscientious opponents of forgetting when it comes to recording the city experience, as well as participants in the project of perpetuating a contemporary urban memory that eschews the mainstream and seeks out the unlikely, the unseemly, and the downright ugly.