Claude Lanz­mann may be known in Amer­i­ca pri­mar­i­ly as the direc­tor of Shoah, the nine and a half hour doc­u­men­tary on the Holo­caust, but read­ers of his new­ly-trans­lat­ed mem­oir will dis­cov­er that the mak­ing of Shoah was a rel­a­tive­ly brief — though sig­nif­i­cant — part of this Frenchman’s remark­able life sto­ry.

Born in 1925, Lanz­mann was just a teenag­er when he fought with the French Resis­tance in World War II. When the war end­ed, Lanz­mann went to Paris to study phi­los­o­phy — and the art of seduc­ing beau­ti­ful women, steal­ing text­books, and carous­ing the boule­vards. Before long Sartre and de Beau­voir invit­ed him into their inner cir­cle; togeth­er they debat­ed pol­i­tics, went trav­el­ing, and wrote for their jour­nal, Les Temps Mod­ernes, which Lanz­mann even­tu­al­ly edit­ed. A com­mit­ted left­ist, Lanz­mann befriend­ed Franz Fanon and oth­ers in the African anti-colo­nial strug­gles. When he began writ­ing for the French pop­u­lar press, Lanz­mann was known for inter­view­ing celebri­ties — Bar­dot, More­au, and Sig­noret, among oth­ers — with great sen­si­tiv­i­ty. His pas­sion for Israel was deep and abid­ing, lead­ing to his first film-mak­ing projects, which explored the phi­los­o­phy of the Jew­ish State and the nature of the Israeli armed forces. In 1973, he start­ed what became the twelve-year project of Shoah, an unflinch­ing exam­i­na­tion of the evil of the Holo­caust. Lanzmann’s mem­oir has none of the bells-and-whis­tles of Amer­i­can biogra­phies; there are no pho­tos, no elab­o­rate appen­dices. Yet his book has every­thing we read­ers want: it’s the life sto­ry of a real mensch.