Biweekly gathering at Book Trader.
“J’étudiais à Paris quand le Covid a commencé,” Genevieve Richardson was telling Larry Hall about her last visit to France.
Genevieve made the remark (translation: “I was studying in Paris when Covid hit”) while eating a decidedly non-French chocolate chip cookie on a warm September morning as she sat on the patio of New Haven’s Book Trader Café on Chapel Street.
She was a first-time attendee at a Meetup group called Parlons Français [We Speak French]. Parlons Français, sponsored by Alliance Française of New Haven (AFNH), attracts French students, transplanted natives of Francophone countries, and those interested in dusting off their high school or college French.
There is no one theme for these discussions, but topics naturally turn to travel, French literature and movies, and, of course, French food.
The lively group gathers on the Book Trader patio to converse in French every other Sunday morning for 90 minutes. The group also meets online once a month at the same time on Sunday mornings.
Those who want a deeper immersion in French often end up joining AFNH. Alliance Française was founded in July of 1883 by a prominent group of French intellectuals, including scientist Louis Pasteur and author Jules Verne, who wanted to promote the learning of the French language and appreciation of French culture.
In Paris and throughout France, the group runs large centers for the formal study of French, supported partly by a small subsidy from the French government, but the chapters throughout the rest of the world are each independently operated and funded.
Alberta Conte, the current president of AFNH, recounts that the local group was founded around 1905 and for many years was given to such genteel activities as afternoon teas. Conte has been in the group for more than 50 years, having joined when she was in high school in East Haven and won the AFNH’s annual book prize. She went on to major in French at Albertus Magnus College and have a full career as a high school French teacher.
This reporter is a far more recent member of AFNH. Like many people who join the organization, I studied French in high school and college but didn’t keep up my skills. I took a trip to France in 2015 and found I could barely hold a conversation, so I looked around for a place to regain some of what I had lost. I had heard about the Alliance Française and was delighted to find that New Haven has an active chapter with monthly book and cinema groups, social events, and French classes.
Through AFNH, I enrolled in several semesters of classes with Swiss-born professor Yvonne Kolodny, who teaches beginner adult classes, and French-born Jackie Munk, who teaches advanced levels (and was also my daughter’s middle-school teacher). Both women have had long careers teaching French in schools, businesses, and language institutes.
Classes at all levels are immersive, taught entirely in French, using the French in Action curriculum developed in the 1980s by the late Yale professor Pierre J. Capretz. The lively classes are supplemented by French music, games, and discussions. Kolodny is encouraging to newcomers who have never studied the language, and she loves to see her students become more fluent as time goes on.
Along with improving my rusty French grammar, my primary goal in taking classes was to better my speaking and listening skills. While my knowledge of written French is strong enough to read French texts, I was reticent about conversing and felt I didn’t even have the verbal skills of a young child. Because of my love of French literature, my ultimate target was to become confident enough to participate in AFNH’s monthly book discussion group, the Café Littéraire, which I finally did in early 2020.
Larry Hall, a longtime member, also had a strong interest in the Café Littéraire from his earliest days in the group. He joined AFNH after visiting France in 2003 and finding he had lost a lot of his high school and college French. When he first started attending the book group, it was led by two French professors from Yale, and Hall was one of the few participants. The leaders of the group chose all the books and led the discussions.
Café Littéraire has grown larger now and meets by Zoom on the second Wednesday of each month. The books for each year are suggested and voted upon by all the groups’ participants. This coming year’s books include those by such well-known authors as Colette and George Simenon. Robert Beech is now the organizer, and his favorite genres are science fiction and detective novels. He led the September discussion of the 1907 suspense classic Arsène Lupin: Gentleman Cambrioleur [Arsène Lupin: Gentleman Burglar] by Maurice Leblanc.
Book group selections.
The next meeting will be on Oct. 12 with a discussion of Hélène Berr Journal 1942 – 1944. Berr was a talented young Parisian writer of Jewish ancestry who is often called the French Anne Frank. She lost her life at the Bergen-Bergen concentration camp five days before it was liberated.
The Café Litteraire also discusses books from throughout the Francophone world such as La Belle Créole by Guadeloupean-born Maryse Condé or Algerian-born Kauther Adimi’s book Nos Richesses, which tells the true story of a renowned early 20th-century Algerian bookstore but also portrays France’s brutal repression of Algerian independence fighters.
The connection with French-speaking countries and people from around the planet is one of the aspects Choukri Ben Mamoun, a Moroccan-born scientist who is based at the Yale Medical School, appreciates about the Alliance Française. Ben Mamoun learned French growing up and then did his graduate work in Paris.
He spoke about how the several centuries of worldwide French colonization ended up enlarging the idea of what it means to be “French.” He thinks the Alliance Française could be called the “Alliance Francophone” because it brings together people from around the globe who are interested in the expansive world of French culture.
Ben Mamoun also enjoys Apéro, a French discussion group that meets every Wednesday on Zoom and is hosted by the Federation of Alliances Françaises USA. Participants join this group from around the world, and Ben Mamoun appreciates meeting people from such countries as India who also have an interest in French. He finds that many of these people share his love of learning other languages.
Larry Hall now serves as the treasurer of the national group, having served the AFNH in that capacity for many years. He says that there are around 100 AF chapters in the United States, as well as 1,100 chapters in 149 countries world-wide. There are three groups in the Ukraine, and they have received strong support from other members of the organization.
Many of the activities of AFNH migrated to Zoom when Covid hit and have remained there because of the ease of bringing people together from a wide geographic area. Clay Howe, who organizes the Ciné Club for the AFNH, credits digital technology with making it much easier for his group’s members to pursue their love of French cinema. Howe, a retired French teacher and translator, is passionate about French film and admits to often watching two films a day.
In earlier days, the cinema group traveled to French movies that were playing in different locations around the region and afterward would gather in a local coffee-shop for a discussion. Now, the movies discussed are available online, and the group gathers for a Zoom discussion on the third Thursday of every month. The next meeting, however, is being co-hosted with Hartford’s Alliance Française and will take place on Sunday, September 18. The group will discuss the film Sous le Ciel d’Alice [Skies of Lebanon]. Director Chloé Mazlomakes made this film about her family’s life in Lebanon in the years leading to that country’s civil war in the 1970s.
Along with Zoom meetings and classes, the AFNH hosts in-person gatherings that often mark French holidays such as July 14, Bastille Day, which commemorates the day the French revolution started with the storming of Paris’s Bastille prison. The third Thursday in November is notable not as Thanksgiving but rather as Beaujolais Nouveau Day, when the annual bottling of this festive wine is officially released.
Lea Chaudun, a member of AFNH’s Board, is a college student who grew up in France. She has helped to organize family events such as a Halloween party in 2021 (not a French holiday but a good reason to celebrate), and she is also hoping to host a game night in the coming year as well as the traditional French celebration of “La Chandeleur,” or pancake day, on February 2.
Those interested in being part of the Alliance Française of New Haven can join at their membership page for a very modest annual fee. The next meeting of Parlons Française is on Sept. 26 at the Book Trader Café terrace (1140 Chapel St). The Zoom version of this discussion group will next meet on Sept. 18, with registration available here. Other events are scheduled throughout the rest of this year, including a cheese tasting and a tour of the Yale University Art Gallery.
