Post-War Jewish Women's Writing in French 1906540403, 9781906540401

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Dedication
Author's Note
Introduction
1 World War II: The Shoah and its Psycho-Memorial Legacies
2 Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma
3 Nation/Deracination: Gendered Experiences of Diaspora and the French Republic
4 New Sites of Conflict: The Personal and the Political
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Cairns_10mm:Cairns_10mm

1/11/2011

7:10 PM

Page 1

CAIRNS IN

Post-War Jewish Women’s Writing in French

FRENCH

Lucille Cairns is Professor of French Literature at the University of Durham.

is a joint imprint of the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge. Titles range from medieval texts to contemporary cinema and form a widely comparative view of the modern humanities.

LEGENDA

POST-WAR JEWISH WOMEN’S WRITING

How have French Jewish women reacted to the great traumas of the last century — the Holocaust, North African decolonization and the resulting migration of African Jews to France, the Arab-Israeli crisis and the aftermath of 9/11? Cairns’s major new volume identifies the themes of books by French Jewish women from 1945 to the present day, gauging to what extent they are dominated by, informed by, or relatively indifferent to these threatening events. Thirty authors in particular serve as representatives of a great, and greatly diverse, pool: divided not only as Ashkenazim or Sephardim, but by origins scattered across Algeria, Egypt, Germany, Hungary, Morocco, Poland, Romania, Russia, Tunisia, and Turkey. Theirs is a transnational, doublydiasporic, and thus particularly complex paradigm in which feminism, loyalty to family culture and to the traditions of Judaism often exists in tension with French Republican models of assimilation, non-differentiation, and genderblindness.

Lucille Cairns cover illustration: Miriams Tanz, from the Tomic´ Psalter (Tarnovo, Bulgaria, c.1360), illustrating Exodus 15:19: ‘Then Miriam the prophetess, Aaron’s sister, took a tambourine in her hand, and all the women followed her, with tambourines and dancing’

Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge

Post-War Jewish Women’s Writing in French

legenda egena , founded in 1995 by the european Humanities Research Centre of the University of Oxford, is now a joint imprint of the Modern Humanities Research association and Routledge. Titles range from medieval texts to contemporary cinema and form a widely comparative view of the modern humanities, including works on arabic, Catalan, english, French, german, greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish literature. an editorial Board of distinguished academic specialists works in collaboration with leading scholarly bodies such as the Society for French Studies and the British Comparative literature association.

The Modern Humanities Research Association ( ) encourages and promotes advanced study and research in the field of the modern humanities, especially modern European languages and literature, including English, and also cinema. It also aims to break down the barriers between scholars working in different disciplines and to maintain the unity of humanistic scholarship in the face of increasing specialization. The Association fulfils this purpose primarily through the publication of journals, bibliographies, monographs and other aids to research.

Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences. Founded in 1836, it has published many of the greatest thinkers and scholars of the last hundred years, including adorno, einstein, Russell, Popper, Wittgenstein, Jung, Bohm, Hayek, Mcluhan, Marcuse and Sartre. Today Routledge is one of the world’s leading academic publishers in the Humanities and Social Sciences. It publishes thousands of books and journals each year, serving scholars, instructors, and professional communities worldwide. www.routledge.com

Editorial Board Chairman Professor Colin Davis, Royal Holloway, University of London Professor Malcolm Cook, University of Exeter (French) Professor Robin Fiddian, Wadham College, Oxford (Spanish) Professor Paul Garner, University of Leeds (Spanish) Professor Andrew Hadfield, University of Sussex (English) Professor Marian Hobson Jeanneret, Queen Mary University of London (French) Professor Catriona Kelly, New College, Oxford (Russian) Professor Martin McLaughlin, Magdalen College, Oxford (Italian) Professor Martin Maiden, Trinity College, Oxford (Linguistics) Professor Peter Matthews, St John’s College, Cambridge (Linguistics) Dr Stephen Parkinson, Linacre College, Oxford (Portuguese) Professor Suzanne Raitt, William and Mary College, Virginia (English) Professor Ritchie Robertson, The Queen’s College, Oxford (German) Professor Lesley Sharpe, University of Exeter (German) Professor David Shepherd, Keele University (Russian) Professor Michael Sheringham, All Souls College, Oxford (French) Professor Alison Sinclair, Clare College, Cambridge (Spanish) Professor David Treece, King’s College London (Portuguese) Managing Editor Dr Graham Nelson 41 Wellington Square, Oxford ox1 2jf, UK [email protected] www.legenda.mhra.org.uk

Post-War Jewish Women’s Writing in French ❖ Lucille Cairns

Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge 2011

First published 2011 Published by the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

LEGENDA is an imprint of the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© Modern Humanities Research Association and Taylor & Francis 2011 ISBN 978-1-906540-40-1 (hbk) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopying, recordings, fax or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher. Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Contents ❖

Author’s Note Introduction 1 World War II: The Shoah and its Psycho-Memorial Legacies 2 Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma 3 Nation/Deracination: Gendered Experiences of Diaspora and the French Republic 4 New Sites of Conf lict: The Personal and the Political Conclusion Bibliography Index

ix 1 7 64 123 181 239 246 255

i dedicate this book to my mother, dorothy scott cairns (née samuel), with all my love

Author’s note v

I would like to record my thanks to Sonia Sarah Lipsyc, for our stimulating dialogue on the role of women in Judaism, and to Keith Reader, for his invaluable comments on a first draft of this monograph (and also on some of the translations). I am also grateful to Graham Nelson for his efficient and encouraging work as editor, to Richard Correll for his meticulous copy-editing, and to Legenda’s specialist reader for helpful evaluation of the first draft of this monograph. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the original French into English are my own. l. c., October 2010

INTRODUCTION v

As anglophone-based French studies increasingly embrace the agendas of cultural studies, including those of gender and ethnicity, this study seeks to remedy an important lacuna in that diversification. The post-World War II literatures of Jewish men, of French women, and of francophone women have all received critical attention within the discipline (with attention to the first category having temporally preceded that to the latter two by some way). However, the Frenchlanguage writings of Jewish women have so far been largely neglected — curiously so, given the rich variety of their national origins and the wide range of cultural forces inf luencing the construction of their identities. If we compare this relative silence on francophone Jewish women with the recent eff lorescence of scholarly writing on francophone women of Arab origin, it is difficult to avoid inferences of cultural blind-spotting. Admittedly, France colonized mainly Arab countries, and so the postcolonial focus on the writings of francophone Arabs may appear entirely logical; but this occludes the presence, albeit a minority one, of Jews in all the Maghrebi countries of the French empire. What exactly is the existing critical literature in terms of monographs? In French there is virtually nothing. Only two texts are even tangentially relevant: Michèle Bitton’s Poétesses et lettrées juives: une mémoire éclipsée (1999),1 which covers a different period from my own — from antiquity to the nineteenth century; and Clara Lévy’s Écritures de l’identité: les écrivains juifs après la Shoah (1998),2 which cites a number of Jewish women writers in its bibliography, but devotes sustained treatment only to male Jewish writers. In English, two texts alone come anywhere near to the remit of the present monograph. Eva Martin Sartori and Madeleine Cottenet-Hage’s Daughters of Sarah: Anthology of Jewish Women Writing in French is, as the title indicates, a collection of key extracts from various Jewish women’s French-language texts.3 Although both informative and lucid, at two to three pages each the introductions to each extract are inevitably constricted in scope, whetting the reader’s appetite for more sustained critique of the primary texts in question. Rarely more and often less than two to three pages per text are found in the second of the two relevant studies, Thomas Nolden’s In Lieu of Memory: Contemporary Jewish Writing in France (2006).4 Nolden provides an excellent overview of works by French Jewish authors born after the Shoah, but the very comprehensiveness of his purview constrains the possibility of engagement with what is specific to the women among them. Unsurprisingly, the field lying beyond studies of uniquely French-language Jewish women’s writing is rather more fertile. The chief landmarks within it are Judith R. Baskin’s edited volume Women of the Word: Jewish Women and Jewish Writing (1994);5 Bonnie Gurewitsch‘s Mothers, Sisters, Resisters: Oral Histories of Women Who Survived

2

Introduction

the Holocaust (1999);6 Marlene E. Heinemann‘s Gender and Destiny: Woman Writers and the Holocaust (1986);7 Margaret-Anne Hutton’s Testimony From the Nazi Camps: French Women’s Voices (2005);8 Marion Kaplan’s Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dignity and Despair (1998);9 Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman’s edited volume Women in the Holocaust (1998);10 and Carol Rittner and John Roth’s edited volume Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust (1993).11 However, whilst this corpus of criticism provides useful background reading for the first chapter of the present monograph, with the exception of Baskin’s edited volume it is of limited relevance for my other three chapters, which venture beyond the Shoah into new challenges for French (female) Jewry, particularly those posed by decolonization of Maghrebi countries, exile, the post-WWII Arab–Israeli conf lict, and the perspectives of post-1968 feminism. The present monograph identifies the key preoccupations of forty-five primary texts by Jewish women published between 1945 and 2007. (It also indicates other primary texts germane to the foci of the four separate chapters, in sections 2–5 of the Bibliography.) The large number of primary texts, many of which are little known outside France and so require at least minimal exposition, inevitably imposes critical limitations on such a survey. I hope nonetheless that readers will find some analytical scope to this survey, and that it will pave the way to analysis that is more qualitatively intensive, if more quantitatively limited. One caveat must be made. While my approach foregrounds the three most salient and recurrent topoi in the corpus of primary texts, namely, conf lict, trauma and identity, the various perspectives thereon of the Jewish women writers examined do not always have either a Jewish or a gendered specificity. Indeed, part of the heuristic process of reading and analysing these texts is increased awareness of a motile interaction between ethnicity/religion and gender on the one hand, and, on the other, the many other, highly variable constituents of identity and subjectivity. The plethoricity of these other constituents is ref lected in my strategic engagement with theories of autobiography (the narrative fashioning of personal identity, or, perhaps more accurately, a Lejeunian ‘mythe personnel’12 [myth of the self ]) and cultural hybridity (of particular relevance in Chapter 3, which treats of Jews whose ‘identity’ is formed at the crossroads of multiple national and cultural inf luences). In short, while the corpus is determined by three elements of the authors’ identity — their ethnicity ( Jewish), their gender (female), and their language (French) — no attempt is made to impose what would be a factitious homogeneity on the sum of these three individual parts — parts being here ipseities, which like the ipseities of other human subjects are multifactorial. Still less is there any attempt to posit an aggregate Jewish female francophone identity. My objective is rather to mediate and ref lect upon the voices of a previously neglected demographic. What these voices have to say is not always original, but occasional banality cannot justify exclusion from a survey that strives to be genuinely representative. Further, as already implied by my eschewal of any homogenizing approach, it need hardly be emphasized that these previously neglected voices are not always in accord; indeed, they are polyphonous and sometimes even collectively cacophonous. The enquiry of this study is conceptually organized around reactions of these Jewish women writers to various nodes of political conf lict: the Second World

Introduction

3

War (Chapter 1), its psychological fallout for the second generation (Chapter 2), decolonization and diasporation13 (Chapter 3), new avatars of anti-Semitism in the late twentieth century (Chapter 4), the fraught symbolic freighting of Israel in the Jewish imaginary (Chapter 4), and, finally, gendered conf lict in the interstitial relations between the personal and the political (Chapter 4). Conf lict often occasions trauma, albeit of varying degrees, and trauma has a significant presence in the primary texts examined. Unless otherwise stated, analysis will not restrict itself to Cathy Caruth’s specialized, Freudian-derived use of the word ‘trauma’: [...] what seems to be suggested by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle is that the wound of the mind — the breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world — is not, like the wound of the body, a simple and healable event, but rather an event that [...] is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor. [...] Trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature — the way it was precisely not known in the first instance — returns to haunt the survivor later on.14

Caruth’s now canonical theorization is certainly valid for some cases of trauma, but it is too restricted to be adequate for all. As I remark in a previous publication, ‘[w]hilst highly inf luential, her position has in more recent years been challenged, inter alia by Ruth Leys.’15 Caruth’s (selective) reliance on a Freudian model of the unconscious and repression precludes any universal applicability of her schema. For it seems to me that, precisely, one may remain deeply traumatized by an event whose violent impact was fully apprehended at the time of its occurrence and which has not been repressed from consciousness. Pace Caruth, nightmares, f lashbacks and so on may indeed coexist with conscious memory of the traumatic event. Accordingly, the present study will, unless otherwise stated, use the term ‘trauma’ in two broader acceptations than Caruth’s. These two acceptations understand trauma as a deeply painful and harrowing experience, and/or emotional shock following a stressful event. The value of the word ‘trauma’ for my purposes lies in its polysemy, for it is also a medical term denoting physical injury, and thus usefully connotes lasting, often material consequences of what is at root a mental experience, the latter being by its very nature invisible. Dominick LaCapra’s psychoanalytically inf lected distinction between what he calls historical trauma, ‘related to particular events that do indeed involve losses, such as the Shoah’,16 and structural trauma, ‘related to (even correlated with) transhistorical absence (absence of/at the origin)’17 is entirely valid. Yet I maintain that historical trauma might well give rise to structural trauma, albeit with a temporal lag. As the following chapters demonstrate, traumatic loss occasioned by violent historical events such as those of the Shoah (first-generational loss of family and community in the Nazi- and Vichy-prosecuted Judaeocide) or of enforced exile following decolonization of Arab countries in the 1950s and 1960s may well lead to the less historically anchored trauma of ‘absence’ manifested in the melancholia, depression, and existential angst experienced particularly by the

4

Introduction

second and third generations. Finally, I am certainly not using the word ‘trauma’ in the aporetic deconstructionist sense identified by Wulf Kansteiner, viz. the ‘construction of a misleading symbolic equivalency between the allegedly traumatic component of all human communication and the concrete suffering of victims of physical and mental trauma.’18 My desistance is based on an illuminating remark made later by Kansteiner: But while it is appropriate to insist on a troubling element of undecidability in all processes of communication, it is neither necessary nor advisable to express this essential dilemma of representation through the metaphor of trauma. Just because trauma is inevitably a problem of representation in memory and communication does not imply the reverse, i.e. that problems of representation are always partaking in the traumatic.19

For the secular, or at the very least non-Orthodox Jews represented by nearly all of the female authors, narrators and protagonists considered in this study (my research uncovered no post-war novels or autobiographies written in French by identifiably Orthodox Jewish women), what determines Jewish identity? For some it is an identity bequeathed by the mother, originating in a biblically recounted (and thus arguably mythical) lineage. For others it is, more simply, adherence to the religion of Judaism. For others still, aware of the existence of many atheist Jews, it is more an ethnicity based on Jewish forebears who are not necessarily the mother. The notion of ethnicity may slide into that of race, which should have but has not been definitively refuted by reference to the existence of both white and black Jews. David Brauner’s pithy remark in his fine study of Anglo-American Jewish writing is equally applicable to the Jewish francophone writing appraised in the present study: ‘In fact, the only consensus on the problem of how to define Jewishness is that there is no consensus.’20 However, one factor that indisputably inf luences if not determines the formation of Jewish identity/ies is awareness of alterity relative to non-Jews, and the unfortunate but apparently inveterate correlate of this alterity, namely anti-Semitism. To view Jewish identity as merely that which the anti-Semite imposes on the Jew, as per Jean-Paul Sartre’s Réflexions sur la question juive (1946),21 is clearly reductive, but we should nonetheless not dismiss the signal importance of anti-Semitism in constructions of Jewish identity. As Jonathan Webber opines, Jews may feel that they have no choice in the matter; but on the other hand it is also true, for secular Jews in particular, that antisemitism reinforces a sense of Jewish identity by confirming that there are boundaries that close them off from the wider society that they otherwise feel a part of.22

Norman Solomon goes further: ‘Much of the Jewish sense of identity is imposed from without. Prime among the external determinants is antisemitism, real or imagined.’23 Allow me a tentative surmise not entirely unrelated to the question of antiSemitism, even as I acknowledge that anti-Semitism must be distinguished from anti-Zionism. While the francophone writings of Jewish women have largely been ignored within their own community because of their gender, international French studies’ nescience of these women may derive from the ( Jewish) ethnicity of these women. Israel, with which even diasporic Jews are commonly if erroneously

Introduction

5

associated, has since 1967 increasingly been condemned as a colonial power, leading by ripple effect to the academy’s demoting of Jewish relative to Arab francophone writing. Yet Israel’s self-understanding is legitimized by its status as a victim of European anti-Semitism and Judaeocide. It seems to me no exaggeration to suggest that Jewish women writing in French constitute a doubly marginalized, unjustly neglected demographic. The primary aim of this monograph is to go some way to remedying that injustice. One final word on intentions. Where relevant I reference the key landmarks in various strands of theory, chief ly those bearing on trauma, memory, and diasporic cultures. However, my enquiry is led by the primary rather than the secondary literature. Rather than privileging theory in order to shape an argument which is merely serviced by the primary texts, I take my cue from the primary texts themselves and from their particular concerns, analysing them in relation to theory where such theory represents genuine added value. Those theoretical arguments of my own that emerge are therefore inductive rather than deductive. In neither sense of the word is theory primary in this monograph, although its concluding chapter does attempt to synthesize and probe the various theoretical points that may be derived from the preceding chapters. Above all, this monograph is motivated by a deontological endeavour critically to listen to and mediate the previously delegitimized, silenced voices animating the primary texts themselves. Perhaps the ideal, if inevitably figurative form of this monograph would be that of the sound archive. Notes to the Introduction 1. Michèle Bitton, Poétesses et lettrées juives: une mémoire éclipsée (Paris: Publisud, 1999). 2. Clara Lévy, Écritures de l’identité: les écrivains juifs après la Shoah (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1998). 3. Daughters of Sarah: Anthology of Jewish Women Writing in French, ed. by Eva Martin Sartori and Madeleine Cottenet-Hage (Teaneck, NJ: Holmes and Meier, 2006). 4. Thomas Nolden, In Lieu of Memory: Contemporary Jewish Writing in France (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2006). 5. Women of the Word: Jewish Women and Jewish Writing, ed. by Judith R. Baskin (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1994). 6. Bonnie Gurewitsch, Mothers, Sisters, Resisters: Oral Histories of Women Who Survived the Holocaust (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999). 7. Marlene E. Heinemann, Gender and Destiny: Woman Writers and the Holocaust (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986). 8. Margaret-Anne Hutton, Testimony From the Nazi Camps: French Women’s Voices (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). 9. Marion Kaplan, Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dignity and Despair (Oxford University Press: New York, 1998). 10. Women in the Holocaust, ed. by Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1998). 11. Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust, ed. by Carol Rittner and John Roth (New York: Paragon House, 1993). 12. See Philippe Lejeune, L’Autobiographie en France (Paris: Armand Colin, 1971), for reference to the ‘mythe personnel’ (p. 85) and the ‘mythe du MOI’ (p. 105). 13. The study of diasporas has gathered strong momentum in the last decade, but the original, foundational diaspora, that of the Jews, has been strangely neglected. This study attempts

6

Introduction

in Chapter 3 to restore Jewish diasporations and diasporic experience to the forefront of investigation in this (sub)discipline. 14. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD, and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 3–4. 15. Lucille Cairns, ‘ “La Mémoire de la Shoah”: The Contentious Case of Soazig Aaron’s Le Non de Klara’, French Studies, 64, 4 (2010), 438–50. The text by Ruth Leys to which I refer is Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 16. Dominik LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. 80. 17. LaCapra, p. 77. 18. Wulf Kansteiner, ‘Genealogy of a Category Mistake: A Critical Intellectual History of the Cultural Trauma Metaphor’, Rethinking History, 8, 2 (2004), 193–221 (p. 194). 19. Kansteiner, p. 205. 20. David Brauner, Post-War Jewish Fiction: Ambivalence, Self-Explanation and Transatlantic Connections (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. 3. 21. Jean-Paul Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive (Paris: P. Morihien, 1946). 22. Jonathan Webber, ‘Modern Jewish Identities’, in Jewish Identities in the New Europe, ed. by Jonathan Webber (London and Washington: Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies and Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1994), pp. 74–85 (pp. 83–84). 23. Norman Solomon, ‘Judaism in the New Europe: Discovery or Invention?’, in Webber, p. 95.

CHAPTER 1

v

World War II: The Shoah and its Psycho-Memorial Legacies The focus of this chapter is on three discrete experiences of World War II. The first is the experience of the female narrator qua Jew of either imprisonment in Gestapo and political prisons, or of deportation to Auschwitz. Whilst accounts of the latter are now legion, accounts of the former are less so. Particular attention will be paid to the two different types of torture recorded in three representative texts. Notable in Anna Langfus’s Le Sel et le soufre (1960)1 is the violent physical torture inf licted on her as a political prisoner by the Gestapo. A less obviously violent, more protracted form of torture which is both physical and moral — starvation, degradation, dehumanization — is evidenced in the two Auschwitz testimonies, Françoise Maous’s Coma Auschwitz, no. A.5553 (1996),2 and Ana Novac’s Les Beaux Jours de ma jeunesse (1968; second, supplemented edition 1996).3 The second form of experience considered in this chapter is that of Jewish women or girls who escaped imprisonment or deportation but not the anti-Semitic measures imposed by the Vichy regime, which constrained them to nomadism and pain-of-death clandestinity. As early as 1968, William Niederland contended that Jews who lived through the Third Reich in hiding were exposed to a psychological strain which to some extent equalled that of the camps.4 Whilst stressing the ‘to some extent’, I aver that the same could be said of French Jews who lived through Vichy in hiding, particularly after the November 1942 abolition of the so-called Free Zone. Many would censure as sheer insult any homologization of the psychological strain endured by Jews living clandestinely in fear of arrest under Nazi-occupied states with the psychological strain of Jews imprisoned in camps equipped with gas chambers. Yet fear is not easily measurable. The strain of uncertainty about whether one might possibly escape arrest, and thus about whether or not to exercise agency, was arguably greater than the strain of merely waiting and knowing there was little if anything one could do in the camps to escape selection for the gas chambers. The sample texts for this second category are Dominique Arban’s La Cité d’injustice (1945)5 and Elisabeth Gille’s Un paysage de cendres (1996).6 The third form of experience examined in this chapter is that of Jewish women or girls living in a ‘Liberation’ France that, reverting to its universalizing Republican tradition, refused to recognize the unique horrors experienced by the Jewish victims of Nazism and of French fascism during WWII (this despite the fact

8

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

that two-thirds of those deported from France were Jewish). This was a refusal in which some French Jews were complicit, unwilling to risk renewed extrusion or persecution as a singular and alien community. The psychological disorientations of this third form of experience include the trauma of coming to terms with the Shoah, with the death of family, friends, and in the case of deportees, camp-mates; the not infrequent syndrome of survivor’s guilt;7 acting out; the slow and painful process, not always successfully or fully achieved, of psychic reintegration; the difficult reassimilation, or failure to reassimilate, into French collective identity. The textual case-studies for this third category of experience are Francine Christophe’s Après les camps, la vie (2001)8 and Yaël Hassan’s Souviens-toi Leah! (Eden, 2004).9 Since many readers will be unfamiliar with these texts, only one of which (Langfus’s) has come even close to canonical status within the male-dominated field of French-language Holocaust literature, in all three sections below a short plot summary of each novel is provided in order to contextualize the subsequent analysis. The reader may wonder why such plot summaries are provided here but not in subsequent chapters. The answer is that a clear idea of the facts and their sequentiality is especially important in the case of Shoah/Holocaust testimonies, given the contestation of such testimonies by historians. While these primary texts do not purport to be historiographical texts, they may, provided their historical veracity is not put into question, feed into historiography (see Conclusion). WWII: Imprisonment/Deportation With testimonial literature, a tacit assumption is that the author will tell the unadulterated truth about her or his experience of atrocity. This seems ostensibly to exclude the novel form, whose fictionality might be assumed to vitiate the evidentiary basis on which testimonial discourse generally lies. Yet Anna Langfus’s Le Sel et le soufre, recipient of the Prix Veillon for 1960, is most certainly a novel. Pierre Horn describes it as ‘an autobiographical novel in which she invented nothing, but rather selected from her war memories, omitting what she referred to as “bad taste” episodes’.10 Le Sel et le soufre certainly cannot be qualified as a conventional autobiography, for two reasons. First, it does not cover a sufficiently broad temporal span, restricted as it is to a five-year period in Langfus’s life, and is thus not a writing (graphy) of a (whole) life (bio). Second, eschewing a(n early) Lejeunian pact with the reader,11 it does not institute a nominal correspondence between the author, Anna Langfus, and the first-person, homodiegetic narrator,12 Maria Janczewska. Only some three-quarters of the way through the narrative does it transpire that Maria Janczewska is a ‘faux nom’ (p. 262) [false name]. Madeleine Cottenet-Hage claims that the narrator ‘has been renamed Maria in the course of one of several reinventions of her identity to ensure that she will pass as a Christian’;13 and it is not immaterial that Langfus’s allegedly adored daughter was named Maria. Despite these two caveats, it is clear that Langfus f louts the codes of traditional autobiography by disabling a straight equation between author and first-person narrator; further, the name ‘Anna’ appears nowhere in the text. What is beyond doubt is that Le Sel et le soufre does draw heavily on material from Langfus’s

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

9

own life and bases its narrator on its author, but that it is nonetheless a re-working, a re-creation of reality rather than a transparent rendering of the reality of Langfus’s life. She herself stated of Maria ‘l’héroïne, c’est moi, bien sûr [...] Mais je crois qu’aussi j’ai récréé la réalité’ [the heroine is me, of course [...] But I also believe that I recreated reality].14 Why this opting for the novel over the testimonial form? As Ellen S. Fine points out, this deliberate and considered choice granted Langfus ‘cette distance, et donc cette liberté, propres à saisir la vérité de l’expérience intérieure’ [that distance, and so that freedom, that help us grasp the truth of inner experience].15 I would define this necessary distance as the distance of the present writing subject from the past traumatized subject who actually experienced the horrific events being mediated in writing. That distance has prompted many critics to condemn the character Maria as callously cold, selfish, and indifferent.16 This moralizing verdict ignores the fact that egotism and suspension of compassion for others may have been necessary survival mechanisms in such extreme circumstances as the deathcamps — a point made cogently by the eponymous protagonist of Souviens-toi Leah! also discussed below: ‘Au loin, les gueules des cheminées crachaient leur fumée âcre. [...] Je marchais tête baissée. Ma peine me suffisait amplement. Je me refusais de la surcharger de celle des autres’ (Souviens-toi Leah!, p. 76) [In the distance, the chimney mouths were spitting out their pungent smoke. [...] I was walking along with my head bowed. My own pain was quite enough for me. I wasn’t prepared to take on other people’s too]. Despite its status as a novel, Le Sel et le soufre does, then, have documentary credentials due to its basis in Langfus’s own wartime experiences of the Warsaw ghetto, of underground resistance activity, of arrest, imprisonment, and torture by the Gestapo, and, finally, of a less than joyous liberation. Further, autobiographically based evocation of the Warsaw ghetto makes Langfus’s text unique within the entire corpus treated in this monograph. While many of the authors to be examined are of Polish origin, only Langfus delivers a sustained representation of the Warsaw ghetto; the fact that she ended up writing it in French some fifteen years after the event is a function of Ashkenazic patterns of deracination and exile (to be explored in Chapter 3) imposed by WWII. As a displaced person, Langfus migrated almost alea­tor­ily to France after the war, where she remained until her premature death in 1966. The plot of Le Sel et le soufre may be summarized as follows. At its opening, Maria has just returned from Belgium with her husband Jacques to her parents’ Polish home. When war breaks out in 1939, she and her family immediately become targets of virulent anti-Semitism, mainly from the occupying Germans but also from the indigenous Poles. The dark, sometimes almost random ordeals of Maria’s family represent those of many Polish Jews during WWII. Jacques is arrested and then, surprisingly, released. He, Maria and her parents f lee the ghetto, to which her parents subsequently return and which will finally be bombed. Her parents are deported to and die in the camps; Maria and Jacques are initially helped and protected by an atypical German, but then, rather more typically, arrested by the Gestapo; Jacques is shot dead, and Maria tortured, then sent to a political prison. When she is finally liberated, she has lost her entire family, along with any sense

10

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

of meaning to life, and is aff licted — as readers of the novel’s powerful sequel, Les Bagages de sable (1962),17 will particularly appreciate — by anhedonia. The following discussion of Le Sel et le soufre could have focused on the historical specificities of Polish-Jewish experiences of WWII, of which the text contains some uncomfortable and many distressing details. An example of the former is the selfserving collaboration of Marc, a Jewish policeman in the Warsaw ghetto, with the Germans’ policy of arresting Jews (pp. 71–72). However, the reader’s condemnation of his collaboration is attenuated by his lying to a German officer in order to save Maria’s life as a Jew (p. 68). Any moralizing censure on our part is thereby confounded by confrontation with the grey areas of life-and-death situations, in which moral purity becomes something of a luxury. Of further note is the depiction of Polish anti-Semitism even within the Resistance movement, the latter supposedly opposed to Nazi ideology: one Resistance member implies that the cell has wasted its time and energy in killing a man who had murdered a Jew, as if Jews were subhuman and thus not worthy of such vicarious vengeance (p. 135). As for depiction of the Germans, certain of Langfus’s tropes have now become standard, including that emblematized within French literature by Vercors’ Von Ebrennac in Le Silence de la mer:18 the aporia of the charming, educated, compassionate German who nonetheless blindly serves the Führer — only in Langfus, that servitude extends to killing Jewish children (p. 189). But in counterbalance, in the character of Vic Langfus also presents a genuinely anti-Nazi German (p. 196). We might also have probed Langfus’s skirting of the hackneyed but injurious charge of Jewish passivity in, and thus partial responsibility for, the Shoah. She includes a narrative cameo of an elderly Jewish man reacting with charitable lenience towards the son who has just thrown him onto the streets because he is too visibly Jewish (p. 22). His defence of the son, along with the condoning of the son’s abrogation of those family ties so fundamental to Jewish tradition, cannot help but shore up that charge. Yet a further area of interest which might have been explored is Maria’s musing on religion. On one occasion she wryly alludes to a Christian complicity in, and thus duty to bear witness to, persecution of Jews in the ghetto. Observing that a rope has been knotted around the wings of the stone angel forming part of the ghetto’s Christian church, she wonders ‘Les a-t-on attachés de peur qu’ils ne s’envolent et ne quittent en toute hâte cet enfer où s’est égarée leur blancheur? Peut-être, les garde-t-on comme témoins. Ou pourquoi pas simplement pour leur édification?’ (p. 37) [Had they been tied up through fear they’d f ly away quickly out of that hell where their whiteness had got lost? Maybe they’re being kept as witnesses. Or why not simply for their edification?]. And when contemplating Christological iconography, she trenchantly opines that the sort of compassion shown to Jesus by Mary Magdalene was a luxury available to a single Jew, Jesus, whereas compassion fatigue would certainly be the response to the mass suffering experienced by present-day Jews dying in the Warsaw ghetto. The effect of this remark is to relativize what has become the hypostasis, the ultimate emblem of suffering, within Christian culture, and to underscore the incommensurability, indeed the uniqueness, of the Shoah. All of the aforementioned topoi amply deserve further study, but I have chosen in what follows to concentrate instead on those of gender and personal trauma in Le Sel et le soufre.

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

11

A subversion of normative gender roles emerges from the narrative of Jacques’s arrest by a German officer, for while her father is passive, Maria is active, remon­ strating with the officer and then reproaching her father: ‘Vous n’avez rien fait pour empêcher qu’on l’emmene, rien!’ (p. 19) [You did nothing to stop them taking him away, nothing!]. In a later crisis she again is agentic, contestatory and self-preserving, her husband Jacques passive and self-sacrificing.19 Yet there is also a sense in which Jacques’s exhortations to calm could be construed, and indeed are construed by Maria, as a form of masculine control, in that he, is whether consciously or not, infantilizing his wife’s rebellion: ‘Que l’enfant nous sorte toutes les bêtises qu’elle a dans sa petite tête [...] Tu vois, je prends soin de toi’ (p. 78) [Let the child get all that nonsense out of her little head for us [...] You see, I’m taking care of you]. Further indices to her infringement of gender norms include her robust resistance to the anti-Semitism expressed by the wife of the Polish policeman who hides them. When the policeman tells his wife to make tea for them, she is incensed: ‘ “C’est à moi que tu dis ça! C’est à moi que tu dis de servir des youpins!” Suivent des cris, des injures, des imprécations’ (p. 84) [‘You’re telling me that! You’re telling me to serve yids!’ Shouts, insults and curses followed]. The Polish woman herself is of course also defying gendered norms according to which she is a mere servant of her husband, but her anti-Semitic hostility certainly complicates the feminist reader’s response. Even less gender-normative is Maria’s response, for although she does not actually kill the woman, she threatens to do so and even asserts the legitimacy of such a hypothetical murder (p. 84). Later on however, when Maria realizes that Jacques is doomed, her will to live disintegrates and she slides from violent resistance to suicidal nihilism: ‘Ils savent que Jacques est juif. Donc c’est la fin. Le reste, auquel je ne comprends rien, m’est absolument égal’ (p. 234) [They know that Jacques is Jewish. So, it’s the end. The rest, which is a complete mystery to me, I couldn’t care less about]. Yet this bleak knowledge is also construed as a form of liberation (p. 235). It is in this spirit that she withstands excruciating physical torture (pp. 236, 250), at first showing ironic derision of her torturers (pp. 250–51), but gradually learning to put aside her pride and submit passively, switching off mentally to physical pain (p. 260). In a 1962 interview, Langfus used precisely the word ‘débrancher’ [disconnect] to describe her mental survival-mechanism: ‘Quand, dix ans après, j’évoquais certaines scènes de la guerre, je me demandais comment j’avais pu les supporter sans devenir folle. Je crois que j’arrivais à me “débrancher”, à me rendre étrangère à ce qui se passait autour de moi’20 [When, ten years later, I recalled certain scenes from the war, I wondered how I’d been able to put up with them without going mad. I believe that I managed to ‘disconnect’, to divorce myself completely from what was going on around me]. After the first torture session, Maria’s means of tolerating almost intolerable pain is a form of psychic projection: she transforms her pain into the image of an abject whore and battles with her, insulting her in significantly genderspecific terms (p. 238) which are rather ironic given the fact that the causes of this pain are men. On the reverse side of the coin, rather more exploitative transgression of gender norms is revealed in the blackmailing efforts of a gentile woman to extract sexual

12

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

favours from a Jewish man over whose fate she has control, along with that of the other fugitive Jews asleep in the room: Elle rit doucement. ‘Tu vois, je n’ai pas de préjugés. Tu es mon Juif à moi. Tu me dois tout, tu entends? Tout. Je tiens ta vie entre mes mains. Je tiens votre vie, à tous. Un mot de moi et vous êtes tous fichus. Mais je ne le ferai pas si tu m’aimes beaucoup, beaucoup.’ (p. 93) [She laughs quietly. ‘You see, I don’t have prejudices. You’re my Jew. You owe me everything, you understand? Everything. I hold your life in my hands. All your lives. One word from me and you’re all done for. But I won’t do it if you really, really like me.’]

Maria herself is not entirely above exploitation of gender norms, although in her case these are for the greater good of simple survival: ‘Je crois qu’il prend très au sérieux son rôle de protecteur. Tant mieux’ (p. 122) [I think he takes his role of protector very seriously. So much the better]. In the same vein, she is indifferent towards gendered codes of acceptable female sexuality. When her male protector raises the prospect of her being considered a prostitute in his service, she bluntly ripostes ‘Pourvu que je puisse dormir tranquille, le cadre m’importe peu, je vous assure’ (p. 122) [As long as I can sleep in peace I don’t care where it is, I assure you]. Her moral compromises start to seem trivial when compared to the poisonous sentiments expressed by certain other female characters. Envious, self-contradictory anti-Semitism is blatant in one Christian woman’s venomous logorrhoea, which is ironically addressed to a Maria she assumes is gentile (p. 41). Langfus delivers a morally repugnant portrait of this Christian woman’s callous bad faith with respect to Jews, and, atypically for ‘woman’ generally, to the most vulnerable of them — children (p. 42). Agents of Jewish exclusion are also found among the women at the political prison of Plonsk (pp. 282–83). Maria correctly suspects one of them, Swoboda, of being Jewish and of acquiescing in generalized anti-Semitism in order to def lect it away from herself personally. Langfus here paints the political prison as a theatre of mauvaise foi motivated by the impulse of self-preservation. And in conformity with the relentless logic (‘comme il se doit’ [naturally]) of state-organized Judaeocide, Swoboda’s Jewishness is soon uncovered by the prison authorities, leading to her murder. Salient in Maria’s reporting of the shooting is a combination of fear and subsequent emotional blankness, or numbing21 — a classic survival mechanism: ‘La peur, que je croyais ne plus jamais connaître, me saisit. Peur de quoi? Ridicule. Swodoba avait bien joué son jeu mais à la fin ils l’ont eue, comme il se doit. C’est chose courante et cela ne me concerne pas’ (p. 296) [Fear, that I thought I’d never feel again, gripped me. Fear of what? It was ridiculous. Swodoba had played the game well but in the end they got her, naturally. It happens a lot and is none of my business]. The acid irony of Swodoba’s murder is that it resulted from denunciation by a so-called Christian woman, Thérèse, who did not know that her victim was the sister of a priest (p. 298). Again, what is striking is the narrator’s affective distanciation and disarticulation from the human stakes of the situation, both of which crystallize the anomie of the concentrationary world: Personne ne lui répond. Je sais que ce n’est pas par indifférence. Elles pensent toutes à Swodoba. La sœur d’un prêtre... morte juive. Elles gardent le silence

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

13

parce qu’elles ont peur de Thérèse. Et moi? Moi, j’ai l’impression d’être hors jeu, d’assister à un spectacle qui ne me passionne pas. Peut-être, même, que j’en tire un vague plaisir. L’injustice pour l’injustice! (p. 300) [Nobody answers her. I know it’s not through indifference. They’re all thinking about Swodoba. A priest’s sister... died as a Jew. They keep quiet because they’re frightened of Thérèse. And me? I have the sense of being out of the running, of watching a show I’m not interested in. Maybe I’m even getting some sort of pleasure out of it. One injustice for another!]

Interestingly, the narrator’s sense of alienation, of disengagement and even of being transported away from the painful experience here, as in the torture scenes, strongly correlates with Caruth’s model of trauma (see Introduction). Langfus’s originary traumatic events were ‘not known’22 inasmuch as she disengaged from them mentally when they occurred; and we know that they returned to haunt her in that unassimilated form by, inter alia, their narrativized re-staging. This is one of the relatively few cases within the corpus of primary texts examined by this monograph where Caruth’s theory seems entirely satisfactory. Le Sel et le soufre inscribes numerous instances of trauma, both as construed by Caruth above and in the less narrow sense proposed in my Introduction of a deeply painful and harrowing experience, and/or emotional shock following a stressful event. These instances include Maria’s affective numbness, evinced above and also in her lack of curiosity about vital events concerning the progress of the Russians against the Germans (p. 338); coldly supercilious pleasure that the war is not yet over (p. 338); suicidally melancholic indifference to liberation by the Russians, as seen in her tart riposte to fellow survivor Henriette: ‘— Et après? dis-je. Je n’aime rien moins qu’on me tire de mon sommeil. Ce sont tes libérateurs. Va les embrasser’ (p. 339) [‘So what?’ I said. ‘There’s nothing I hate more than being dragged out of my sleep. They’re your liberators. Go and kiss them’] — sleep being the best escape bar death from a life that has become intolerable. The death drive is manifest in her dialogue with a wounded Russian soldier. Alluding to the home to which he would like to return to end his days, he is met by her gnomic ‘J’aimerais aller avec toi’ (p. 343) [‘I’d like to go with you’], meaning into death rather than to his home. Corresponding to this death drive is her association with the moribund: whilst her fellow survivor Henriette shuns ‘ces mourants qui la gênent’ (p. 345) [those dying people who bother her], Maria chooses to spend all her time with them (p. 344). While Henriette wants to embrace liberation and life, Maria states ‘Mais je ne suis pas pressée’ (p. 345) [But I’m in no rush]. And when the two young women have set off for Warsaw in the most daunting of physical conditions, even she ponders her antagonism towards Henriette’s will for life: ‘Pourquoi m’acharner ainsi à lui faire peur? Pourquoi souff ler sur cette joie de vivre qui est en elle et que moi je ne ressens pas?’ (pp. 347–48) [Why am I so determined to scare her? Why should I be snuffing out that joie de vivre in her that I don’t feel?]. Even in the very last paragraph of the novel, when after a physically crippling walk she has finally reached her former home, what is stressed is her life-weariness: ‘Je suis toujours dans le noir, couchée sur la malle. Et je me dis qu’un de ces jours innombrables qui me restent encore à vivre là-haut doit se lever’ (p. 373) [I’m still in the dark, sitting on the trunk. And I

14

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

tell myself that one of those countless days I still have left to live must be dawning up there]. Whilst Madeleine Cottenet-Hage’s diagnosis below extends beyond Le Sel et le soufre to encompass Langfus’s other two novels, her comments merit consideration: That very experience of numbness of the soul, of the loss of desire, and the desire for loss shape both Langfus’s characters and her fiction in that the act of writing seems not to have empowered her to escape from the reenactment of the scenario of death branded into her memory. In the end, the witness sinks with the burden of her testimony. (pp. 96–97)

Admittedly, it seems that for Maria writing has brought no empowerment ‘to escape from the reenactment of the scenario of death branded into her memory’. In psychoanalytic terms, this is acting out rather than working through. Yet the very provision of an almost unique testimony in the canon of French-language Shoah literature is an act of high ethical and epistemological value. And, to return to my opening remarks, Maria is in no sense identical to her creator; for Langfus, the burden of her testimony might not have been so heavy. What is clear is that Langfus did not sink, but went on from Le Sel et le soufre to produce a Goncourt-winning second novel, Les Bagages de sable (1962), which despite the anhedonia and pervasive nihilism dogging its principal protagonist was not, claimed Langfus, entirely bereft of hope: ‘Non, ce n’est pas un roman désespéré. Une lueur apparaît, au loin, au fond du tunnel’23 [No, it’s not a hopeless novel. A gleam of light does appear, far off, at the end of the tunnel]. Like Le Sel et le soufre, Françoise Maous’s Coma Auschwitz no. A.5553 (1996) only documents one brief part of its author’s life, the war years, but it is more firmly rooted in standard autobiography insofar as the name of author and homodiegetic narrator are identical. The text was written a year after Maous’s liberation from Auschwitz, but not published until fifty years later. In it, Maous relates her and her husband’s arrest as Jews in south-east France, her deportation, and her incarceration in Auschwitz. Whilst her husband was to die in the camps, she would narrowly escape death by being sent as an invalid to the camp’s infirmary and escaping the regular selections for the gas chambers. Maous’s text is worthy of analysis not as literature in the sense of aesthetically distinguished textuality — her style is not without clumsiness — but rather as documentary evidence of fairly representative psychological, ethical and even metaphysical responses by women to an unprecedented ‘human condition’. This condition is that of (female) victim of a meticulously planned and industrially sophisticated effort to exterminate an entire ethnic grouping on the part of one of the most culturally advanced nations on earth. Stylistically limited at it is, Maous’s account has a wide experiential and political scope which includes but is not restricted to the gender-specific, as the following analysis will attempt to convey. First, though, it is worth considering the status of the text and Maous’s own relationship to testimonial writing. Coma Auschwitz no. A.5553 contains a preface from the distinguished historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, conferring a form of legitimacy on the oft-contested genre of the témoignage (witness account).24 What Hirsch and Spitzer observe of oral testimonial narrative can equally be applied to written testimonial narrative:

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

15

‘[s]earching for “historical truth” in oral testimony — factual accuracy that can be corroborated and not dismissed or denied — these historians are suspicious of testimonial narrative, of “soft” evidence constructed in individual acts of recall.’25 Vidal-Naquet attests to the closeness of the events recounted by Maous and their recounting, thus heightening the seal of authenticity (pp. 11–12). Of salience in this peritextual material is a historian’s vindication of testimony as an indispensable source for history, albeit not history’s only ingredient: Le livre de Françoise Maous est donc un témoignage qui nous vient d’un passé déjà lointain. L’histoire se fait avec des témoignages [...] Elle ne se fait pas qu’avec des témoignages, ni en les mélangeant, ni en les juxtaposant. L’histoire est une combinaison, une synthèse, un passage à la limite qui se fait aussi avec des archives, avec des études techniques qui permettent parfois de mieux comprendre comment fonctionnait la machine à tuer et à détruire. [...] Le titre du livre auquel on m’a fait l’honneur de me demander une préface, Coma, dit assez bien ce dont il s’agit: d’un état qui n’est plus la vie sans être encore la mort, un état-limite, avec, pourtant, une conscience sans cesse en éveil, une mémoire intense et fidèle. (pp. 18–19) [So Françoise Maous’s book is a testimony which comes to us from a past that is already distant. History is made from testimonies. [...] It’s not made only from testimonies, whether through blending them or placing them side by side. History is a combination, a synthesis, a movement to the very limit which is also made from archives, from technical studies which sometimes enable a better understanding of how the machine for killing and destroying functioned. [...] The title of the book for which I was honoured to be asked to write a preface, Coma, gives us a good idea of what it’s about: a state that is no longer life without yet being death, a limit-state, with, nonetheless, an everalert consciousness, an intense and faithful memory.]

Vidal-Naquet’s mention of ‘un état-limite’ prompts reference to Dominick LaCapra, a renowned psychoanalyst of historiography: With respect to traumatic events, and certainly with respect to the extremely traumatic limit-event, one must, I think, undergo at least muted trauma and allow that trauma (or unsettlement) to affect one’s approach to problems. In treating these events, a kitsch, harmonizing, or fetishistic narrative that denies trauma is particularly objectionable. But one should not remain at the level of acting-out or asbolutize the latter in the form of an attempt actually to relive or appropriate others’ traumas [...] Even if trauma cannot be fully overcome, as it may not be for victims of limit-cases or even for attentive secondary witnesses, it may be counteracted by the attempt to work through problems, mourn the victims of the past, and reengage life in the interest of bringing about a qualitatively better state of affairs.26

LaCapra’s ‘limit-event’ is not synonymous with the ‘état-limite’: the former refers to an event on the borders of the conceptualizable, the latter to the state of mind induced by such an experience — something more akin to the ‘limit-cases’ he also mentions. However, what is of relevance to the present study is LaCapra’s attention to the ideologeme of trauma, and to not just the historian’s but to the abused subject’s response to trauma. Like Langfus, Maous provides material steeped in trauma and ripe for (psycho)analysis.

16

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

The text opens in May 1946, well after Liberation, a writing present from which the wartime experiences will be presented via retrovision. The recovered capacity for happiness affirmed in the very first sentence is instantly compromised by the fear that such happiness might efface memory of the horror the narrator has survived: a paradoxical juxtapositioning of mental states that problematizes the more positive of the two, happiness. This amnesophobia is countered by compulsive writing, but Maous is at pains to affirm, first, the priority of the affective over the aesthetically crafted (p. 23), and second, that her intention was signally not to bear witness to the atrocity that was Auschwitz — this had been done by others before her — but, rather, to impose a permanent form on her own subjective experience of that atrocity (pp. 23–24). What follows is an enigmatically anti-testimonial recollection contrasting with the desire expressed in so many deportee texts to bear witness to the atrocities: ‘nous avions fait le sermon là-bas de nous taire, sachant bien que personne, personne parmi les vivants, ne serait digne de recueillir les effroyables confidences...’ (pp. 35–36; my emphasis) [we’d sworn back there to say nothing, knowing full well that nobody, nobody among the living, would be worthy of receiving the dreadful confidences...]. By ‘personne parmi les vivants, ne serait digne’, does Maous mean the living would be unworthy because they had never experienced such suffering? If so, is this an oblique valorization of suffering? No clear answer emerges, but it is worth noting what follows this cryptic statement: ‘Mais aujourd’hui, un an après, pour moi seulement, je veux sortir de l’ombre les fantômes’ (p. 36) [But today, a year on, for my sake alone I want to bring the ghosts to light]. From an otherwise morally normative text, in which a stereotypically feminine author transvalues care for and empathy with others, this is an empowering if surprising affirmation of self over others. Her subsequent ref lections reveal a need to preserve in words a former avatar of herself that had endured a year of experience outside the parameters of life. Interestingly, she stresses the integrity of even aberrant, negative variants of the self which are produced by aberrant, supremely negative conditions (p. 24). Yet the concluding chapter, written in May 1996, fifty years after the events recounted, casts a different light on Maous’s motives in narrativizing her experience. Now, she asserts a need for catharsis through writing, for the instrumentalization of writing as a form of therapy to treat intense trauma: ‘Je ne voulais rien d’autre que répondre à un besoin physique, impérieux, de vomir les démons, de me livrer à une purification de l’esprit qui, je l’espérais, me libérerait d’incessants cauchemars ou, tout au moins, atténuerait leur fréquence et leur intensité’ (p. 177) [All I wanted was to respond to a pressing, physical need, to spew out my demons, to give myself over to a purification of mind that, so I hoped, would free me from incessant nightmares or at the very least would make them less frequent and less intense]. This is not inconsistent with her earlier proclaimed imperative to preserve memories; indeed, it represents a form of the working through of which Langfus’s fictional alter ego had appeared incapable, rather than acting out. The inconsistency lies between Maous’s earlier rejection of testimony and her new awareness of its vital nature in the fin-desiècle context of revisionism, negationism, and renewed anti-Semitism (pp. 177–78). Her second proclaimed reason for publishing this fifty-year-old text is redolent of positivistic humanism:

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

17

[...] laisser un message à ceux qui se trouvent, ou se trouveront un jour, dans le tréfonds de la douleur. Ce message est un message d’espoir: la vie, quoi qu’il advienne, a des racines tenaces. Il est bien rare qu’elle ne puisse renaître, qu’elle ne puisse redevenir acceptable, qu’elle ne puisse offrir des heures de bonheur. (p. 178) [[...] to leave a message for those who are, or will one day be, in the depths of pain. This message is a message of hope: whatever happens, life has tough roots. It’s very rare that it can’t be reborn, can’t become acceptable again, can’t offer at least some hours of happiness.]

Some might criticize this stance as implicitly minimizing the suffering of the Shoah by suggesting that its survivors may ultimately put such suffering behind them — a suggestion contradicted by many other testimonies to the ineradicable trauma of the catastrophe. In response to such critiques, I would advance that Maous’s attempt to universalize the experience of suffering and the human capacity to surmount it is surely commendable in axiological terms, whatever its mismatch with other sur­ vivor accounts. Within the schema of Holocaust historiography, hers is an emplot­ ment of survival and secular transcendence of atrocity. It may not consider the reality of irreparable psychological damage found in other testimonial accounts of the Jewish ethnocide, but this does not diminish its moral integrity as an individual response. Before proceeding to examine how Maous mediates Auschwitz, it is worth brief ly noting her mediation of what precedes it. Her text prefaces testimony of the Nazi camps with testimony to the culpability and moral ignominy in the round-up of Jews not of the Germans, but of the French milice (a French paramilitary organization which collaborated with the occupying Germans against the Resistance) (pp. 29–30). Also of note is her emphasis on the cynical deception operated by the Drancy officials to lull the detainees into a false sense of security: children were given picture books to keep them amused in the train the day before transfer to Auschwitz, and the destination was kept a secret to minimize inconvenient panic (p. 37). Cruel though such French cynicism was, she is at pains to relativize it. Her use of the metaphor of hell to evoke not the death camps but what preceded arrival at them, the infernal journey, has an ironic twist: ‘Les hurlements se mêlaient au bruit infernal du train; je me souviens avoir dit: “C’est ainsi que je me représente l’Enfer.” Quelques jours plus tard, ces heures dans le wagon devaient me sembler les derniers bons moments de ma vie’ (p. 38) [The howls were mixed with the infernal noise of the train; I remember having said ‘This is what I imagine Hell to be like’. A few days later, those hours in the train carriage were to seem like the last good moments of my life]. Maous’s narrative is representative of the French female deportee narrative as a genre in its recording of the distressing experiences routinely registered in other such narratives. The one exception seems to be the emphasis placed on extreme thirst as a more terrible sensation than extreme hunger (p. 49). In this she concurs with Charlotte Delbo, but with few other accounts.27 Other than this, her text contains many staples of the deportee narrative: the daily roll-call, which for Maous was the greatest, most refined of Nazi tortures (p. 42); the illnesses and infections

18

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

contracted due partly to abysmal lack of hygiene (p. 49); the mysterious powder mixed into the daily soup (also mentioned in Le Sel et le soufre, p. 309) which was thought to induce amenorrhoea (p. 51); the obsession with recipes28 — a symptom of severe under-nourishment, as has more recently been confirmed in studies of anorexia nervosa (p. 53); the hostilities between different nationalities (pp. 60–61); the cruelty of even the camp nurses towards their sick patients (p. 63); and the sadism of the Kapo (p. 115). Finally, Maous attempts to convey the invariable mutilation, both physical and psychological, of the deportees upon their return from the camps: her rhetorical question ‘Laquelle d’entre nous ne revenait pas mutilée dans sa chair et dans son cœur de cette terrible aventure?’ (p. 171) [Which of us wasn’t returning disfigured in body and heart by this terrible experience?] allows only one answer, which echoes the first word of the most renowned French-language female deportee account, the non-Jewish Charlotte Delbo’s Aucun de nous ne reviendra29 [whose literal meaning is ‘None of us will return’]. Another standard motif in French female deportee narratives is the tension between racial and political deportees.30 Maous’s text is perhaps unusual in dwelling to quite such an extent on this feature and, whether intentionally or not, in undermining the claims of the political prisoners to moral superiority. Her new French friend Marie-Jeanne, who was deported for Resistance activity as opposed to Jewish identity, is perceived as holding her in contempt due to her (Maous’s) simple will to survive, in contrast with Marie-Jeanne’s supposedly more noble sense of suffering for her homeland. The perception of contempt is of course nonverifiable, and could conceivably indicate Maous’s unconscious internalization of typical deportee hierarchies of worth. Nonetheless, the words that Marie-Jeanne is supposed to have pronounced (suspension of disbelief is required here, given the implausibility of Maous having recalled verbatim sustained speech from some fifty years ago) do underscore that hierarchy, borne out by other deportee accounts, in which those deported for political actions are more morally admirable than those deported for immanent, unalterable and unchosen Jewish identity (p. 73). MarieJeanne’s self-aggrandizement is f lagrant in her reference to ‘le merveilleux sentiment de souffrir pour ta patrie’ (p. 73) [the fantastic feeling of suffering for one’s country]. Equally f lagrant is her lack of empathy for those deported, starved, humiliated and dehumanized because of what they are ( Jewish) as opposed to what they do (engage in political resistance). When hope of liberation from the Americans is clouded by fear that they may arrive too late, this emotional obtuseness is compounded by Marie-Jeanne’s accusing Maous of narcissistic selfishness because she does not share her own grandiose ambitions to world redemption through self-sacrifice: — Trop tard pour toi, égoïste! disait Marie-Jeanne. Mais le monde, le reste du monde délivré, y songes-tu? Le monde qui revivra libéré par notre sacrifice, crois-tu que cela ne vaut pas la peine de mourir? Ta petite vie vaut-elle plus que celle des dizaines de milliers de soldats russes qui tombent tous les jours, les plains-tu? Non, tu ne plains que toi-même... (p. 75) [‘Too late for you, you selfish thing!’ said Marie-Jeanne. ‘But what about the world, the rest of the freed world? The world that, liberated by our sacrifice, will live again, don’t you think that’s worth dying for? Is your little life worth

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

19

more than the life of tens of thousands of Russian soldiers who are dying every day, don’t you have any pity for them? No, you only have self-pity.’]

Marie-Jeanne’s self-righteousness ignores the fact that in risking deportation and likely death, she had had a choice, whereas her younger Jewish ‘friend’ had not. It also occludes the fact that non-Jewish political prisoners like herself enjoyed certain privileges, and more importantly were, if considered Aryan, spared the dreaded selections for the gas chambers (p. 72). Maous’s portrait of the political prisoners’ disdain for the Jewish prisoners is supported by the words of a high-profile public figure in France, Simone Veil, who was deported to Auschwitz as a Jew at the age of seventeen: ‘Les déportées résistantes nous tenaient à distance. Surtout que l’on ne confonde pas nos situations. Déjà au camp, à l’occasion de très exceptionnelles rencontres, j’avais constaté cette fracture entre nous, cette forme de mépris que beaucoup avaient à notre égard’31 [The deportees who’d been in the Resistance kept us at arm’s length. Our situations were absolutely not to be confused. Already in the camp, when very exceptional meetings took place, I’d noticed this split between us, this form of contempt that many of them felt for us]. Despite Marie-Jeanne’s accusations of selfishness, Maous shows considerably more care than Marie-Jeanne for all of her fellow deportees, regardless of the reasons for their deportation. Significantly, while we can assume most of her camp mates are Jewish because this is Auschwitz-Birkenau and also because she refers to the ‘solution finale’ (p. 104), Maous never identifies those most victimized as such, although she does make identifications along national lines. This may have been a calculated strategy to prove the non-partisan quality of her compassion. For example, she foregrounds the distressing case of Ina without indicating that Ina was Jewish. Stressing Ina’s vulnerability (p. 79), she goes on to evoke the young woman’s faecal incontinence due to typhus and to register the appalling defalcation of duty and sheer sadism of the Polish nurses, culminating in murder: Un jour qu’[Ina] s’était particulièrement souillée, l’horrible mégère se mit dans une rage folle et, devant moi, battit, pinça, insulta ce demi-cadavre. Jamais je n’oublierai ce spectacle dont la bassesse aurait réjoui les yeux des Allemands en leur prouvant à quel degré ils avaient réussi dans leur démoniaque exploitation de la lâcheté humaine. Mais pour Ina, cela n’avait plus d’importance. Elle avait cessé de souffrir. (pp. 80–81) [One day when [Ina] had messed herself really badly, the horrible shrew got into a mad rage and, in front of me, beat, pinched, and insulted that halfcorpse. I’ll never forget that spectacle whose baseness would have delighted the Germans by proving to them just how much they’d succeeded in their diabolical exploitation of human lowness. But for Ina, all that was of no consequence. She’d stopped suffering.]

Maous’s compassion is foregrounded here by her outraged tone, giving the lie to Marie-Jeanne’s charge of the racial (read ‘Jewish’) deportee’s selfishness. The foregoing has stressed the documentary value of Maous’s account rather than its artistic or philosophical qualities. However, her text is not entirely devoid of such qualities. It does, for instance, contain some highly revealing ironies. And it is

20

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

well worth pondering Maous’s hardly banal remark that certain limit-experiences or limit-conditions require images in order to render functional the words used to evoke them: ‘La Weberei... Pour tracer un tableau qui soit vivant, il faudrait des images... Il est des cas où seules les images peuvent faire vivre les mots, quand ceuxci sont trop faibles, impuissants’ (p. 106) [The Weberei... To give a vivid idea of it, you’d need images... Sometimes only images can bring words to life, when words are too weak, powerless]. Here Maous interestingly inverts the figure of ekphrasis (the rendering in words of visual phenomena), since she wants images to render words. Commenting on another French-language female-authored testimony, Brodzki has rightly observed that ‘[i]mage belongs to the realm of imputed certitude, language to the realm of shadowy indeterminacy’.32 To this I would add the basic Saussurean point that the linguistic signifier is arbitrary, bearing no necessary relationship with the signified; its very arbitrariness may, if one pursues Maous’s logic, also imply a dearth of ontological integrity and impact, hence her privileging of the image over the word to convey emotionally freighted experiences or phenomena. Of course, it could be countered that images themselves never present unmediated reality. But they can certainly give the illusion of doing so more than words. What is without doubt is that in her remark, Maous enters into the sort of speculation about language and its limits found in the more intellectually probing texts in our corpus. The various iterations of such speculation in that female-authored, relatively little known corpus coalesce to underscore a philosophical trope found in established Holo­caust meta-discourse: crisis of confidence in language and thus in narrative also. A critical approach to language is evident in Ana Novac’s Les Beaux Jours de ma jeunesse, which was first published in 1968 under the earlier title J’avais quatorze ans à Auschwitz. References will be to the 1996 edition, which as Margaret-Anne Hutton points out was considerably revised,33 and which contains a new prologue authenticating the main text as a genuine diary. The prologue also augments the autobiographical dimension of a main text which in itself is a mere snapshot of Novac’s life during the war years, by providing a broader temporal backdrop that includes both the author’s childhood and her adulthood long after Auschwitz, up to the late 1990s. The main text constitutes a diary whose clandestine drafting was largely, and against all the odds, coextensive with the experiences of the camps that it encodes. In this respect, it is unique in the entire corpus of texts either treated in the present monograph or listed in its Bibliography. It is also distinct from Maous’s retrospective account in affording the immediacy of eye-witness testimony virtually contemporaneous with the events witnessed (I say virtually because there is always a gap, however slight, between witnessing an event and recording it in writing). This is just one of several differences between Maous’s and Novac’s texts, despite their conf luence in dramatizing the ethical aporia of Auschwitz. Novac was deported as a fourteen-year-old girl, whereas Maous had reached (early) adulthood; Novac was originally from Romania, and torn between several nationalities and several languages including French, whereas Maous was emphatically French and understood no other language than French; Novac experienced transportation between several Nazi camps, whereas Maous’s ordeal was confined to Auschwitz.

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

21

Yet there are similarities too beyond the fact that both give first-hand accounts of Auschwitz. In what follows, I identify the main convergences and divergences between these two deportee narratives, and attempt to identify the aesthetic and conceptual distinctiveness of Novac’s. The prologue of Novac’s text meshes with Maous’s opening chapter in disavowing any noble scriptorial aims: for Maous, the aim in writing was not, or at least not initially, to bear witness, just as for Novac it was not to contribute to the memory of humankind. For Novac (if only initially — the prologue is later superseded by recording of the motive to write for posterity), the only reason for writing this text composed during her actual time in Auschwitz was to survive psychologically by distracting herself from hunger and anguish, by differentiating herself from the mass through creation of a private space, and by not complying passively with her fate (p. 11). It soon becomes apparent that for Novac, writing in and of Auschwitz and other camps (mainly Plaszow) was a form of therapy, of self-affirmation, a bulwark against the ambient atrocities. It is not, however, what Suzette A. Henke has called ‘scriptotherapy — the process of writing out and writing through traumatic experience in the mode of therapeutic reenactment’,34 because Henke’s neologism refers to a retrospective process taking place some time after the traumatic exper­ iences in question, whereas as we have seen, Novac’s writing takes place almost con­ temporaneously with those experiences in Auschwitz. Yet while Novac’s writing does not constitute scriptotherapy, it clearly had the basic therapeutic bene­f it of allowing her actually to survive the traumatic experience mentally. This point is illustrated in what seems like a conceit of writing on and of the body avant la lettre. When a Kapo orders her to tear up what she has written, asking menacingly ‘Tu tiens à ta peau?’ [Do you value your life?], Novac retorts ‘j’ai deux peaux, et la deuxième — mes notes — est peut-être ce qui empêche le reste de s’écrouler’ (p. 23) [I have two lives/skins, and the second — my notes — is perhaps what keeps the rest from collapsing]. (Note that the French idiom ‘tenir à sa peau’ means ‘to value one’s life’, but that ‘peau’ on its own means ‘skin’, and that Novac is playing on a double-meaning that cannot be rendered in English but which stresses the protection of the body’s vital organs against the outside world.) Her later qualification of this personal investment in writing is only partial: ‘je n’écris pas pour moi, cela va sans dire. Puissent ces notes figurer parmi les témoignages, au jour du règlement de comptes! Mais serais-je ma seule lectrice, j’écrirais quand même! Je me donnerais autant de mal pour trouver le mot le plus juste, le plus fort’ (p. 71) [I’m not writing for myself, that goes without saying. May these notes figure among the testimonies when scores come to be settled! But even if I were my only reader, I’d still write! I’d go to as much trouble to find the right word, the word with most impact]. Much later on, when energy and will are depleted by serious illness, she does refer to her writing as testimony, but distances herself from the label by the use of inverted commas. Nonetheless, the notion of duty towards a now dead camp-mate who encouraged her writing is seen to sustain the latter activity: ‘Rien du reste n’a la même importance qu’à Plassow [sic]. Pas même mon “témoignage”? C’est de plus en plus une sorte de devoir que le sculpteur m’aurait légué [...]’ (p. 201) [Besides, nothing is as important as it was in Plaszow. Not even my ‘testimony’?

22

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

It’s more and more a sort of duty that seems to have been bequeathed to me by the sculptor [...]]. Stylistically, Novac’s text is diametrically opposed to Maous’s. While recounting similar horrors (salient among which are the psycho-behavioural abnormalities induced by starvation: see pp. 159 and 164), its approach to the rendering of atrocity is oddly decentred, often homing in on quirky aspects of a difficult or horrific experience. Its tone is emotionally detached, wry, ironic, and even blackly humorous. It respects no taboos, openly commenting, for instance, on Jewish collaborators among the deportees who were able through moral compromises to accede to the rank of ‘kapo’ (p. 59). It is deliberately opaque in its temporal and spatial indices, with not only Auschwitz but also other camps alternating as imprecise settings (Novac experienced many evacuations or transfers, between eight camps including Auschwitz-Birkenau, Plaszow, Visau and Kratzau). Depiction of the death camps is fragmentary, with no pretensions to a totalizing vision: Je l’admets, je suis un témoin partial; mais autrement, comment pourrais-je me tirer de cette aventure sans y laisser ma jugeote? J’observe surtout cette miette du camp que je suis; les miettes qui m’entourent. Non, comment prétendrais-je donner une image exhaustive du camp? (Autant vider la mer à la louche.) (p. 71) [I admit it, I’m a biased witness; but how else could I come out of this experience without leaving my common sense behind? Above all I observe this tiny bit of the camp that I am; the tiny bits that surround me. No, how could I claim to give an exhaustive picture of the camp? (You might as well try to empty the sea with a ladle.)]

In the light of this stylistic dichotomy between Maous and Novac, it is important to bear in mind that the latter had written from a very young age and would go on to become a professional writer (for evidence of her vital relationship with writing, see p. 69), whereas the former was a non-professional writer and has only published one text. This fundamental distinction is clear in the denser metaphoricity of Novac’s text compared to Maous’s. Figurative language is rare in Maous’s text; one of its few uses is the title’s deployment of the word ‘coma’ to connote the state of non-life without actual death that constituted existence in a Nazi camp. Maous painstakingly attempts mimetically to transpose lived reality into faithfully accurate written record. In this she is typical: as James Young has commented, ‘many Holocaust writers and critics have assumed that the more realistic a representation, the more adequate it becomes as testimonial evidence of outrageous events.’35 Writing against that current, however, Novac uses powerfully figurative language to convey the mental disorientations of a world beyond all human reason. One simple example is Novac’s attitude towards the hope that the Russians will arrive and liberate the camp: ‘Le jour, je le sais: ils sont à proximité. Mais la nuit mon optimisme me quitte; je f lanche. La nuit est allemande et que suis-je devant cette nuit’ (p. 170; my emphasis) [During the day, I know it: they’re close. But at night my optimism deserts me; I lose my nerve. The night is German and what am I faced with this night]. In spite of this literariness, Novac’s prologue classes her text explicitly as a testimony and asserts its enduring relevance in the late twentieth century: ‘55 ans après la guerre, ce témoignage garde son actualité. Une actualité désolante’ (p. 12)

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

23

[55 years after the war, this testimony is still relevant. Distressingly relevant]. The aesthetic and conceptual distinctiveness of Novac’s text consists in multiple factors, and there is space here to comment only on the most striking. Gendered markers are far less common than in Maous, in fact fairly negligible, which is probably because at the time of deportation, the fourteen-year-old Novac was barely a woman and thus less likely to be sensitive to such specificities. The only gendered details are her description of the French women in the camp, who impress by their indomitable attention to style and femininity, their energy and their optimism (pp. 220–22), and her emphasis on the trauma for women of having their hair shaved upon arrival at the camps. This head shaving is experienced at least momentarily as the worst of her ordeals, not for reasons of wounded vanity, but because of the sense of severed identity it inf licts: ‘Comme si la tondeuse m’avait coupée de moi-même’ (p. 40) [As if the shearer had cut me off from myself ].36 Beyond these sparse notations of gendered experience of the camps, there is far more stylistic and thematic traction to Novac’s text. First, the reader finds powerful expression of multiple or, alternatively, fissured national and ethnic identities, along with their complex interplay. Born in Romania in 1929, at eleven years of age the author and homodiegetic narrator ‘became’ Hungarian because of territorial conquests, then on return from Auschwitz in 1945 found herself to be again deemed Romanian. Novac wryly renders the bureaucratic conf lation of nationality and ethnicity: ‘j’ai beaucoup de mal à préciser ma nationalité, sauf celle figurant sur mes cartes d’identité successives: juive’ (p. 9) [I find it very hard to specify my nationality, apart from the one that features on my successive identity cards: Jewish]. She lays bare here a conceptual slippage between national, geographic identifications (Romanian, Hungarian) and those based on something notoriously hard to pin down, but historically never hard to use as a pretext for at best symbolic exclusion ( Jewishness). As brief ly discussed in the Introduction above, there is no consensus on what constitutes Jewish identity; but in the case of the Central European bureaucratise with which Novac has to contend, Jewish identity is a figure tapping into the old conspiracy theory of Jews as forming a separate and threatening ‘nation within a nation’. However, Novac ludically subverts all such notions of identity, along with their frequent graftings onto different language systems: ‘Comment le savoir? Je rêve en trois langues avec un accent dans chacune. Sur mon passeport il est écrit “Juive” en hongrois bien que je ne comprenne pas un traitre mot de “Juif ”; avant, c’était écrit en roumain, et je n’ai aucune idée de la langue dans laquelle ce sera écrit le jour où je regagnerai mon pays. Peut-être en norvégien ou en turc?’ (p. 219) [‘How would I know? I dream in three languages with an accent in each. On my passport “Jewish” is written in Hungarian even though I don’t understand a single word of “Jewish”; before, it was written in Rumanian, and I’ve no idea which language it will be written in the day when I return to my country. Maybe in Norwegian or Turkish?’]

This wry response suggests that gentile pigeonholing of her as above all Jewish is irremediable, and will endure throughout time and space.

24

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

Second, Novac’s mediation of anti-Semitism in all its degrees from denigration of Jews to their murder is crisp, cutting, and sometimes even caustically humorous. Occasionally there is a disorienting commonality between Novac’s description of her fellow Jews on the one hand, and anti-Semitic lexicon on the other; and some readers may wonder if this shows Novac’s internalization of anti-Semitism or her satire of it. The Falk sisters are described as having ‘le sens de la survie [...] tu n’as qu’à voir leurs pattes de rapace courtes, puissantes et crochues’ (p. 83) [the survival instinct [...] you only have to see their predatory paws, short, powerful and hooked]. The dehumanizing language here echoes anti-Semitic propaganda of the 1930s in which Jews featured as rapacious, sub-human beasts. If this is satire, Novac’s strategy is hazardous: in the absence of evidence that she has not internalized such propaganda, the risk of readerly misprision is high. Part of this off beat approach is Novac’s use of litotes. One particularly disturbing event — a German woman mockingly dubbed ‘Tête de Poupée’ [Doll-Face] casually murdering a mother trying to protect her daughter — is relayed in a detached, merciless mode which registers no emotion, but may well appal the reader by its stark exposure of complete contempt for human life and for the mother–child bond: La silhouette agenouillée fait une culbute bizarre dans la poussière [...] Tête de Poupée vient de glisser dans sa poche un objet que je ne l’ai pas vue en retirer, et qui semble étinceler un instant dans sa paume [...] Elle passe devant le mur du corps, fait un petit saut pour éviter la forme étalée sur le sol, jambes nues écartées, une marionnette disloquée, et l’enfant courbée dessus comme une bosse. (p. 27) [The kneeling figure does a strange tumble into the dust [...] Doll Face has just slipped into her pocket an object I hadn’t seen her taking out of it, and that seems momentarily to sparkle in her palm [...] She passes in front of the wall formed by the body, does a little skip to avoid the shape spread out on the ground, its naked legs apart, a broken puppet, and the child bent underneath like a hump.]

This forms a sharp contrast with Maous’s reporting of murder in the camps, where the witness’s sense of outrage is openly expressed (Maous, pp. 80–81). In Novac’s text, the approach is more subtle: an affective response is not absent, but is delayed and then implied through the narrator’s self-interrogation: ‘Est-ce que je suis normale? Ai-je bien vu l’espèce de bosse sous le soleil brûlant ce matin? Suis-je frappée d’insolation, moi-même en train de délirer?’ (Novac, p. 28) [Am I normal? Did I really see the sort of hump under the burning morning sun? Am I struck by sunstroke, myself delirious?]. But Novac also registers a gradual process of desensitization to death. In the face of the death-like ‘living’ conditions inf licted on Jews, reverence for the dead is attenuated: [...] ce camp se trouve sur l’emplacement d’un ancien cimetière juif — on tombe tantôt sur une côte, tantôt sur un tibia. Un jour, j’ai heurté un dentier complet. On s’y habitue comme à la poussière et à la boue; on marche dessus ou on les repousse du pied. La pauvre âme dont les ossements craquent sous nos pas nous pardonnera, j’espère. À notre place, ferait-elle autrement? (p. 46)

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

25

[[...] this camp is on the site of a former Jewish cemetery — sometimes you stumble over a rib, sometimes over a shinbone. One day, I ran into an entire set of dentures. You get used to it as you get used to the dust and the mud; you walk over them or you kick them away. The poor soul whose bones crack beneath our steps will forgive us, I hope. In our position, would it behave any differently?]

Third, and again a function of her off beat approach to horror, Novac’s style is often dryly witty, sardonically drawing on comedic codes which at first sight seem highly incongruous with her subject matter. While Terrence Des Pres concedes that ‘toward matters of the Holocaust the comic attitude is irreverent, a mode that belittles or cheapens the moral severity of its subject’, he proceeds pertinently to observe that ‘[a]t the same time, no one disputes its survival value’.37 And as Mark Cory has remarked, ‘[b]eyond marking moral boundaries and establishing nuances of credibility in incredible circumstances, the comic in Holocaust literature also functions as resistance, as protest.’38 Novac both performs and self-consciously frames Jewish humour as a defiant ‘coping’ mechanism: Félicie note nos professions sur des fiches [...] seul l’humour juif nous aide à supporter tout le reste — je ne vois pas, ma foi, ce que deviennent les Juifs sans humour — comme ma voisine de droite, par exemple, qui a inscrit sur sa fiche: Profession: femme du monde (bachelière). (pp. 85–86) [Félicie notes our occupations down on index cards [...] only Jewish humour helps up to bear the rest — upon my word, I can’t see what would become of Jews without humour — like my neighbour on the right, for example, who has written on her card: Profession: woman of the world (‘A’ level standard).]

A powerful cognate passage is the following. Je trouve pour ma part qu’un destin de Juive, ça suffit largement à un Juif... Mais non, à en croire Sophie, la particularité du destin juif est de ne pas se suffire, d’avoir à traîner d’autres destins, d’autres calamités, hongrois, polonais ou russe etc. en plus des siens! C’est pourquoi on avait été élu exprès par le Monsieur d’en Haut! Merci, j’observe, le Monsieur d’en Haut n’a qu’à se trouver un autre ‘Élu’ et nous faire ses excuses. (pp. 220–21) [For my part I find that a Jewish woman’s fate is quite enough for any Jew... But no, if you were to believe Sophie, what distinguishes Jewish fate is never being enough in itself, having to shoulder other fates, other calamities, Hungarian, Polish or Russian etc. as well as your own! That’s why we’d been specially chosen by the Gentleman up on High! Thanks, I observe, the Gentleman up on High need only find another ‘Chosen’ lot and apologize to us.]

Importantly, the obvious humour (evident in the exclamation marks, the faux-naïf capital letters in ‘Monsieur d’en Haut’, and the irreverent satire of Jewry as god’s elect people) does not obscure the serious point being made. That point is the difficult articulation of Jewish identity, already a misfortune due to anti-Semitism, and national identity, with all the misfortunes that can befall a nation. The passage also suggests a gendered dig in the first sentence’s contrasted use of ‘Juive’ and ‘Juif ’, implying that Jewish woman have it even worse than Jewish men. Finally,

26

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

the emphasis on anti-Semitism is consolidated by its use in a shocking joke that instrumentalizes it in order to expose its dark depths: ‘Elle ajoute: “Tu sais ce que disent les Slovaques d’un Juif qui en a marre d’être juif au point de s’électrocuter: ‘C’est un antisémite.’” ’ (p. 221) [She adds: ‘You know what Slovaks say about a Jew who is so sick of being a Jew that he electrocutes himself: “He’s an antiSemite.” ’]. Does such irreverent humour index Novac’s ambivalence towards her own Jewishness? The author inscribes herself as an ethnic rather than a religious Jew, and comically mocks a group of orthodox Jewish women’s ostentatious prayers (p. 173). The complexities of Jewish identity are evoked by the observant Ruchi’s abrogation of Novac’s claims on such identity due to her lack of faith: ‘petite garce, goy, putain!’ (p. 174) [little bitch, goy, whore!]. Ruchi’s insult of ‘goy’ is a deliberate solecism chosen to expunge Novac from the community of the elect, but perhaps also a parody of the sort of abusive contempt in which Gentiles hold Jews. Undeterred, Novac again satirizes observant Jews, this time targeting two differing levels of Jewish observance: firstly the insincere, where her mockery is caustic, and secondly the sincere, where her mockery is less caustic than destabilizing. First, Novac presents a group of Finnish-speaking devout Jewish women as hypocritical thieves and liars (p. 272), and reports her friend Edith’s cynicism about the authenticity of their observance (p. 273). But Novac goes on unmaliciously to undermine the whole basis of Edith’s far more sincere form of Jewish observance: Elle, Edith, se laisserait couper les deux mains plutôt que de toucher un couteau le jour du sabbat. La rigueur avec laquelle elle enlève toute bribe de viande de son potage! Respecte tous les jeûnes, majeurs et mineurs, chancelante parfois, à demi dans les vapes! Franchement je trouve que son ‘Suprême’ lui mène la vie dure pour des vétilles. (p. 273) [Edith would rather let her two hands be cut off than touch a knife on Shabbat. How rigorously she removes any scrap of meat from her soup! Respects all fasts, major and minor, sometimes she’s shaky, half dazed! Frankly I think that her ‘Supreme Being’ gives her a tough time over trif les.]

The foregoing reveals Novac’s text to be an admixture of atrocity and bathos. This is nowhere more evident that in her elevation of self-preservation over even the most sacred of family ties. She relays a Jewish man’s account of how his son had been the only Jewish child saved at Plaszow; how the child had witnessed his mother and sister’s massacre, had been hidden until the age of seventeen when he was finally able to emerge from clandestinity because now fit for work; and how he had, ultimately, been slaughtered in the bloodiest of ways. This tragic tale is framed by the banal notation that its narrator is munching on a bacon sandwich, and by Novac returning to this detail upon completion of his tale. The passage exploits the rhetorical figure of burlesque, of ironic incongruity, with a sense of jarring humour in its conclusion: ‘ “En fait, remarqua Sophie, le sandwich qu’il continuait à grignoter m’impressionnait davantage que son histoire” ’ (pp. 75–76) [‘Actually,’ remarked Sophie, ‘I was more impressed by the sandwich he carried on munching than by his story’]. Even when Novac does express her own stark shock and sense of impending mental collapse, it is through the imposition of aesthetic distance, via

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

27

implicitly comedic punning on the word ‘tête’: Un corps presque nu gît devant la baraque. Une femme SS passe à vélo pardessus. Le corps remue. A un moment, la tête ensanglantée se soulève mais le jeune garde qui se tient à côté la repousse de sa botte pour que son alerte copine puisse continuer son jeu. Lorsqu’elle passe devant nous, je la dévisage attentivement; elle est très jeune, ses joues en feu, elle glousse hystériquement. Le vélo... Cette large bouche d’adolescente avec ses grandes dents plates, ce gloussement continu... Je crains qu’ils ne cessent de rouler dans ma tête, tant que je l’aurai. (p. 193) [An almost naked body is lying in front of the hut. A woman SS rides over it on her bike. The body moves. At one point, the bloody head rises up but the young guard standing by pushes it back with his boot so that his lively friend can carry on her game. When she passes in front of us, I stare closely at her; she’s very young, her cheeks on fire, she’s chuckling hysterically. The bike... That large teenaged mouth with its big f lat teeth, that continuous chuckling... I’m scared they won’t stop rolling around in my mind, for as long as I haven’t lost it.]

Novac’s approach here seems amply to bear out Terrence Des Pres’s claim that ‘laughter is hostile to the world it depicts and subverts the respect on which repre­ sentation depends’.39 Given the formal sophistication of Les Beaux Jours de ma jeunesse, it is unsurprising that after liberation from Auschwitz Novac became a professional writer. Her main concern in that activity, she states, was to find the appropriate words to express the incoherence of the world, to be an honest witness to what she was powerless to change (p. 323). That accent on incoherence is fitting, given the moral vertigo in which her account leaves the reader. She sought to bear witness to the depredations of not just Nazism but also Stalinism, which came under particular focus with the collapse of communism in the late 1980s. In using memory to parallel the two forms of state-executed atrocity, and to suggest an ethical stance beyond them, Novac illustrates what Levinas in 1980 proclaimed as the imperative ‘de trouver toujours l’actualité des renseignements de la shoah à partir de nos experiences nouvelles’40 [always to find relevance in information about the Shoah on the basis of new experiences]. She could also be viewed as making what Tzvetan Todorov in 1998 designated exemplary as opposed to literal use of memory.41 In fact, Terrence des Pres had formulated a similar theory before either Levinas or Todorov, but the latter have been by far the more inf luential thinkers.42 For Todorov, exemplary memory, unlike literal memory, allows category-links to be made between past and present phenomena of differing contingent forms; through such links, exemplary memory permits the learning of lessons from the past that may improve the present. Potential objections to these dynamically forward-facing models of memory might include the charge that they desecrate the Shoah’s tragic unicity, or, less dramatically, that they promote the drawing of facile and possibly dubious equivalences between tragic events of entirely different qualitative and/or quantitative scales. Pointcounter-point, it might be advanced that such arguments foment what Michael Rothberg has designated ‘competitive memory’,43 in which different social groups vie for precedence as victims.

28

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

Given the complex moral and even epistemological stakes of this debate, it seems to me that only one point is non-negotiable: that unconditional respect must be accorded the position adopted by genuine victims of such tragedies, as opposed to those who never endured them, even if they belong to the same ethnic group as was targeted in the past. Despite her feistiness, Novac was, objectively speaking, a genuine victim of the Nazis. Further, her willing espousal of these forwardfacing models of memory does not preclude a readiness to challenge conventional historiography in a manner which further intensifies the scandal of Judaeocide during WWII and of all who contributed to it, on either ideological or pragmatic grounds. Discovering that the Allies had rejected the Nazi offer to release four hundred thousand Hungarian Jews in exchange for four thousand lorries from the Allies, Novac implies the Allies’ complicity in the genocide of Jews: ‘il y a des “sacrifices inévitables, stratégiques”. Qu’en tout état de cause, pour mettre fin à la guerrre, les camions étaient plus importants que les Juifs hongrois’ (p. 323) [there are ‘inevitable, strategic sacrifices’. That anyway, to put an end to the war, lorries were more important than Hungarian Jews]. Her own survival is presented as something vaguely unreal, but her perplexity and propensity to interrogate remain robust (p. 324). In closing her testimony thus she proffers to the reader no falsely happy ending, but instead a salutary veto on complacency. WWII: Persecution/Clandestinity Complacency is no more an option for the reader at the end of Dominique Arban’s La Cité d’injustice (1945). A conventionally linear third-person narrative, this novel is based on the real-life experiences of its author during WWII. Its only formally innovative feature is the periodic intercalation of chapters by transcriptions of the ‘Statuts des Juifs’ passed by the Vichy government during the early part of France’s Occupation by Germany. These intercalations anticipate the increasing restrictions on the principal protagonist Catherine’s civil rights and freedoms. For example, the first statute typographically reproduced in the novel constitutes a performative act banning Jews from practising certain professions, and this adumbrates Catherine’s loss of her profession as a journalist. The last intercalation differs markedly from the previous whilst forming their sinister conclusion, for it constitutes a quotation from a speech made by Hitler on 26 April 1942. The actual content of that quotation is ostensibly non-specific to the Nazis — ‘ “Je n’ai pas d’autre prière à addresser au Tout-Puissant que celle de nous accorder sa bénédiction” ’ (p. 359) [‘My only prayer for the Almighty is that He grant us His blessing’] — but its superficial appeal to the religious reader is all the more chilling when viewed in the historical context of the Nazis’ by now confirmed ‘Final Solution’: namely, the extermination of European Jewry. The early parts of La Cité d’injustice chronicle Catherine’s progressive destitution not only of basic human rights but also of love (her partner Bernard’s), friendship, and support. Like so many other assimilated French Jews, Catherine Vernier, born of Russian parents settled in France since 1914, had been unaware of her alterity relative to non-Jewish French citizens until the establishment of the Vichy regime: ‘Depuis vingt-sept ans qu’elle était au monde, elle se sentait Française, catholique.

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

29

Anéanties toutes les valeurs de sa vie, voici qu’elle était Russe comme l’attestaient ses “papiers”. Le tampon “Juive” étalait sur la page de garde ses hautes capitales rouges’ (p. 15) [For the seventeen years she’d been on this earth, she had felt French, Catholic. All the values of her life having been destroyed, she was now Russian, as her ‘papers’ attested. The stamp reading ‘Jewish’ spread its large red capital letters out on the f lyleaf ]. But interpellation by Nazi and Vichy ideology force her into awareness of her Jewish identity, however much it clashes with her own sense of identity; and much later on, she acknowledges this point in the bitter remark that ‘On fait de nous ce qu’on nous reproche d’être. On fait de nous des juifs’ (p. 323) [They make us into what we are criticized for being. They make us into Jews]. Catherine’s argument that conscious Jewish identity is imposed by the anti-Semite uncannily anticipates Sartre’s Réflexions sur la question juive, published one year after Arban’s novel. Even if Sartre’s 1946 essay contains virtually no reference to the Shoah, it does plausibly posit the construction of the Jew by the gaze of the antiSemite. That gaze is of course a metaphor, but in Arban’s text the metaphor indexes all too material attributes of exclusionary laws. Arban probes various constructs of Jewishness, including the highly stereotypical, along with their internalization by Jews themselves. When her gentile friend Gilberte protests ‘il n’est pas possible qu’un seul être ait tout cela à supporter’ [it’s not possible that a single person should have all that to bear], Catherine — who has had to assume the false name Françoise — ripostes mordantly ‘— Toujour ton goût de la justice. Tu mériterais d’être juive, toi aussi, avec cette passion-là. Bernard me disait autrefois: “Tu n’as vraiment rien d’israélite, ça non. Mais ce besoin effréné de justice, pas d’erreur!” ’ (p. 18) [‘That same old taste for justice of yours. With that passion, you’d deserve to be a Jew too. Bernard used to say to me: “You really don’t look at all Jewish. But with that desperate need for justice of yours, there’s no doubt about it, you’re Jewish!” ’]. Cultural clichés of Jewish legalism, which is what Jewish respect for justice was often reduced to by anti-Semites, are thus invoked in an effort to vanquish despair by wry humour. But despair triumphs as Catherine admits the bankruptcy of such clichés: ‘Tout se réduit à quelques lieux communs lamentables [...] Même une catastrophe aussi complète que celle-ci’ (p. 18) [Everything is reduced to a few pathetic clichés [...] Even a catastrophe as complete as this one]. Striking here is the lexical choice of ‘catastrophe’. For ‘catastrophe’ is what is meant by the Hebrew word ‘Shoah’, applied after WWII by Jews to the specifically Jewish genocide, as opposed to the wider term of ‘Holocaust’ which encompassed all victims of Nazi persecutors: political prisoners, gypsies, and homosexuals. It should, however, be stressed that this is something of a proleptic pairing of the two words ‘catastrophe’ and ‘Shoah’, for Alban’s text begins in 1940, before the Wansee conference’s decision on the ‘Final Solution’ in 1942 to prosecute wholesale extermination of European Jewry. After Catherine’s former lover Bernard has abandoned her in order to protect his career, Gilberte expresses a sense of collective guilt shared by all Gentiles for such betrayal: Nous sommes tous coupables devant toi de l’attitude de Bernard [...] Je ferais n’importe quoi pour réparer. Je me sens coupable. Je ne sais pas s’il y a une

30

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies solidarité humaine, ou si c’est autre chose. Oui, je crois que c’est une sorte de solidarité. Je me sens requise, comprends-tu? engagée. Parce qu’un homme a pu... Un homme comme lui! (pp. 42–43) [We’re all guilty before you for Bernard’s attitude [...] I’d do anything to make up for it. I feel guilty. I don’t know if there’s such a thing as human solidarity, or if it’s something else. Yes, I think it’s a sort of solidarity. I feel called upon, do you understand what I mean? committed. Because a man was able... A man like him!]

Yet Gilberte’s moral high ground is very slightly undercut when she reproves Catherine’s mentioning under police interrogation Gilberte’s husband as guarantor of her situation’s regularity. Gilberte’s disapproval marks up the moral complexities of Occupation, where the wish to fight injustice collides with fear for the safety of one’s nearest and dearest. Moral complexity also marks the characterization of Luc, a Catholic four years Catherine’s elder who takes her under his wing and soon into his bed, temporarily restoring her battered faith in both God and humanity (pp. 136 and 138), but eventually deserting her for reasons the reader is left to infer (p. 368). Even at the outset of this ambiguous relationship, based partly on desire, much on circumstances, and not at all on genuine love, the reader may be left uneasy by Luc’s literal imprint of the Cross on Catherine’s forehead — a Christian appropriation of a Jewish body: ‘elle sentit la main de Luc sur son front: d’un pouce fermement appuyé, il y traçait un signe de croix’ (p. 132) [she felt Luc’s hand on her forehead: pressing firmly with his thumb, he traced on it the sign of a cross]. Admittedly, there are counter-examples to the central thesis of injustice em­bodied in the novel’s title, and a fairly nuanced view of French society under Vichy gradually emerges. Two ciphers of privilege and power within that generally unjust society extend help and protection to Catherine. The aristocratic Isabelle de Vardt uses her inf luence to save the young woman from deportation (p. 153), whilst the Catholic priest Père Anselm ensures her subsistence in Fontvern, the isolated village to which she is sent to ensure her (clandestine) survival (p. 159). Catherine’s despair at not being allowed as a Jew to work in any capacity (p. 160) is salient: a relatively neglected element in Franco-Jewish historiography of WWII, that ban on professional activity corrodes her sense of identity as an independent, autonomous woman. She does find genuine sympathy and protection in this village, even if some of its inhabitants, including the parish priest, are anti-Semitic, while others exoticize and thus implicitly exclude her at least on one level from their indigenous community (p. 174). The mayor’s wife also ignorantly assumes that she is a foreigner because she is Jewish, ironically complimenting this entirely assimilated French Jew on her excellent command of French. Despite its mediation of the good will and disinterested succour offered by various gentile elements of French society, La Cité d’injustice above all emphasizes irretrievable displacement, loss, and alienation from that society. Through the rhetorical figure of condensation, Arban etches the nomadism enforced on Jews along with the self-estrangement it occasions: ‘Tous ces lieux étrangers... Chez elle...’ (p. 165) [All those foreign places... Within her...]. Later on, Catherine refers to her literal ‘exil’ in Fontvern (p. 172) and, through free indirect style, the narrative

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

31

conveys her metaphysical exile constituted by, inter alia, the interdiction on work: [...] elle comprenait que c’était cela qu’elle ne pouvait pas supporter: cette journée qui allait s’achevant, sans tenir compte d’elle qui n’y avait pas trouvé place. L’heure de répit auprès de Luc paraissait lointaine, inutile. Ce n’avait été qu’une heure. La journée allait se clore, sans qu’elle y fût entrée. Elle était restée dehors. Exilée. (pp. 177–78) [ [...] she realized that this was what she couldn’t bear: this day drawing to a close, taking no account of her, who had found no place in it. The hour’s respite with Luc seemed distant, pointless. It had only been an hour. The day was going to end without her having entered it. She had remained outside. Exiled.]

The narrative of her endless, empty days is stamped by a morbid sense of ennui and isolation, underlining sufferings far less dramatic than those of the camps, but hardly negligible either. Deprivation of freedom to develop as an unfettered individual is conceived by her as an existential attack: ‘Voilà. Voilà exactement ce qu’on me défend. On me défend de devenir. De de­venir quelqu’un. De devenir moi-même. De jouer ce jeu, mon Dieu, pour lequel Vous nous mettez au monde, pour savoir si nous l’aurons gagné ou perdu.’ Elle pose sa tête sur ses bras pliés. ‘On m’a pris ma vie. On m’a pris ma vie.’ (p. 191) [‘That’s it. That’s exactly what I’m forbidden. I’m forbidden to become anything. To become someone. To become myself. To play this game, my God, for which You put us on earth, to see if we’ll have won or lost it.’ She puts her head on her folded arms. ‘My life’s been taken away from me. My life’s been taken away from me.’]

Arban strongly suggests that Catherine’s existence has been annulled and then re­con­ stituted in a void, outside the spaces of the living, by the Jewish statutes (p. 213). Without Arban’s benefit of hindsight, her rather more ingenuous character Cath­ erine clings to an idealized vision of Republican France. Hence her naïve reaction upon receipt of a telegram extending help from a previously rather distant friend, Marie-Anne: ‘Elle a, comme Gilberte, cette passion innée de justice... Il y a là une vertu nationaliste. Non, républicaine. Une conception de la solidarité humaine qu’on ne trouve, sous cette forme, qu’en France. Une sorte de vertu laïque. Les Droits de l’Homme sont devenus à la longue autre chose qu’une conception de l’esprit. Une notion du cœur.’ (pp. 312–13) [‘Like Gilberte, she has that innate passion for justice... There’s a nationalist virtue in that. No, a republican virtue. A concept of human solidarity that you only get, in this form, in France. A sort of secular virtue. The Rights of Man have eventually become something other than a concept of the mind. A notion of the heart.’]

And it is this idealism that inspires her patriotic affirmation ‘— Je ne quitterai pas la France, dit-elle avec ferveur. Jamais!’ (p. 316) [‘I won’t leave France,’ she said ardently. ‘Never!’].

32

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

The end of the novel will trenchantly stress the irony of that desperate idealism. Only twenty or so pages to its end, the spare notation ‘L’armée allemande franchit la ligne de démarcation’ (p. 364) [The German army crossed the demarcation line] signals the Occupation of the so-called Free Zone by the Nazis in November 1942. The novel closes on Catherine’s psychological collapse after learning of her parents’ arrest by French policemen and internment in Drancy, sure transit point to the Nazi death camps of the East (p. 380). Voided of any human substance drawing on familial love and hope, she ceases to occupy any human place, becoming affectively absent from a world now dominated by the murders instigated by Nazism but also by French fascism: ‘Elle vit dans un lieu intangible qui n’a ni figure, ni nom. Et MarieAnne sait qu’elle ne garde qu’une absente’ (p. 385) [She’s living in an intangible place which has neither a face nor a name. And Marie-Anne knows that all she’s left with is a woman who isn’t really there]. While La Cité d’injustice attempts to deal a fair hand with respect to France during WWII, it ultimately emphasizes the dehumanization of that country’s majority gentile population through their failure to oppose Vichy’s elimination of Jews. Like Arban’s La Cité d’injustice, Elisabeth Gille’s Un paysage de cendres (1996) is a novel loosely based on the experiences of its author in Vichy France. However, one important variant is their differing ages: whilst Arban was a young woman during WWII, Gille survived it as an ‘enfant caché’, that is, as the child of Jewish deportees who was hidden by non-Jews in Vichy France and thus saved from deportation and death in the camps.44 Jean Laloum has aptly delineated the particular difficulties these children faced both during and after the war: [...] plus de 10000 enfants juifs furent déportés de France. Ceux qui échappèrent à la déportation ne furent pas pour autant épargnés. Orphelins, cachés par des institutions ou chez des particuliers, confiés à des nourrices pour les plus jeunes d’entre eux, ils allaient devoir affronter de nouvelles épreuves: sortir de l’anonymat, réapprendre à vivre, taire la peur présente à tous les instants, retrouver une famille, un nouveau foyer.45 [[...] more than 10,000 Jewish children were deported from France. Those who escaped deportation were not for all that spared. As orphans, hidden in institutions or the homes of private individuals, entrusted to childminders in the case of the youngest, they would later on have to face new ordeals: emerging from anonymity, learning to live again, silencing an ever-present fear, finding a family again, a new home.]

Those difficulties are forcefully conveyed in Gille’s searing novel, described by Le Magazine littéraire as ‘un livre de feu et de glace’ [a book of fire and ice] in which Gille ‘éventre les couches du temps pour se dresser contre le risque de l’oubli’46 [rips open the layers of time to combat the risk that we might forget]. The chief protagonist of Un paysage de cendres, Léa Lévy, figures as a quasi-double of the author Gille, even though their experiences are not identical. The chief difference is that Gille was hidden along with her older sister Denise Epstein,47 whereas no such character exists in Un paysage de cendres. In 1942, Léa is only five years old when her parents are arrested and deported. Thanks to a few brave French people, she is saved and smuggled into a Catholic boarding school where she remains until the end of

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

33

the war. Here she forms an intimate, indeed passionate bond with the non-Jewish Bénédicte, two years her elder and daughter of heroic Resistance fighters. Léa undergoes a mutilation of her identity in being given a new name, Eliane Lelong, in order to elude the suspicions of the milice. It is only at the end of the war that she discovers the horrific truth of the camps, their gas chambers, and her parents’ death in the latter. Despite the kindly guardianship of Bénédicte’s parents, Léa becomes a disturbed teenager who fixates on the war, the Shoah, and the political trials of persecutors and collaborators. Just as she appears to be approaching mental equilibrium and hope for the future as a student in Paris, she experiences a second, tragic loss, when Bénédicte is killed in a car crash. Gille bears ample testimony to anti-Semitic remarks, measures, persecutions and round-ups of Jews in France, mainly in Bordeaux and Paris, and the following analysis will certainly make some reference to these. However, proportionately more attention will be paid to a rather more original feature of the novel: its poignant rendering of the trauma experienced both during and after the war by a young Jewish child who was not deported. The sources of this trauma are threefold: being severed from her parents at a very young age and placed with total strangers; being forced to change her identity completely; discovering the Jewish ethnocide and her parents’ murder in it. Pathos is achieved despite the fact that there is curiously little, if any, interiority in the characterization of Léa; indeed, the third-person narrative voice never appears to focalize upon her. This could be symptomatic of the trauma experienced by her referential model, the author Gille, and a consequent need for distancing, as I have posited in the case of Langfus above. Extreme infantile trauma is evident from a very early point in the novel when the five-year-old is wrenched from her Jewish parents, to save her from arrest along with them in Bordeaux (despite their having converted to Catholicism in 1939): ‘Elle n’arrêtait pas de hurler. On a fini par la bâillonner avec son écharpe. [...] La môme s’est endormie à force de pleurer’ (p. 18) [She wouldn’t stop howling. They ended up gagging her with her scarf [...] The kid cried herself to sleep]. Whilst she appears gradually to accept her new circumstances, such acceptance is contingent on the fantasy that her parents will eventually return. Léa is and remains radically different from her peers. She displays intellectual precocity, which is interpreted as suspect by sister Saint-Gabriel. Her view of the five-year-old Jewish child who claims to be already able to read is tinged with a latent anti-Semitism prophetic of de Gaulle’s infamous reference to the ‘peuple juif, peuple d’élite, sûr de lui et dominateur’48 [ Jewish people, an élite people, self-confident and domineering]. For she believes the child to be ‘indisciplinée, insolente, orgueilleuse et menteuse, en plus. [...] On disait sa race dominatrice et fourbe. Fallait-il le croire? Elle s’admonesta intérieurement pour revenir à des sentiments plus charitables’ (p. 35) [undisciplined, cheeky, proud and deceitful, what’s more. [...] Her race is said to be domineering and treacherous. Was that to be believed? She admonished herself inwardly and returned to more charitable sentiments]. Léa is indeed cheeky and proud, but with a good deal of pathetically hollow bravado: Quant à Léa, on ne l’interrogeait plus tant on était las de son éternelle réponse: ‘Mon papa et ma maman sont partis en voyage. Ils sont très forts et très riches.

34

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies Quand ils reviendront me chercher, ils m’apporteront beaucoup de belles choses et ils tueront toutes celles qui ont été méchantes avec moi.’ (p. 44) [As for Léa, people had given up questioning her they were so tired of her eternal answer: ‘My mummy and daddy have gone away on a journey. They’re very strong and very rich. When they come back to collect me, they’ll bring me lots of lovely things and they’ll kill everyone who’s been nasty to me.’]

Léa’s violent if unintentionally ironic threat at the end of the last sentence cited betrays an inchoate intuition of her parents’ fate, which she here inverts and fantasmatically projects onto others. Her insurrection intensifies, possibly in an unconscious attempt to sustain a threatened sense of self through aggressive performance of an inviolable self (p. 49). She is equally challenging of religion, asking questions premonitory of those that would be formulated by adults after the war as to god’s whereabouts during Auschwitz: ‘Que faisait Dieu pendant cette guerre? Etait-il aveugle ou en vacances?’ (p. 51) [What was God doing during this war? Was he blind or on holiday?]. Yet her intellectual poise and general defiance do not form an impervious shield, and her behaviour also reveals profound psychological disturbance: ‘On la craignait malgré son âge: quand elle ne se vengeait pas d’une méchanceté par de mauvaises plaisanteries ou des moqueries, elle piquait des crises de nerfs si violentes que les bonnes sœurs s’affolaient’ (p. 51) [Despite her age she was feared: when she wasn’t taking revenge for some nasty act or joke or bit of mockery, she was throwing a nervous fit so violent that the nuns panicked]. This disturbance grows increasingly plain in her maladaptive behaviour at Liberation when her parents, unlike her close friend Bénédicte’s, do not return. She refuses to leave the school building, is found hiding in the cupboard where she had recently been hidden by the nuns for her own protection (pp. 77 and 79), becomes docile and silent, and wanders restlessly around the school sucking her thumb (p. 79). The latter detail is a clear index to her psychological regression to the now lost infantile state in which her parents had been present and her psychological security intact. The cessation of her explosive anger and bragging is also symptomatic of a failure of will and of hope triggered by her parents’ non-return. The loss of a previously robust appetite consolidates the picture of pathology, with her increased need for sleep signifying refuge from pain at the growing revelation of abandonment and loss. The radical transformation of the child is most cogently encapsulated in the detail that her schoolmates find her to be a ‘petit fantôme muet qui ne réagissait à aucune de leurs taquineries (p. 80) [silent little ghost who didn’t react to any of their teasing]. The metaphor is apt: identification with the parents she subconsciously knows to be dead takes the form of her physically becoming ghostlike herself — silent, ethereal, unreachable. Understated pathos increases as the narrative moves into the immediate post-war era, whose documentation provides a salutary historical lesson. The reader is apprised of the French state’s indifference during this era towards the situation of children like the now eight-year-old Léa, orphan of Jewish deportees. At this historical juncture the authorities’ priorities lay elsewhere, in purges of collaborationists and miliciens [members of the milice] and in restoring adequate food supplies:

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

35

Sœur Saint-Gabriel [...] se rendit à la préfecture où le désordre régnait encore [...] On y était bien trop préoccupé par les problèmes administratifs de toutes sortes, par les difficultés de l’épuration, par le ravitaillement de la ville, dont l’insuffisance donnait lieu à des manifestations et à des grèves, pour s’intéresser au destin d’une petite fille, juive de surcroît. (pp. 81–82) [Sister Saint-Gabriel [...] went to the prefecture where disorder still reigned [...] People there were far too preoccupied by administrative problems of all kinds, by the difficulties of the purges, by food supplies for the town, whose inadequacy was prompting demonstrations and strikes, to be interested in the fate of a little girl, who what’s more was Jewish.]

The free indirect style of the last clause here effectively conveys an oblique form of French anti-Semitism surviving Vichy’s anti-Jewish Statutes. The reader is also made aware of the French public’s initial refusal to accept the truth of the death camps and their gas chambers. This refusal is typified by the response of sister Saint-Gabriel, again rendered via free indirect style, to a newspaper article and photograph about the camps appearing in April 1945: ‘Ce ne pouvait être qu’une exagération, une affabulation de journaliste. D’ailleurs, il s’agissait d’un quotidien communiste’ (p. 82) [It had to be an exaggeration, the sort of thing a journalist concocts. Besides, it was a communist daily]. However, when similar evidence appears in a more rightwing paper, Le Figaro, the nun is more receptive — ‘Cette lecture la glaça’ [Reading this chilled her] — and suddenly realizes the severity of Léa’s traumatized regressive state: ‘Léa suçait son pouce, recroquevillée sur un banc, les jambes ballantes. Sœur Saint-Gabriel la contempla avec une sorte d’horreur. Impossible de continuer ainsi. Cette petite était en train de devenir folle’ (p. 83) [Léa was sucking her thumb, hunched up on a bench, her legs dangling. Sister Saint-Gabriel looked at her with a kind of horror. They couldn’t go on like this. The little girl was going mad]. Yet when she announces to Léa that they will go directly to Paris where deportees are returning, the reaction of the child is described in judgemental and censorious terms, as if the will to life that returns with re-ignited hope is indecently at odds with Christian codes of propriety for little girls: ‘Son indiscipline et son arrogance lui étaient revenues en un tournemain’ (p. 85) [She’d recovered her unruliness and her arrogance in a f lash]. Is the remark an echo of Sister Saint-Gabriel’s earlier anti-Semitic ref lection, ‘On disait sa race dominatrice et fourbe’ (p. 35)? The attribution of reproof in ‘indiscipline et son arrogance’ is, admittedly, curiously free-f loating. The narrative construct represented by Sister Saint-Gabriel in fact represents a complex configuration. Whilst the narrative sections focalized on her convey her affection for Léa, whose life she literally saves, as a conformist Christian of her time she is complicit with the systemic anti-Semitism of the Catholic Church at that historical juncture (emblematized by Pope Pius XII’s refusal to oppose Nazi Judaeocide). Even if the charge of anti-Semitism is rejected, few if any Jews would not be offended by her and other Christians’ view of Jews as Christ-killers, or by her appropriation of Léa for Christianity — baptized Jewish children becoming Catholic property (pp. 119–20). Less complex are the ignorance and malevolence vis-à-vis Jews in the Liberation period which are exemplified by the concierge at

36

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

Léa’s former home in Paris. The concierge’s anti-Semitism is communicated first by innuendo and omission, then overtly: De l’argent, ils en avaient, les Lévy, ça, c’est vrai, il fallait voir les fourrures de la femme, les autos du mari... mais la famille, les amis, tout un tas de... enfin, d’Israélites ont défilé chez eux, après leur départ, surtout au moment des raf les de juillet. [...] faites donc un saut à l’hôtel Lutétia, sur le boulevard Raspail. Un hôtel de luxe, où on rassemble les rapatriés. Ils n’y manquent de rien, paraît-il. On les gorge de viande, de foie gras et de vins fins pendant que nous, les bons Français, comme d’habitude, nous mourons de faim. (pp. 90–91) [Money, oh they had plenty of that, the Lévys, it’s true, you just had to see the wife’s furs, the husband’s cars... but the family, the friends, a whole bunch of... well, of Jews turned up at their place one after the other after they’d left, particularly during the July round-ups [...] Why don’t you drop in at the Lutétia Hotel, on the boulevard Raspail. A luxury hotel, where they gather together people back from the war. They lack for nothing there, so I’m told. They’re being stuffed with meat, foie gras and fine wines while we decent French folk, as usual, we’re dying of hunger.]

The last sentence maintains the hackneyed distinction between parasitical Jews and martyred French people, from whose collectivity Jews are excluded even at Liberation. And the harrowing scenes at the Hôtel Lutétia, where Léa’s crucible is staged, attest elliptically to the extensive geography of Vichyite contributions to the Holocaust: ‘Avez-vous rencontré, croisé, entendu parler de... Pouvez-vous me donner des nouvelles, bonnes ou mauvaises, de... mes parents, mon mari, mon épouse, mon fils, ma fille... raf lés à Paris, Bordeaux, Marseille... en 42, 43, 44... aperçus pour la dernière fois à Drancy, Pithiviers, Beaune-la-Rolande...’ (p. 98) [‘Have you met, come across, heard about... Can you give me any news, good or bad, about... my parents, my husband, my wife, my son, my daughter... rounded up in Paris, Bordeaux, Marseille... in 42, 43, 44... seen for the last time at Drancy, Pithiviers, Beaune-la-Rolande...’]

The innocence of Léa’s childlike egotism is expressed in the belief that her parents could not possibly be found among these deportees because they would have first come to collect her before helping these wretches (p. 101). Occasioned by another Jewish child some five years her elder, her fall from childlike ignorance is all the more cataclysmic. Whilst sister Saint-Gabriel deals with the required paperwork, Léa explores the building and chances upon the child, who is presented not as a boy but as a corpse; thus the narrative ref lects the Nazi policy to dehumanize Jews: Léa sursauta et releva les yeux. Surgi de nulle part, un cadavre la regardait. C’était le même crâne que les têtes coupées posées sur les civières, en bas, peau livide semée de taches rouges, tendue sur des pommettes en biseau, si pointues qu’elles semblaient sur le point de la transpercer, larges cernes bistre, grandes dents jaunes déchaussées, lèvres blanches, fendues et gercées. Pas de cheveux, pas de cils. (p. 107) [Léa jumped and looked up. A corpse that had appeared from nowhere was looking at her. Its head was the same as the shaven heads laid out on stretchers

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

37

downstairs, the skin pallid with red marks, stretched over cheekbones with slanted edges, so pointed that they seemed to be about to pierce it, wide blackish-brown rings under the eyes, big loose yellow teeth, white lips, split and chapped. No hair, no eyelashes.]

Prominent here is the detached, graphic typology of physical stigmata borne by the camp victim. The succeeding description foregrounds the topos of apocalyptic disaster which is part of Jewish scriptural tradition:49 Dans ce visage de mort vivant, les yeux nocturnes, dont on ne distinguait pas la pupille, brûlaient d’une f lamme sourde qui braquait sa lumière noire en dedans d’eux-mêmes, comme si une vision de désastre en avait incendié et révulsé la rétine, ne laissant intacte et capable de regard que la face intérieure. (p. 108) [In this living-dead face, the nocturnal eyes whose pupils you couldn’t make out burned with a dull f lame which turned its black light inside them, as if a vision of disaster had burned and rolled the retina upwards, leaving only the inner side intact and able to see.]

The mythical dimensions are amplified by the trope of blindness: ‘Les yeux à la fois aveugles et sagaces s’agrandirent encore comme s’ils s’apprêtaient à engloutir la fillette dans quelque puits profond de vérité visqueuse’ (p. 108) [The eyes, both blind and wise, got even bigger as if they were preparing to engulf the little girl in some deep well of viscous truth]. Along the signifying chain, this could be interpreted as an allusion to the blindness of Isaac in a context of catastrophe which is underscored by recourse to exactly that word when the cadaverous boy spasmically empties Léa’s box of toy pearls over her head: ‘Et soudain, comme électrocuté, le garçon se redressa [...] agrippa les deux bords de la boîte et la renversa sur la tête de Léa. Celleci resta d’abord muette devant l’étendue de la catastrophe’ (p. 109; my emphasis) [And suddenly, as if he’d been electrocuted, the boy got up [...] grabbed the two sides of the box and tipped it over Léa’s head. To begin with she remained mute faced with the extent of the catastrophe]. Another hermeneutic coordinate might be that of Tiresias, the blind sage endowed with oracular powers, although this does not negate the ancient Hebrew precedent of inscribed catastrophe. Perhaps fittingly given his function of universal truth-bearing, this potentially oracular figure is, in the boy avatar here, stripped of individual markers to the radical point of bearing no human name and identifying himself merely by the number tattooed on his arm. The antinomy of elevation to oracularity and debasement to the synecdochical status of the skeletal hand (‘la main’ is the most common designation of the boy throughout this sequence) ref lects the dualistic status of the Shoah in modern Jewish history. For it is on the one hand ineffable, unjustifiable atrocity, and on the other hand, trigger for an adamantly non-compromising movement of Jewish selfpreservation and self-affirmation, which certainly accelerated if it did not cause the creation, and subsequently the militant protection of, the State of Israel. Bearer of catastrophic truth this spectral child certainly is. In response to Léa’s question as to where her parents are, he replies with calculated precision: ‘— Gazés. Empoisonnés comme des rats. Brûlés dans un four’ (p. 110) [‘Gassed. Poisoned like rats. Burned in an oven’]. The epistemological rupture created by the announcement is confirmed by its positioning in the penultimate paragraph

38

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

of this dyadic novel’s first part. Léa’s reaction to the revelation is regression to an even more infantile, almost foetal state which seems to signify an unconscious wish for womblike protection against truths that even adults cannot fully integrate — witness Sœur Saint-Gabriel’s recoiling (p. 82). Her friend Bénédicte’s parents, the Gaillacs, find her thus at the convent: Léa dormait sur l’un des lits blancs, dans la grande pièce vide, repliée sur ellemême comme un fœtus dans le ventre de sa mère, le pouce dans la bouche. [...] Quand elle avait ouvert les yeux, son regard très noir leur avait paru habité par une sombre présence étrangère, exclusivement perceptible pour sa vision révulsée. On eût dit que, pour elle, le monde s’était retourné comme un gant, qu’elle n’en voyait plus que l’envers, grisâtre et rugueux, collé au fond de ses orbites. (p. 117) [Léa was sleeping on one of the white beds, in the big empty room, curled up like a foetus in its mother’s belly, her thumb in her mouth. [...] When she’d opened her eyes, her intensely dark gaze had seemed to them haunted by a sombre foreign presence, visible only to her rolled-up retina. It was as if, for her, the world had been turned inside out like a glove, that she could only now see the inside, greyish and rough, right at the bottom of the sockets.]

What stands out here is recursion to that emphasis on the ocular seen above (p. 108) in which Léa begins to resemble the oracular boy-survivor who had killed her innocence. Additional evidence of the psychological damage inf licted on her during this crucible is her denial of ever having had parents (p. 125). It is as if she is only able to survive mentally by suppressing all memory of them, rather than psychologically integrating their death. Other evidence is her inability to trust. When the Gaillacs become her guardians and the two girls are sent to a new, secular Bordeaux school in 1945, Léa is met with overtures of friendship based on the other girls’ intuition of national indignation about the Nazi crimes against Jews, which had by then become general knowledge (pp. 129–30). Léa rejects such overtures with cold contempt, refusing to mix with the other girls. Her heterodox spirit has also been extinguished, as if revelation of the Shoah has turned her into an automaton unable to feel, think, or exercise imagination — in fact, aff licted by the anhedonia located above in Langfus’s fictional alter-egos. All that appears to interest her is reference to vengeance against collaborators (p. 131). Contrary to the Gaillacs’ belief, but as the reader is aware, Léa knows all about the genocide. The Gaillacs’ misapprehension is narratively excused by the fact that in the early 1950s the Shoah has slipped from the horizon of public discourse and memory in France, where it had only ever had a slight and ephemeral place. For her part, Léa is obsessed by the Shoah and by political purges of key collaborators, acutely aware of how the two phenomena are never publicly linked: Elle écouta ainsi tous les comptes rendus du procès qui s’acheva par la condamnation à mort du vieux Maréchal, aussitôt gracié. A huit ans, elle ne comprit pas tout mais elle remarqua qu’il y était beaucoup question d’intelligence avec l’ennemi, de trahison, d’humiliation inf ligée à la France, et jamais du destin de ceux qu’on appelait les ‘déportés raciaux’. De même pour le procès Laval [...] (p. 138)

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

39

[So she listened to all the accounts of the trial which ended in the death sentence for the old Marshal, who was immediately pardoned. At eight years old, she didn’t understand everything but she noticed that there was a lot of talk about complicity with the enemy, about betrayal, about humiliation inf licted on France, and never about the fate of those who were called ‘racial deportees’. It was the same with the Laval trial [...]]

The attribution of this insight to a child pastiches the classical use of the ingénue figure to expose unpalatable truths. What remains unexplained is why Léa hides her obsession. The reader may infer that it exposes a part of herself belonging to a past identity which she has extruded. For she firmly distances herself from her Jewish identity: Juifs? Israélites? Léa ignorait ce que ces mots signifiaient et, à vrai dire, s’en moquait. Dès son départ du pensionnat, elle avait déclaré à Bénédicte qu’elle ne croyait pas en Dieu, parce qu’il ne pouvait pas exister d’Etre Tout-Puissant assez méchant et stupide pour créer les hommes à seule fin de les exterminer (p. 139) [ Jews? Israelites? Léa didn’t know what these words meant and, truth be told, didn’t care. As soon as she’d left the boarding school, she had declared to Bénédicte that she didn’t believe in God, because there couldn’t be an Almighty Being malicious and stupid enough to create men with the sole aim of exterminating them.]

Even at the tender age of eight, Léa is here grappling with problems of theodicy that continue to be debated to this day. The visual evidence of the camps’ barbarities to which she is exposed by a docu­mentary film aggravates Léa’s obsession with the Shoah and her concomitant refusal to communicate verbally, as if the atrocities had not only tested the limits of language but destroyed its validity entirely: ‘A dater de ce jour, l’obsession de l’enfant et son mutisme s’aggravèrent parallèlement’ (p. 144) [From that day on, the child’s obsession and her refusal to speak simultaneously got worse]. To her only interlocutor, Bénédicte, Léa expresses bitterness about the apparent amnesia visà-vis the camps even of present-day Jews, whom she sees as concerned only with the creation of the State of Israel (p. 146). Rebutting Bénédicte’s protest that many French people had cared and given their life for the Resistance, Léa answers acidly: ‘— Pas pour les Juifs, souff la Léa, avec rage. Oh non, pas pour les Juifs’ (p. 146) [‘Not for Jews,’ whispered Léa, enraged. ‘Oh no, not for Jews’].50 The gulf between Bénédicte’s and Léa’s views is entirely logical: while Bénédicte, whose parents are living Resistance heroes, has an idealistic conception of human nature as morally perfectible, Léa, whose parents are dead Jews, has an aprioristically misanthrophical view (p. 147). That misanthropy is only intensified by the vagaries of the French state machinery to which she is witness, keeping a record of all the trials for collaboration judged in Bordeaux, which rarely ended in the death sentence (p. 148). The irony of Maurice Papon’s receipt of the Légion d’honneur from the French state is egregious for the contemporary reader, given his later condemnation for war crimes against Jews. But lesser ironies offend her as she sits surreptitiously in the courtrooms, and while

40

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

not strictly speaking focalized upon her, the narrative does convey the progressive etiolation of natural justice administered to collaborators by the so-called justice system: Les avocats faisaient appel à la clémence du tribunal, invoquaient l’âge de l’accusé, sa situation difficile, ses charges de famille, dénichaient toujours un résistant auquel il avait prêté main-forte, un Juif qu’il avait mis en garde à la veille d’une raf le. Les sentences les plus dures étaient commuées, les lois d’amnistie s’annonçaient, l’épuration ne faisait plus recette. (p. 152) [The lawyers would call for the court to exercise clemency, pointing out the accused’s age, his difficult situation, his family responsibilities, always unearthing a resister to whose aid he had come, a Jew he had warned the day before a round-up. The harshest sentences were commuted, amnesty laws were announced, purges were no longer popular.]

When two former SS officers are tried and given only a few years’ imprisonment, the courtroom metaphor so important in epistemological constructions of Holocaust/ Shoah witnessing is dramatically literalized as the now sixteen-year-old Léa surges forward to arraign the defendants: — Hé, vous, qu’est-ce que vous avez fait de mon père et de ma mère? L’accusation retentit dans la grande pièce comble comme le tonnerre divin sur le mont Sinaï. Elle fut suivie d’un silence de mort. [...] deux gendarmes s’avancèrent pour encadrer Léa, et le procureur donna l’ordre d’évacuer la salle. (p. 158) [‘Hey, you, what have you done with my father and my mother?’ The accusation reverberated in the large crowded room like divine thunder on Mount Sinai. It was followed by a deadly silence. [...] two policemen moved forward to f lank Léa, and the prosecutor ordered the courtroom to be cleared.]

The last sentence demonstrates the inversion of justice, as the victim is silenced and seized by the police. But of more symbolic interest are the two preceding sentences, the first with its inescapable allusion to God’s giving of laws to the founding Jewish father Moses, the second with its recursion to the dominant motif of Léa’s obsession: death. The paradox is f lagrant: Léa’s head-on confrontation of the Judaeocide operates in a space theoretically incarnating law and justice, but in which the law against murder is trivialized and justice travestied. With the discovery of Léa’s illicit attendance of trials, Bénédicte is questioned by her parents and reveals further signs of her friend’s deep trauma: threshold suicidal behaviour, including dangling her legs precariously over a window edge and swallowing a whole tube of aspirin (pp. 161–62). That disturbance is also implicit in declaration of hatred for her dead parents (p. 163) because of what she sees as their desertion of her. Exhorted to re-enter language and express her distress verbally rather than inf licting it on her body, Léa condemns her parents’ blind faith in France, and, when reminded that at least some French people resisted Vichyite and Nazi anti-Semitism, ripostes with the telling rhetorical question ‘Mais, si je vous le demandais, est-ce que vous oseriez me soutenir que toute cette bravoure avait pour but de sauver les gens comme mes parents?’ (p. 165) [‘But if I were to ask you, would you dare to maintain that all that bravery was aimed at saving people like my parents?’]. The morally scrupulous Gaillacs admit that even if nobody had really

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

41

known the horrific extent of Jewish persecution until 1945, there had been definite rumours, and that their aim as members of the Resistance had indeed been more about saving honour and liberating France than about protecting Jews. Coming from agents of France’s most noble wartime conduct, this is a grim home truth, confirming relative French indifference to the Shoah during WWII. In such an inhospitable environment, it is hardly surprising that Léa comes to deny her Jewish identity. When in Paris pursuing university studies she is accosted by a stranger whose character is modelled on the black American novelist James Baldwin (p. 174). In response to his question, prompted by her surname Lévy, as to whether she is Jewish, she replies coldly in the negative. Noticing that she is reading Sartre’s Réflexions sur la question juive, he asks her if she finds it interesting, eliciting the following response: — Instructif. Je commence à comprendre pourquoi les goys n’ont pas laissé la solution finale se poursuivre jusqu’au bout. C’est parce que l’antisémitisme a un besoin vital du Juif pour justifier ses propres échecs. S’il ne l’avait pas, il serait obligé de s’en prendre à lui-même ou à ses semblables. Ca f lanquerait la révolution partout. — Au fait, tu es allée voir l’Union des étudiants israélites, comme tu le voulais? — Non. Sartre dit aussi qu’on n’est juif que par le regard de l’Autre et qu’on peut parfaitement décider de ne pas l’être. J’ai décidé que je ne l’étais pas. (p. 173) [‘Instructive. I’m beginning to understand why the goys didn’t let the final solution reach its natural conclusion. It’s because anti-Semitism desperately needs Jews to justify its own failures. If it didn’t have them, it would have to lay the blame on itself or its ilk. You’d get revolution everywhere.’ ‘By the way, have you been to the Jewish Students Union, as you wanted to?’ ‘No. Sartre also says that it’s only the gaze of the Other that makes you Jewish and that you can perfectly well decide not to be. I decided I wasn’t.’]

There is here a significant blind spot in her discursivization of identity: she refers to non-Jews as goys, a term which only a Jew is likely to use, and yet it is precisely Jewish identity that she is repudiating. Of course it could be countered that she is using the term goys ironically, but however she is using it, it is always already overdetermined in its suggestion of the user’s Jewish identity. Her painfully split identity is physiologically matched by poor physical health, a cause of acute concern for her guardian Jacqueline Gaillac on whom the following extract of narrative is focalized: Cette enfant au teint gris, dont la f lamme du briquet creusait les orbites, lui parut soudain n’être que l’ombre portée de Bénédicte. Comme s’il lui fallait, pour dessiner son empreinte ténue sur la terre, la lumière qui irradiait de son amie. Ou même comme si elle était déjà morte, depuis bien longtemps, depuis 1945 peut-être, et que seule l’énergie de son aînée, sa force de vie, lui insuff lait une existence artificielle. (p. 184) [This grey-faced child, whose eye-sockets were hollowed out by the f lame of the lighter, suddenly seemed to be nothing more than the shadow Bénédicte

42

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies carried around. It was as if to trace her tenuous mark on earth she needed the light that radiated from her friend. Or even as if she was already dead, had been for a long time, perhaps since 1945, and that only her older friend’s energy and life-force were breathing life into an artificial existence.]

Once more, there is figurative accent on the ocular and on Thanatos; and when Léa affirms ‘Ma famille, c’est Bénédicte’ (p. 185) [‘Bénédicte is my family’], the pathos is proleptically resonant, because with Bénédicte’s death at the end of the narrative Léa will lose her ‘family’ a second time. That final psychic blow is rendered all the more piercing by its eruption into what appears to be a new phase of affective stability and self-acceptance in Léa’s young life. Discovery of the Jewish philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch, to whose lectures she has access at the Sorbonne, is pivotal in the reintegration of her own Jewish identity. His 1948 article ‘Dans l’honneur et la dignité’51 [‘In Honour and Dignity’] condemns the iniquities of Vichy and the inequities of the post-war trials (p. 197). Léa is jubilant in realizing that at least one adult, and a distinguished intellectual at that, expresses the sort of intransigence she had felt at the age of eleven. Jankélévitch’s work is also instrumental in her problematizing the Sartrean definition of Jewishness, and under Jankélévitch’s inf luence she ponders the possibility of a more positive alternative, of a substantive, secular, non-Zionist and freely chosen meaning to the sign ‘juif ’. With this possibility comes a new ethical possibility of love for the Other (one assumes, the gentile Other) without forgetting or forgiveness (p. 197). The dénouement of the novel, then, is all the more pungent given the positive upturn that precedes it, leading to Léa’s sense that there might be meaning in and value to life after all. Although the narrative does not explicitly spell out who dies in the car crash, the reader can only infer that it is Bénédicte. Léa’s fragile new engagement with life is immediately crushed, and she reverts to automatism, self-mutilation and foetal withdrawal: Pendant quelques minutes, elle erra vaguement dans la chambre, rangea une paire de bas qui traînait [...] Passant devant l’armoire à glace, elle s’y arrêta et, posément, s’arracha les cheveux par poignées, puis, toujours avec calme, se déchira le visage avec ses ongles. Après quoi, elle alla s’asseoir sous la table et s’y roula en boule, la tête entre les cuisses, les bras enserrant les mollets. Des heures ou des jours passèrent. Un tintement fragile, comme un crépitement de perles égrenées, puis déversées sur elle en cascade, occupait toute son attention. (pp. 200–01). [For a few minutes she wandered around the bedroom vaguely, tidied away a pair of stockings that were lying around [...] Passing in front of the wardrobe mirror, she stopped and, calmly, tore out handfuls of hair, then, still calmly, tore at her face with her nails. After which, she went and sat down under the table, rolling up into a ball, head between thighs, arms clasping her calves. Hours and days passed. A fragile tinkling sound, like a rattle of pearls dropping off a line and then being tipped over her in a cascade, absorbed all her attention.]

A number of features are striking here. First, the suspension of temporal parameters in this new phase of living death (‘des heures ou des jours passèrent’). Second, the symmetry between the facial laceration here and that performed by Léa upon herself after the revelations of the documentary film on the camps (pp. 143–44); both the

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

43

slaughter of Jews and Bénédicte’s death represent an atrocity which she internalizes and symbolically enacts upon herself. Third, an image present both in Léa’s encounter with the cadaverous boy survivor and in the novel’s final scene: pearls being thrown onto her. Finally, the transformation, within the novel’s very last sentence, of pearls into ashes: ‘Mais la cascade de perles s’était changée en pluie de cendres, qui la recouvrait d’une épaisse couche grise et qui finit par étouffer tous les sons’ (p. 201) [But the cascade of pearls had changed into a shower of ashes, covering her with a thick grey layer and finally muff ling all sounds]. The symbolism of ashes in the context of the Shoah hardly requires explanation. The pearl, for its part, is a symbol of regeneration and rebirth. Might the pearls in both stages of the narrative represent new-found but ultimately illusory hope? In the first narrative unit, when given the toy pearls, Léa had still hoped to find her parents alive; immediately prior to the second narrative unit, she had been tentatively re-building hope in life. In both narrative units, hope is extinguished: first by the revelation of her parents’ murder in the Shoah, secondly by the revelation of her close friend’s, indeed her surrogate family’s death. Ashes are, of course, the waste-product of human death; and the novel closes on the morbid image of Léa being engulfed by them. ‘Liberation’ The nihilism aff licting Léa is resisted in Francine Christophe’s Après les camps, la vie (2001), as its title indicates. Compared with the texts discussed so far in this chapter, Christophe’s is unproblematically autobiographical. There is onomastic fit between author and first-person narrator; the book covers a large part of the author’s life, from her early teens to her early seventies; and it does occasionally refer to her childhood, which had in any case been covered by the text to which it forms a sequel, Une Petite Fille privilégiée.52 Après les camps, la vie in fact opens with reference to just that prior text. Une Petite Fille privilégiée is a testimonial account of Christophe’s arrest aged only eight and a half along with her mother and of their time in Bergen-Belsen. The sequel, Après les camps, la vie, brief ly recapitulates its author’s wartime itinerary, then moves forward to the immediate post-war period. However, references to the horrors of the camps are frequent, particularly towards the end of the text. This suggests the return of the partially repressed in later years: a new need to bear witness, after years of endeavour to forget through the conduct of an exemplarily ‘normal’ life (work, marriage, motherhood). The text comprises mainly narrative and dialogue interspersed by Christophe’s childhood drawings, poems, songs, and nursery rhymes. It has no pretensions to the status of literature, and indeed its style bears the marks of amateurism in, for instance, its awkward fragmentation (short, halting paragraphs) and its frequent recourse to bold font and exclamation-marks for emphatic emotional effect. The first attempt at emphatic emotional effect expresses Christophe’s scandalized incredulity that in the Liberation period, anti-Jewish persecution during WWII was almost a taboo subject in France (as observed above, this is also decried by Gille’s narrative). She insists that while everyone in France had suffered during the war, her suffering as a Jew was in a different category — that of inhumanity:

44

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies Cela peut paraître, de nos jours, incroyable, mais après la guerre, les persécutions anti-juives, on n’en parle pas! Au procès Pétain, pas un mot; au procès Laval, pas un mot. La France, lorsque je la retrouve, est libérée depuis un an. Chacun y a souffert. Moi aussi, mais différemment. Ce que j’ai subi était in-hu-main, si au-delà de ce que l’on conçoit comme humain, que je ne peux essayer de le transmettre à l’âge de douze ans sans risquer de passer pour une folle. (Third page, unnumbered, of preface) [It may seem incredible these days, but after the war, nobody talked about the anti-Jewish persecutions! At the Pétain trial, not a word; at the Laval trial, not a word. When I returned to France, it had been liberated for a year. Everyone had suffered. I had too, but in a different way. What I suffered was in-hu-man, so beyond what is conceived as being human, that at the age of twelve I can’t try to convey it without risking being thought mad.]

The last sentence bespeaks the victim’s self-censorship; even a twelve-year-old child was aware of the unbreachable gap between concentration-camp experience and the refusal of the general French public to believe in such horror. Although not mentioned by Christophe, what is also material is the resolutely future-oriented will of a post-war French state determined to suppress particularities of suffering such as those endured by Jews, for the greater ‘good’ of promoting a united France. Like Maous and Novac, Christophe provides an explicit statement of intent. Unlike them, though, she intends to chronicle the problems of her reinsertion into everyday life after the alienation of the univers concentrationnaire53 [concentrationary universe]. Despite her status as an amateur writer, she powerfully suggests a fossilizing process by which personal history in its undifferentiated f low gradually coagulates and is transformed into official History, with its agents becoming museum pieces. Her text shows a tension between desire to forget the distress of Bergen-Belsen and desire to communicate its consequences for her after-life in life. As she clarifies, she wanted to live like everyone else; and thus, she had fallen silent about that previous (death-in-)life. But that concentrationary, death-centred life has remained part of her mental environment, from which she will not cease to attempt escape (p. 4 of preface). Traumata sustained variously in Bergen-Belsen, in the immediate post-war years, and also in later life will form the first area for my analysis of Après les camps, la vie; the second will be Christophe’s articulations of Jewish identity and of anti-Semitism; and the final will be the sense of duty to bear witness that emerged in her later years. One of the first instances of trauma in the immediate post-war years is a selfcensoring fear of being thought mad were she to reveal her experiences of the concentration camp: ‘Allons donc, c’est fini, je n’ouvrirai plus jamais ma bouche pour raconter. J’ai tenté, j’ai bien tenté d’expliquer que j’enjambais des cadavres pour aller aux latrines. Je ne peux toute ma vie passer pour une toquée!’ (p. 25) [Come on, it’s over, I’ll never open my mouth again to talk about it. I’ve tried, I’ve really tried to explain that I used to step over corpses to go to the toilets. I can’t be taken for a nutter all my life!]. A commonplace of psychoanalytic theory is that psychic

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

45

censorship is habitually followed by a return of the repressed, and this is certainly the case in her implacable, vicious fighting with another child who also appears to be an ex-deportee. Here we discern a curious reversal of power relations whereby one child has introjected the violence previously endured in the camps and directs it towards another child with a similar past. Significantly, this occurs in silence, as if verbal language were unequal to the task: Ce garçon et moi sommes de force égale. Jamais aucun de nous deux n’aura le dessus. Nous nous rentrons dedans en silence [...] Sans explication. On ne peut nous séparer. Nous devons nous battre. [...] Deux brutes. Aveuglées de haine froide. Déchargeant peut-être le mal dont la vie nous a régalés. (p. 31) [This boy and I are of equal strength. Neither of us will ever get the better of the other. We lay into each other in silence [...] No explanations. Nobody can separate us. We have to fight. [...] Two brutes. Blinded with cold hatred. Maybe discharging the evil to which life has treated us.]

Such aggression, so much at odds with her public persona, also characterizes the unavowed resentment of her parents as the cause of her deportation (in the sense that they had transmitted the Jewishness which sentenced her to such deportation). Immediately her super-ego kicks in with recognition of the aberrance of such thinking and the assertion that all surviving deportees should have received psychiatric help. Instead, they had to face alone the traumata for which they had been unprepared, including the lack of fraternity among non-deportees upon their return. In fact, they had to become maieutic agents of self-regeneration and re-birth into humankind. And part of that process involved repression of distress (p. 104). But there are new forms of distress in life after the camps. One is shame about her body, still literally marked in the f lesh by the concentrationary experience. In Liberation France, this young girl hides her legs because they had been disfigured by hours of exposure to the snow during interminable roll-calls (p. 49). Another is the spectral presence of death marring any pleasure in family occasions: ‘J’adore les grandes réunions de famille, les mariages. Je m’y amuse follement et me goinfre. [...] Mais il y a toujours une vieille-cousine-qui-pique-veuve-de-guerre, qui me trouve une ressemblance avec un cousin fusillé ou gazé’ (p. 50) [I love big family get-togethers, marriages. I have a great time and stuff my face. [...] But there’s always an irritating-old-war-widow-cousin, who thinks I look like a cousin who was shot or gassed]. In fact, deportation has irretrievably deprived her of childhood: ‘les personnages imaginaires de Papa qui accompagnèrent ma petite enfance puis mon adolescence (pas mon enfance, puisque je n’en ai pas eu) [...]’ (p. 107) [Dad’s imaginary characters who peopled my early childhood then my teens (not my childhood, since I haven’t had one)]. A further source of distress is rejection by those to whom she does try to communicate her nightmarish memories. Here Christophe invokes the authority of canonical deportee author Jorge Semprun: ‘ “Nos récits finissent par créer une sorte de gêne, provoquant un silence qui s’épaissit. Votre entourage — la femme aimée, même, dans les variantes les plus angoissées du cauchemar — finit par se lever, vous tournant le dos, quittant la pièce” ’ (p. 114) [‘Our stories end up making people feel uncomfortable, prompting a heavy silence. Those around you — the woman you love, even, in the most anguished variants of

46

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

the nightmare — end up getting up, turning their back on you, leaving the room’]. This is followed by a gendered counterpart to Semprun’s observation: reference to her husband’s distress when she recalls the horrors of the camps: ‘Je m’aperçois que je fais souffrir mon mari. [...] J’essaie de ne pas parler, moi qui suis si bavarde’ (p. 114; cf. Simone Veil’s similar experience)54 [I realize that I’m making my husband suffer. [...] I try not to speak, even though I’m usually so talkative]. While it has no obviously feminist framework, other gendered specificities steadily accrue to Christophe’s account of her ordeals during and after incarceration in Bergen-Belsen. One is a comment on the ‘equality’ of the sexes in the camps, where women were tortured as much as men; the violent fighting with the boy cited above is motivated at least partly by the desire to show him that she too can endure violence in silence (p. 31). Further, intense anxiety is provoked by the uniquely female phenomenon of amenorrhoea. Just as women in Bergen-Belsen had stopped menstruating due to dramatic weight loss caused by undernutrition, so in life after the concentration camp her periods fail to arrive at the normal age, and her longing for the menarche is expressed as a longing for the capacity to give life and thus replace those babies killed in the Shoah (p. 38). This passage correlates with a later one expressing fear of infertility or of stillbirth due to physiological damage caused by the atrocious conditions in the camp. Another anxiety is that, even if she does manage to give birth, she will have transmitted her inveterate fears and anguish to the child (p. 117). In a moving apostrophe to her newborn son, she affirms him as victory over those who had wished to eliminate Jewry from the face of the earth (p. 117). Nonetheless, until her two children had passed the age during which she had been imprisoned in Bergen-Belsen, she was superstitiously dogged by fear for their safety (p. 118). Looking at her grandchildren opens a new vista of incomprehension, of inability to comprehend the injustice which had allowed equally beautiful babies to be gassed and burnt. Et maintenant, mes petits-enfants, je les regarde: ceux qu’on a gazés étaient aussi beaux. Ceux qu’on a brûlés riaient aussi bien. Je les trouve merveilleux, mes petits. La maternité fut un moment fort de ma vie, un éblouissement, un événement considérable auquel je croyais difficilement. Il est dur d’imaginer qu’un fantôme enfante, je le répète. J’étais la revenante du royaume des morts, et j’enfantais. Avec mes petitsenfants, j’ai dépassé ce stade, ce sont de vrais vivants qui enfantent: mes enfants. (p. 118) [And now I look at my grandchildren: the children who were gassed were just as beautiful. Those who were burned also used to laugh. I think they’re wonderful, my little ones. Motherhood was a very important experience in my life, a dazzling experience, an important event which I found hard to believe. It’s hard to imagine that a ghost gives birth, let me repeat. I was the ghost who’d returned from the kingdom of the dead, and I was giving birth. With my grandchildren, I got beyond that stage, it’s the real living who are now giving birth: my children.]

Her sense of repugnant absurdity at the macro level is here juxtaposed with the happiness she has derived at the micro level from her own motherhood and grandmotherhood, ref lecting a complex interplay between the social and the

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

47

personal. The passage has a bitter-sweet conclusion, for her persisting if not perma­ nent identification with the non-living is conveyed by recursion to the image of herself as a ghost — literally in French, somebody who comes back (‘revenant[e]’). Beyond her own case she relays gendered signs of trauma in her mother’s postconcentrationary life, registering the damage inf licted on the woman’s de-feminized body which had led to a sense of psychological splitting and corporeal death: Au retour, Maman, avec son crâne ras, sa poitrine chiffonnée, son ventre douloureux et ses jambes blessées, fonçait petit à petit dans sa folie. Son ‘double’ la suivait partout. Il finit par s’en aller, mais abandonna une femme qui n’était plus qu’une carcasse. Dans le miroir, ses premiers regards sur elle-même la remplirent d’horreur. (p. 39) [When Mum returned, with her close-cropped head, her sunken chest, her painful stomach and her wounded legs, she was gradually sinking into madness. Her ‘double’ followed her everywhere. At last it went away, but it left behind a woman who was reduced to a mere shell. When she first looked into the mirror at herself she was horrified.]

Reference to her father’s attempt to restore his wife’s damaged femininity by pro­ ceeding to sexual business as normal is followed by one of the few sibylline state­ ments in Après les camps, la vie, here addressed to her parents: ‘Mes Chéris, mon un plus un égale UN’ (p. 39) [‘My Darlings, my one plus one equals ONE]. Does this statement imply that her mother’s damage was so grave that no mere sexual coupling could equal true union, given her body’s transformation into insentient shell? This supposition is indirectly supported by a further observation that when hospitalized for a spinal operation, her mother gives away her food to the young nurses left constantly hungry by France’s post-war rationing (p. 40). What Christophe presents as extended maternal self-abnegation could also be construed as anorexia (although not anorexia nervosa) arising from closure of normal bodily functioning. Although as observed above Christophe goes on to construct an exemplarily ‘normal’ life (work, marriage, motherhood), signs of unresolved trauma resurface particularly in later life. Witness the intense, visceral fear triggered in her by the Six-Day War which aligned Egypt, Jordan and Syria against Israel, and the sense it brought that the Final Solution was finally being accomplished (p. 146). This is compounded by reference to the terror she experienced during the events of May 1968, summed up in the resonant words ‘Tout va revenir’ (p. 147) [It’s all going to come back] which are typographically isolated in a single paragraph to maximize their impact. The irrationality of her aggressive hatred for the reporter who covers the events of May 1968 on radio and involuntarily disinters her buried fears is conveyed by her only act of adult violence in the entire narrative: ‘Ma terreur, ma gigantesque terreur me pousse à envoyer, à celui qui parle, mon poing, et de toutes mes forces, à travers la figure. C’est mon poste que j’envoie dans le mur’ (p. 147) [My terror, my immense terror drives me to punch the person who’s talking as hard as I can in the face. It’s my television set that I send f lying into the wall]. It is clear that memory of arrest in France and brutality within Bergen-Belsen even some twenty years on eclipses any other affect and blocks access to present- and future-oriented moral and political planes.

48

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

A similar crisis is induced thirty years later. Faced with the Papon trial in 1998, she resuscitates her ghosts from the camp and, in reading the details of the trial, projects herself onto Papon’s many Jewish victims (p. 129). Suddenly, temporal certainties vacillate, time is collapsed and fifty years ago becomes yesterday; through meticulously archivized memory she re-lives the suffering symbolized by the stigmata of her yellow star (p. 130). Unlike Novac, who exercises exemplary memory in discerning parallels between the Shoah and other forms of genocide, Christophe seems to resent such analogies: ‘Et les Arméniens qui demandent une reconnaissance du génocide commis. Alors, on ne tolérerait pas qu’un juif recherche l’assassin de ses parents, parce qu’il y a plus de cinquante ans et qu’il est juif?’ (p. 130) [And then there are the Armenians demanding recognition of the genocide that was committed. So, does that mean people will no longer put up with a Jew looking for his parents’ murderer, because it happened more than fifty years ago and because he’s Jewish?]. It is important to distinguish such resentment from Rothberg’s notion of competitive memory. What Christophe jibs at is not so much the need to recognize other genocides, but the fact that such recognition can cancel out recognition of previous genocides, almost as one fashion replaces another. This evokes Rothberg’s rueful reference to the misconception that collective memory is ‘a zero-sum struggle over scarce resources’.55 Christophe’s rendering of the Papon trial inspires an uncharacteristically opaque writing style in which an oneiric tone predominates, conveying the nightmarish quality of Drancy so acutely that the reader is unsure whether the scene etched is waking memory or dream. The metaphor of theatre, of performance, and the blurring of reality and unreality, a blurring indeed of all images within that liminal state, together create the sense of aghast impotence experienced in nightmares. It is when memory is suddenly sharpened by the Papon trial that the blurring gives way to a new clarity, but the passage nonetheless closes on an elegiac tone (p. 131). Among the other memories of atrocity assailing her, one in particular is so horrific that her use of an exclamation mark borders on bad taste, so unnecessary is any added emphasis: ‘Je pense à ceux dont de curieuses estafilades m’intéressaient. Leurs compagnons y avaient plongé la main pour en retirer un viscère et le dévorer parce qu’il n’y avait plus de chair!’ (p. 151) [I think about those whose curious gashes interested me. Their companions had plunged their hands into them to extract an organ and devour it because there was no f lesh left!]. A further memory still is less viscerally dramatic, yet indicative of the mental torture of camp life: deprivation of privacy and silence, which can lead to mental imbalance (p. 151). However, narrative of residual pathology arising from her wartime persecution as a Jew coexists with that of her post-war aspiration towards a healthier relationship to her Jewish identity. In an early apostrophe to a gentile Frenchman, there is a strategic blending of pride in the Jewish tradition of the Book and respect for learning on the one hand, and on the other hand, gratitude for the French Revolution’s granting of citizenship to Jews. However, the expression of this gratitude also adroitly expresses the converse: that France has, for its part, been honoured by the erudition and culture of Jewry (pp. 71–72). It is significant that she recalls her father imposing as a moral imperative his particular understanding of Jewish identity: as a state of which

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

49

one should be neither proud nor ashamed, a state for which one is not responsible but which should be assumed with dignity, and which one should neither display ostentatiously as an integral part of one’s identity nor deny. Equally significant is his positing as a moral duty the combating of anti-Semitism. Christophe had tried to learn this lesson, but did not initially know if she would be able to conquer the fear that being Jewish had represented for her (p. 76). Later on, having left school and started a job, she makes an implicit link between the message of the paternal lesson and the situation of the gay men she meets, thus adumbrating solidarity with other oppressed minorities: Cela dit, les ‘tapettes’ je n’en ai ouï dire que par la presse, au sujet d’acteurs célèbres. Ici, j’en côtoie qui deviennent mes amis, si sensibles, si souvent écorchés eux-mêmes. Ni fiers, ni honteux d’un état dont ils ne sont pas responsables... comme moi [...] (p. 87) [That said, I’ve only heard about ‘poofters’ through talk in the papers about certain famous actors. Here I mix with them and some of them become my friends, so sensitive, so often themselves tormented. Neither proud nor ashamed of a state for which they’re not responsible... like me [...]]

One positive aspect of ageing stressed by Christophe is the new courage it brings to confront anti-Semitism head-on, even when it does not target her directly (p. 123). The linear, chronological thrust of the narrative indicates that it is in relatively advanced years when she is able most robustly to assert her equality as a Jew with all other human beings, despite the Judaeocidal indoctrination of Bergen-Belsen: Là-bas, ils affirmaient que j’étais de race inférieure. Mais je me sens l’égale de tous. ‘Ils’ répétaient que je ne méritais pas de vivre [...] ‘Ils’ me serinaient que mes semblables et moi devions disparaître de la terre, mais chacun sur terre est mon semblable. (p. 123) [Back there, they said I was of a lower race. But I feel equal to all. ‘They’ repeated that I didn’t deserve to live [...] ‘They’ drummed into me that I and my kind should disappear from the earth, but everyone on earth is my kind.]

The shorthand deployed in ‘là-bas’, referring to the concentrationary universe, is an attenuating, less distressing, more controllable form of reference than naming it explicitly. (Although in different modalities, Karin Bernfeld and Esther Orner also deploy this form of shorthand, as discussed in Chapters 3 and 4 respectively.) The tempo of arraignment rises as the narrative traces the ageing process: the return of the repressed liberates an articulable outrage unavailable to her as a child-survivor concerned above all not to stand out from her peers. Evoking in stark, uncompromising detail the inhumane conditions of the transportations from France to the Nazi camps (as we have seen with Maous also), Christophe insists that these were in themselves already crimes against humanity (p. 133). One specific charge is against the French who witnessed the opening of cattle-transport wagons filled with moribund adults and children, yet did nothing. The ambiguity of her bald statement ‘Les wagons à bestiaux, on ne les ouvrait pas qu’en Allemagne. Lorsqu’on les ouvrait en France, tout le monde pouvait VOIR’ (p. 135) [The cattle

50

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

trucks weren’t opened up only in Germany. When they were opened up in France, everyone could SEE] is dispelled when it becomes clear that she is targeting the French authorities rather than individual French citizens (p. 135). This new courage and sense of outrage experienced with advancing years produces an urgent sense of duty to bear witness. And here the reader will note an unusual change of narrative voice, from first person to third person, as the author comes to a transitional point in her life in the decision to transmit her experience of deportation. This decision means confronting the fear she has conquered but which still structures her memory (p. 149). It may well be that the shift of narrative voice here is symptomatic of a need for distancing, so difficult is the return she decides upon — from healthy, stable married woman of forty with two adored children and mastery of her former fear, to her former psychic state as a still vulnerable ex-deportee. The first recipients of her testimony, her own children, are profoundly disturbed by efforts to educate them about the Shoah. When her son sees Alain Resnais’s 1955 documentary film on the camps, Nuit et brouillard, he vomits; when her daughter reads the memories she has committed to written form, the girl has nightmares. Christophe’s reaction is to try to explain how, having experienced absolute evil, she had wanted to transmit to her children absolute good, to give them nothing but love — a decision she now condemns as foolish (p. 149). A duty to narrate memories of the Shoah, to coax every memorial detail from the recesses of one’s mind, is now proclaimed (p. 169). That sense of duty even brings about her participation in a German conference entitled ‘Témoignages de femmes’ (p. 174) [Women’s testimonies] which brings together a group of some fifteen female survivors. Here, the emphasis is on the inexhaustibility of their plethoric memories of the concentrationary world (p. 174). Lest such loquacity even hint at self-indulgence, she is also anxious to reiterate her sense of guilt as a survivor, her sense that she had no more right to survive than those who perished, and her inability to understand this distinction: Je vous demande pardon, à vous qui êtes restés là-bas. Je vous demande pardon, car je ne vaux pas mieux que vous. [...] Alors, pourquoi? Chaque jour qui passe m’entend reposer la question: pourquoi moi? On me répond qu’il fallait des témoins. C’est vrai, il en fallait, mais pourquoi moi? Puisque je suis là, je témoigne, je ne cesserai jamais de témoigner, jusqu’à mon dernier souff le, mais je ne cesserai jamais de demander pardon aux autres qui auraient aussi bien témoigné que moi, et qui ne sont pas rentrés de là-bas. (p. 176) [I ask for your forgiveness, you who remained back there. I ask for your forgive­ ness, for I’m worth no more than you. [...] So, why? With every day that passes I hear myself asking the same question: why me? I’m told that witnesses were needed. It’s true, they were, but why me? Since I’m here, I bear witness, I’ll never stop bearing witness until my last breath, but I’ll never stop asking for the forgiveness of those who would have borne witness as well as I do, and who didn’t return from there.]

In its expression of survivor’s guilt, Christophe’s testimony typifies one prominent topos of the deportee narrative. Importantly, however, guilt is here a stimulant to action rather than sterile self-reproach. Of crucial importance in terms of

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

51

Christophe’s ethical response to catastrophe is her apprehension of a quasi-sacred, covenantal duty to bear witness for those who did not return. And that duty she fulfils not only by participating in the German conference and by visiting schools to bear oral witness to children and adolescents about the Shoah, but also, crucially, by writing and publishing Après les camps, la vie. Moreover, this new sense of ethical mission is not confined to bearing witness to the Shoah. It is also informed by a sense of responsibility for the general suffering of others: La douleur me fait mal. La douleur des autres s’entend. La souffrance des autres m’est proche, elle m’empêche quelquefois de dormir. Elle me pèse tous les jours, parce que mon impuissance à la soulager me rend rageuse. [...] Cette souffrance des autres que je ressens si fort, je ne puis la prendre, c’est vrai. Mais si j’y pense de toutes mes forces, si ma réf lexion se concentre sur elle, peut-être pourrais-je la soulager un peu. C’est ma responsabilité. (pp. 59–60) [Pain hurts me. I mean other people’s pain, of course. I’m close to the suffering of others, sometimes it stops me sleeping. It weighs on me every day, because my inability to relieve it makes me furious. [...] True, I can’t take on this suffering of others that I feel so strongly. But if I think about it with all my strength, if my thoughts are concentrated on it, perhaps I can relieve it a little. It’s my responsibility.]

To this extent, Christophe transcends the more narrow purview suggested on p. 130, where she had appeared to resent parallels between the Shoah and other forms of genocide, as if the horror of the Shoah negated other forms of suffering. Here, and significantly, in relatively ‘old age’, she instead ascends to a more disinterested moral position of empathy and solidarity with all victims of persecution. Her position implicitly acknowledges that suffering is a generative grammar whose potential is almost infinite. Such empathic solidarity with all victims of persecution is less apparent in the eponymous protagonist of the final text to be examined in this chapter. Yaël Hassan’s Souviens-toi Leah! (2004) is not autobiographical, but its roots do lie within the life-experience of the author’s family. Born in 1952 and of Polish origin, Hassan is a practising Jew whose grandparents perished in the Shoah, about which she vowed as a child she would one day write. Already an established writer for children and teenagers, she honoured that vow at the age of fifty-two with her first novel for adults, Souviens-toi Leah! It comprises four sections of unequal length, focalized upon four different characters whose lives are closely imbricated. While the two sections focalized upon male characters (Simon Stern and Jacob Wiener) have a third-person narrative voice, those focalized upon female characters (Leah Stern and Edith Schwarz) have a first-person narrative voice, which affords the reader easier identification with the (constructed psyches of the) two women. Both women are survivors of the Shoah, but experienced Auschwitz in highly atypical mode: as Jewish female deportees forced to work as prostitutes for German soldiers. Their story is based on a real one. Souviens-toi Leah! was lauded by Le Nouvel Observateur as ‘une fiction d’une belle architecture sur les thèmes de la mémoire et de l’oubli’ [a beautifully constructed fiction on the themes of memory and forgetting] and

52

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

for being ‘d’une émouvante simplicité’ [of a moving simplicity].56 But simplicity is certainly not the watchword of the text’s narrative and epistemological properties. The following brief summary belies the complexities generated by the novel, which are such that it also provides the intellectual stimulation of a well-constructed mystery tale. Leah Stern, of Polish origin and married to the Jewish doctor Simon Stern, is arrested as a Jew in France along with their two children in 1942. Physically and mentally revolted by forced sex with German soldiers in Auschwitz, she is unable to sustain any sense of her former self. Thus she exchanges her name and entire identity with those of a fellow Jewish deportee also press-ganged into such prostitution, Edith Schwartz, and whom she erroneously thinks is dying. Unbeknownst to Leah, the real Edith Schwartz actually survives and ends up at the Hôtel Lutétia, where, under her new name of Leah Schwarz, she is passed off by Simon as his wife. Meanwhile, apart from one visit to her former family home where she encounters the real Edith, the real Leah forges a new life for herself in Israel under Edith’s name. The real Edith, for her part, commits suicide after the real Leah’s visit. Death is a ghostly presence in Souviens-toi Leah!; not only through Edith’s suicide, but also through Leah’s proclamation of the death of Leah, to be replaced by Edith (pp. 81–82). Hassan’s novel opens with focalization on Simon, who even though no longer observant is caricaturally portrayed as the archetypal Jew swaying in despairing prayer (p. 10). His despair arises from the fact that although he himself has survived the war in hiding, his deported family have not returned in the Liberation period. His sense of radical alienation in Paris, a city he as an immigrant Jew had lovingly chosen to be his home and from which he now feels definitively excluded, is presented as paradigmatic of Jews generally during Liberation (p. 18).57 Proleptic irony is generated by a remark made by one of the survivors Simon meets at the Hôtel Lutétia where he is trying to find his family: that despite the Nazis’ many successes, they had never succeeded in one of their dehumanizing aims — displayed in the systematic tattooing of Jews — of making the latter forget their own name (p. 23). For of course, exactly the opposite is true of Leah and Edith, who will display willed and involuntary amnesia respectively about their names and identities. When Simon pretends that the stranger Edith is indeed his wife Leah Stern and takes her home from the Lutétia, her impassivity betrays a psychic numbing similar to that displayed by Langfus’s Maria (p. 24). We later learn that there is an additional reason for Edith’s mute compliance: having lost her memory, she cannot know that he is lying about her being his wife (p. 48). Simon’s motive for this rash act of deception is to escape acute loneliness after months of futile hoping that his wife and children will return (p. 25). Not entirely egotistic, he does resolve to help ‘Leah’ reconstruct her life — but in so doing, he is also giving himself a reason to live (p. 25). ‘Leah’, however, proves more difficult to help than envisaged. Her emotional blankness is accompanied by what a psychiatrist diagnoses as a form of partial and temporary amnesia serving to shield the subject from excessively painful memories. His professional advice to Simon is to help her to expurgate her pain by expressing it in words (p. 26).

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

53

Whilst ‘Leah’ gradually recovers her physical health, her mental health remains poor, her state one of self-absorption and imperviousness to Simon’s attempts at emotional contact: ‘son regard restait tourné vers ce monde intérieur où Simon ne parvenait pas à pénétrer’ (p. 27) [her gaze remained turned on this inner world that Simon was unable to penetrate]. Her compliance with his commands to get up in the morning, to sit down, to eat, bear all the signs of vacant automatism. But she does listen to him, and, ironically, since she refuses to talk, the medically prescribed roles are reversed as she listens patiently to his desperate logorrhoea in which he begins to invent an imaginary past for them. Feeling that she needs a memory, he verbally offers his own, which derives from his marriage to the real Leah (p. 27) Elaborating a detailed past for them, he disingenuously asks her if she remembers certain details — a form of emotional manipulation, no doubt unconscious but bordering on the abusive: ‘Et Leah opinait, sans faire preuve d’une grande conviction, mais opinait’ (p. 29) [And Leah consented, without looking terribly convinced, but she consented]. This passivity only confirms her enduring affective dysfunction and numbness; and even when he confesses all to her, she remains silent, untouched, continuing her daily duties in mechanical fashion (p. 30). Only his physical gesture of embracing and kissing her finally triggers a response, and it is a dramatic one that speaks volumes about her past experience of sexual abuse by the Nazis: ‘Il la sentit se raider. Puis, elle le repoussa violemment et se précipita au cabinet de toilette où il l’entendit vomir’ (p. 31) [He felt her stiffen. Then, she pushed him away violently and rushed to the bathroom where he heard her vomiting]. Already pierced by this re-traumatizing event, her armour of affective numbness is fully breached by a newspaper article on Auschwitz, which drives her to self harm: ‘— Auschwitz! fit alors une voix dans leur dos. Auschwitz! Auschwitz! Auschwitz! scandait Leah en se lacérant le visage de ses ongles’ (p. 34) [‘Auschwitz!’ said a voice behind their back. ‘Auschwitz! Auschwitz! Auschwitz!’ chanted Leah, lacerating her face with her nails]. This strongly resembles a scene in Gille’s Un paysage de cendres where another Leah, albeit of a variant spelling and younger age, also mutilates herself after discovering the atrocities of the camps: ‘Léa monta droit dans sa chambre et, regardant bien en face son amie qui lui avait emboîté le pas, se déchira lentement le visage avec ses ongles’ (Gille, pp. 143–44) [Léa went straight up to her room and, looking directly at her friend who had followed close behind her, slowly tore her [own] face with her nails]. The doctor Stern’s positivist grand narrative in which confrontation of a repressed past automatically solves the problem is progressively subverted. His hopes of a breakthrough are dashed as ‘Leah’ reverts to her mute automatism (p. 36). Simon’s reaction is to seek gratification and self-validation by transferring his energies away from the zombified woman and towards abandoned Jewish children: ‘Alors, avec ou sans Leah, elle était là, la solution, s’occuper des enfants. Remplacer les uns par les autres. Il se devait de le faire’ (p. 36) [So, with or without Leah, that was the solution, looking after children. Replacing children by other children. It was his duty to do so]. In a father who has lost his children, this impulse is understandable; but it does nonetheless suggest an exploitation of ‘Leah’, a willingness to replace one victim by another for personal gains.

54

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

There is a striking stylistic contrast between section one, narrated from Simon Stern’s perspective and section two, narrated from the supposed Leah Stern’s. The latter is far more fragmentary, more impressionistic, and arguably more poetic. This could imply authorial deference to theories of ‘écriture féminine’, or more simply an attempt to render the trauma endured by Leah and unknown by Simon. One of the salient features of this stylistic contrast is the image of the black hole which is to become a recurring motif in Leah’s mental meanderings: ‘Trou noir... Cette salle... Ces visages émaciés... Ces ombres faméliques... Spectres? Humains?’ (p. 45) [Black hole... That room... Those emaciated faces... Those scrawny shadows... Spectres? Human beings?]. The French definition of ‘trou noir’ is ‘objet théorique extrêmement dense exerçant une attraction si forte qu’il n’émet aucun rayonnement’ [extremely dense hypothetical object with such a power of attraction that it emits no light]. In this acceptation, Hassan’s metaphorical use of the astronomical term serves to indicate Leah’s attraction to an unfathomable, dark and dense object. Initially, the repeated ‘trou noir’ in Hassan’s novel appears to be a metaphor for Leah’s amnesia, or rather, for the black hole which her arrested memory constitutes: ‘Trou noir... Comment me suis-je trouvée là? Comment y suis-je arrivée? Aucune image, aucun souvenir. [...] Comment pourrais-je faire des projets avec ce trou noir dans la tête?’ (p. 45) [Black hole... How did I end up there? How did I get there? No image, no memory. [...] How could I make any plans with this black hole in the head?]. The relentless repetition of ‘Trou noir...’ creates a haunting and menacing tonality; and gradually, the image begins to take on other significations, such as inner desolation: ‘Trou noir... Simon ne me raconte plus rien’ (p. 50) [Black hole... Simon doesn’t tell me anything any more]. Apart from the motif (which will become a leitmotif ) of the black hole, what is immediately striking about section two is the glaring disjunction between Simon’s and ‘Leah’’s versions of the sexual encounter first narrated from Simon’s viewpoint (p. 31), in which she had vomited after his physical advances: Il m’a retenue. Nos lèvres étaient proches, son corps plaqué contre le mien. Son corps... mon corps...! Non! Je me suis raidie. Une giclée de bile m’a empli la bouche. Je l’ai repoussé avec force et me suis ruée vers le cabinet de toilette. J’ai craché larmes et entrailles. [...] Les images explosent. Les yeux ouverts. Les yeux fermés. Je suffoque. Simon voulait que je me souvienne. Vœu combien cruel. Je suis persuadée que s’il s’était seulement douté de la teneur de ces images, il m’aurait plutôt aidée à les enfouir à jamais. Il ne sait rien. Je n’ai d’autre choix que de me taire. Il faut que je me taise. Tais-toi donc! Me crache une voix dans l’oreille: TAIS-TOI, CHIENNE! (p. 50) [He kept hold of me. Our lips were close, his body pinned against mine. His body... my body...! No! I went stiff. A spurt of bile filled my mouth. I pushed him away roughly and rushed to the bathroom. I spit tears and entrails. [...] Images are exploding. Eyes open. Eyes shut. I’m suffocating. Simon wanted me to remember. How cruel a wish. I’m convinced that if only he suspected the content of these images, he would rather have helped me bury them forever. He knows nothing. I have no choice other than to keep quiet. I have to keep quiet. Be quiet, then! A voice spits in my ear ‘BE QUIET, BITCH!’.]

Of note is the recurring association she makes between silence, or mutism, and

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

55

banishing her terrifying memories from the threshold of full recall. Noteworthy too is the self-inf liction of a verbal degradation formerly inf licted on her by persecutors in the camps. This sense of self-revulsion is emblematized by her abhorrence for the indelible tattoo and its close proximity to a body part that conventionally is erotically invested, namely the breast: ‘Je me déshabille. Nue devant la glace. J’ai envie de hurler. Le tatouage est là, au-dessus du sein, juste en dessous du tampon électrique: Feld-Hure. Hure!’ (p. 50)58 [I undress. Naked in front of the mirror. I want to howl. The tattoo is there, above my breast, just beneath the electric stamp: Army-Whore. Whore!]. The disgusted self-alienation, the nauseated antipathy for her own body caused by her experiences are powerfully conveyed by ‘foutre’, a word of vulgar register denoting sperm: ‘Je ne suis rien. Plus rien. Je ne serai jamais femme. Ma chair a des relents de foutre. Je les sentirai toujours en moi, nuit et jour. Dans mon sexe, dans ma bouche, sous mes yeux’ (p. 58) [I’m nothing. Nothing any more. I’ll never be a woman. My f lesh has the stench of spunk. I’ll always feel them inside me, day and night. In my genitals, in my mouth, under my eyes]. Distinctive here are her impression that in violating her body the German soldiers destroyed her identity as a woman, and the powerful use of olfactory metaphor to convey entrapment within this corporeal as well as psychological memory. The topos of language’s inability to render memories exceeding the bounds of all known experience permeates ‘Leah’’s thoughts as her memory slowly returns. She is unable to recount these memories to Simon quite simply because they are unspeakable, even though permanently inscribed within her like the tattoo on her chest (p. 52). Again, there is disjunction between the positivistic theory of Simon the doctor who had never experienced the atrocities of Auschwitz — the theory that it suffices verbally to articulate suffering in order to expunge it — and her own empirical knowledge that, while her mind might eventually efface the images of atrocity, those images will be permanently etched upon and in her body (p. 55). It is important to note that she does (ironically, since she ultimately takes her own life) concede the possibility of her mind forgetting these experiences, but insists on the indelibility of bodily memories of sexual trauma. The opening page of section three, focalized upon the so-called Edith Schwarz (who is of course the real Leah Stern) contrasts her present, renascent pleasure in sex with a man she loves with the revulsion experienced during forced sex at Auschwitz: ‘Pouvoir m’abandonner voluptueusement entre ses bras, de toute mon âme, sans répulsion, sans relents immondes, sans souvenir, sans images et sans peur’ (p. 63) [To be able to abandon myself voluptuously in his arms, with all my soul, without feeling repulsed, with no foul stench, no memories, no images and no fear]. There is continuity here between the false and the real Leah’s emphasis on the olfactory; the hideous stench (‘relents immondes’) are not particularized as those of sperm, but the antecedent found in the false Leah’s use of ‘foutre’ (p. 58) in the previous section promotes this interpretation. In counterpoint to the other woman’s sense of corporeal death, the real Leah, reconfigured as ‘Edith’, feels that the body which she once believed to have been irretrievably sacrificed to the Nazi carrion-eaters is being reborn: ‘Alors que je croyais mon corps à jamais sacrifié aux charognards, voilà qu’il se mue en offrande et revient à la vie’ (p. 63) [Whereas I believed my

56

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

body had been sacrificed for ever to the carrion eaters, here it is now turning into an offering and coming back to life]. Two metaphors stand out here: ‘charognards’ to denote the Nazi men who figuratively devoured her f lesh, viewing it as mere meat; and the figuration of her body as an almost sacred offering to this new, nonNazi, desired man. Emphasis on sex, the female body and gender is pronounced in section three. This thematic triad, along with that of language, memory, and writing, will form the object of analysis of this third section, which is by far the most conceptually dense of the four sections comprising Souviens-toi Leah!. When ‘Edith’ realizes that her body is being viewed as a piece of lucrative merchandise, a schism opens up between body and mind, with the latter — or, as she puts it, her soul — leaving the former: A partir de ce moment, j’eus l’impression que mon âme avait quitté mon corps et qu’elle demeurait suspendue au-dessus de moi. Je fus comme anesthésiée... [...] De quelle marchandise, de quelle mise en service était-il question? Les formalités reprirent. Un numéro me fut tatoué entre les seins et, juste au-dessus, l’on m’appliqua une inscription au tampon électrique. (p. 70) [From that moment, I felt that my soul had left my body and that it remained suspended above me. It was as if I were anaesthetized... [...] What kind of merchandise, of service was this all about? The formalities resumed. A number was tattooed onto me between my breasts and, just above, a registration was made with an electric stamp.]

The same inscription had, of course, been made on ‘Leah’’s body in the same place, suggesting another mechanized processing of reducing human beings to exploitable objects. Worse is to come, however, for ‘Edith’ is subjected to genital torture in this processing: On me donna un uniforme que j’endossai sur mon corps zébré par les marques du knout et brûlé par le tatouage et le tampon. Je me sentais alors enserrée toute entière dans un étau qui allait en m’écrasant le corps et le crâne. Une douleur chassait l’autre, rapidement. Celle de la cautérisation fut plus fulgurante encore. Attachée, les genoux écartés, l’instrument qui me fut enfoncé dans le vagin y alluma un feu dont les braises incandescentes se consumèrent des heures durant. (pp. 70–71) [I was given a uniform that I put on over my body streaked with the marks of knout and burned by the tattooing and the stamping. Then I felt completely clasped in a vice which was crushing my body and skull. One kind of pain succeeded another, rapidly. The pain of cauterization was even more searing. I was bound with my knees apart; the instrument which was shoved into my vagina set alight a fire whose white-hot embers burned away for hours.]

We later learn that these appalling experiences in Auschwitz have left ‘Edith’ permanently infertile. Such sterility was presumably the intended effect of the cauterization, to avoid conception of babies that would have been of mixed race, half-Aryan, half-Jewish. Her gradual re-acceptance of her body once living in that part of Palestine which was to become the State of Israel in 1948 is also presented in gendered terms. It is through tactile contact with the younger of the refugee children that she slowly begins to re-establish a relationship with her own female

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

57

body and to accept it without disgust: ‘je me surpris à retrouver peu à peu les gestes maternels oubliés, à recevoir sans brûlure la tiédeur de leur peau sur la mienne. Et à renouer ainsi avec mon propre corps, supporter de le voir, le regarder, le toucher enfin sans dégoût’ (p. 99) [I caught myself gradually recovering forgotten maternal gestures, feeling the softness of their skin against mine without the sense of being burnt. And being thus reconciled with my own body, being able to bear seeing it, looking at it, at last touching it without disgust]. Maternity and the maternal body are here mediated as redemptive of the sexually abused female body. But rather than merely recycling a cultural cliché, Hassan reconfigures the maternal as a mental structure open to all women including those without children. Such surrogate or vicarious maternity is presented as a primal force in the violent fury of the women prisoners at Pithiviers when they realize that mothers and children are to be deported: ‘La douleur nous transforma en furies lorsque l’ordre tomba de déporter les mères et les adolescents. Il fallut nous les arracher, nos petits, et nous les avons laissés là, hagards, brisés, derrière les barbelés, aux mains des policiers’ (p. 68) [Pain transformed us into furies when the order was given for mothers and teenagers to be deported. The children had to be torn from us, and we left them there, dazed, broken, behind the barbed wire, in the hands of the policemen]. The inference is that this powerfully protective instinct towards children (and towards the sanctity of maternity) belongs to all women, even when the children concerned are not their own. The salience of gender as an experiential category also emerges in the strong female bonding, indeed identity-commingling between ‘Leah’ and ‘Edith’. When the latter meets the former in the ‘maison des Poupées’ (the camp brothel), she feels an affinity and intuits a similar survival mechanism of mind–body distanciation (p. 79). When later on ‘Leah’ appears to be dying, ‘Edith’ exhorts her to live, for both of their sakes: ‘— L’heure n’est plus à la mort, petite, lui murmurais-je inlassablement à l’oreille, il faut vivre. Si peu seront sorties vivantes. Il faut vivre, toi aussi. Ne me laisse pas seule. Cela m’aiderait tant de savoir que quelque part, une autre ‘poupée’ raconte et témoigne’ (pp. 79–80) [‘This is no time for dying, my dear’, I’d murmur tirelessly into her ear, ‘You have to live. So few will have got out alive. You too have to live. Don’t leave me on my own. It would help me so much to know that somewhere, another ‘doll’ is telling what happened and bearing witness’]. Significant here are rejection of the term ‘doll’ implied by the inverted commas, a cynical image of insentient, manipulable feminine objects, and also the accent on telling and witnessing. When the young woman appears close to death, ‘Edith’ watches over and cradles her, cathecting to her as if to a family member with whom she will always be connected due to shared experience: ‘Je la veillais, la berçais, n’arrivant pas à me faire à l’idée que j’allais la perdre, ma sœur d’infortune qui avait vécu ce que j’avais vécu, qu’une même experience m’attachait à jamais’ (p. 81) [I watched over her, cradled her, unable to accept the idea that I was going to lose her, my sister in adversity who had been through what I’d been through, attached to me for always through our common experience]. In contrast, her meeting with ‘Leah’ in Paris after the war is not without rancour towards this woman who has usurped not just her name but also her entire identity as wife of

58

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

Simon. However, she finally comes to a partly egotistical, partly altruistic decision to accept the transfer of identities, whose basis is connected to the strong sense of female solidarity against a unique form of Auschwitz suffering — that of the prostitute ‘Doll’ (p. 88). The linguistic affixing of a doll-like property onto these women is one instance of the structuring function of language in identity-formation. This leads us to the second of the two thematic triads of interest in this third section of Souviens-toi Leah!, viz. language/memory/writing. The woman we now know to be the real Leah intends to devote her energies to talking about herself through the real Edith, and, conversely, about Edith through herself, putting into words their dire experiences. Her quest will be for naked, unembellished words without false modesty and without artifice (pp. 65–66). This emphasis on the necessity of speaking their experiences is diametrically opposed to Edith’s mutism, born of linguistic nihilism. Five years later, settled in what is now the State of Israel, the real Leah finds a different way to communicate through language, namely writing. The illusion is contrived that she now begins within the diegetic present to write down her own version of the Leah/Edith story, in which identities have been swapped or perhaps doubled. Soon, however, her positivistic view of language’s power is challenged: Auschwitz, comment en parler? Tout ce que je pourrais en dire ne sera jamais qu’un insipide ref let de sa monstrueuse réalité. Parce que les mots que nous connaissons tous n’ont pas été conçus pour le décrire. Rien dans l’histoire de l’humanité ne nous a préparés à cela. Aussi, même les termes comme enfer, purgatoire ne peuvent être en aucun cas rattachés à ce lieu. (p. 66) [How to speak about Auschwitz? All that I could say about it will never be anything but an insipid ref lection of its monstrous reality. Because the words that we all know weren’t designed to describe it. Nothing in the history of humankind prepared us for that. So, even terms like hell or purgatory can in no circumstances be linked to that place.]

Faced with what many other commentators have seen as an impossibility of tran­ scending the limitations of a language with no antecedents on the scale of Auschwitz, she resolves nonetheless to take up the challenge. Her resolve is to be guided by the imperative of sincerity, stressing that her own experience cannot be taken as representative of Auschwitz as a totality, not least because that experience had not followed the teleology of Auschwitz: death in the gas chambers (pp. 66–67). Significantly, she had resolved to fix her experiences in language from the very start of her stay in one of the many French camps forming ante-chambers to the death-chambers of Auschwitz: ‘La décision d’écrire s’imposa dès mon arrivée à Pithiviers’ (p. 67) [The decision to write became obvious as soon as I arrived at Pithiviers]. Unlike Ana Novac, whose diary was real and material, hers was a mental construct, since she had written her diary in her mind alone while incarcerated in Auschwitz. However, there is conf luence between her and Novac’s diary in that both had the same function of granting the writer psychological survival: Je me mis à rédiger mentalement ce journal. C’est ce qui me donna la force d’endurer le reste. Le soir venu, le vécu insoutenable de la journée ne se réduisait plus qu’à un magma de mots et phrases qui s’inscrivirent dans ma

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

59

mémoire tout comme ce tatouage à l’encre bleue sur mon corps, dans ma chair. Il ne me resterait plus, le moment venu, qu’à les déverser sur le papier pour en effacer les marques, me disais-je alors. (p. 67) [I started to write this diary in my head. That’s what gave me the strength to endure the rest. By evening, the unbearable experience of the day would be reduced to nothing more than a muddle of words and sentences which were inscribed in my memory just like this blue-ink tattoo on my body, in my f lesh. All I’d have to do when the time came was to pour them onto paper in order to erase their marks, I used to tell myself.]

Conspicuous here is the recurrent motif of inscription, linking writing to the body,59 memory to f lesh. However, her assumption that she will so easily be able to pour out this mental stock of words and sentences after liberation in order to erase their stigmata from her mind seems naïve. She herself implies recognition of this point, or at least of the need for a long hiatus between the traumatizing experiences and their transmission via written words: ‘Ce n’est sans doute pas par hasard qu’il me fallut attendre ces cinq années pour pouvoir enfin cracher tout cela’ (p. 67) [It’s probably no accident that I had to wait five years before being finally able to spit all this out]. The power of her own words and narrative are revealed when, in a temporal shift from narrative of the past experiences in the camps to the diegetic present of writing, her sense of degradation and humiliation is so intense that she starts to sob and hurls the notebook violently against the wall. This suggests projection of repressed violence onto the vehicle of its articulation. And yet on re-reading her narrative, she feels that it is effecting a form of catharsis by allowing purgation of her anger. The difficulty remains with finding the means to expression via an existing lexis which is inadequate to convey the unprecedented (p. 74). And this difficulty is not easily overcome. In a second temporal movement forward to the diegetic present of Leah’s writing, she expresses lassitude and a sense of not having managed to engender this testimony seething inside her, rotting her from inside. The lexical choice of ‘enfanter’ is, again, gendered, and may have some unconscious link with her bereavement as a mother and her present infertility (p. 78). In a third recursion to the diegetic present of writing, there is recognition of the paradox that she is bringing the Leah Stern she had pronounced dead back to life from her ashes. This leads to interrogation of her perhaps hidden motives for writing: neither to confess to her husband, nor to fulfil a duty of memory towards her dead children, but quite simply to become herself again, to re-embrace the identity of a woman whom she refuses to pity (p. 82). And now the writing process does indeed appear to have started the therapeutic process by which she recognizes her status of victim and her inability to have saved her children, who had literally been torn from her: ‘On t’a empêchée de rester auprès d’eux. On te les a arrachés! Souviens-toi, Leah! Ce n’était pas ta faute. Non. Ce n’était pas ta faute’ (pp. 82–83) [You were prevented from staying with them. They were torn from you! Remember, Leah! It wasn’t your fault. No. It wasn’t your fault]. In Leah’s case at least, writing has provided a form of (scripto-)therapy60 which succeeds in negating the common syndrome of survivor’s guilt.

60

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

In conclusion, it is clear that despite the many variations in experience of WWII profiled by the seven texts examined in this chapter, collectively they have two main cynosures. First, there is the perceived inadequacy of language to render unprecedented experiences of deep trauma. Once again, I contest the position of Caruth and her many followers, which as Wulf Kansteiner and Harald Weilnböck insistently note is fundamentally mistrustful of any attempt narratively to represent trauma, even though ‘[m]any psychologists and therapists agree that traumatic experiences may be truthfully represented in everyday narrative language, for instance as the result of successful therapy’.61 The second cynosure, namely the perception nonetheless of a vital need to memorialize such experience in language, is experienced as an ethical duty to bear witness for posterity and for history, but also as a duty towards the mental integrity of the surviving self. The paradox lies in the perceived inadequacy of language set aside the fact that witness-bearing cannot occur without it. These seven texts attest to what Paul Ricœur has designated a tremendum horrendum, which constitutes ‘the ultimate ethical motivation for the history of victims’.62 Given that language is necessary for the constitution of such history, deconstructionist critics tend to posit aporia. But it is important to heed the recent warning of Hirsch and Spitzer who, observing the ‘foregrounding of embodiment, affect and silence’ in recent theorizations of witness testimony, have rightly cautioned ‘against a hyperbolic emphasis on trauma and the breakdown of speech’.63 It is not that trauma needs to be de-emphasized, but more that the breakdown of speech which is often associated with it needs to be resisted. It is, in fact, in the constant striving to work with language, despite its current constraints, towards the fulfilment of that both testimonial and ego-restorative objective that the value of the texts examined in this chapter resides. The literary ‘merit’ of these texts may vary (see Introduction) according to purely formal criteria (although who can set and arbitrate on such criteria is a moot issue), but this is, ultimately, besides the memorial, ethical, and indeed human point. Notes to Chapter 1 1. Anna Langfus, Le Sel et le soufre (Paris: Gallimard, 1960). 2. Françoise Maous, Coma Auschwitz, no. A.5553 (Paris: Le Comptoir, 1996). 3. Ana Novac, Les Beaux Jours de ma jeunesse (Paris: Gallimard, 1996; first published 1968). 4. William G. Niederland, ‘Clinical Observations on the “Survivor Syndrome” ’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 49 (1968), 313–15. 5. Dominique Arban, La Cité d’injustice (Paris: Julliard, 1945). 6. Elisabeth Gille, Un paysage de cendres (Paris: Seuil, 1996). 7. The expression ‘survivor’s syndrome’, coined by William G. Niederland, includes a number of aspects other than survivor’s guilt. 8. Francine Christophe, Après les camps, la vie (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001). 9. Yaël Hassan, Souviens-toi Leah! (Paris: Eden, 2004). 10. Pierre Horn, Modern Jewish Writers of France (Lewiston, Queenston and Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1997), p. 35. The quotation from Langfus comes from ‘Entretien: Anna Langfus’, La Nouvelle Critique ( June 1965), 45–51 (p. 45). 11. Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975). 12. By ‘homodiegetic narrator’ I mean the figure that is both the first-person narrator of and chief protagonist in the diegesis.



World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

61

13. Madeleine Cottenet-Hage, ‘Anna Langfus (1920–1966)’, in Sartori and Cottenet-Hage, eds, Daughters of Sarah, pp. 95–98 (p. 95). 14. In interview with Marc Maurice, ‘Les Bagages de sable, par Anna Langfus’, Les Lettres françaises, 23–29 August 1962, p. 3. 15. Ellen S. Fine, ‘Le Témoin comme romancier: Anna Langfus et le problème de la distance’, Pardès, 17 (1993), 93–109 (p. 95). 16. One salient example of this moralizing tendency is found in Adah Lappin’s ‘Front Nightmare to Fairy Tales’, in The Reconstructionist, 31 May 1963. 17. Anna Langfus, Les Bagages de sable (Paris: Gallimard, 1962). 18. Vercors, Le Silence de la mer (Paris: Minuit, 1942). 19. An interesting point of comparison here is with the work of Ilona Karmel. Born in Krakow, Poland, on 14 August 1925, Karmel spent the war years in the Krakow ghetto and in nearby labour camps. As Sara R. Horowitz comments, ‘Karmel’s work inverts the conventional war narrative wherein heroic men protect endangered women. Most frequently portrayed as weak and passive, the men in her writing become increasingly reliant upon women for survival as conditions worsen. [...] The protagonist of Stephania, for example, remembers her father paralyzed with fear in face of an impending roundup’. Sara R. Horowitz, ‘Memory and Testimony of Women Survivors of Nazi Genocide’, in Baskin, ed., Women of the Word, p. 276. 20. See ‘Prix Goncourt. Anna Langfus: une voix coléreuse. Une interview par Jeanine Delpech’, Les Nouvelles littéraires, 22 November 1962, pp. 6–7. 21. For analysis of the phenomenon that has been named ‘psychic numbing’, see Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (New York: Random House, 1969) and The Life of the Self (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976). 22. Caruth, p. 4. 23. Langfus, in Maurice. 24. For more on the legitimating function of paratext in deportee accounts, see Hutton, pp. 55–56. 25. Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, ‘The Witness in the Archive: Holocaust Studies/Memory Studies’, Memory Studies, 2, 2 (2009), 151–70 (p. 160). 26. Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, NJ, and London: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 40. 27. In her pioneering study, Cynthia Haft observes that ‘The description of thirst is not as frequent as the description of hunger. Thirst is most acutely described in Aucun de nous ne reviendra.’ Cynthia Haft, The Theme of Nazi Concentration Camps in French Literature (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1973), p. 76. However, Ruth Kluger, an Austrian deportee, comments of her time in Auschwitz: ‘Hunger was less of a problem than thirst’. Ruth Kluger, Landscapes of Memory: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (London: Bloomsbury, 2003), p. 115. 28. Both the mysterious powder thought to induce cessation of periods and the obsession with recipes are documented by Hutton as being extremely common features of published testimonies by women deportees: see Hutton, pp. 122 and 133–34 respectively. 29. Charlotte Delbo, Aucun de nous ne reviendra (Geneva: Gonthier, 1965). 30. Again, Hutton attests to the widespread nature of this tension. 31. Simone Veil, ‘Une difficile réf lexion’, Pardès, 16 (1992), 271–82 (p. 272). 32. Bella Brodzki, ‘Trauma Inherited, Trauma Reclaimed: Chamberet: Recollections from an Ordinary Childhood’, The Yale Journal of Criticism, 14, 1 (2001), 155–67 (p. 157). Whilst written in French by its author, Claude Morhange-Bégué, Chamberet was never published in French, appearing only in English translation by Austryn Wainhouse (Marlboro, VT: Marlboro Press, 1987). 33. Hutton, p. 37. 34. Suzettte A. Henke, Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life-Writing (London: Macmillan, 1998), p. xii. 35. James Young, ‘Interpreting Literary Testimony: A Preface to Re-reading Holocaust Diaries and Memoirs’, New Literary History, 18, 2 (1987), 402–23 (p. 406). 36. Hutton comments that ‘the shaving of hair is most frequently represented in terms of an assault upon the deportees’ femininity’ (p. 125).

62

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

37. Terrence Des Pres, ‘Holocaust Laughter?’, in Writing and the Holocaust, ed. by Berel Lang (New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1988), pp. 216–33 (p. 218–19). 38. Mark Cory, ‘Comedic Distance in Holocaust Literature’, Journal of American Culture, 18, 1 (1995), 35–40 (p. 36). 39. Des Pres, ‘Holocaust Laughter?’, p. 219. 40. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘La Mémoire d’un passé non révolu: entretien avec Foulek Ringelheim’, Revue de l’Université de Bruxelles (special issue, ‘Les Juifs entre la mémoire et l’oubli’, 1987), 11–20 (p. 14). 41. Tzvetan Todorov, Les Abus de la mémoire (Paris: Arléa, 1998). 42. There are clear convergences between Todorov’s and Levinas’s theories here and Terrence Des Pres’s earlier though less well-known theory of ‘dreaming back’: ‘Bearing witness is a form of memory. The dreaming back is memory in action. And so is conscience, which in Schopenhauer’s definition is our collective knowledge concerning what mankind has done and suffered. In exactly this sense (as in Santayana’s much quoted remark), remembering the past becomes, through disturbance and revulsion and also fear, attention to the present and care for the future. It follows that knowledge of the Holocaust becomes the source and inspiration for conscience in its post-Holocaust form.’ Terrence Des Pres, ‘The Dreaming Back’, Centerpoint: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, 4, 1, 13 (Fall 1980), 13–18 (p. 17). The ‘much quoted remark’ of Santayana is ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’ (George Santayana, The Life of Reason, vol. 1 (London: Constable, 1905), p. 284). 43. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 3. 44. Amongst other texts representing this occluded demographic, one of particular literary merit is Yveline Stéphan’s Élise B (Paris: Éditions de l’Aube, 1998). It is prefaced by Jean-Pierre Guéno, editor of a recent collection of non-fictional testimonies from former ‘enfants cachés’ under Vichy (Paroles d’étoiles (Paris: Librio and Radio-France, 2002). More recently, a significant contribution has been made by Annelise Schulte Nordholt in her edited volume Témoignages de l’après-Auschwitz dans la littérature française d’aujourd’hui: enfants de survivants et survivants-enfants (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2008). 45. Jean Laloum, ‘La Création des maisons d’enfants: l’exemple de la commission centrale de l’enfance auprès de l’UJRE’, Pardès, 16 (1992), 247–70 (p. 247). 46. Danièle Brison, ‘Une enfance saccagée’, Magazine littéraire, September 1996, p. 69. 47. It is to her elder daughter Denise Epstein that Irène Némirovsky owes her posthumous recognition as the author of Suite française (Paris: Denoël, 2004). Némirovsky’s now famous novel Suite française, published sixty-two years after the author’s death in Auschwitz, and recipient of the Prix Renaudot for 2004, has become an international bestseller. 48. This reference was made by de Gaulle at a press conference on 27 November 1967. 49. ‘It is appropriate, then, that Roskies prefaces the modern responses to catastrophe by recalling the earliest responses found in the Holy Scriptures, the source of nearly all subsequent tropes and archetypes. In “The Liturgy of Destruction”, Roskies thus traces the ancient responses from the churban of the First Destruction in 587 B.C.E. in Lamentations to the Second Destruction in 70 A.D. and the Lamentations Rabbati, written in light of the first catastrophe.’ James Young, ‘Modern Jewish Culture’, Contemporary Literature, 28, 2 (1987), 278–83 (p. 280). 50. This ref lects historiographical findings: ‘La Résistance, certes, combattait le régime de l’État français et les occupants; mais elle ne combattait ni ne condamnait les réformes du Maréchal, comme le principe d’un statut des Juifs. La distinction entre Français et Juif, dont la mentalité française s’était imprégnée au cours des années 30, était omniprésente dans le discours des médias de la Résistance’ [Admittedly, the Resistance was fighting against the regime of the French state and the occupiers; but it neither fought against nor condemned the Marshal’s reforms, such as the principle of a Jewish statute. The distinction between Frenchman and Jew, with which French mentality had been imbued in the 1930s, was omnipresent in the discourse of the Resistance media]. Lucien Lazare, ‘La Résistance a choisi de se taire’, L’Arche, September 2009, 134–37 (p. 135). See also Renée Poznanski, Propagandes et persécutions. La Résistance et le “problème juif”, 1940–1944 (Paris: Fayard, 2009). 51. This essay was first published in Les Temps modernes. It subsequently appeared in L’Imprescriptible: Pardonner? Dans l’honneur et la dignité (Paris: Seuil, 1986).

World War II: The Shoah and its Legacies

63

52. Francine Christophe, Une Petite Fille privilégiée (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996). 53. The collocation was coined by David Rousset in his eponymous L’Univers concentrationnaire (Paris: Éditions du Pavois, 1946). 54. ‘Une sœur de mon mari a été déportée: nous nous sommes à peine croisées à Bergen Belsen, mais nous avons des camarades communs, beaucoup de souvenirs communs. Chaque fois que nous nous voyons, nous en parlons. C’est instinctif, un besoin de le faire. Mais le reste de la famille ne le supporte pas. Quand nous en parlons, inconsciemment, on nous fait taire. [...] Encore aujourd’hui mon mari, mon beau-frère détestent lorsque nous parlons du camp. Nos rencontres avec nos anciennes camarades ne leur plaisent guère, peut-être parce qu’ils se sentent exclus d’un monde si important pour nous. Ils ne supportent pas notre souffrance. Alors nous nous taisons lorsqu’ils sont là.’ (Veil, p. 278) [A sister of my husband was deported: we barely saw each other in Bergen-Belsen, but we have in common friends and lots of memories. Every time we see each other, we talk about it. It’s instinctive, we need to. But the rest of the family can’t bear it. When we talk about it, unconsciously they silence us. [...] Even today my husband and my brother-inlaw hate it when we talk about the camp. They don’t exactly appreciate our meetings with our old friends, maybe because they feel excluded from a world that is so important to us. They can’t bear our suffering. So we fall silent when they’re there]. 55. Rothberg, p. 3. 56. T. R., ‘Roman: Souviens-toi Leah! Par Yaël Hassan’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 10–16 June 2004, p. 62. 57. For a similar but more tragic narrative configuration, see ‘La Marche à l’étoile’, in Vercors. 58. Roughly translatable as ‘prostitute who travels with the army’, or more euphemistically ‘camp follower’. 59. This is a link also discerned in the female-authored deportee accounts examined by Hutton. 60. See Henke. 61. Wulf Kansteiner and Harald Weilnböck, ‘Against the Concept of Cultural Trauma (or How I Learned to Love the Suffering of Others without the Help of Psychotherapy)’, in Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, ed. by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), pp. 229–40 (p. 231). 62. Paul Ricœur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, trans. by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 187. 63. Hirsch and Spitzer, p. 151.

CHAPTER 2

v

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma Car vous avez vécu l’holocauste, vous aussi. Vous êtes né après? Peu importe. [...] On peut mourir à Auschwitz après Auschwitz. [For you too went through the Holocaust. You were born afterwards? That doesn’t matter. [...] You can die in Auschwitz after Auschwitz.] Elie Wiesel, 19701

This chapter examines writings by Jewish women of the second generation, in the widest possible sense of that term. Most obviously, the term denotes children born after the war to survivor parents. Wider interpretations, such as Ellen S. Fine’s, encompass ‘those born both during and after the war, including those who did not directly participate in the Holocaust but who have come to endure the psychic imprint of the trauma’.2 In the French context, I will use ‘second generation’ to designate Jewish women born during or shortly after World War II whose parents were either deported, or else escaped deportation but were subject to the constant threat of discovery and arrest under the Vichy regime, in the second case almost always being forced out of their homes and into hiding or exile. In their autobiographical or autofictional writings, these women map the psychic life of such children in the post-war period. This includes interpellation by, in some instances, their own early memories of the war years, and in all cases by transmitted parental memories of both the Shoah and anti-Semitic persecution under Vichy — a persecution systemically embedded in the numerous ‘statuts des Juifs’ [ Jewish statutes]. For these children, what has variously been called absent memory, postmemory, secondary memory, or transmitted memory remains a central, abiding, and structuring category of identity; indeed, recent anti-Semitic and Judaeocidal history is crucially constitutive of their identity. My preference will be for the term ‘postmemory’, as defined by Marianne Hirsch: [...] a powerful and very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated, not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation. [...] Postmemory characterises the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated.3

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

65

It is worth comparing Hirsch’s conception of postmemory with that of the ghost and haunting in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s L’Ecorce et le noyau (1978).4 As Colin Davis remarks, [i]n their account a ghost is not to be understood in classic psychoanalytic terms as a return of the repressed, or at least not of material repressed by the person to whom the ghost appears. Rather, they describe the operation of unconscious, transgenerational communication, so that the secrets and crimes of past generations can be deposited in the unconscious without the subject ever having been conscious of them.5

The common factor between this psychic operation and postmemory is the transgenerational communication of densely invested events unknown to the recipient. However, there are two vital distinctions. The first and more clear-cut is the fact that, as Abraham states, ‘[s]i un fantôme revient hanter c’est pour mentir: ses prétendues “révélations” sont mensongères par nature’6 [if a ghost comes back to haunt it’s in order to tell lies: its so-called ‘revelations’ are by nature false], whereas postmemory of the Shoah is not about lies, even if it may be subject to involuntary distortion relative to its original source. The second, rather less clear-cut distinction is the emphasis in the ghost model on the depositing in the unconscious of ‘secrets and crimes’, that is, sources of shame. Postmemory of the Shoah, although it often comes about via a similar process of unconscious transgenerational communication, differs in content. It is not crimes for which earlier family generations have been responsible which get deposited in the unconscious of the second-generation subject, but rather, devastating atrocities perpetrated on one’s family. However, subjection to Nazi or Nazi-inspired violence and cruelty could be construed as a ‘guilty’ secret in the sense of humiliating victimhood, and further, as noted in Chapter 1, survival of the Shoah has often generated a guilt syndrome in the survivor (typified by such questions as ‘Why did I survive when they died?’). To this extent, there is a conceivably ‘guilty’ secret that the first generation may unconsciously transmit to the second. If I invoke Abraham and Torok’s model, it is first because of the (partial) convergences between it and the model of postmemory, and second because the semantics of ‘ghost’ and ‘haunting’ resonate very strongly with the imagery and poetics characterizing a number of our primary texts, most notably those of Myriam Anissimov. Postmemory, though, is undoubtedly the model with the greatest fulcrum for the corpus of primary texts treated here. As Hirsch insists, postmemory is not ‘absent memory, or the “gaping black hole of the unmentionable years” ’; it is ‘as full or as empty, certainly as constructed, as memory itself ’.7 This chapter will study the transgenerational transmission of Jewish memory and its legacy of often indelible trauma. References to trauma will largely relate to what could in its turn be qualified as secondary trauma: trauma experienced by the child of survivors who transmit their memories of original, primary traumata so powerfully that the child integrates them as her own. In addition to the incorporation of retrospective trauma, this chapter will also consider the lesser but hardly negligible trauma experienced by the second generation in a Liberation France which, despite its numerous purges of collaborators, was certainly not purged of anti-Semitism.

66

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

Within their thematic subsections, the analyses of Chapter 1 were ordered chronologically by publication date of the texts in question, with the aim of exposing any evolutions over time in representational practices centred on the Shoah from first-hand, ocular witnesses. In contrast, Chapter 2 will be less guided by date of publication than by paradigmatic affective clusters, in keeping with the essentially non-linear nature of postmemory. It is of course true that all memory is spontaneously non-linear, but primary memory is capable of a relatively easy chronological marshalling in a way that is not true of postmemory, given the latter’s only ever doubly mediated apprehension of memorial objects, and given also that postmemory is not anchored in a personally experienced temporal sequence. Chapter 2 will first consider five texts by Myriam Anissimov and one by Anne Rabinovitch which are representative of the dominant tenor discerned in the wider corpus of second-generation French-language Jewish women’s writings (a corpus documented in section 3 of the Bibliography): that is, affective pain and psycho-social impairment. It will then scrutinize two intermedial cases (Catherine Clément’s and Ania Francos’s), situated at the crossroads between pain induced by and desacralization of the Shoah; and it will end by analysing a text which at least ostensibly presents the heritage of the second generation with mordant humour (Patricia Finaly’s), but which also contain signs of its own, more subcutaneous traumata. Anissimov’s oeuvre, which as Nolden observes ‘has won many awards and literary prizes, among them the prestigious Ordre des Arts et Lettres awarded by the Ministry of Culture’,8 represents by far the most substantial corpus of Jewish femaleauthored writing in French consistently to foreground traumatic postmemory of the Shoah. While the following observation does not specify the ‘post’ factor, it is well worth citing for its general validity: Dès que nous abordons l’œuvre de Myriam Anissimov, nous sommes confrontés à un très grand traumatisme historique, qui a frappé durablement les différents narrateurs de ses romans. Myriam Anissimov a été marquée par la Shoah, qui a laissé en elle des blessures aussi profondes qu’indélébiles. La Shoah est un événement qui parcourt toute son œuvre, que ce soit de manière explicite ou implicite.9 [As soon as we approach Myriam Anissimov’s work, we are confronted with a huge historical trauma, which has permanently stricken the different narrators of her novels. Myriam Anissimov has been marked by the Shoah, which has left her with wounds as deep as they are indelible. The Shoah is an event running through her entire oeuvre, whether explicitly or implicitly.]

Born in a Swiss refugee camp in 1943 to Jewish parents f leeing from persecution in Vichy France, Anissimov was too young to have any of her own memories of the Judaeocide, and thus remembered instead what her parents remembered aloud to her. As we have seen, Hirsch has rightly observed that postmemory is ‘a powerful and very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated, not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation’.10 The element of imagination and creation is accentuated by the autofictional nature of Anissimov’s writing, in which traumatic postmemory is

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

67

usually conveyed from the perspective of a fictional female protagonist who bears striking similarities to what we know of the author herself. Before proceeding any further, it is important to establish that Anissimov is liminally positioned between the second generation on the one hand, and on the other hand — but arguably only just because she was born as late as 1943 — what Susan Suleiman has called the 1.5 generation. By ‘1.5 generation’, Suleiman means ‘child survivors of the Holocaust, too young to have had an adult understanding of what was happening to them, but old enough to have been there during the Nazi persecution of Jews’.11 Since Anissimov had only ‘been there during the Nazi persecution of Jews’ as a one- to two-year-old baby, I will for the sake of clarity refer to her as a second-generation Jew; but Suleiman’s distinction is a useful one. Analeptically, certain autofictional threads very clearly link Anissimov’s third novel, Rue de nuit (1977),12 to her subsequent seven novels, the most recent of which appeared in 2007. The first name of Rue de nuit’s homodiegetic narrator Anna Makowski will be echoed homonymically in later texts by other narrator/ main protagonists named Hanna/Hannah. Likewise, Anna’s source of income — the buying, reconditioning and selling on of cheap clothes in Parisian f lea markets, which could be seen as a (stereo)typical Jewish activity — will be shared by narrators and/or main protagonists in later texts. Beyond these relatively superficial resem­ blances, there are more substantial lines of continuity between the various compo­ nent parts of Anissimov’s now substantial oeuvre. Such lines are most obviously of a psycho-existential order, but are nonetheless integrally bound up with the historical. Anna Whitehead’s ref lections have obvious relevance to Anissimov’s work: One of the key literary strategies in trauma fiction is the device of repetition, which can act at the level of language, imagery, or plot. Repetition mimics the effects of trauma, for it suggests the insistent return of the event and the disruption of narrative chronology or progression.13

Anissimov’s entire oeuvre certainly contains repetitions of a number of Shoahrelated primal scenes, but the repetitions also contain re-significations. Whilst Rue de nuit sets a thematic template for Anissimov’s later works, it differs formally from those later works. The inscription of second-generation symptomatology is complicated by a particular narratological choice that sharply demarcates Rue de nuit from the rest of Anissimov’s oeuvre. Most of that oeuvre is largely if not exclusively mimetic; in contrast, Rue de nuit, although cast in an ostensibly realist framework of post-war (early 1970s) Paris, is in fact a dystopic, oneiric narrative. As such, it causes lectorial oscillation between belief and disbelief of its narrator’s claims. Indeed, it has been justly qualified by celebrated Jewish writer Gilles Pudlowski as ‘très kaf kaïen’ [very Kaf kaesque].14 In that departure from mimeticism, there is a certain aesthetico-ethical exemplarity in the forging of post-war structures of feeling. One effect of the Holocaust was a radical undermining of confidence in representation per se,15 and it is certainly the case that the non-mimetic as a literary mode is critically distanced from the illusion of unmediated representation. This formal feature is one way in which Rue de nuit conveys post-war, secondgeneration structures of feeling. Another is via its presentation of postmemory of

68

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

the Shoah as existentially disabling. Revealingly, one of Anissimov’s interviewers commented of Rue de nuit ‘Je dirais que votre livre est plutôt l’explication d’une sorte de complexe de persécution ou de culpabilité. Ou des deux en même temps...’ [I’d say that your book is rather the explanation of a sort of persecution complex or a guilt complex. Or of both simultaneously...]. Anissimov’s response was poignant: Vous avez raison. [...] Mes parents m’ont expliqué ce qui s’est passé pendant la guerre et comment nous sommes des rescapés. Et je me suis toujours demandé pourquoi, moi, j’ai survécu et pourquoi les autres sont morts. Je me suis demandé aussi si vraiment j’avais le droit d’existence et si je n’étais pas coupable de quelque chose.16 [You’re right. [...] My parents explained to me what happened during the war and how we are survivors. And I’ve always wondered why I survived and why the others died. I’ve also wondered if I really had the right to exist and whether I wasn’t guilty of something.]

This response exhibits one common facet of a survivors’ syndrome which clinical studies have shown to be highly prone to intergenerational transmission:17 what Robert Lifton in his Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima called ‘death guilt’. But the symptomatology of Anna, one of Anissimov’s many fictional alter egos, extends well beyond the single facet of death guilt. The presentation of this symptomatology is both complicated and enriched by that particular formal choice of border-crossing between realism and non-realism that demarcates Rue de nuit from the rest of Anissimov’s oeuvre. The reader of Rue de nuit hesitates between accepting the view of Anna’s boyfriend Claude that she is in the grip of paranoia, and, conversely, believing with Anna that they truly are being spied upon by a minatory post-WWII state panopticon. Is Anna, as Claude claims, mentally disturbed? Is she plagued by paranoid delusions, or are her claims of secret surveillance and persecution by shadowy agents of the state in fact ‘true’? If neither diegetically veridical nor consonant with extratextual reality, these claims are certainly veracious in terms of Anna’s psychological self-mapping. Anissimov has opted for an enduring ambiguity that has a distinct referential function: the beliefs of those considered paranoid by some in the ‘real’, extra-textual world often remain neither vindicated nor unvindicated, sustaining a state of anxiety in a psychological entre-deux. The interconnection between such anxiety and the predicate of enduring, albeit far more muted anti-Semitism has often been regarded as a particularly Jewish post-war structure of feeling. If the reader believes that Anna and Claude truly are under state surveillance, then the silence of their 1970s’ French neighbours in the face of such intimidation allegorizes the silence of French Gentiles faced with the police arrest of Jews during WWII: Je pressens qu’ils projettent cela. Nous faire disparaître de cette ville. Pourtant, ils auraient tout aussi bien pu nous arrêter à l’aube et nous entraîner vers quelque colonie pénitentiaire ignorée de tous. [...] Mais j’aurais peut-être crié ma terreur, appelé au secours. Les voisins auraient tout entendu. Ils n’auraient peutêtre rien dit, par crainte de subir le même sort [...] On nous aurait emmenés et ils auraient été les témoins de notre disparition. (p. 63)

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

69

[I sense they’re planning it. To have us disappear from this city. Yet they could just as easily have arrested us at dawn and dragged us off to some prison colony nobody knows about. [...] But maybe I’d have screamed in terror, called for help. The neighbours would have heard everything. Maybe they’d have said nothing, through fear of suffering the same fate [...] We’d have been taken away and they would have been witness to our disappearance.]

The last sentence here marks up the moral complexities of witnessing: it is possible to witness an injustice but fail to bear witness to it in solidarity with the victim, as was almost always the case with French Gentiles when French Jews were deported by the collaborationist Vichy regime. A similar failure is fantasized in the following: ‘Je me sens en sécurité, dans la rue, au milieu de la foule. Si l’on essaie de se saisir de moi, de m’arrêter, je me débattrais, je crierais “à l’aide, au secours! Je n’ai rien fait!” Les autres regarderont. Ils ne feront rien, bien sûr. Mais ils seraient témoins’ (p. 68) [I feel safe in the street, in the midst of the crowd. If anyone tries to grab hold of me, to arrest me, I’d struggle, I’d shout ‘help, help! I haven’t done anything!’ The others will look on. They’ll do nothing, of course. But they would be witnesses]. The reader may well wonder why Anna prizes so highly this type of witnessing, given its failure to instigate protest. Bitter irony permeates the words of the judge to whom Anna makes a formal complaint about suspected state monitoring: ‘Vous êtes la première à venir me raconter des histoires aussi farfelues. Croyez-moi, la légalité est encore respectée en ce pays et une histoire comparable ne m’a jamais, je dis bien jamais, encore été signalée’ (p. 90) [You’re the first person who’s come along with such far-fetched tales. Believe me, lawfulness is still respected in this country, and a story like this has never, and I mean never, been brought to my attention]. After all, the persecution, arrest and deportation of Jews had been entirely legal in Occupied France. Equally, Claude’s pacifying words — ‘Allons, dans un pays démocratique, pourvu d’une constitution, c’est impossible de nos jours’ [Come on now, in a democratic country with a constitution, it’s impossible nowadays] — acquire an unpleasant irony on this allegorical level. Prior to 1940, France had been a democratic country with a constitution, but this had not prevented the advent of the anti-Semitic Vichy regime when the French parliament voted full powers to Marshal Pétain. The intensification of Anna’s anguish caused by Claude’s dismissive response to her words also bears out Dori Laub’s remark that ‘if one talks about the trauma without being truly heard or truly listened to, the telling itself might be lived as a return of the trauma — a re-experiencing of the event itself.’18 Laub’s use of ‘re-experiencing’ and its syntactical status as noun in apposition to ‘trauma’ suggest that, pace Caruth, trauma is actually experienced qua trauma in the original event. This is at odds with Caruthian doxa of trauma, which, as seen in the Introduction above, stresses ‘its very unassimilated nature — the way it was precisely not known in the first instance’.19 Caruth’s theory ill befits first-generation victims of the Shoah, for whom the originary traumatic event may well have been fully, indeed vividly ‘known’: not just cognitively, but physically and affectively also. Admittedly, Anna’s subject-position differs from that of the first generation, and her experience of the first-hand trauma of the Shoah victims is mediated entirely

70

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

through postmemory. Yet her own experience of state persecution, if taken literally and particularly at the close of the novel, is a first-hand trauma in its own right, regardless of its partial bases within postmemory. And the logical corollary of Laub’s position, viz. that there are risks as well as benefits involved in talking about trauma, does not constitute a valid reason for wholesale censorship of such talk. Indeed, the result of such censorship could be one of the worst possible mental states: solipsistic psychosis. By the end of the narrative Anna has arguably reached this state, precisely because she has not been ‘truly heard or truly listened to’. In addition to this first-hand trauma experienced by a Jew in the post-war diegetic present, Anissimov inscribes very direct aural and visible signs of wartime Jewish trauma in the physical spaces of Anna’s movements. The Jewish quarter (‘Pletzl’) where Anna chooses her eventual hideout is overwritten by memorial traces of past Jewish traumata, and there is a compelling fusion of the literal and the figurative in the mention of expulsion: Un drôle de silence règne dans le Pletzl. Certains immeubles promis à la démolition prochaine ont vu leurs fenêtres murées l’une après l’autre au fur et à mesure du départ des locataires. On les a expulsés, ils sont partis sans résister, alors que leurs ancêtres étaient venus s’installer là, vague après vague. (p. 108) [A strange silence pervades the Pletzl. Some buildings earmarked for demolition have seen their windows boarded up one after the other as the tenants leave. They’ve been expelled, they’ve left without putting up a fight, whereas their ancestors had come to settle there, in wave after wave.]

This is followed by fairly transparent allusion to the ‘raf le du Vel’ d’Hiv’ — the round-up of some 13,000 Jews in Paris in July 1942 — and to the unique responsibility of the French police in this infamous episode, following which the majority of these Jews were deported to the death camps: ‘Les policiers ne sont pas venus là depuis au moins trente ans. Peut-être ont-ils même oublié qu’un matin, à l’aube, ils ont sorti les gens de leur lit pour les charger dans des autocars et les parquer dans un stade. Personne ne s’en est autrement ému et la raf le s’est déroulée dans le calme et l’ordre’ (p. 109) [The police haven’t been here for at least thirty years. Perhaps they’ve even forgotten that one morning, at dawn, they got people out of their bed to pile them into coaches and herd them into a stadium. Nobody was particularly bothered by this and the round-up went off in a calm and orderly manner]. And the enduring Jewish specificity of the area in which she hides is established via reference to ‘papillottes’ (p. 118) [sidelocks]. Initially, Anna’s experience of persecution would seem most open to a symbolic reading. Only two pages into the narrative, the trope of invisible yet palpable spying on the individual is mobilized, along with the suggestion that it derives from Anna herself — that it is Anna who follows and menaces herself in a kind of psychic splitting, not to say schizoidism: ‘L’écho de mes pas me semblait être celui de quelqu’un qui me suivait, invisible’ (p. 10) [The echo of my footsteps seemed to me the echo of someone invisible following me]. Yet certain elements of the narrative quicken the tension between a figurative and a literal hermeneutic, with support for the latter being the detail that at first, Claude too sees the functionaries who spy on them, and also witnesses the replacement of their front door by a transparent glass

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

71

pane. Later, however, he dismisses her fears as paranoid derangement. Is Anissimov implying a gendered response to the Shoah here, with Claude minimizing and repressing memory of his own ( Jewish family history of ) victimhood whilst identifying Anna as clear victim of madness (close cousin of the hysteria classically ascribed to undocile women)? It is undeniable that he infantilizes and even pathologizes her. In response to her question as to whether he hadn’t seen the state sleuth, he quips ‘Non, il n’y avait pas de loup-garou dans l’ascenseur. Personne. Toujours aussi malade, tu devrais retourner voir ton médecin’ (p. 11) [No, there was no Bogeyman in the lift. Nobody. You’re still just as sick, you should go back to see your doctor]. His patronizing dismissal of her nightmare — ‘Encore un de tes cauchemars. Bientôt, tu ne pourras plus distinguer le rêve de la réalité. Tu devrais te faire soigner!’ (p. 21) [Another one of your nightmares. Soon you won’t know the difference between dreams and reality. You should get treatment!] — anticipates the reader’s later hesitation between belief in and scepticism about the material foundation to Anna’s fears. Yet for the feminist reader at least, that hesitation may be complicated precisely by Claude’s patronizing treatment of Anna. What Lifton has named ‘death anxiety’ certainly seems to have haunted Anna long before the suspicion of state surveillance began: ‘Je ne sais pas si vraiment j’aime la vie. Si oui, je l’aime mal et mon existence ressemble à une suite de convul­ sions grotesques et désordonnées. Et je pourrais mourir. Pour l’avoir longtemps contemplée fascinée, parfois même désirée et frôlée, j’ai peur de la mort’ (p. 19) [I don’t know if I really like life. If I do, it’s a poor kind of affection, and my existence is like a series of grotesque and uncoordinated convulsions. And I could die. Because I’ve contemplated it, fascinated, for so long, sometimes even wanted it and come close to it, I’m frightened of death]. Her reaction to seeing the man on the landing watching their door is paranoia, one of the key disorders diagnosed in second-generation analysands: ‘Car c’est bien moi qu’il cherche. Moi Anna. Anna qui... Anna quoi. Pourquoi moi? Je n’ai rien fait de mal après tout, ou pas grandchose. Des bricoles comme tout le monde. Vétilles, péchés véniels. Croyez-le, je n’ai tué personne. Je suis innocente’ (p. 25) [Because it’s certainly me he’s looking for. Me Anna. Anna who... Anna what. Why me? I’ve done nothing wrong after all, or not much. Trivial little things like everyone else. Trif les, venial sins. Believe me, I haven’t killed anyone. I’m innocent]. The fragmentation and disintegration of syntax in ‘Anna qui... Anna quoi’ translate the disaggregation of her very identity, recalling Whitehead’s contention that ‘[t]he effects of the inherent latency of trauma can be discerned in the broken or fragmented quality of testimonial narratives’.20 Anna’s obsession with cleanliness (also found in female protagonists of other works by Anissimov) partakes of this schizoid formation. In Anna’s case the obsession betokens aspiration to the virtue of purity, but paradoxically descends into the vice of kleptomania: Oui, c’est vrai, je vole des savonettes dans les pharmacies. Une compulsion, monsieur l’agent, monsieur le juge, monsieur le président, une pauvre petite compulsion. Une véritable fascination pour la pâte de savon parfumée. [...] De quoi tenir un siège en temps de guerre. De quoi se laver, se purifier des jours, des mois, des années. [...] Oui si la guerre éclatait, s’il fallait que je me cache,

72

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma je pourrais rester propre et même si la nourriture venait à manquer, manger du savon. Et devenir ainsi, moi-même, une belle petite savonette. Anna parfumée à la lavande. J’aurais pu devenir cela, il y a trente ans, Savonette Anna, made in Auschwitz. Il y en a eu. Ils en ont fait. Das beste kalität. (p. 30) [Yes, it’s true, I steal bars of soap from pharmacies. A compulsion, your Honour the policeman, your Honour the judge, your Honour the president, a sad little compulsion. A real fascination for scented soap. A collection in my bathroom. [...] Enough to hold the fort during wartime. Enough to wash yourself with, purify yourself with for days, months, years. [...] Yes, if war broke out, if I had to hide away, I could stay clean and even if there were no food, I could eat soap. And so myself become a pretty little bar of soap. Lavender-scented Anna. I could have become just that, thirty years ago, Anna the Soap Bar, made in Auschwitz. They made such things. Das beste kalität.]

From admission of a simple concern for cleanliness — a virtue notoriously denied Jews in anti-Semitic clichés (‘sale juif ’/‘sale juive’ [dirty Jew] being the commonest of anti-Jewish insults in the French language) — her discourse escalates into a neurotically feminized investment of sensuality and incorporation (ingesting and even becoming a pretty little bar of lavender soap) and finally of a deeply morbid identification with the murdered Jews allegedly made into soap by the Nazis. However, this particularly grotesque form of identification with Jewish victims is later countered by desire for collective resistance, which on a symbolic level refutes the stereotype of Jews as passively accepting Jewish ethnocide: ‘Pourtant ce serait bien d’entrer en contact avec des gens comme nous. On pourrait peut-être faire quelque chose, s’organiser, réagir’ (p. 62) [Yet it would be good to make contact with people like us. Maybe we could do something, get organized, react]; and similarly, ‘Oui, j’ai peur. Et alors? Ça ne m’empêche pas de demander des explications. C’est mieux que de rester à trembler dans son coin comme une victime, non?’ (p. 80) [Yes, I’m frightened. So what? That doesn’t stop me asking for explanations. It’s better than staying trembling in your corner like a victim, don’t you think?]. Later on still, Anna transparently alludes to and subverts the myth of Jews going to the slaughter like lambs: ‘Ils ne m’emmèneront pas comme un mouton [...] Je leur résisterai’ (p. 136) [They won’t lead me away like a sheep. [...] I’ll stand up to them]. Unfortunately, that will to resistance is overshadowed by foreknowledge of defeat: ‘mais je sais déjà qu’ils m’auront et que peut-être ils me tueront’ (p. 136) [but I already know that they’ll catch me and maybe kill me]. Other aspects of Anna’s second-generation symptomatology include impaired object relations. Sexual union is entirely devoid of emotional union: ‘Il ne disait rien et ne se plaignait pas. Il venait en moi lorsque je lui demandais et je jouissais dans ses bras et il éjaculait entre mes cuisses. Puis il sortait de moi et nous étions à nouveau des étrangers silencieux qui ne savaient plus rien l’un de l’autre’ (p. 133) [He said nothing and didn’t complain. He entered me when I asked him to and I came in his arms and he ejaculated between my thighs. Then he came out of me and once again we were silent strangers who no longer knew anything about each other]. Whilst she is physically capable of orgasm, it is significant that what she wants is sexual alienation: ‘J’aurais voulu qu’il vienne en moi sans un regard, qu’il me pénètre comme une inconnue’ (p. 138) [I’d have liked him to enter me without

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

73

a glance, for him to penetrate me as he would a stranger]. Also of import is that her fantasies of anonymous sex are overwritten by the trope of death: this time, the death of desire: ‘Un homme que je ne connaissais pas [...] Il serait enfin nu, devant moi. Et je me rendrais compte alors, que je ne le désirais pas. Que je courais après une ombre’ (p. 139) [A man I didn’t know [...] Finally he’d be naked, in front of me. And then I’d realize that I didn’t desire him. That I was chasing after a shadow]. Does her algolagnic fantasy of abjection (‘Je veux qu’un homme ait besoin de moi et qu’il me baise, me défonce, m’use, me fasse crier’, p. 166 [I want a man to need me and to fuck me, to break me down, to wear me out, make me scream]) have a gendered overdetermination? It is significant that the inscription of this fantasy is preceded by ‘Je veux servir à quelque chose’ [I want to be of some use], which suggests normatively feminine concepts of self-validation in usefulness to others. Equally, it could derive from guilt at having survived the Shoah. Transmitted survivors’ guilt is evident in the predilection for suffering which the enigmatic cipher Claudius diagnoses in her: ‘Je veux dire que peut-être vous aimez bien souffrir, mademoiselle Anna. Que c’est dans votre caractère’ (pp. 175–76) [What I mean is that maybe you like suffering, miss Anna. That it’s in your nature]. Towards the end of Rue de nuit, the reader is again destabilized by the porosity of the borderline between reality and nightmarish fantasy. This correlates with Whitehead’s remark that ‘Trauma fiction often demands of the reader a suspension of disbelief and novelists frequently draw on the supernatural [...]. Alternatively, the realist novel is troubled by coincidences and fantastic elements which lurk just beneath the surface’.21 The indictment speech of the judge to whom Anna had made a formal complaint about state surveillance violently displaces the narrative from its tenuously realist framework into the realm of symbolism: ‘Vous êtes venue alors que vous aviez déjà commis des forfaits abominables’ [You came even though you’ve already committed abominable crimes] — ‘forfaits’ which are never explained, purely phantom crimes. In ‘J’ai même fait nommer une commission rogatoire, pour apprendre finalement que vous étiez une dangereuse et perfide citoyenne. Ce nom de citoyenne, est-ce que vous le méritez? Non’ (pp. 156–58) [I even set up a commission to take evidence, only to learn that you were a dangerous and treacherous citizen. Do you even deserve to be called a citizen? No], the last two sentences clearly allude to Jews being stripped of citizenship under Vichy. The indictment becomes even more hyperbolic and congruent with WWII antiSemitic discourse: ‘Vous êtes une bête nuisible. Vous empestez l’atmosphère, vous et vos pareils [...] Et lorsque vous disparaîtrez, vous et vos semblables, l’air sera à nouveau respirable’ (p. 158) [You’re a harmful animal. You poison the atmosphere, you and your sort... And when you vanish, you and your kind, the air will become breathable again]. Yet Claude swings the narrative pendulum back into the realm of realism by insisting that the ruined building in which she is hiding out is merely one of many destined for demolition, and that this alone explains why these buildings are deserted (p. 176). However, the final apocalyptic ending completely obliterates the realist, literal referents proffered by Claude. Anna is arrested, taken to a forest, and forced to look at a pit full of decomposing corpses: ‘Dans la fosse s’entassaient des cadavres en décomposition. Des têtes émergaient de la boue, des

74

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

bras, des jambes mêlées’ (p. 190) [In the pit, decomposing corpses were heaped up. Heads emerged from the mud, arms, entangled legs]. The sickening familiarity of this Shoah image in the novel’s grim finale reinforces and corroborates Anissimov’s cumulative allusions to the Final Solution. On the last page of Rue de nuit, as Anna is sentenced in the penitentiary to write a ‘mémoire’, word-play reinforces the Shoah-connoted architectonics of the entire novel. Play upon the word ‘mémoire’ and its gendered differences — in the grammatical masculine, ‘mémoire’ means a report or a dissertation (the latter having pedagogical implications), whereas in the grammatical feminine it means memory — underscores the imperative of knowing about, remembering, and bearing witness to the dead of, the Shoah. There is a disturbing double meaning in ‘Si mon mémoire est accepté par le directeur, je gagnerai de droit de me rééduquer par le travail. Si mon mémoire n’est qu’un pauvre récit sentimental, je mourrai dans le sous-bois et je tomberai à mon tour dans la fosse’ (p. 192) [If my mémoire is accepted by the director, I’ll earn the right to be rehabilitated through work. If my mémoire is just a sad, sentimental little narrative, I’ll die in the undergrowth and in my turn fall into the pit]. The surface meaning of this ref lection is that only an officially approved ‘report’ on Vichy’s role in the Shoah will allow Anna’s social rehabilitation in post-war France. But subterraneously, there is the implication that if her ‘report’ reveals a darker Jewish memory of atrocity, she will face death. While writing the truth of memory may spell death in the diegesis, it will be key to the psychological survival of Anissimov’s future fictional alter-egos, as it appears to have been for Anissimov herself. In this connection, it is apt to recall Suzette A. Henke’s designation of ‘scriptotherapy — the process of writing out and writing through traumatic experience in the mode of therapeutic reenactment’.22 The parallelism of Henke’s formulation ‘writing out and writing through’ with the psychoanalytic formulation ‘acting out and working through’ highlights the potentially beneficial effects of writing both in expressing postwar, second-generation structures of feeling and, perhaps, in overcoming their potentially crippling effects. To this extent there is considerable continuity between Anissimov’s work and the works considered in Chapter 1, the conclusion to which stressed a dimorphic preoccupation with the inadequacies of language and the vital need nonetheless to put into language apparently ineffable atrocities. The personal benefits of writing include the sense of psychically integrating and controlling if not expunging the experience of deep trauma. This may — although certainly not invariably — involve recovering the memory of that which was not always fully present to consciousness. Rue de nuit intermittently exhibits and crystallizes in its closing page a memorial drive which reappears in Anissimov’s next novel, albeit in far less allegorical mode. L’Homme rouge des Tuileries (1979)23 is a nonlinear text which frequently alternates between different narrative perspectives, and it is striking that, since only the sections focalized upon Rebecca — her diary extracts — are written in the first person, only the female voice is direct and unmediated. The main focalization is on Simson, a disabled (one-legged) artist born in Poland who, as we discover only belatedly, had lost his entire family to the Shoah, and whose life is dominated by that past loss and also the fear of future loss.

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

75

This latter fear cathects above all onto Rebecca, a Jewish woman much younger than he. The fear functions symbolically at a microcosmic level to recall the macrocosmic loss sustained by European Jewry during WWII. All of the novel’s characters are Jewish, and Yiddish is used intermittently through the narrative, with the occasional word or two in Hebrew: for example, ‘Elohim’ for ‘Mon Dieu’ (p. 124) [My God]. The fact that Simson’s fear of losing Rebecca proves entirely justified problematically reinscribes the notion of Jewish suffering as ineluctable. This reinscription is underscored by the words of a more minor character, Schwartz: ‘Nous autres Juifs, nous savons ce qu’est la souffrance’ (p. 93) [We Jews know all about suffering]. Simson’s role as witness to Jewish suffering comes sharply into focus when, with no obvious narrative justification, he returns to his earlier reminiscences of a happy Jewish childhood in Poland (pp. 133–36), but this time with a brutal change of tone and a caustic new concision: Après, on est venu nous chercher, tous. Et ce monde s’en est allé en fumée. Mon grand-père est parti le premier, il m’a force à lâcher sa main, m’a poussé, et a murmuré: ‘Simson, ils ne t’ont peut-être pas vu, tu es petit, cache-toi, dépêche-toi.’ Il a marché sans se retourner. Jamais je ne l’ai revu depuis ce jour. Aujourd’hui, je suis là, encore vivant, je ne sais pas pourquoi. (pp. 139–40) [After, they came to get us, all of us. And that world went up in smoke. My grandfather left first, he forced me to let go of his hand, pushed me, and murmured ‘Simson, maybe they haven’t seen you, you’re little, hide, hurry up’. He walked away without turning round. I’ve never seen him again since that day. Today, I’m here, still alive, I don’t know why.]

The reader only learns toward the end of the novel that Simson himself had been deported (p. 166). A few pages later, in terse litotic vein, he states: Ce n’était pas vrai, la colonie de vacances. Et ce qu’on faisait de nous là-bas, je vous le laisse deviner. Moi, ils m’ont raté [...] et comme tu le sais, Rebecca, main­ tenant je suis encore vivant. Encore vivant! [...] un tas de culpabilité. (p. 172) [It wasn’t true about the holiday camp. And what they did to us there I’ll let you guess. They didn’t get me [...] and as you know, Rebecca, now I’m still alive. Still alive! [...] a heap of guilt.]

The curious variation here between vouvoiement (the formal or plural second-person address) and tutoiement (the singular and informal second-person address) hints at Simson’s bearing witness to a wider audience than Rebecca. Rebecca is certainly the addressee of the tutoiement, but it is unclear who precisely is/are being addressed by the vouvoiement: perhaps a post-war European populace that should be listening but which refuses reception of unpalatable truths? Rebecca, for her part, is a shadowy figure who appears to have no occupation save writing a diary and seeking sexual gratification with the eponymous red-clad man in the Tuileries gardens of Paris. Yet even she, considerably younger than Samson, seems trapped in identification with Jews predestined to die prematurely — to the dramatic point of crying ‘Je vais mourir’ [I’m going to die] even as she orgasms. Contemplating renewed sex with Simson, she again alludes obliquely to

76

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

their shared Jewish heritage of painful memory: ‘Je ne connaîtrais jamais le repos entre tes bras, mais la meurtrissure indélébile de la mémoire. J’ai lu la mort entre tes yeux, chaque jour couchée près de toi’ (p. 130) [I would never know peace in your arms, but [rather] the indelible scar of memory. I’ve read death in your eyes, every day when I’ve lain next to you]. Moreover, her reason for leaving Simson is to escape imbrication in the death which he incarnates (p. 131). For much of the novel, though, she is particularized by an apparent lack of agency. She seems to have begun a sexual relationship with Simson and to have lived with him for years simply because he wanted her, never herself deriving pleasure from the relationship (pp. 163–64). As a female Jew in her historical context, she is restricted both by general gendered codes of appropriate behaviour — self-sacrifice to the putatively greater good of the male partner — and by a specifically Jewish legacy of guilt experienced by those who escaped the Judaeocide, whether by the luck of circumstance during WWII or by the luck of being born after it. Once she is separated from Simson, a subtle reversal of the imperative Zakhor (meaning ‘remembrance’ in Hebrew) is seen to have occurred when Rebecca conveys her failure of memory: Maintenant, je tente de faire surgir en ma mémoire, les traits de ton visage [...] J’ai perdu ta nudité, tes mains, tes yeux, ta voix. [...] Il n’en reste que des cendres éparses, dans ma tête. Toi seul te souviens, Simson, et lorsque tu mourras, il n’y aura plus rien. (p. 145) [Now, I try to summon to memory your facial features [...] I’ve lost your nudity, your hands, your eyes, your voice. [...] Only scattered ashes are left, in my head. You alone remember, Simson, and when you die, there’ll be nothing left.]

Yet the choice of ‘cendres’ cannot help but reinvoke the Shoah and its memory. Simson himself uses the word ‘cendres’ to render the death-in-life of his existence as a bereft survivor: ‘Rebecca, tu voulais étreindre la vie, j’en ai contemplé les cendres’ (p. 165) [Rebecca, you wanted to embrace life, I’ve gazed at its ashes]. L’Homme rouge des Tuileries ends with a diary entry recording Simson’s death and Rebecca’s desperate wish to join him: ‘Ne me laisse pas, prenez-moi dans la mort même’ (p. 175) [Don’t leave me, take me even into death]. The reader may ponder Rebecca’s new recourse to vouvoiement, perhaps a function of the distance from Simson incurred by his death, or else an extension of his role to that of doomed Shoah survivors more generally. But the novel also ends with ref lections on the eponymous man with the red shirt who has abandoned her and, finally, on a tenuously positive note, with her adoption of a red-coated cat on whom she lavishes affection. It is unclear what is implied by this lexical proximity between the red-coated cat and the red by which the other male figure in Rebecca’s life is identified. Like the cat now, the man in question had been a symbol of life and hope, for she had not read pain in his eyes (p. 96). In contrast, Rebecca’s visual memory reinforces the conf lation of Simson, Jewish identity, and death: Chez Bulli, il y avait une photo sur le mur. J’y ai reconnu le visage d’un homme mort. Je me souviens avoir lu, sur son front qui surgissait de l’ombre et dont les traits semblaient maculés de terre, trois lettres en hébreu carré. Je ne pouvais chasser de mon esprit l’idée que ce visage était le tien, Simson. (p. 114)

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

77

[At Bulli’s there was a photo on the wall. In it I recognized the face of a dead man. I remember having read, on his forehead that appeared suddenly from the shadows and whose features seemed covered with earth, three Hebrew letters. I couldn’t banish from my mind the idea that this face was yours, Simson.]

While the whole of Simson’s life is death-directed, Rebecca herself ultimately escapes death, and one not nugatory reason for this survival is investment in writing. Her diary is a form of witness-bearing, but unlike Anna’s testimony in Rue de nuit it has no collective dimension. It represents what clinicians might call an autoplastic rather than an alloplastic adaptation on the part of a second-generation Jewish woman. Yet Rebecca’s witness-bearing could also be seen as productively subversive in two senses. It could be regarded as a quasi-sacrilegious refusal to participate in ritualized communal memory of the Shoah. Equally, its very lack of other-orientedness could be rehabilitated as an empowering defiance of gendered norms which acculturate girls rather than boys (and in adult life, women rather than men) to put the feelings and needs of others before their own. The ethical stakes of writing in such charged historical circumstances are also addressed at the beginning of Anissimov’s La Soie et les cendres (1989).24 Set roughly in a compositional present of 1978 but structured on a series of analepses, this novel connotes the Shoah in its very title. The word ‘cendres’, semantically pregnant in Simpson’s discourse within Rue de nuit, here denotes what most of homodiegetic narrator Hannah Kaganowski’s family were reduced to by the Nazis. The hampering of creative freedom among Jewish writers who were spared the Shoah features in La Soie et les cendres as a particular permutation of survivor’s guilt. This occurs partly through negation via mention of the absence of bad conscience in pre-Shoah Jewish writers, who were able to write without any form of accommodation. But such hampering is also directly confronted. As one of the post-Shoah generation of writers, when touching on anything to do with Jews Hannah feels constrained to caution through a heightened sense of responsibility; equally, she feels her creative range to be restricted by a duty constantly to re-conjure the Shoah (p. 15). The fictional Hannah’s postulate of the Shoah as a terrible, savage but also fertile reality — with the fertility surely relating purely to the creative — serves again as a mise en abyme for all of Anissimov’s novels, which owe virtually their entire existence to that pan-European tragedy. The inculcation of an ethical duty to remember — the Shoah, but previous catastrophes also — is placed in a lineage of Jewish suffering: ‘Oublier, ce n’est pas un mot juif, ça. Izkor–souvenir. Gedenk–souvienstoi. Nicht fargessen–ne pas oublier. On lui avait fait promettre de se souvenir, elle se souvenait’ (p. 44) [Forget, that’s no Jewish word. Izkor–memory. Gedenk– remember. Nicht fargessen–don’t forget. She’d been made to promise to remember, she remembered]. From an initially adult and writerly perspective, the narrative recedes far into the diegetic past of Hannah’s early childhood, but the chain between the two temporal fields is unbroken. Not for Hannah any childhood innocence: from the age of four she was confronted by the horrors of the Shoah and its spatial enactment in Poland, her parents’ lost homeland, via the primary testimony of an Auschwitz survivor, her uncle Yossl:

78

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma Moi, Hannah Kaganowski, j’ai vu les forêts de Pologne, la plaine, la terre noire de Pologne saturée de charniers, son herbe, ses chemins, pétris de nos cadavres, son ciel bas, j’ai respiré son air qui charrie nos cendres. Quand Yossl revint seul de là-bas, il me terrorisa. Il s’exprimait dans une langue dont les contours m’étaient intimes, limpides: le yiddish. (p. 19) [I, Hannah Kaganowski, have seen the forests of Poland, the plain, the black earth of Poland saturated by mass graves, its grass, its paths, filled with our corpses, its low sky, I’ve breathed in its air that carries our ashes. When Yossl came back from there alone, he terrified me. He spoke in a language whose outlines were intimate to me, crystal-clear: Yiddish.]

Note here Hannah’s (af )filiation with death-camp corpses, conveyed by use of the plural possessive adjective ‘nos’. Even at the age of four she feels the isolating burden of her secret heritage, due to an unspoken dictum that this is not to be divulged to the outer gentile world (p. 21). Through emphasis on death in the figure of the Yiddish language, which indeed nearly died along with the majority of its speakers during the Judaeocide, Yiddish becomes a metonym for death. Infantile second-generation trauma is evident in the child Hannah’s frequent refusal of food, signifying inverted identification with concentration- and deathcamp prisoners. In his in-depth interviews with children of survivors, Aaron Hass has observed a possible ‘desire to participate in the victimization’, and goes on to assert that ‘[t]he ongoing angst these children carry with them also ref lects their need to suffer, to not be excluded from the Holocaust’.25 Hannah’s childhood rejection of milk is explicitly linked with this victimhood through sensory association. She detests the whiteness of milk because it evokes the bloodless Jewish corpses heaped up in what have now become iconic photographs: Pour ne pas mourir, suppliait ma mere, tu dois manger! Manger, je ne voulais pas, et boire non plus. Surtout le lait, dont la fine peau ridée évoquait celle des corps blancs accumulés en pyramide. Avec les Juifs, on fait du suif et du savon. Je me racontais cela en silence. J’étais inexplicablement en vie, intégrée bizarre­ ment au monde des filles-de-l’école qui chantaient insouciantes [...] (p. 21) [If you’re not to die, my mother would beg, you must eat! I didn’t want to eat, or drink. Above all milk, whose thin wrinkled skin made me think of the skin of the white bodies heaped up in a pyramid. With Jews, you make candles and soap. I’d tell myself this silently. I was inexplicably alive, strangely integrated into the world of carefree, singing girls-at-school.]

The inversion of childhood norms here is perturbing: Hannah’s sense of puzzlement at being alive (‘inexplicablement’) is hardly typical of her age, yet it is indeed life itself which is atypical when set aside the recent genocide of her people. The juxtaposition of standard childhood activities such as singing at nursery school with this precocious awareness of mortality is striking, and she again associates whiteness with death, whence her abhorrence for white foods: ‘Les morts, sur les photos, étaient tout blancs avant d’être réduits en cendres. J’étais pâle aussi, maigre, et je me détournais de la semoule refroidie et épaissie dans le lait. J’aurais voulu mourir, sans doute’ (p. 22) [In the photos, the dead were all white before being reduced to ashes. I was pale too, thin, and would turn my back on the semolina that had gone cold and thick in the milk. I’d have liked to die, no doubt].

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

79

A more contextually bound sign of second-generation trauma in Hannah’s childhood is her alienation from the French language, which problematizes her adult position as a writer of that language. When she learns French at school (her parents being Yiddish-speaking), it is hardly experienced as the unifying force for cohesion that the Republican state and French educational system claim: ‘Et que dire alors des vers [...] de Racine, “De tous les Juifs on doit exterminer la race”. Et c’était sur elle, Hannah, que la lecture à haute voix était tombée’ (p. 46) [And what about the lines [...] from Racine, ‘Of all Jews the race must be exterminated’. And it was to her, Hannah, that the reading aloud had fallen]. For her, and notwithstanding its precision and elegance, French is the language of exclusion: ‘ “c’est un principe mademoiselle Hannah Kaganowski, nous ne recevons pas les israélites dans nos sauteries”. Français, langue élégante, concise, précise, langue de l’exclusion’ (p. 47) [‘It’s a rule Miss Hannah Kaganowski, we don’t accept Jews at our parties’. French, an elegant, concise, precise language, a language of exclusion]. In the narrative of Hannah’s adult life, it is obvious that her occupation is overdetermined along both gendered and ethnic lines. An interest in clothes is stereotypically associated with the feminine, and her purchase, recycling and re-sale of old clothes (note the link with Anna from Rue de nuit) is also presented as a correlate of her Jewish lineage, on one level transparently — the rag trade as a typical Jewish activity — on another more obliquely — the link with clothes worn by her mother in the refugee camp (p. 23) Further, a parallel is implied between her situation in the clothes-market and that of Jews in the camps: ‘Des barbelés rouillés cernaient le marché. Dans les deux boutiques mitoyennes, on parlait le yiddish, j’aimais qu’il en fût ainsi’ (p. 24) [Barbed wire surrounded the market. In the two adjoining shops, people spoke Yiddish, I liked that]. The juxtaposition of barbed wire and Yiddish here cannot help but evoke Jews in the camps. Symptomatically, an unexplained sense of infinite sadness overwhelms her after sorting through the old clothes destined to bring in large profits, while the adjective ‘sélectionné’ connotes Nazi ‘selections’ for the gas chambers: Qu’y avait-il là de désespérant? Hannah l’ignorait encore et ne comprenait pas le sentiment d’infinie tristesse qui succédait à l’excitation d’avoir chargé dans le coffre de sa voiture trente ou cinquante kilos de ‘crème’, comme on appelait la marchandise de premier choix soigneusement sélectionné pour la première fois. (pp. 76–77) [What was it about it that was so depressing? Hannah didn’t yet know and didn’t understand the feeling of infinite sadness that followed the excitement of having loaded into her car boot thirty or fifty kilos of ‘cream’, as people called grade-one merchandise carefully selected for the first time.]

Hannah’s trade is also significant in two other respects. First, La Soie et les cendres stresses the importance of clothing as a vector of memory. All the dresses Hannah keeps for herself from the thousands sorted through and sold on resemble the dress worn by her mother in a photograph taken in the Swiss refugee camp where she and Hannah’s father had escaped murder by the Nazis (p. 116). Pungent melancholy pervades three elements of Hannah’s ekphrasis centring on this photograph. Recall of that photograph is followed by recall of many others featuring family members

80

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

slaughtered in the camps, which form an indexical chain whose signifying function is to make present an absence, to evoke an exterminated family, and in so doing to constitute a postmemory thereof: ‘Cette photo dormait dans une valise [...] avec d’autres souvenirs de famille, des images d’oncles et de tantes, de grands-pères et de grand-mères, envolés en volutes noires dans les cheminées des crématoires de Pologne’ (p. 116) [This photo slumbered in a suitcase [...] along with other family memories, images of uncles and aunts, grandfathers and grandmothers, gone up in black curls of smoke in the chimneys of the Polish crematoria]. In addition, the photograph was taken when her parents did not yet know about the Final Solution being prosecuted beyond the Swiss frontiers (p. 117). What is more, the child’s unconscious identification with her bereaved mother emerges in the screenmemory of that dress, which also becomes a potent punctum:26 ‘Un enfant était né qui se souvenait, dans une ferme désolée du Néguev, d’une robe que portait sa mère le jour où la photo avait été prise’ (p. 117) [A child was born who remembered, in a desolate farm in the Negev, a dress worn by her mother the day the photo had been taken].27 What the reader draws from this sequence is a condensation of huge affect within a single image. Marianne Hirsch has rightly drawn attention to ‘the textual nature of postmemory — its reliance on images, stories, and documents passed down from one generation to the next’.28 La Soie et les cendres indeed foregrounds the role of the photographic image as well as of narrative (‘stories’) in the construction of the second-generation narrator’s postmemory. Here, as elsewhere in Anissimov’s oeuvre, the photographic image may be said to constitute a lieu de mémoire. As defined by Pierre Nora, lieux de mémoire are places or sites in which national memory or heritage are embodied: material places, but also abstract or intellectually constructed places.29 Hirsch has also argued that Nora’s notion of lieux de mémoire ‘does usefully describe the status with which Holocaust photographs are often invested’.30 In the case of La Soie et les cendres, however, the photographic image is a private affair, the vehicle through which the Shoah is preserved within one individual Jew’s memory. This should be clearly distinguished from its preservation within a collective memory (a concept to which Chapter 3 below returns) of surviving Jews, and even more clearly from its preservation within French national memory. This private–public binary largely invalidates mention of another form of memory that may appear coextensive with postmemory, namely prosthetic memory. Granted, memory which is not of one’s own former experience and is to that extent artificial might be figuratively likened to the replacement of a missing bodily part with an artificial substitute. However, Alison Landsberg’s seminal definition of prosthetic memory introduces conditions which, while not of course binding within free intellectual debate, largely negate its pertinence at least to the present corpus. For Landsberg, prosthetic memories ‘are sensuous memories produced by an experience of mass-mediated representations’.31 The mass-mediated representations mentioned by Landsberg are those made possible by ‘an experiential site such as a movie theater or museum’.32 While the photographic image may be considered a technology of memory, it is patently not a massmediated one in the case of the family snaps poured over in private by the secondgeneration protagonist of La Soie et les cendres. Bearing in mind this private–public

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

81

divide in the experience of photographic viewing, my claim that the photograph is a lieu de mémoire obviously differs from Nora’s use of the term, which is situated on the public, national level. With reference to Anissimov’s photographically induced postmemories, I use the term lieu de mémoire in the following sense. Photographs are physical ‘lieux’ [places/sites] in that they occupy material space, but more importantly, in that they bear a physical, indexical relationship to the past image, which itself was necessarily located in a place, and which they have frozen in time, preserved for posterity. That preservation enables a form of memory which in the case of the second-generation viewer is a postmemory. The second reason why Hannah’s trade in clothes is significant is that it begins to take on profoundly ironic moral dimensions as the narrative progresses. One early sign of this is the deontological complexity of a situation in which she refuses to buy ex-Wehrmacht and Gestapo leather coats, only to discover that her would-be tout is actually a survivor of the camps. Having revealed his tattoo, he denies her right as a non-survivor to make such judgements about life and making a living after Auschwitz: ‘Mais ma p’tite, avait-il ajouté, qu’est-ce que tu sais de la vie, toi? Tu ne peux pas juger’ (p. 244) [‘But love,’ he’d added, ‘what do you know about life? You can’t judge’]. Hannah’s growing suspicion that the clothes from which she makes her own living may include not just those of Wehrmacht and SS officers but also those of Jews killed in the gas chambers (pp. 245 and 248) is finally vindicated when it is confirmed that the clothes from which she has been earning her living did in fact originate in the concentration and death camps (pp. 372–73). Just as Hannah is entrapped by vestiges of the Shoah, so La Soie et les cendres exudes a sense of imprisonment, with all narrative roads leading inexorably back to Auschwitz. No dimension of her life is free from the lesions of recent Judaeocidal history. Although she had been a mere baby during the war, the trauma of mediated Shoah memories, transmitted through images, texts, and oral testimony, impairs even her sexual life: Il l’embrassa encore, elle s’abandonna, mais à ce même instant, des images qu’elle repoussa avec une volonté désespérée vinrent s’interposer entre Schmuel et ses yeux clos. Des amoncellements de cadavres épars apparurent derrière le voile de ses paupières. Ils étaient répandus sur la terre où ils gisaient en quantité considérable. Elle ordonna, en pensée, aux morts de disparaître. Non seulement ils n’en firent rien, mais ils semblèrent s’animer légèrement. Des corps sans vie, rigides, semblables à ceux qu’elle avait vus lorsqu’elle était enfant, dans les livres de ses parents. (pp. 122–23) [He kissed her again, she let herself go, but in the same instant, images that she desperately pushed away came to interpose themselves between Schmuel and her closed eyes. Piles of scattered corpses appeared behind the veil of her eyelids. They were spread out on the ground where they lay in large numbers. In her thoughts she ordered the dead to disappear. Not only did they do no such thing, but they seemed to come slightly to life. Lifeless bodies, rigid, like those she had seen as a child, in her parents’ books.]

These corpses have become her own ghosts, haunting her from beyond widely disseminated ashes (no such luxury as a grave for them). The deep affect of both personal memory and, refracted through it, postmemory also blights her capacity

82

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

for aesthetic pleasure. When her partner Emmanuel Moskovitch, a professional musician, plays the violin, she is prompted to tears by involuntary memories of her grandfather’s painting of a violin. For the grandfather the violin had crystallized memories of his son Samuel, a talented violinist killed at the age of eighteen after having f led to the Pyrenees following a round-up of Jews in July 1942 (p. 271). What is striking here is the intricacy of the chain of memories — some primary, others secondary — and the fact that what should be a source of emotional fulfilment, her relationship with Emmanuel, is corroded by fear of loss stemming from family history (recalling Simson’s in L’Homme rouge des Tuileries). The enduring effects of second-generation, mediated trauma induce fear of separation from Emmanuel, who becomes but one point along a memorial scale encompassing an entire people’s genocidal loss: Mais l’image de cette séparation, de toutes les séparations, du deuil, voici qu’elles montaient du plus profond d’elle-même, épaisses, noires, fouillant sa chair vive. Entre tous ces arrachements, le plus cruel était le premier, et tous ceux qui lui avaient succédé avaient le parfum barbare de ce commencement. En ces jours enténébrés où le ciel d’Auschwitz éclatait d’une lueur incand­ escente que contemplait sans broncher la plaine polonaise, parce qu’on brûlait les Juifs, après avoir récupéré leurs chaussures, leurs vêtements, leurs cheveux, l’or de leurs dents, en ces jours où on assassinait leur peuple, des femmes juives mettaient des enfants au monde, et les enfants juifs surgissaient du brasier. Tandis que se consumaient leur grand-père, et la famille entière, des rameaux jaillissaient de la cendre brûlante. C’est dans cette suie issue des corps consumés, c’est dans ces cendres humaines que Hannah était née. (pp. 391–92) [But the image of that separation, of all separations, of mourning, now arose from the deepest part of her, dense, black, scouring her living f lesh. Of all these wrenches, the first was the cruellest, and all those that came after had the barbaric smell of that beginning. In those gloomy days where the Auschwitz sky shone with an incandescent light gazed at unf linchingly by the Polish plain, because people were burning Jews, after taking away their shoes, their clothes, their hair, the gold from their teeth, in those days when their people were being murdered, Jewish women were giving birth to children, and Jewish children were arising from the inferno. While their grandfather and their whole family were burning away, branches shot out of the burning ash. It was in that soot of burned bodies, those human ashes that Hannah was born.]

This extract foregrounds suffering within and of the body (‘fouillant sa chair vive’) and the sense that all losses in Hannah’s life reopen a primal wound caused by loss of Jewish forebears murdered in Auschwitz. That tragic legacy is, however, slightly mitigated in the very last clause of the extract by the motif of Jewish birth and thus Jewish renewal. Closely following this extract is a tentative movement towards psychological stabilization fostered by cognizance of changed historical processes. Sitting on a train bound for Germany, Hannah at first projects herself into the role of a Jew en route for Auschwitz-Birkenau, but eventually becomes aware of and rejects such acting-out (p. 400). However, this potential new stability is deeply precarious, and is almost immediately compromised by a sense of shame at, precisely, her freedom from the fate of the deportee (p. 401). Reverting to second-

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

83

generation type, she is re-engulfed by the syndrome of morbid introjection of Shoah victimhood. After brief eye-contact with a barman in a German Bräuhaus, she feels she is literally dying. Only several months later does she realize that this morbid sensation had sprung from her unconscious identification with the cameraman who, during the filming of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), had come face to face with a former SS officer now living peacefully as a barman: L’homme qui portait sur son épaule la caméra dans le film de Claude Lanzmann, Shoah, avait accompli le même chemin qu’elle dans la Hof Braühaus [sic] qui trônait depuis deux siècles sur la Max-Joseph-Platz, à Munich. Lui aussi s’était trouvé face à Josef Oberhauser, le loufiat, à ceci près qu’il était venu le démasquer. Le SS du comptoir qui débitait depuis vingt ans quatre à cinq hectolitres de bière par jour, avait quotidiennement versé, de mars à décembre 1942, le Zyklon B sur la tête des Juifs entassés dans les chambres à gaz de Belzec. [...] Quant à Josef Oberhauser, recyclé dans la bière, on le voyait sur l’écran lever brusquement son coude pour dissimuler son visage. [...] Tandis que la caméra filmait la façade de la brasserie, Hannah s’était aussi souvenue de l’homme, et avait compris à qui Lanzmann était venu demander des comptes. (pp. 408–09) [The man carrying the camera on his shoulder in Claude Lanzmann’s film, Shoah, had taken the same path as she in the Hof Bräuhaus, which for two centuries had sat imposingly in the Max-Joseph-Platz in Munich. He too had come face to face with Josef Oberhauser, the waiter, with the difference that he had come to unmask him. The SS at the counter who had been selling four to five hectolitres of beer per day for twenty years had, from March to December 1942, each day poured Zyklon B on the heads of Jews crammed into the Belzec gas chambers. [...] As for Josef Oberhauser, who had changed careers to the beer trade, he could be seen on the screen abruptly lifting his elbow to hide his face. [...] While the camera was filming the front of the brasserie, Hannah had also remembered the man, and realized just who it was Lanzmann had come to demand an explanation from.]

This passage is marked by indeterminacy, with the reader hesitating between belief and disbelief that Hannah’s barman could also have been an SS officer, and the narrative actively promoting such liminality. Vicarious acting-out of trauma not experienced first-hand is also found in the parallel between Hannah’s current life and that of Jews massacred in the Shoah: Le temps présent fut anéanti jusqu’au départ pour Varsovie. Moskovitch et Hannah respireraient bientôt le même air que leurs grands-parents [...] Ils inspireraient l’air qu’avaient expiré les Juifs en tombant dans les fosses et dans les chambres à gaz. Plus de quarante ans s’étaient écoulés depuis que le dernier Juif avait été réduit en cendres. Hannah s’en souvenait, bien qu’elle ne fût qu’un nourrison de quelques semaines lorsque le massacre avait pris fin. Pourquoi voyait-elle avec tant de netteté ce qu’elle n’avait pas connu? Pour que tous ceux qui avaient été assassinés ne sombrent pas dans l’oubli, elle devait se remémorer jusqu’au moment où elle disparaîtrait à son tour. (pp. 419–20) [Present time was annihilated until they left for Warsaw. Soon Moskovitch and Hannah would be breathing the same air as their grandparents [...] They would breath in the air that Jews had breathed out when they fell into the pits or in the gas chambers. More than forty years had gone by since the last Jew had been

84

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma reduced to ashes. Hannah was remembering this, although she had only been a few weeks-old nursling when the massacre had ended. Why did she see so clearly what she hadn’t experienced? So that all those who had been murdered should not sink into oblivion, she had to remember right up to the moment when she in her turn would disappear.]

Thus, close to the end of La Soie et les cendres, a very clear explanation is provided of what it is all too easy to reduce to a personal pathogenic pattern: via postmemory, Hannah feels invested with a duty constantly to remember these victims so that they are never consigned to oblivion. Moral integrity comes at a high price for Hannah, with (post)memory taking on the qualities of mummification, and death seeping morbidly into a post-Shoah life. Published three years after La Soie et les cendres, Anissimov’s Dans la plus stricte intimité (1992)33 also figures a homodiegetic narrator named Hannah, and it too explodes linearity via a shuttle between different pasts and different presents. (As Nolden remarks, the ‘jump cut in the narrative’ is ‘a favorite technique of the author’.34) The epigraph from Nabokov triggers expectations of fragmented identity which are highly apposite in the case of a homodiegetic narrator cathecting intensely onto numerous family members who perished in the Shoah, and to whose memory her subjectivity is passionately beholden. This fissuring of ego boundaries is compounded by the attitude of her bereft Jewish parents, who dismiss the difficulties of her early childhood relative to the fate of Shoah victims: ‘Et de tout ce qu’on m’avait raconté, il ressortait que je devais plutôt m’estimer heureuse de n’avoir pas été jetée vivante dans les f lammes d’un four crématoire. La pouponnière d’un camp de réfugiés, c’était paraît-il, un luxe inouï à cette époque’ (pp. 21–22) [And from everything I’d been told, it transpired that I should instead consider myself lucky not to have been thrown alive into the f lames of a crematory. The nursery of a refugee camp was, apparently, an unheard of luxury at the time]. What Hannah does not mention here is that she, like Anissimov, had almost died as a baby in that refugee camp. The elision seems to indicate her acceptance of the family precept that all suffering pales into insignificance compared to that of the Shoah. The result is her incapacity for selfsustaining thought and behaviour. Fantasized re-enacting of Jewry’s destruction is apparent on the part of both Hannah and her cousin Benjamin. Both engage in self-destructive conduct that seems symptomatic of a death-wish, even though neither wishes genuinely to die: ‘Il semblait que nous cherchions à mourir, sans vouloir vraiment y passer’ (p. 29) [It seemed that we were trying to die, without really wanting to go through with it]. The intergenerational transmission of survivors’ syndrome is patent here; what is less so is its exact signification — identification with their murdered forebears, or a sense of guilt about their own life in the knowledge of that murder? Hannah’s analysis of this ambivalence merits attention: Nos simulacres avaient de l’allure. Et lorsqu’on avait ramassé le peu qu’il restait de nous, nous versions des larmes poignantes pour qu’on vienne nous redonner goût à l’existence. Est-ce à dire que nous fûmes, chacun à notre manière, de vulgaires simulateurs? Je ne le crois pas. Quand on réussit à se nuire autant, il faut avoir eu contre soi une hargne assassine [...] (pp. 29–30)

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

85

[Our shams had style. And when the bits left of us had been picked up, we would shed heart-rending tears so that people would come and make us want to live again. Is this to say that we were, each in our own way, common playactors? I don’t think so. When you manage to harm yourself so much, you have to have had a murderous aggression against yourself [...]]

What also stands out is ‘la finalité de la cérémonie’: ‘finalité’ is semantically cognate with the ‘Final Solution’, while ‘la cérémonie’ conveys theatricality, performance (reinforced by mention of ‘simulacres’) — acting out. It is in the sense of acting out, compulsional and morbid, that such a scenario distinguishes itself from the delectation of Alain Finkielkraut’s ‘Juif imaginaire’ in assuming the character of the persecuted Jew: Pensez donc: avec le judaïsme, j’avais reçu le plus beau cadeau dont puisse rêver un enfant de l’après-génocide. J’héritais d’une souffrance que je ne subissais pas; du persécuté je gardais le personnage mais je n’endurais plus l’oppression. Je pouvais jouir en toute quiétude d’un destin exceptionnel.35 [Think of it then: the Judaism I had received was the most beautiful present a post-genocidal child could imagine. I inherited a suffering to which I had not been subjected, for without having to endure oppression, the identity of the victim was mine. I could savor an exceptional destiny while remaining completely at ease.]36

Unlike the young Finkielkraut, Hannah and Benjamin derive no pleasure from identification with the suffering of their forebears. While their behaviour is acting out prompted by genuine distress, Finkielkraut’s is play-acting; their fantasy world is life-denying, his and that of other ‘Juifs imaginaires’ self-aggrandizing: ‘le judaïsme dont il se réclament les ravit à eux-mêmes et les transporte magiquement sur une scène qui les élève et qui les sanctifie. Ces habitants de l’irréel, plus nombreux qu’on ne le pense, je propose de les nommer Juifs imaginaires’37 [The Judaism they invoke enraptures and transports them magically to a setting in which they are exalted and sanctified. For these habitués of unreality, more numerous than one might suppose, I propose the name ‘imaginary Jews’].38 Dans la plus stricte intimité both revisits Shoah-related semes familiar from Anissimov’s previous works and potently amplifies the topos of the mother–daughter relationship, which as Chapter 4 will demonstrate is one of the most complex topoi in our entire corpus. The text proffers a diverse palette of pathological formations in its second-generation protagonists. Yet here too there is innovation rather than replication, because in Dans la plus stricte intimité these formations are no longer restricted to the first-person female narrator. Hannah’s young uncle Franz, who as a child had witnessed his mother being arrested by French policemen in July 1942 for dispatch to Drancy and thence to the gas chambers of Auschwitz, has foundered in mental illness and finally been incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital. Eschewing psychiatric labels, Hannah figures Franz as suffering quite simply from a broken soul: Je ne puis croire que pour la famille — du moins ce qu’il en restait — et pour Moché, cette histoire de train, sur laquelle l’âme de Franz s’était brisée, fût un mystère. N’avait-il pas vu, en juillet 1942, les gendarmes emmener sa mère? Ne

86

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma l’avaient-ils pas fait monter dans le train pour Drancy? Ne l’avait-on pas gazée à l’arrivée à Auschwitz? (p. 42) [I can’t believe that for the family — at least what was left of it — and for Moché, this business about a train, which had broken Franz’s soul, was any mystery. Had he not seen the police take his mother away in July 1942? Had they not made her get into the train for Drancy? Had she not been gassed upon arrival at Auschwitz?]

Her rhetorical questions implicitly posit Franz’s particular mental disorder as a natural response to unnatural atrocity. What also stands out is the insinuation that her family had understood but repressed knowledge of Franz’s preoccupation with trains: a striking metonym, given that trains were virtually the sole method of deportation to the camps. In addition to Hannah and Franz, affective domination by Shoah-induced loss is also ascribed to a complete stranger. At the funeral of an acquaintance, the narrator observes a man imbued by a deep sadness arising from some anterior bereavement: ‘Il me vient à l’idée, en le voyant pétrifié, si loin de ce qui se passait autour de lui, que ses yeux, dissimulés par les verres opaques, voyaient une autre nécropole, sans tombe celle-là’ (p. 57) [Seeing him transfixed, so removed from everything going on around him, it occurs to me that his eyes, hidden by dark glasses, were seeing another necropolis, with no graves]. And indeed, the tombless necropolis turns out to have been that of his parents, arrested by French policemen and gassed in Poland (p. 57). Yet tempering this preoccupation with death is Hannah’s sudden sense of joy at simply being alive: ‘J’éprouvais une sorte de soulagement joyeux en m’engageant sous le portail du cimetière, où un nouveau convoi faisait son entrée. Je suis en vie, pensai-je’ (p. 58) [I felt a sort of joyous relief as I passed beneath the cemetery gate, where a new convoy was arriving. I’m alive, I thought]; note the use of ‘convoi’ alluding to the convoys to the death-camps during WWII. This joy is a new sensation. It contrasts sharply with the previous morbid monopoly by and attraction towards death, which had amounted to a form of necrophilia and had induced suicidal fantasies: Dire que j’avais souvent préféré l’ombre à la lumière, et même pensé à mourir. J’étais abasourdie d’être en vie, je reconnaissais à peine cette partie de moi qui n’avait parfois songé qu’à la mort, et s’était délectée, durant de longues rêveries, des divers moyens d’y parvenir. (p. 58) [And to think that I’d often preferred shadow to light, and even thought about dying. I was stunned to be alive, I could hardly recognize that part of me that had sometimes thought only of death, and during long daydreams had relished the various ways of achieving it.]

One strong line of continuity between Anissimov’s previous writings and Dans la plus stricte intimité is the pre-eminent role of the photographic image. As well as tool of identity-construction, it is a vehicle of memory, of real but also of phantom, imagined memory: viz, postmemory. Interestingly, it is in response to the photographic image that Hannah concedes the unreliability of memory in general: ‘Malgré les réponses nettes et précises de ma mère, de nouvelles images viennent se superposer aux photos et à mes propres réserves de souvenirs — vrais ou faux — , dans ce temps si court et qui me parut illimité dans les années de mon enfance’ (p. 71)

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

87

[Despite my mother’s clear and precise answers, new images came to superimpose themselves on the photos and on my own reserve of memories — true or false — during this time that was so short but seemed to me limitless during my childhood years]. In this context Anne Fuchs is surely right in cautioning that postmemory specifically ‘runs the risk of obscuring important epistemological distinctions, such as that between experience and fantasy, past and present, evidence and fabrication or fact and fiction’.39 That caution is validated when the reader confronts Hannah’s sudden belief that she had loved the young nun Blanche Sterki who had nursed and wrested her from death during the first few months of her life, but whom she actually cannot even remember (p. 72). Here, love is paradoxically conferred on an unknown figure. Yet this does not trivialize either the love or the figure, since the latter is instantiated as the symbolic foundation of Hannah’s being as a survivor (in two senses of the word ‘survivor’: child of survivors, and a survivor from nearly fatal childhood illness). When dealing with the forging of a self-sustaining ‘mythe personnel’ [personal myth: see Introduction], epistemological considerations may perhaps be set aside; does the exact historical veracity of Hannah’s (post)memory here really matter more than its function of allowing her to construct and sustain a viable sense of self? What is also implied here is the power of photographs and documents to summon dead figures into a form of after-life as potentially communicative ghosts (although not in the sense elaborated by Abraham and Torok, discussed above). Rather, Hannah’s overriding need to instigate a (fantasized) dialogue with such ghosts bespeaks a drive to fill in the gaps of what Raczymow has termed a ‘mémoire trouée’ [memory shot through with holes]:40 ‘Ne pas poser de questions qui pouvaient aff liger ma mère était une possibilité, mais tout le monde était mort autour d’elle, et je sentais le besoin impérieux de parler aux fantômes dont la photographie et certains papiers d’identité se trouvent encore dans la valise au sous-sol’ (p. 104) [Not asking questions that could upset my mother was a possibility, but everyone around her was dead, and I felt the pressing need to speak to the ghosts whose photograph and identity papers still lie in the suitcase in the basement]. Whilst mediated memories of the catastrophe had fostered in the child a deep melancholy from which she sought escape, they had also become a pole of attraction, a means of self-transcendence and of uncanny vision: Aussi loin que je me souvienne, je n’ai rien aimé plus au monde qu’échapper à cette mélancolie de mon enfance en me faisant raconter celle des autres. Si ma mère commençait le récit des années de guerre, quels que fussent la cruauté des faits mentionnés et le désarroi qu’ils faisaient naître en moi, je plongeais dans une sorte de ravissement hors du temps, où je voyais sans avoir vu. (p. 89) [As far back as I can remember, I’ve loved nothing more in the world than escaping from this melancholy of my childhood by getting people to tell me about theirs. If my mother started to tell me about the war years, whatever the cruelty of the facts mentioned and the distress they caused in me, I would plunge into a sort of rapture outside of time, where I could see without having seen.]

Importantly, Hannah assimilates her mother’s memories as if they were her own

88

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

(‘je voyais sans avoir vu’): a standard operation of transgenerational transmission of memory, or in other words, a standard operation of postmemory. What is perhaps less banal is Hannah’s horror when contemplating the demise of the subject of the primary memory, her mother, on which her own identity has been based: Les souvenirs de maman devenaient aussi les miens, tandis que je m’évertuais à reconstituer les épisodes manquants, précédés par un désespérant: ‘Je ne sais plus.’ Aujourd’hui encore, je ne renonce pas à lui poser ces mêmes questions, sans me lasser jamais de ses réponses. Ce qui m’accable le plus, c’est qu’une pareille personne, ma mère, puisse un jour disparaître, qu’elle m’abandonne avec tout ce qu’elle sait, et malgré tout ce qu’elle m’a donné. (p. 89) [Mum’s memories became mine too, while I strove to reconstitute the missing episodes, preceded by a heartbreaking ‘I don’t know any more’. Even today, I haven’t given up asking her those same questions, without ever tiring of her answers. What devastates me most is that such a person, my mother, could one day disappear, that she could abandon me with all she knows, and despite all she’s given me.]

This horror may well explain why, when faced with the prospect of her mother’s death, she begins to tremble: an extreme bodily reaction which appears to spring from the spectre of most of her family’s death in the Shoah: Je l’appelais maman, songeai-je en marchant aux côtés de ma mère. Et la peur de la perdre, elle aussi, draina les larmes que je versais sur Mlle Sterki vers ma mère qui, elle, pensait sans doute à d’autres morts. Soudain, comme six années auparavant, lorsqu’elle était venue nous rejoindre à Metz, je me mis à trembler. Tant qu’elle marchait à mes côtés, il y avait une femme que je pouvais appeler maman, dont j’étais incapable d’imaginer la disparition [...] (p. 127) [I used to call her mum, I thought as I walked by my mother’s side. And the fear of losing her too diverted the tears I was shedding over Miss Sterki towards my mother who, for her part, was no doubt thinking about other deaths. Suddenly, like six years before when she’d come to join us in Metz, I started to tremble. As long as she was walking by my side, there was a woman I could call mum, whose disappearance I just couldn’t imagine.]

Cathexis onto her mother is reinscribed in her immense and paradoxical sadness at greeting that mother in an urban space overwritten by traces of the Jewish persecution and genocide: Contrairement aux autres fois, c’est en accueillant ma mère à Metz, et non en lui disant au revoir, que je fus incapable de surmonter mon trouble. Dès qu’elle eût posé le pied sous la voûte lugubre de la grande gare, je sentis une tristesse terrible m’envahir. Une tristesse qui ne me quitterait plus. Ces rues noyées de brume, silencieuses dès huit heures, où nous marchions ensemble ce soir-là, l’avaient vue, enfant, passer, une lampe de poche à la main, pour gagner une mansarde, où elle avait son lit. (p. 132; my emphasis) [Unlike the other times, it was when I greeted my mother in Metz rather than when I said goodbye to her that I was unable to overcome my emotions. As soon as she had set foot under the gloomy roof of the central station, I felt a terrible sadness overcoming me. A sadness that was not to leave me. Those streets shrouded in mist, silent from eight o’clock onwards, where we were

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

89

walking that evening had seen her passing through as a child, torch in hand, on her way to a garret where she had a bed.]

This is immediately followed by recall of her mother’s tales of her own childhood, and of her begging for the rest of the tale (p. 133). Thus is stressed the imperative of narrativization, of conferring a permanent form on the impermanent f lux of a foundational (m)other’s anterior lived experience. In Hannah’s recollection of them, these tales are dominated by the rise of the Nazis (p. 133) and the anti-Semitic attack on her grandfather’s millinery business (p. 134), which forced the family into exile in France. Her mother’s protest that Hannah has heard the story over and over again at first points towards a syndrome found in Nadine Fresco’s study of other survivors’ children and their parents’ ‘rideau de mots, eux aussi toujours les mêmes, récit immuable, geste toujours recommencé des morceaux choisis de la guerre’41 [curtain of words, which were also always the same, an unchanging tale, a gesture that was always being started over again to evoke the choice morsels of the war]. However, Hannah’s experience seems to be quite distinct from that of the subjects of Fresco’s study, where the compulsion lay in the parental telling of the same, limited narrative items which in fact conceal far greater and more significant swathes of the past condemned to silence.42 In Hannah’s case, the compulsion lies rather in the child’s demand for repetition of the same narrative. When her mother complains ‘Mais tu as déjà entendu cette histoire au moins dix fois’ (p. 134) [But you’ve already heard this story at least ten times], Hannah’s response — ‘Je m’embrouille dans les dates. J’ai peur d’oublier les choses telles qu’elles se sont passées’ (p. 134) [I get confused over the dates. I’m scared of forgetting the way things happened] — reveals the sense of a duty to remember as accurately as possible these precursors of the Shoah. For it was those precursors that wove her mother into a Nazi- and Vichy-engineered genocidal fabric from which she only narrowly escaped, with the rest of her family fatally stitched up. Intergenerational transmission is not just of memory, which implies at least some degree of cognition, but also of affect, and indeed affect predominates in the involuntary relaying of the survivor mother’s sadness to her daughter: Le lendemain soir [...] nous la conduisîmes rue du Pont-des-Morts, rue lugubre de l’ancien quartier juif. Elle reconnut, dans l’obscurité, ces lieux de son enfance avec une sorte de soulagement, et, tandis que je la suivais, il me semblait que toute sa tristesse accumulée s’échappait de son cœur pour s’engouffrer dans le mien. (p. 136) [The following evening [...] we drove her to the Pont-des-Morts, a gloomy street in the former Jewish quarter. In the darkness, she recognized those places of her childhood with a sort of relief, and as I followed her it seemed to me that all the stored up sadness was escaping from her heart and plunging into my own].

This constitutes an almost literal transfer of affective burden from first to second generation: a curiously ambiguous, but clearly transitive and possibly willed process. The end of a literary text is often thought to have a special if not totalizing significance. It is not immaterial that Anissimov chooses to close her text with Hannah’s communication of a matrilineal memorial heritage, an unbroken line

90

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

from grandmother to mother and finally to daughter. Searching in a Jewish cemetery with her mother for the grave of the latter’s own mother, the daughter finally, as if by miraculous force of will, lights upon this familial lieu de mémoire: ‘Je sentis que ma mère était, tout du moins à cette heure, sur le point de renoncer. ‘Puissé-je la retrouver!’, pensai-je alors soudain. Et comme obéissant à cette brève incantation, la tombe fut soudain devant mes yeux’ (p. 199) [I sensed that my mother was, at least at that point, about to give up. ‘May I find her!’ I thought suddenly. And as if obeying this brief incantation, the grave was suddenly there before my very eyes]. This (grand-)mother’s memorial heritage consists in that sadness intuited and inscribed in preceding passages. The perlocutionary act of this text’s very last paragraph is assertion of a terrible sorrow at the death of most of this Jewish family, and by extension most of European Jewry, from the perspective of she who, by Jewish tradition, is held to be the guarantor of Jewry’s survival: the mother (see Chapter 4). That final paragraph is imbued with a haunting melancholy, in both the common and the Freudian sense. With respect to the Freudian take on melancholy, it is clear that Hannah has not been able to accomplish a proper mourning that would allow ‘letting go’, because the millions of deaths incurred during the Shoah allow of no such logical response. Further, in the logic of Anissimov’s mythopoeisis, Hannah has been possessed by the soul of her prophetic grandmother: Ma mère, soudain apaisée, cessa de murmurer, et, dans un silence vibrant, Emmanuel prononça les premiers mots du Kaddish: Yitgaddal véytquaddach chéméh rabba, tandis qu’une tristesse terrible, surgie comme de derrière la tombe, telle une sorte de râle lointain venu du fond des années écoulées depuis la mort de ma grand-mère, m’enveloppait et s’insinuait définitivement en moi. Comme si, au-delà du temps, son âme avait attendu notre venue, ce matin-là, dans cet ancien cimetière où les tombes sculptées voilà des siècles tanguent dans la terre indifférente, sous le ciel gris, pour prendre secrètement possession de moi. (p. 199) [Suddenly calm, my mother stopped murmuring and in a resonant silence, Emmanuel uttered the first words of the Kaddish: Yitgaddal véytquaddach chéméh rabba, while a terrible sadness, suddenly arising as if from behind the grave, like a sort of distant moan coming from the depths of the years since my grandmother’s death, enveloped me and seeped into me permanently. As if, beyond time, her soul had been waiting for us to come that morning into this former cemetery where the graves carved centuries ago swayed in the indifferent earth, under the grey sky, and secretly to take possession of me.]

There is almost seamless semantic segue from such possession by death in the excipit of Dans la plus stricte intimité to the title and incipit of Anissimov’s next work, Sa Majesté la mort (1999).43 The latter, which won the Jean Freustié Prize, has been hailed as a ‘récit déchirant, admirable de pudeur’ [heartrending narrative, with an admirable sense of propriety] in which Anissimov ‘scrute, creuse, dénonce, et se fait kaddish quand la douleur devient trop brûlante’ [scrutinizes, bores into, denounces, and turns into Kaddish when the pain becomes too intense].44 Sa Majesté la mort is a hybrid text blending personal and family history along with documentary sections in the form of (comments on) family photographs, family letters, citations, and historical facts. For the first time, there is a quasi-identity between the author, Myriam Anissimov, and the narrator, Myriam Frydman (Frydman being

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

91

Anissimov’s real surname).45 This marks an evolution of the author’s oeuvre from autofiction to, if not standard autobiography, at least writing of the self combined with family biography. Nolden asserts that Sa Majesté la mort does not pretend to be anything other than a memoir. As such, it offers the reader a kind of contract that, according to the literary critic Philippe Lejeune, confirms to the reader that the author, narrator, and protagonist are identical and engage in proper self-representation (1975).46

Whilst sympathetic to Nolden’s view, I would not wish to elide the distancing element of a surname (Frydman) that, while actually closer to the author than the pseudonym ‘Anissimov’, will, for the reader unaware that ‘Anissimov’ is a pseudonym and that the actual writer is named ‘Frydman’, fail to satisfy the Lejeunian condition of exact correspondence between homodiegetic narrator and author as public persona (Anissimov, not Frydman). The undocumented nature of its narrator Myriam’s statements about the Shoah mark Sa Majesté la mort out very clearly as personal, transmitted, secondary testimony as opposed to professional historiography. Myriam refers to accounts of individuals without indicating their provenance or status, except very minimally if at all: thus, for example, we learn that Moszek Krys is a survivor, but nothing about Mordechaï Strigler (p. 37). In addition, there is no pretence of the arguably impossible, but habitually professed neutrality and non-emotivity of the professional historian. Indeed, the narrator’s opening gambit is deliberately dramatic: stark assertion of the murder of almost her whole family in the Treblinka extermination camp in 1942 (p. 13). But also of importance is the fact that almost all her family had been thus murdered before her own birth: ‘La presque totalité des membres de notre famille avait disparu avant ma naissance’ (p. 13) [Practically all the members of our family had died before I was born]. She thus clearly self-designates as a member of the second generation. But as we will see, this apparent stroke of good fortune — being born after the Judaeocide — is in fact inscribed by Sa Majesté la mort as a form of living death. The second section makes an abrupt temporal leap forward, to her mother’s decision (curiously pre-empted by the daughter in Dans la plus stricte intimité) that her adult daughter will be ‘le dépositaire de sa mémoire, de celle de tous les siens; les vivants et les morts’ (p. 15) [the guardian of her memory, of all her family’s memory; the living and the dead]. The mother’s decision is at least partly prompted by the daughter’s longstanding curiosity about her largely deceased family, as well as by a sense that, through her daughter’s questioning, the two of them might ‘comprendre le miracle de notre survie, puisque nous étions des survivants’ (p. 15) [understand the miracle of our survival, since we were indeed survivors]. Intergenerational transmission of memory is here intentional, which is by no means always the case. Further, while both mother and daughter are survivors, the differences in their respective relationships to the Shoah are acute. While the mother has the authenticity of primary memory to deposit, the daughter feels both honoured and burdened by a secondary memory, or postmemory, consisting in simulacra which she can never personally verify. Yet she never once questions her duty to conserve, albeit at one remove, the primary memory of her parents, which involves mapping

92

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

in written form their familial lieux de mémoire. Towards the end of the narrative, she registers a compulsive need to take photographs recording her parents’ former, literally vital investment in the sanctuary of Swiss space: ‘Je pris encore quelques photos pour voler au secours de mes neurones, que je suspectais de n’être pas en mesure de tout bien retenir. Je me sentais comptable de cette mémoire envers mes parents’ (p. 271) [I took a few more photos to help along my brain cells, which I suspected were not up to retaining everything properly. I felt that I was accountable to my parents for this memory]. The sense of accountability denoted in ‘comptable de’ is all the more striking given that, at this point, her mother is still alive. Far from conventional historiography, then, and no mere memoir, Sa Majesté la mort is a devotional text in the sense that its second-generation narrator constructs her entire existence around remembering and commemorating the dead. Her identity is relational rather than autonomous. Origins are illegible, their only remaining traces being inscribed on the faces and in the body language of mother and daughter: Nos noms avaient été engloutis dans l’opacité impénétrable de l’extermination, et l’origine de ma famille était à présent illisible. Il n’en restait que des traces que je pouvais observer sur nos visages. Ces traits, ces yeux, ces mimiques, cette manière d’accentuer les mots, d’accompagner la parole par un geste de la main nous appartenaient-ils en propre, constituaient-ils un système cohérent de signes dans la galaxie éteinte dont nous étions issus? (p. 15) [Our names had been swallowed up in the impenetrable darkness of extermination, and my family’s origin was now illegible. All that remained of it were traces I could see on our faces. Did those features, those eyes, those gesticulations, that way of emphasizing words, of accompanying words by a movement of the hand, belong to us alone, did they form a coherent system of signs in the extinct galaxy we had come from?]

The transience of such bodily traces fuels Myriam’s desire to discover her genealogy through more stable sources such as letters, photos, the set stories of her mother and, in the more distant past, of her father (pp. 15–16). It is Myriam’s impression of being linked, or bound (the second generation’s inveterate dilemma) to murdered forebears that prompts her to read countless family letters written in Yiddish. Juxtaposition of the antonyms ‘morts’ to designate the dead relatives and ‘vivants’ to describe the extant written words in these letters suggests at least textual survival of dead family members — a continuity between the community of the dead and the living, between the past and the present (p. 16). This impression is augmented by observations on the following page about visitors to the ‘bibliothèque Medem’ (a Parisian library dedicated to the Yiddish-speaking world). These visitors try to hang on to what she names the ruins of a civilization buried in ashes whilst paradoxically referring also to their will to keep that world alive, despite their tenuous grasp of Yiddish (p. 18). Yiddish is presented as having once been a vehicle for the expression of vigorous life but as having become, after the Shoah, the language of death (cf. La Soie et les cendres): Car le yiddish, le parler juif, était une façon de voir le monde, de nommer le ciel, la pluie, le soleil, d’exprimer la joie, le malheur. Mais nous n’avons

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

93

pris aucune part à ce monde antérieur à la catastrophe, dont le yiddish est l’expression privilégiée. La langue de la vie est devenue la langue de la mort. (pp. 18–19) [For Yiddish, the Jewish way of speaking, was a way of seeing the world, of naming the sky, the rain, the sun, of expressing joy, unhappiness. But we hadn’t taken any part in this world from before the catastrophe, of which Yiddish is the privileged expression. The language of life has become the language of death.]

Family letters written in Yiddish have a painful emotional charge in Sa Majesté la mort. Indeed, the public honour of the function devolved to Myriam by her mother — repository of a massacred family’s collective memory — is experienced personally as a disabling obsession with death: ‘Cet hiver 1996–1997 au cours duquel ma mère me remit ces lettres me sembla un adieu prématuré à la vie’ (pp. 29–30) [That winter of 1996–1997 when my mother gave me these letters seemed like a premature farewell to life]. Of import is the recognition that, whether they like it or not, she and her mother are bound to their family ghosts, which are figured as real presences rising from their ashes on the slightest prompt — for instance, when she hears even a few words of Yiddish being spoken.47 Even more disturbing is the recognition that she had at root actually wanted to join her annihilated family members: ‘dans le fond, c’était tout ce que je désirais. Les rejoindre dans leur anéantissement’ (p. 30) [basically, it was all I wanted. To join them in their destruction]. Here the potentially pathogenic character of second-generation witnessing becomes clear: Myriam conf lates honouring the dead with becoming one of them. Having been raised in the looming shadow of death, the fact that she manifests such a symbiotic identification with the dead is hardly surprising. This identification is almost literalized, at least in its linguistic mediation, in relation to her mother’s younger brother Samuel, killed in f light from anti-Semitism at the start of the Occupation: ‘je ne sais comment Samuel est entré en moi [...] Samuel voulait que quelqu’un se souvienne de lui’ (p. 176) [I don’t know how Samuel got into me [...] Samuel wanted someone to remember him]. Indeed, it is so that Samuel may live on in some form that she has written Sa Majesté la mort, as the first paragraph of the book’s last section attests: ‘J’écris ces lignes pour que Samuel soit à nouveau parmi nous. [...] Ces pages sont la tombe que je lui ai construite, alors que ses assassins voulaient que sa mémoire soit à jamais effacée’ (p. 278) [I’m writing these lines so that Samuel may be with us again. [...] These pages are the tomb that I’ve built for him, whereas his murderers wanted his memory to be wiped out for ever]. The pages of her book, a synecdoche for writing, are a means of resurrecting this slaughtered forebear, but ironically they also form his tomb — a somewhat sinister, and presumably unintended, connotation of eternal imprisonment which perhaps ref lects the morbidity of her own second-generation confinement in the economy of death. More positively, perhaps, is Myriam’s attentiveness to her family ghosts (not just Samuel) in the name of justice, recalling Derrida’s assertion in Spectres de Marx (1993): Il faut parler du fantôme, voire au fantôme et avec lui, dès lors qu’aucune éthique, aucune politique, révolutionnaire ou non, ne paraît possible et pensable

94

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma et juste, qui ne reconnaisse à son principe le respect pour ces autres qui ne sont pas encore là, présentement vivants, qu’ils soient déjà morts ou qu’ils ne soient pas encore nés.48 [It is necessary to speak of the ghost, indeed to the ghost and with it, from the moment that no ethics, no politics, whether revolutionary or not, seems possible and thinkable and just that does not recognize in its principle the respect for those others who are no longer or for those others who are not yet there, presently living, whether they are already dead or not yet born.]49

Anissimov’s oeuvre indeed speaks of, even to and with her family ghosts. Part of that address derives from a personal will to fill in the gaps of her mother’s primary memory and of her own postmemory. But it also derives from an ethical stance: from the sort of respect for the dead on which Derrida insists, and also from a sense of responsibility which is both retrospective (survivors’ guilt) and prospective (the will to keep the memory of those dead alive). In this again, it concurs with Derrida’s ruminations: Aucune justice — ne disons pas aucune loi et encore une fois nous ne parlons pas ici du droit — ne paraît possible ou pensable sans le principe de quelque responsabilité, au-delà de tout présent vivant, dans ce qui disjointe le présent vivant, devant les fantômes de ceux qui ne sont pas encore nés ou qui sont déjà morts, victimes ou non des geurres, des violences politiques ou autres, des exterminations nationalistes, racistes, colonialistes, sexistes ou autres, des oppressions de l’impérialisme capitaliste ou de toutes les formes du totali­t ar­ isme.50 [No justice — let us not say no law and once again we are not speaking here of laws — seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of exterminations, victims of the oppressions of capitalist imperialism or any of the forms of totalitarianism.]51

Emphasis on ethical duty, in this case to read the few written testimonies that survived their authors, is also evident in the last sentence of the following passage: Mais, face à la chute abyssale de l’allemand, qu’est-il advenu de notre langue, le yiddish, alors que le peuple qui la parlait, que les écrivains, les penseurs, les poètes qui l’écrivaient ont été anéantis? La langue meurt. Elle se meurt mais elle ne veut pas mourir. Elle agonise lentement. [...] Adorno s’est trompé en écrivant que, après Auschwitz, il était impossible d’écrire des poèmes. Après Auschwitz, on ne peut plus écrire de poèmes, sinon en yiddish, car la mort a été donnée en allemand et reçue en yiddish. (pp. 114–15) [But, faced with the profound decline in German, what has become of our language, Yiddish, when the people who spoke it, when the writers, thinkers and poets who wrote in it have been destroyed? The language is dying. It’s dying but it doesn’t want to die. It’s dying a slow death. [...] Adorno was wrong when he wrote that, after Auschwitz, it was impossible to write poems. After Auschwitz, poems can’t be written anymore except in Yiddish, for death was given in German and received in Yiddish.]

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

95

The need is reciprocal: for non-victims to read and listen, for survivors to bear written witness and be listened to. Derrida has also implied the essential bilaterality of witness bearing: [c]e qui distingue un acte de témoignage de la simple transmission de con­nai­ ssance, de la simple information, du simple constat ou de la seule manifestation d’une vérité théorique prouvée, c’est que quelqu’un s’y engage auprès de quelqu’un, par un serment au moins implicite. Le témoin promet de dire ou de manifester à autrui, son destinataire, quelque chose, une vérité, un sens qui lui a été ou qui lui est de quelque façon présent.52 [What distinguishes an act of bearing witness from the simple transmission of knowledge, from simple information, from the simple statement or mere demonstration of a proven theoretical truth, is that in it someone engages himself with regard to someone else, by an oath that is at least implicit.]53

In short, testimony must be transitive if it is to be at all. Testimony is a compulsive need for Myriam’s aunt Fraye and uncle Israël, who as Auschwitz survivors ‘avaient surtout besoin de raconter. C’était une exigence puissante qui les tourmentait autant que celle de manger’ (p. 118) [needed above all to tell others what had happened. It was a powerful need which tormented them as much as the need to eat]. The primal quality of that need is stressed by analogy with a raging hunger resulting from starvation in Auschwitz. Both in presence and in absence, hunger forms a dense exegetical seam in Sa Majesté la mort. As in many other parts of Anissimov’s œuvre and as evinced in discussion of La Soie et les cendres above, the child Myriam’s anorexia (in the original sense of lack of appetite, rather than the modern sense of refusal to eat in a morbid drive to lose ever more weight) appears to have been one more unconscious manifestation of secondgeneration identification with the physical suffering of Shoah victims deprived of food. This deprivation scenario is unconsciously acted out even to the point of her involuntarily vomiting food she has been forced to ingest (pp. 35 and 56). It is a staple part of Jewish cultural narratives that the Jewish mother has always been anxious to see her children eat copiously. However, Anissimov expresses the sense that, after the Shoah, Jewish children were charged with a duty to exhibit appetite as sign of robust health, to prove to their parents and particularly to their mother that murdered family members at least had a surviving family line. This conf licts with Myriam’s own abhorrence at being, as she perceived it, force-fed. Her mother’s investment in her child as symbol of Jewish continuity through such exemplary health and appetite is frustrated by the child’s distaste for most foods: J’étais indigne d’elle. N’étais-je pas investie d’une unique mission: engraisser comme une oie promise au sacrifice, devenir une enfant présentable, alors que tout ce qui se mangeait me soulevait le cœur [...] La vue de ma silhouette étique, de mon air de chien battu consternait Maman. (p. 70) [I was unworthy of her. Was I not charged with a unique mission: to fatten up like a goose destined to be sacrificed, to become a presentable child, whereas all food made me heave [...] The sight of my emaciated figure, of my hangdog look, worried mum. ]

In contrast to her own emaciation, her sister Lola was ‘délicieusement ronde, potelée,

96

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

souriante et docile. Ce qu’on appelle une “belle enfant” ’ (p. 71) [delightfully round, chubby, cheerful and obedient. Now that’s what you call a ‘beautiful child’]. For her part, Myriam takes almost violent issue with the linking of beauty to eating, given the deprivation of food from which Jews had suffered and in many cases died during the Shoah: ‘Belle’, pour les Juifs qui avaient l’impudence de vivre encore, pour les Juifs qui avaient eu la khoutzpa — le culot — de revenir d’un lieu où ils auraient dû tous être transformés en cendres, ‘belle’, pour ceux qui avaient connu une faim inouïe, avant de produire des f lammes qui empuantissaient la plaine polonaise, ‘belle’ signifiait grosse, ou plutôt rassasiée. Mais aucune nourriture n’était plus capable de combler la faim de bouches si avides de manger. (p. 71) [‘Beautiful’, for Jews who were shameless enough to still be alive, for Jews who had had the khoutzpa — the cheek — to return from a place where they should all have been transformed into ashes, ‘beautiful’, for those who had experienced unprecedented hunger, before producing f lames that stank out the Polish plain, ‘beautiful’ meant fat, or rather full up. But no food was now able to satisfy the hunger of mouths so eager to eat.]

This diatribe against the pressures placed by Jewish survivors on their children both reiterates the notion of that survival as being somehow aberrant (use of the condi­ tional mood, such as ‘auraient dû’ here, is common in this text) and also implies metaphorical distaste for a satiety denied the Shoah victims. A curious hiatus emerges between this anorectic pattern and the bulimia (although not bulimia nervosa, in which bingeing is followed by efforts to avoid weight-gain either through vomiting, laxative abuse, excessive exercise, or fasting) of Israël and Fraye, who three years after liberation are bloated through inability to control their appe­tite (p. 73). (It is not incidental that modern research into eating disorders has traced a common trajectory from the starvation of anorexia into the over-eating of bulimia.) This is not the only irony of Fraye and Israël’s post-war lives. After surviving incarceration qua Jews in Auschwitz, they are also subject to discrimination qua Jews in so-called ‘Liberation’ France. Israël, for instance, is refused a work permit despite his family being able to assure him work and housing. The bitterly sardonic formulation of these facts implies an anti-Semitic continuity between Vichy France and the French Republic which has succeeded it: La République française ne saurait encombrer son territoire d’étrangers et de Juifs, alors qu’elle s’était donné tant de mal pour se débarrasser d’eux. On n’imaginait pas que des survivants eussent l’impudence de revenir, puis de quémander des papiers pour des membres de leur tribu. C’est ce même Service de la main-d’œuvre étrangère qui avait établi la carte d’identité de mon père portant en rouge la mention ‘Israélite’ et la remarque ‘Nez: légèrement Juif ’. (p. 122) [The French Republic couldn’t clutter up its territory with foreigners and Jews, when it had been at such pains to get rid of them. Nobody imagined that survivors would have the brazenness to return, then to beg for identity papers for the members of their tribe. It’s the same Foreign Labour Service that had drawn up my father’s identity card with the mention of ‘Jew’ in red and the remark ‘Nose: slightly Jewish’.]

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

97

Further evidence is adduced for the persistence of anti-Semitism in post-war Republican France At the age of six, Myriam is insulted as a dirty Jew and Jesuskiller by a fellow schoolgirl who is clearly parroting the prejudices of her gentile parents: Je ne me souvenais pas d’avoir tué qui que ce fût. Elle m’avait exactement dit: ‘Sale Juive, tu as tué le petit Jésus!’ [...] Un point incompréhensible me laissait en outre perplexe: comment avait-on pu me reconnaître pour la meurtrière d’un être dont j’ignorais l’existence et l’apparence? [...] Pendant la récréation, j’étais seule, on me repoussait. J’avais envie de mourir, mais j’ignorais comment m’y prendre. (p. 74) [I didn’t remember having killed anyone at all. She had said to me quite precisely: ‘Dirty Jew, you killed little Jesus!’ [...] What’s more, one incomprehensible point left me puzzled: how could I have been recognized as the murderer of a being about whose existence and appearance I knew nothing? [...] During playtime, I was alone, rejected. I wanted to die, but didn’t know how to go about doing it.]

Aside from the wry humour of her complete ignorance as to who her supposed victim Jesus was, what commands the reader’s attention are the child’s justified sense of exclusion and the rather less justified suicidal impulses it induces. Later on Myriam herself uses the word ‘exclusion’, which she relates to her non-attendance of catechism classes and the hostile reaction this produces: being told by the ringleader of her persecutors ‘Sale-Juive-on-ne-veut-pas-jouer-avec-toi-tu-as-tuéle-petit-Jésus!’ (p. 98) [Dirty-Jew-we-don’t-want-to-play-with-you-you-killedlittle-Jesus!]. The use of hyphens conveys both the chanting mode of delivery but also the mechanical, unthinking content of the exclusionary discourse. This could be viewed as a Bergsonian ‘habit memory’ on the part of these young novitiates in the dogma of anti-Semitism spawned by pre-Vatican II Catholicism.54 Defence mechanisms previously little in evidence kick in, and Myriam literally hits back — but only some ten years later, after lasting psychological damage has been inf licted by persistent anti-Jewish bullying (p. 99). The price of her satisfaction in this revenge is, paradoxically, a reinforcement of her exclusion through what is now reconfigured as [...] un isolement ostentatoire, dont je voulais qu’il signifiât que quiconque s’approcherait de moi pour me rappeler que j’étais juive et que c’était, par exemple, ‘sale’ risquait de me voir répondre par des coups. Oui, rendre les coups était pour moi une question de vie ou de mort. Personne n’était venu m’expliquer qu’aucune bonne parole n’est capable de convaincre qui que ce soit de renoncer aux préjugés et aux insultes. J’avais été sanctionnée par un discours moralisateur et dégoûtant de la directrice érigeant l’hypocrisie en vertu [...] (p. 99) [[...] an ostentatious isolation, which I wanted to be a message that anyone who approached me to remind me I was Jewish and that this was, for example, ‘dirty’ ran the risk of my responding with blows. Yes, fighting back was for me a question of life or death. Nobody had come and explained to me that no word of God can convince anyone to renounce prejudices and insults. I had been punished by a moralizing, disgusting discourse from the headmistress, which set up hypocrisy as a virtue.]

98

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

In its last two words, the sentence immediately following this extract caustically implies an equivalent if non-verbalized level of anti-Semitism in the headmistress of this French Republican school: ‘Elle ignora l’offense, stigmatisa l’usage de la force et prôna l’amour du prochain, le renoncement à la violence, le pardon envers ceux qui vous offensent, fussent-ils bouffeurs de sales Juifs’ (p. 99; my emphasis) [She ignored the offence caused, stigmatized the use of force and preached love for one’s neighbour, renunciation of violence, forgiveness of those who insult you, even if they were dirty Jew haters]. Other fault-lines in Liberation France, particularly its educational system, are evident in the antinomy between her mother’s unwavering faith in that system — ‘Si tu veux t’en sortir, n’oublie jamais qu’il n’y a qu’une seule voie: l’école laïque, gratuite et républicaine’ (p. 81) [If you want to come through all right, never forget there’s only one way: the secular, free, and Republican school system] — and the system’s censorship of the Shoah from history lessons: Rien de ce que mes parents rapportaient sur ce qui s’était passé récemment en Europe orientale ne nous était enseigné à l’école. Dans les manuels, on nous racontait l’histoire lointaine des Gaulois, de Vercingétorix, de Clovis et du vase de Soissons. Il était question non d’exécutions de masse, de massacres, mais d’invasions, d’Ostrogoths, de Burgondes, de victoires et de conquêtes. Nous étions censées en être fière. (pp. 98–99) [Nothing of what my parents reported about recent events in eastern Europe was taught to us at school. In our textbooks we were told about the remote history of the Gauls, of Vercingétorix, Clovis and of the Vase of Soissons. Not about mass executions or massacres but about invasions, Ostrogoths, Burgondes, victories and conquests. We were supposed to be proud of it all.]

The piquancy of the laconic final sentence is arresting: the precept that all French schoolchildren should be proud of their country’s history ill befits the case of a young Jewish child alienated by a Judaeocide in which Vichy France had been actively complicit. The mother’s naïve faith in Republican France is mirrored in Myriam’s father Yankel-Itzik, who makes a Manichean distinction between the egalitarianism of the Republic and the exclusionary fascism of Vichy. Il admirait la France, qui avait exécuté son roi, promulgué la Déclaration des droits de l’homme, réhabilité le capitaine Dreyfus. [...] Même après le statut des Juifs, les raf les, les camps d’internement, la République demeurait selon lui immaculée, puisque ce n’était pas elle mais les fascistes qui avaient accompli ces ignominies. Illuminé par cet amour aveugle, il était allé se faire recenser comme Juif en 1941, quand la police l’avait convoqué. (p. 196) [He admired France, which had executed its king, promulgated the Declaration of the Rights of Man, rehabilitated Captain Dreyfus. [...] Even after the Jewish statutes, the round-ups, the internment camps, the Republic remained unsullied in his eyes, since it wasn’t the Republic but the fascists who had carried out these disgraceful acts. Inspired by this blind love, he had gone to register as a Jew in 1941 when the police had summoned him.]

Yankel’s distinction elides the fact that anti-Semitism had existed in the Third Republic (as evidenced by the condemnation and imprisonment of the innocent

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

99

Dreyfus in the first place) and continues to exist in the Fourth Republic (as evidenced by the post-war anti-Semitism to which his young daughter is subject). Anissimov’s designation of her father’s love for France as blind exposes the dangerous gullibility of such nationalistic fervour. Nolden has rightly averred that ‘among today’s Jewish writers in France, Myriam Anissimov is the most engaged in reminding the reader of exactly what happened in the past’.55 Yet such reminders, albeit less quantitatively significant, are not absent from the writings of other French Jewish women. Anne Rabinovitch’s Les Étangs de Ville-d’Avray (1987)56 resembles Anissimov’s works in that it is a first-person narrative drawing on autobiographical material which powerfully renders the trauma of the second generation. However, that trauma is mediated far more obliquely than in Anissimov’s oeuvre, not in conceptual or affective mode but through the registering of its enduring bodily traces (not unknown in Anissimov’s oeuvre, but less common). As Nolden observes, ‘[t]he absence of any reference to Eva’s emotional reactions to the environment is remarkable. Only her physical reactions are being narrated: the paralysis of her body speaks volumes’.57 Indeed, Les Étangs de Ville-d’Avray institutes a dichotomy between apparent psychic numbing on the one hand, and sensorial hyper-reaction on the other. When homodiegetic narrator Eva visits Auschwitz in the early 1980s, the very journey to it is presented as a form of collective acting-out with the coach passengers standing in for deportees to the death camp. In this narratively deterritorialized sequence — it features liminal, quasi-phantasmatic elements at odds with the largely mimetic frame-narrative of the novel — fear is introjected by these Shoah tourists. They engage in a form of psychodrama marked by hysterical performance and spectacle, the latter being underscored by the allusion to Claude Lanzmann’s foundational film Shoah: Shoah comme un interminable voyage en car avec des arrêts toutes les deux heures, de plus en plus pénible à mesure que la journée avance, un sandwich et une bière pour résister au choc, le cri hystérique d’une femme dans le noir, quelques spectateurs se lèvent effrayés, peut-être un attentat, Auschwitz au printemps, Auschwitz à l’automne, Auschwitz en hiver. (pp. 46–47) [Shoah like a never-ending coach journey with stops every two hours, more and more hard going as the day wears on, a sandwich and a beer to withstand the shock, the hysterical scream of a woman in the dark, a few spectators get up in fright, maybe it’s an attack, Auschwitz in spring, Auschwitz in autumn, Auschwitz in winter.]

Prominent here is the narrator’s apparent detachment from the symbolic re-enactment, her spectatorial rather than participatorial self-positioning. This paves the way for her recording of de-affectivized response to Auschwitz. One prime example is her reaction to seeing her own surname on the list of deportees: ‘Sur une liste de déportés j’ai lu mon nom, Aronson. L’odeur suffocante imprégnait ma peau, mes vêtements. Un mélange de bois pourri, de vieille pierre humide, de goudron chaud’ (pp. 47–48) [On a list of deportees I read my surname, Aronson. The suffocating smell impregnated my skin, my clothes. A mixture of rotten wood, of old damp stone, of warm tar]. Rabinovitch here deploys a spare, telegrammatic

100

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

style to recount a traumatic confrontation with her personal, family connection to Auschwitz, in which affect is occulted and transmuted into olfactory overload and disarray. The following pages sustain the spare style in recording the evolving experience, with sensory impact continuing to stand in for affect. Particularly arresting is the power of painfully overdetermined visual stimuli to induce olfactory hallucination: Des murs nus, des graffiti. Une lucarne. J’ai mis plusieurs secondes à réaliser. La chambre à gaz. M’en aller immédiatement. J’entendais des voix dans la pièce voisine. Je me suis avancée. Marek était là, avec un groupe de gens. ‘Tu sens? a-t-il dit. Le brûlé.’ Quarante ans après. L’odeur du four crématoire a persisté. (p. 48) [Naked walls, graffiti. A skylight. It took me several seconds to realize. The gas chamber. Leave immediately. I could hear voices in the neighbouring room. I moved forward. Marek was there, with a group of people. ‘Can you smell it?’ he asked. ‘Burning.’ Forty years later. The smell of the crematorium lingered.]

The postmemorial status of Eva’s subject-position is confirmed by the fact that it takes her a few seconds to realize the connection between the visual signs of ‘[d]es murs nus, des graffiti. Une lucarne’ and what they once constituted: the gas chambers. Even those few seconds would have been unnecessary for the first generation, with nothing to realize and all to re-cognize. A return to the same mind/body schism occurs towards the end of the sequence, in which sensorium eclipses affect, and the (auto-)suggestions of postmemory become striking: at Birkenau, ‘Dehors, des fillettes cueillaient des fraises sauvages. J’ai voulu en goûter une. C’était acide’ (p. 50) [Outside, little girls were picking wild strawberries. I wanted to taste one. It was acid]. As the cumulative effect of postmemory’s con­ frontation with the physical traces of the Shoah (although the acrid taste of the strawberry may well be a gustatory hallucination) reaches crisis point, Eva herself begins to engage in the acting-out to which she had seemed immune during the journey to Auschwitz, now projecting herself into the role of camp prisoners. She literally puts herself in their place, occupying the same space as they would have occupied, with verbally unarticulated distress translating into gestural language and, finally, into psychic paralysis: ‘Dans un baraquement, je me suis assise à même la terre battue. La tête dans les mains. Autour de moi, les carcasses des lits à trois étages, des lavabos communs. Je ne supportais pas de rester. Je ne supportais pas de m’en aller’ (p. 50) [In a hut, I sat down on the beaten earth. My head in my hands. Around me, the shells of triple bunk beds, communal toilets. I couldn’t bear to stay. I couldn’t bear to go]. Yet the expression of emotion remains at its barest minimum, and it is again the sensory which renders her trauma at the close of the sequence. At least an hour or two after departure from the camp, the olfactory preserves her memory of Auschwitz, in a blurring of the literal and the figurative: ‘L’odeur d’Auschwitz persistait sur mes mains’ (p. 52) [The smell of Auschwitz lingered on my hands].

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

101

It is surely significant that the same privileging of the sensory over the overtly affective marks the relaying of another source of trauma, although the trauma in question here is unmediated through the accretions of prior knowledge and associations which constitute and partially condition postmemory. However, the two traumata are still cognate: the Shoah was the hypostatization of anti-Semitism, and it is to the recrudescence of anti-Semitism some thirty-six years after WWII that Rabinovitch’s narrative later turns. In 1981, when the extreme right-wing, nationalist and racist political party le Front national had started to gain electoral ground, Eva overhears racist and anti-Semitic remarks from two men in a café; and once more, her distress is registered via physical signs: Je n’entends pas la suite. Je me sens devenir blanche. Une seconde je veux intervenir. Les gif ler. J’ai ouvert la porte d’une main tremblante, je suis partie. (p. 91) [I don’t hear what follows. I feel myself going white. For a second I want to intervene. To slap them. I opened the door with a trembling hand, I left.]

There is no explicit statement of anger, but rather, reference to its physical conse­ quences (her pallor, her trembling) and to what is almost a motor response (the impulse to slap them). Similarly, when her close friend Paula’s anti-Semitic husband Felix bans her from his house because of the Israel–Lebanon war of 1982, the narrative tone again contracts to a terse, compressed minimum. But there is evo­ lution, since this time affect begins to seep through the cracks of her armoury, as shown by awareness of wanting to cry and of Paula’s fragility: Paula ricanant rue des Rosiers après l’attentat. Paula me reprochant de jeûner le jour du Kippour. Les Israéliens dans Beyrouth. Les f lics devant les synagogues. Envie de pleurer. Paula fragile, émouvante dans sa volonté de toucher la vérité. Notre amitié avait résisté aux années, aux conf lits, aux jalousies. Elle sombrait dans une querelle raciste sordide. (p. 98) [Paula sneering in the rue des Rosiers after the attack. Paul reproaching me for fasting for Kippur. The Israelis in Beirut. Cops in front of the synagogues. Wanting to cry. Fragile Paula, touching in her will to get to the truth. Our friendship had withstood the years, the conf licts, the jealousies. Now it was foundering in a sordid racist quarrel.]

Nonetheless, as the antagonism between the two friends deepens, Eva once more reverts to the oblique encoding of emotion via sensory observations: ‘Le café a un goût de médicament. Je n’ai pas d’attaches visibles’ (p. 100) [The coffee tastes like medicine. I have no visible ties]. The fact that this f lat style is far less common when Eva is not evoking anti-Semitism or the Shoah supports the hypothesis of a self-imposed psychic numbing. As with the first generation studied in Chapter 1, for the secondary generation too such numbing serves as a defence against trauma. However, the distinctiveness of Eva’s experience is her apparent resistance to the eventual attempt directly to express that trauma within language which marks the authors studied in Chapter 1.

102

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

So far, Chapter 2 has considered avatars of the most dominant paradigm in second-generation French Jewish women’s writing: an inscription of postmemory characterized by distress and affective impairment. My introduction signalled Catherine Clément as the author of a threshold text, situated between this main paradigm and its almost heretical obverse, that of desacralization and humour (however much such humour may be qualified as wry, satirical, or black). Clément’s Cherche-Midi (2000)58 is an autobiographical narrative in which the author revisits personal and family history. Intergenerational transmission of trauma first becomes obvious in the fact that Clément’s Jewish mother, Rivka,59 who survived deportation under the Vichy regime only because she hid her Jewishness, transmits to her daughter a distinct sense that ‘Liberation’ France is still not a safe place for Jews. In the first three sentences of the following extract there are distinct echoes of the salutary ending of Joseph Joffo’s bestselling Un sac de billes (1973),60 whose final image of ‘musettes’ being stored in the attic in case they are needed for further swift escape symbolizes the (French) Jew’s need always to be prepared for f light from state-prosecuted danger: [...] bien qu’elle fût dûment née à Paris, Rivka m’éleva dans l’idée qu’on n’est jamais tranquille en France. Valises prêtes. Bouclées pour le départ. C’est tout juste si elle n’ajoutait pas un agneau à manger à la hâte et debout, les reins ceints, comme le peuple de Dieu convoqué par Moïse à la veille de la sortie d’Égypte. Et ne pas oublier, avec l’agneau rôti, les herbes amères en mémoire. Les sales petits papiers du Cherche-Midi. Maintenant que j’y ai posé mes valises, ne se passe pas un jour sans que je m’en souvienne. Où sont les délateurs? Nulle part et partout. Ces lettres anonymes qui informent les juges, provoquent des affaires et des perquisitions, qui les envoie, en ce moment même, pour le fric? On ne sait pas leurs noms — qui sont ‘identifiés’. Sautillant par ça et là, les bons corbeaux de France dénoncent par écrit. Nous en avons eu douze: dix au Cherche-Midi, deux dans le Lot, un chevrier et un bedeau, qui expédièrent Georges et Sipa au gaz, à cause des primes. C’est assez pour avoir le violent désir d’en prendre un par le cou et de serrer, à mort. Jamais tranquille, et l’Égypte est partout. (pp. 15–16) [[...] although she had duly been born in Paris, Rivka brought me up with the idea that in France you can never be easy in your mind. Suitcases ready. Fastened for departure. She came this close to adding a lamb to eat on the go, and on your feet, loins girded, like God’s people summoned by Moses the day before the exit from Egypt. And don’t forget, with the roast lamb, the bitter herbs in memory. The dirty little Cherche-Midi notes. Now that I’ve laid down my suitcases there, not a day goes by without my remembering. Where are the informers? Nowhere and everywhere. Those anonymous letters that inform judges, prompt scandals and police searches, who’s sending them, at this very moment, to make a fast buck? You don’t know their names — who are ‘identified’. Hopping here and there, France’s fine crows [informers] denounce others in writing. We had twelve of them: ten in the Cherche-Midi, two in the Lot, a goatherd and a verger, who sent Georges and Sipa off to be gassed, because of bonuses. It’s enough to give you a violent urge to take them by the neck and squeeze them to death. Never easy in your mind, and Egypt is everywhere.]

This polysemic passage merits exegesis on several levels. First, there is the Jewish

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

103

mother’s transmission to her daughter of the conviction that even after the Shoah, France could at any point turn upon Jews again. As Bella Brodzki has observed, ‘the psychic life of children of Holocaust survivors is characterized by an extreme identification with, if not virtual internalization of, the horrors their parents witnessed and experienced’.61 Brokzki’s point is shored up by the presence in this second-generation subject of the desire for murderous vengeance, which recalls the rage responses exhibited by numerous survivors in clinical studies.62 Second, Jews f leeing twentieth-century anti-Semitism are situated along a historical continuum of Jewish persecution allowing analogy with the exit of Jews from Egypt — a transformational narrative which turns defeat into victory. The triumphalist tenor of the analogy is, however, undercut by the fact that in post-war France, the daughter is still constantly haunted by Vichy France’s complicity in the Shoah. Third, the collapsing of clear temporal lines in the use of the present tense referring to letters of denunciation implies a collapse also of (Vichy) past and (Fifth Republic) present in a second-generation subject’s state of atemporal paranoia. It will be obvious from this brief preview that Clément’s text has much in common with Anissimov’s and Rabinovitch’s. Another link with Rabinovitch’s in particular is the emergence of second-generation trauma via corporeal signs. Clément’s severe juvenile asthma could of course be interpreted as somatization of the anguish produced by prior cognition of the gas chambers.63 But it could also be viewed as a much more agentic, albeit unconscious bid to express solidarity with family victims of Nazi gassing. This second interpretation is supported by the ‘comme par un fait exprès’ in the extract below, by the emphasis on suffocation, by the reference to the song by Sipa, the grandmother who had expired in the gas chambers, and finally, by the expression of shame about breathing when Sipa had died of suffocation: Et quand mon frère fut sorti de l’asthme, ce fut mon tour. Je devins asthmatique, comme par un fait exprès. Nos souff les s’échangèrent et s’échangent toujours. Lorsque l’une perd sa respiration, l’autre lui dit ‘Mais non, tu ne vas pas crever!’ et, lorsque l’autre suffoque, l’une l’enfume encore, ‘Inspire!’. [...] Le souvenir du souff le coupé persiste. Au Cherche-Midi, on a la mémoire accrochée aux poumons. Après la crise, un murmure de bronches siff le dans la poitrine la chanson de Sipa sur son dernier chemin: ‘Va, galoubtchik, n’aie pas peur, va nue puisqu’ils le hurlent, ne les regarde pas, va à la douche, la serviette sur le bras, entre donc et respire à pleins poumons, respire...’ La honte d’inspirer encore quand elle étouffe! (p. 21) [And when my brother got over his asthma attack, it was my turn. I became asthmatic, as if on purpose. Our breaths were exchanged and are still exchanged. When one can’t breath, the other says ‘No, you’re not going to snuff it!’, and, when the other is suffocating, the other smokes him out, ‘Breathe!’ [...] The memory of short breath persists. In the Cherche-Midi, your memory is hitched to your lungs. After the attack, a bronchial murmur whispers in your chest Sipa’s song on her final path: ‘Come on, galoubtchik, don’t be scared, go naked since they’re yelling at you to, don’t look at them, go to the shower, your towel on your arm, go in, then and breath in deeply, breathe in...’ How shameful to be breathing in still when she’s suffocating!]

104

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

On the following page the lexical traces of suffocation resurface in the reference to Sipa as ‘celle qui mourut étouffée’ (p. 22). Towards the end of her text the narrator virtually confirms this link by referring to an incident in 2000, just after she had given a reading of her work in Germany: on m’hospitalisa aux urgences de Cochin pour détresse respiratoire subite. [...] L’inconscient, il vaut mieux le savoir, est un sale con; un vandale, un muf le qui ne veut rien entendre, vous lui dites, ah mais pardon, c’est terminé, tout ça, et lui, le salopard, il vous fait chambre à gaz. Ah! Tu veux oublier, carcasse! Eh bien, crève! (p. 104) [I was taken into the emergency department at Cochin Hospital for sudden breathing problems. [...] The unconscious, it’s best to know, is a bloody bastard; a vandal, a lout who won’t listen to anything, you say to it, oh but sorry, all that’s over, and he, the swine, makes you into a gas chamber. Ah! You want to forget, you useless heap of bones! Just die, then!]

The duty to memorialize the Shoah and pay homage to its victims belies the mordantly jaunty tone of the passage. Intensely aware of her mother’s irremediable grief at her parents’ murder, the child takes on the role of custodian of her dead grandparents’ memory (p. 21). The thematic parallel here with Anissimov especially is evident, although the stylistic mediations differ significantly. Further thematic intersections with Anissimov include the censorship of Vichy from the French school curriculum (p. 61); and echoes of both Anissimov and Rabinovitch are found in Clément’s reference to persisting anti-Semitic discourse in Liberation France. In a Sartrean turn, Clément recalls her younger self ’s interpellation into awareness of Jewish identity by the anti-Semitic discourse of the gentile Other: De Georges et de Sipa, je savais simplement qu’ils étaient morts à Auschwitz. C’était terrible, point final. La première semaine de l’entrée en sixième, je me fis une amie, à qui je racontai. Et le lundi suivant, la petite Nadine m’apprit que son papa ne voulait pas qu’elle se lie d’amitié avec une juive. C’est ainsi, comme tant d’autres enfants, que je fis connaissance avec le mot qui désigne, en français, les filles du peuple d’Israël. (p. 57) [All I knew about Georges and Sipa was that they had died in Auschwitz. It was terrible, period. The first week of my first year at secondary school, I made a friend whom I told about it. And the following Monday, little Nadine informed me that her dad didn’t want her to be friends with a Jewish girl. Thus it was, like so many other children, that I was introduced to the word which in French designates the daughters of the people of Israel.]

Clément’s text also meshes strikingly with Rabinovitch’s in recording her first commemorative trip to Auschwitz, in 1972. The visit was conducted in a state of psychic refrigeration, as if her emotional system had shut down in anticipation of a visual onslaught so horrific it leads to aphasia: Là, les visiteurs pleurent. Et moi, rien. Tas de valises étiquetées, de lunettes, de jambes artificielles, de bras en plastique, de cheveux. Je restai dans le rien. Je posai mes f leurs au pied d’une urne, d’un geste mécanique. J’étais venue pour rien et je l’avais trouvé.

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

105

On ne sort plus de là, on y reste. Je ne me souviens plus du moment où mon corps quitta Auschwitz. J’ai tant voulu garder, j’ai tant écrit dessus! Quand je remontai dans la voiture, j’étais muette. Je ne dis pas silencieuse, ni remuée, ni émue, ni en larmes. Plus moyen de parler. Défense passive. (p. 88) [Visitors are crying there. And I — not a drop. A heap of labelled suitcases, spectacles, artificial legs, plastic arms, hair. I remained in a state of nothingness. I laid my f lowers at the foot of an urn, mechanically. I had come for nothing and had found it. You don’t get out of there, you stay there. I no longer remember the moment when my body left Auschwitz. I wanted to retain so much, I’ve written so much about it! When I got back into the car, I was dumb. I won’t say silent, nor stirred up, nor moved, nor in tears. No way of speaking. Passive defence.]

Once more, the intergenerational transmission of trauma is evidenced as Clément experiences what Hirsch and Spitzer referred to in first-generation survivors as the ‘breakdown of speech’.64 The important difference, however, is that while her faculty of speech was short-circuited, she is later able to commit her trauma to written language and so, if not to expunge it, at least to integrate it psychically. Thus far, I have located centripetal forces in our postmemorial corpus. What of the centrifugal? Where Clément’s text shifts away from the grave, even tragic tenor of Anissimov’s and Rabinovitch’s is in its refusal of a tacitly reverential relation to tragedy and trauma. Such refusal often results in recourse to ironic satire and even to a form of wry humour (also discerned in Novac in Chapter 1). This differentiation first becomes manifest in the grimly tongue-in-cheek relaying of how French Gentiles react to a second-generation French Jew’s hinting at family tragedies under Vichy. Quand on m’y fixe un rendez-vous, je n’ose pas refuser. Il faudrait expliquer, mais au Cherche-Midi, on a tant rabâché qu’on n’a plus le courage. — L’hôtel Lutétia? Non. Autre part, s’il vous plaît. — Pourquoi? Il n’est pas bien, ce bar? — C’est-à-dire, voyez-vous, que, pendant la guerre, mes grands-parents... — Oh pardon, je ne savais pas. Je comprends. (p. 17) [When people arrange to meet me there, I don’t dare refuse. I’d have to explain, but in the Cherche-Midi we’ve gone over so much that we can’t face it any more. ‘The Hôtel Lutétia? No. Somewhere else, please.’ ‘Why? Is the bar there no good?’ ‘It’s just that, you see, during the war, my grandparents...’ ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know. I understand.’]

The narrator’s reaction to the Gentile’s facile claim to understand implies fatuousness on the part of those who, precisely, cannot understand her shunning of a painfully overdetermined Jewish lieu de mémoire. Fired by such a patronizing untruth if not conscious lie, the narrator forces herself into a potentially nauseating re-encounter with that site of horrific revelation: ‘Mines aff ligées, martyrologe, assez! Dire n’est pas possible. Bouche cousue, sourire. L’hôtel Lutétia? Entendu. Comme ça, je saurai si j’ai encore la nausée au bas des marches’ (p. 17) [Pained looks, all that martyr stuff, enough! I can’t tell them. Mum’s the word, smile. The Hôtel Lutétia? Fine. That way, I’ll know if I still feel sick at the foot of the steps]. The narrator’s visceral response (‘la nausée’) to this site of memory is based partly on primary memory: as a small child she had accompanied her mother to the Lutétia in the doomed hope of finding the (grand)parents.

106

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

A further factor differentiating Anissimov and Clément is that while the former conveys her narrative alter ego’s depressive reactions with intensity and sobriety, the latter expresses them in minimizing, almost self-mocking terms. Referring to her maternal grandparents Georges and Sipa’s murder, Clément briskly implies a corresponding deficit of normal teenaged rebelliousness in her younger self: ‘Georges et Sipa m’ayant marquée d’un vide à vivre, je n’avais pas grand-chose à me mettre sous la dent, en matière de révolte’ (p. 62) [Since Georges and Sipa had marked my life with emptiness, I didn’t have much to chew on in the way of rebellion]. In relation to Rabinovitch, centrifugal forces are evident in Clément’s narrative of her second visit to Auschwitz. Having consulted a psychoanalyst after the first, she finds that her tears f low freely on the second. But the way in which she reports this weeping is curiously f lippant, almost derisive, suggesting that customary displays of distress and grief are somehow either fake or in poor taste: ‘La gaieté avec laquelle elle entreprit de me rendre la langue bien pendue me sauva. La fois suivante, au cimetière d’Auschwitz, j’eus des larmes en réserve, comme la pisseuse’ (p. 88) [The cheerfulness with which she undertook to get me talking again saved me. The next time, at the Auschwitz cemetery, I had tears in stock, like someone who can’t stop pissing]. Some might argue that what for Anissimov and Rabinovitch is sacred tragedy is treated by Clément with disrespectful vulgarity. But it is equally viable to contend that Clément’s recourse to lower-register, grim humour and apparent banalization is a mechanism of psychic self-defence not entirely unrelated to Rabinovitch’s affective switching-off. Beyond differences of tone, there are other distinctions to be drawn between the second-generation writings of Anissimov and Rabinovitch treated above and Clément’s Cherche-Midi. Clément’s text shows three distinct features: irony, intellection, and critical distance, the latter two not altogether unsurprising given her status as a trained philosopher. There is, for instance, a finessed if difficult attempt to assess France’s moral conduct compared to other countries under Nazi occupation: La France étant une communauté ordinaire, elle eut son contingent de Justes, ici ou là. Quantité suffisante pour en faire un pays. Ni plus ni moins qu’un autre, un simple pays avec ses sauveteurs, ses résistants, ses Justes, ses délateurs, ses traîtres, ses Injustes. Pays banal. J’ai du mal à l’admettre. Il faut que je me force, et je sais bien pourquoi. C’est à cause de la phrase que, paraît-il, a dite mon grand-père Georges lorsque les maquisards vinrent le prévenir. ‘Arrêté, moi? Mais je suis un Français!’ Georges ne se cacha pas, parce qu’il était français. (p. 26) [France was an ordinary community, it had its share of the Righteous, here and there. Enough to make it into a country. No more no less than another, a simple country with its rescuers, its resisters, its Righteous, its informers, its traitors, its Unrighteous. A run-of-the-mill country. It’s hard for me to admit it. I have to force myself, and I know full well why. It’s because of what my grandfather Georges had apparently said when the maquis came to warn him. ‘Under arrest, me? But I’m a Frenchman!’ George didn’t hide, because he was French.]

This sequence is highly ambiguous. The source of her discomfort in this admission

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

107

could be in recognizing that there were courageous French people, or, conversely, in recognizing that there were ignoble, treacherous French people. It is also unclear why she goes on ostentatiously to point out her determination to believe that her grandfather Georges was acutely aware of having chosen to become French, and conscientious in fulfilment of that identity: ‘Georges fut consciencieusement français. Reconnaissant au pays d’adoption où il s’était fixé depuis 1906. C’est mon idée à moi, j’entends qu’on me la laisse’ (p. 27) [Georges was conscientiously French. Grateful to the adoptive country where he had been settled since 1906. That’s what I think, and nobody’s going to change my mind]. Surely this fixed idea would render her grandfather’s arrest and deportation by the French all the more painful? Interpretative barriers appear to be deliberately erected by the narrator, but she does make tangential reference to the willed and perhaps unfounded nature of the beliefs one chooses: of her parents Sipa’s and Georges’s deportation, Rivka préféra croire qu’ils étaient morts en route. De chaleur, de soif, d’arrêt cardiaque. C’était son idée à elle, qui avait l’avantage d’éviter l’arrivée sur le quai et le gaz Zyklon B. Du côté des idées, on ne sait que choisir entre pire et bien pire. Mon grand-père eut raison, même s’il avait tort. (p. 28) [Rivka preferred to believe that they had died on the way. Of heat, of thirst, of heart failure. That’s what she thought, she who’d had the benefit of escaping arrival on the platform and the Zyklon B. gas. With ideas, all you can do is choose between worse and much worse. My grandfather was right, even if he was wrong.]

Rivka’s choice seems to represent one of the probable fictions that at least some families of Shoah victims had to tell themselves in order to avoid psychological breakdown. Clément’s critical distance is apparent in the expression of her relationship with Judaism (as opposed to Jewish ethnicity and history). Despite her atheism, Clément and her brother (who seems no more of a believer than she) strictly respect Judaic rites at their mother’s funeral (pp. 40–41). She also continues to mourn her mother according to Judaic tradition (p. 42). Stress is placed on the need to pay homage to a religion to which she does not adhere but which she apprehends as constitutive of her historical identity as a Jew. Despite her atheism, bonds with the language and signifying system of Judaism remain unsevered, as is illustrated in her metaphorical use of the expression ‘les herbes amères’ [bitter herbs]. Thus she enumerates any number of post-war catastrophes under the Jewish sign for misfortune, bitter herbs: ‘Elles poussent en tous lieux, les herbes amères. Choses vues en d’autres pays. Émeutes, couvre-feux, secrets d’État, gilets pare-balles, menaces d’attenat, trois cents suicides d’étudiants brahmanes, racisme hindou, deux mille musulmans troués à la poitrine par les tridents sacrés des yogis’ (p. 105) [They grow everywhere, bitter herbs. Things seen in other countries. Riots, curfews, State secrets, bulletproof vests, bomb threats, three hundred Brahman student suicides, Hindu racism, two thousand Muslims shot in the chest by the sacred tridents of the yogis]. The homologization of anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim violence here demonstrates the use of transitive historical thinking glimpsed in Chapter 1. Clément’s intellection and critical distance also emerge in her various references

108

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

to a Jewish cultural imaginary, a stock of Judaic tropes on which she draws to represent to herself and to her reader other, non-Jewish-specific experiences and concerns. In this sense, there is a curious universalization of Jewish experience, normally regarded as minoritarian. This operation may tangentially recall the stance of fellow Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. As Simon Critchley observes, ‘there is a deeply paradoxical claim implicit in Levinas’ writing, namely that all human beings are Jews. Thus, rather than reducing philosophical universality to the particularism of a specific religion tradition, Levinas universalizes that particularism’.65 In Clément’s case, the universalization of certain Judaic tropes usually serves not to elevate Jews to some privileged prototype of humanity (as in the oft misconstrued notion of the elect people), but rather, to break down barriers between Jewish and gentile experience. Thus the metaphor of the Wailing Wall is deployed to evoke more general calamity, both personal and political: ‘en juin 1968, mon foyer implosa. Le Cherche-Midi devint le mur de mes lamentations’ (p. 82) [in June 1968, my family imploded. The Cherche-Midi became the Wailing Wall]. And secularized reference to the book, respect for which is fundamental to Judaism, paradoxically but fecundly poses a bridge between the sacred texts of Judaism and the atheist writings of Marx, Lenin and so forth: ‘Au moins, c’étaient des gens qui respectaient le livre’ (p. 83) [At least they were people who respected the book]. A different use of Judaic tropes is discernible in Clément’s expression of a complex and differentiated relationship to images on the one hand and ideas on the other. Regarding images, her decision never to place herself in front of them is prompted by the fear that the lampshade seen at the first exhibition on the concentration camps may have been made from the skin of her grandfather: ‘Depuis ce jour-là, je sais qu’en aucun cas je ne dois me placer en face des images’ (p. 85) [Since that day, I’ve known that in no circumstances should I stand in front of images]. This auto-interdiction recalls Judaism’s interdiction on the worship of (graven) images. And whilst wholeheartedly approving the dissemination of images of Auschwitz and by extension of the Shoah for pedagogical purposes, on a personal level she simply wishes that she could bear to behold images like anyone else: ‘J’aimerais cent fois mieux supporter les images comme tout de monde, mais voilà, je ne peux pas. Désolée’ (p. 86) [I’d a hundred times prefer to be able to bear images like everyone else, but there you go, I can’t. Terribly sorry]. This defensively distanced prose reveals a deep-rooted phobia born of the Shoah and enduring into the present of writing: an irreparable wound sustained by a second-generation child. The impression of permanent disablement is reinforced by the following: ‘De temps en temps, une image échappe à ma vigilance et me saute dessus. Je crie. Je ne peux pas m’en empêcher. C’est à vie’ (p. 87) [From time to time, an image escapes my vigilance and jumps on me. I scream. I can’t help it. It’ll always be like this]. Later on, in inverted counterpart to the interdiction on images, she asserts the need to do to ideas what one would normally do to images, viz. ‘dévisager’ (stare at, look hard at) them; for ‘[u]ne seule idée, ça tue. Hitler mit en œuvre une seule idée’ (p. 90) [A single idea kills. Hitler implemented a single idea]. Such emphasis on relentless scrutiny of all ideas as opposed to images is one facet of Clément’s intellection in Cherche-Midi. Another is her impeachment of

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

109

philosophy and its ethical bankruptcy during the Judaeocide. That impeachment operates through another of the three distinguishing features of Clément’s approach identified above: the figure of irony. The craven silence of philosophers faced with that Judaeocide is conveyed in archly satirical terms: Qu’avait fait la philosophie pendant la catastrophe? Silence dans les rangs. Répondez, nom de nom! Nous étions occupés, voyez-vous. Nous signâmes des pièces d’identité certifiant que nous n’étions pas juifs. Si nous avons des remords? Non, pourquoi? (p. 91) [What had philosophy done during the catastrophe? Silence in the ranks. Answer, hell! We were occupied, you see. We signed identity papers certifying that we weren’t Jewish. Do we feel remorse? No, why would we?]

The emphasis on the silence of French elites is reprised on the following two pages, which evoke the Paris police’s ministerially authorized massacre of Algerians in 1961 (pp. 91–92). Clément’s recollection of two distinct yet not unrelated forms of French state violence, the first against Jews from 1940 to 1944 and the second against Algerians in 1961, recalls Michael Rothberg’s paralleling of the two in his recent work on what he calls ‘multidirectional memory’, whose ‘archive [...] is irreducibly transversal; it cuts across genres, national contexts, periods, and cultural traditions’.66 It is indeed significant that these massacres took place under the aegis of Maurice Papon. Although convicted in 1998 for the deportation of over 1,600 Jews during WWII when he was secretary general for police of the Prefecture of Bordeaux, in 1961 Papon still enjoyed high rank within de Gaulle’s new Fifth Republic as prefect of police for Paris. In complement to this, it is worth comparing the very last two paragraphs of the text, which in their summum play to acid effect on the words of the title (p. 111). Critically distanced word play, irony, and intellection decisively set Clément’s Cherche-Midi apart from the normative template for Jewish female-authored texts in French inscribing second-generation trauma and identity. The remainder of this chapter will examine two other textual inroads into that mainstream model of solemnity. The ethics and aesthetics of solemnity are formidably challenged by Ania Francos’s Sauve-toi, Lola! (1983),67 another autofictional text written by a second-generation narrator who, like Clément, treats tragedy transgressively. Set in 1982, Sauve-toi, Lola! is a largely first-person narrative focalized upon Lola, a Jewish lawyer in her early forties who survived Vichy as an ‘enfant caché’ (p. 218) but lost her father to the Shoah (p. 219), spent some time in a home for the children of deportees (p. 250), and is now battling breast cancer. My reference to a ‘largely’ first-person narrative acknowledges the not infrequent interpolations by a different narrative voice apostrophizing Lola, which could constitute Lola’s self-address or else an imagined, hyper-critical external commentary on herself. Far from the sobriety one might expect from her doubly dark subject matter (the Shoah and cancer), Francos’s style is lively, colourful, and humorous, steadfastly eschewing any hint of self-pity. It is also richly textured, blending an often familiar register of French with lexis from other languages (Arabic, English, German, Spanish and Yiddish), and this heteroglossia reinforces the sense of a startling verve and energy in a woman facing possibly imminent death. Sauve-toi, Lola! focuses largely on Lola’s struggle against

110

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

breast cancer, but her identity as a Jewish second-generation ‘victim’ is inscribed in isomorphic relationship with this illness. This autofictional novel certainly draws heavily on the author’s own experience, for Francos herself lost her father in the Shoah and was eventually to die from breast cancer. And like her eponymous heroine Lola, Francos had also associated her cancer with persecution of Jews: Grand reporter et romancière militante, Ania Francos présente à 40 ans une petite boule dans le sein gauche, là où sa ‘mère avait cousu l’étoile jaune’. Ce cancer du sein est d’emblée grave mais va évoluer assez lentement, lui laissant des phases de répit entre des périodes de traitements, de douleurs dues à des métastases osseuses, de métastases cérébrales. Cette tumeur le renvoie à son passé (son père journaliste juif polonais mort à Auschwitz), elle culpabilise et la rattache à ses difficultés personnelles; un amant qui l’a plaquée en lui laissant un fils comme elle le souhaitait, mais qu’elle regrette et cherche à revoir, une psychanalyse qui a commencé avec une promesse de cancer.68 [A prominent reporter and a militant novelist, Ania Francos presented at the age of 40 with a small lump in her left breast, where her ‘mother had sewn the yellow star’. This breast cancer was serious from the outset but was to develop fairly slowly, leaving her periods of respite between periods of treatment, of pain due to bone metastases, of brain metastases. This tumour took her back to her past (her Polish Jewish journalist father who died in Auschwitz), she felt guilty and linked it to personal problems: a lover who dumped her, leaving her a son as she had wanted, but whom she missed and tried to see again, a psychoanalysis that started with a promise of cancer.]

Faced with her niece’s relapse, Lola’s aunt Rivka, a survivor of the camps, summons Lola into a sense of the sacred duty to live: ‘Elle me répète régulièrement, la survivante: “Vivre est un devoir sacré. Comporte-toi comme moi à Birkenau. Distoi: c’est un film que je vois, un livre que je lis.” ’ (p. 8, my emphasis) [As a survivor she regularly repeats to me: ‘Living is a sacred duty. Do as I did in Birkenau. Tell yourself: this is a film I’m watching, a book I’m reading’]. This adumbrates Francos’s later quotation from Robert Antelme, a non-Jewish Holocaust survivor and author of the celebrated L’Espèce humaine: ‘Vivre est devenu une tâche sainte...’ (p. 327) [Living has become a holy task].69 It is significant that the aunt’s proposed means of survival includes narrativization and aesthetic distance, or at least the imposing of an aesthetic pattern upon brute, random reality. This proposed means generates a number of ethical concerns in Lola’s case, as the following analysis will attempt to elucidate. The analogy between the two forms of danger to life — the Nazi camps and breast cancer (the latter a highly gendered topos, breast cancer being overwhelmingly associated with women) — is reprised by France, a friend and eventual victim to cancer, whose similar exhortation to writing, in her case to testimonial writing, is recalled by Lola (p. 8). The analogy is again reprised by Lola herself when, just before admission to hospital, she conjures up images of Auschwitz to help her face her own death-threat: [...] pour m’obliger à franchir cette grande porte de fer-blanc qui mène de l’autre côté de la vie, je me contais à nouveau la légende: un SS se tient derrière moi, de sa mitraillette il me pousse [...].

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

111

Puis, respirant profondément, je me murmurai en yiddish [...] je me dis: ‘Lolkelèm, mon petit agneau, ne krekhtzes pas. Tant qu’on n’est pas à la porte de la chambre à gaz, il y a de l’espoir.’ Une fois de plus, j’utilisais la bien vieille ruse de: ‘Rien de pire que Hitler ne peut m’arriver.’ (p. 19) [[...] to force myself to pass through the big tinplate door that leads to the other side of life, I’d tell myself the legend again: an SS officer stands behind me, pushing me with his submachine gun [...]. Then, breathing deeply, I murmured to myself in Yiddish [...] I told myself, ‘Lolkelèm, my little lamb, don’t krekhtzes. As long as you’re not at the door of the gas chamber, there’s hope.’ Once more, I was using the good old trick of ‘Nothing worse than Hitler can happen to me’.]

Lola also derives strength from comparing her chances of survival within a dedi­ cated cancer unit to those of deportees to Auschwitz: ‘— De chaque convoi pour Auschwitz, une personne sur mille est revenue. Ici, j’ai plus de chances...’ (p. 71) [From each convoy for Auschwitz, one person in a thousand returned. Here, I stand more of a chance...]. Striking in these examples is the transformation of atrocity into a psychological weapon against subsequent ordeals, on the basis that no ordeal can be as bad as the Shoah, and so that, since the Shoah, one is always relatively strong. This seems to contradict evidence of the Shoah as psychologically noxious to the second generation who identify with its victims. Much later on, however, there is an interesting twist on this second-generation syndrome: whilst identification with de­portees to the death camps is on one level pathological, the fact that the identification is with those who survived implies a rather more healthy dynamic (p. 219). Despite these empowering identifications, some readers may feel that Francos also instrumentalizes or even exploits the Shoah in order to render more poignant still her tale of breast cancer. A somewhat cruder argument would be that she uses all means available to self-dramatize. What is the textual material in question? First, a direct parallel is drawn between her tumour and her persecuted identity as a Jew, represented metonymically by the yellow star imposed during WWII by Vichy: ‘Je me caressai le sein gauche, je fis rouler la bosse et je me dis qu’elle se trouvait justement là où ma mère trente-sept ans plus tôt avait cousu l’étoile jaune’ (p. 48) [I caressed my left breast, I rolled the lump and told myself that it was located exactly where thirty-seven years earlier my mother had sewn the yellow star]. Similarly, the two discrete ills are yoked in response to her friend Simon who, referring to her Jewish father’s contribution to the International Brigades in 1930s Spain, suddenly announces that one day he will write a book about her entitled Et pendant ce temps que faisaient les Juives nos sœurs (p. 40) [And Meanwhile What Were our Jewish Sisters Doing]. Her answer to that titular question, ‘Elles se fabriquaient connement un cancer’ (p. 40) [The stupid cows were busy getting cancer], seems to exhibit gendered stereotypicality: a corporeal internalization of aggression by Jewish women as opposed to Jewish men (p. 40), a destructive in-turning of evil as opposed to Jewish men’s combating of external evil. Further, Shoah-connoted lexis is relentlessly deployed to chart the creep of her illness and its collateral depredations (p. 99). Her medically striated body is homologized with the topography of the

112

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

camps: the cancer nurses ‘marquèrent à l’encre indélébile des tracés en forme de clôture de barbelés autour du champ de l’irradiation. Mon ventre ressemblait à un petit camp’ (p. 99) [marked with indelible ink lines in the shape of a barbed wire fence around a radiation field. My stomach looked like a little camp]. It is also worth noting the not-infrequent personification of cancer and its figurative equation with the SS (see, for example, pp. 238 and 295). In addition to this arguably self-dramatizing conf lation of Nazi-inf licted suffering with post-war personal suffering, she suggests a very particular, and highly problematic, variant of survivor’s syndrome (and as we have seen, survivor’s syndrome was highly transmissible to the survivors’ children) — an aprioristic and systematic disculpation from all guilt: ‘Depuis que j’avais un cancer, je me sentais un peu moins coupable. Le cancer, comme Auschwitz, ça innocentait à jamais? Trop facile. Mais en ce jour, j’y croyais’ (p. 96) [Since having cancer, I felt a bit less guilty. Did cancer, like Auschwitz, prove you innocent for always? That’s too easy. But that day, I believed it]. In this connection, it is worth noting that when her half-sister Noémie starts to say what she would do in Lola’s place as a cancer patient, Lola shouts ‘— Mais tu n’es pas à ma place! [...] Merde! C’est déjà pas si drôle d’en être arrivée là, si en plus je ne peux pas tenir le premier rôle! C’est comme les goyim qui veulent devenir juifs’ (p. 22) [But you’re not in my position! [...] Shit! It’s hard enough to have got to this, without finding that I can’t even keep the star role! It’s like goys who want to become Jews]. Again, the question arises as to whether this constitutes distasteful instrumentalization of Jewish misfortune. Alternatively, it could be construed as an honest, even poignant jealousness regarding suffering that non-sufferers cannot understand and upon which they should not pronounce. Nonetheless, Francos’s continuous conf lation of cancer and the Shoah may strike some readers as a rather objectionable category error which depoliticizes the particular evil that is Judaeocidal anti-Semitism, presenting it by analogy as an illness over which human beings can exercise no control. So, does Francos’s autofictional novel expose a cynical willingness to capitalize upon second-generation victimhood in order to secure even more sympathy and interest from the reader, and thus more selling power, than would apply with a ‘mere’ breast-cancer narrative? Or does all this point to a psychopathology stemming from Lola’s position as a second-generation child in genuine (if understated) mourning for her murdered Jewish father? There is clear evidence of severe childhood trauma arising from her father’s death in the Shoah, for she had made a suicide attempt at the age of seven and thereafter had repeated the attempt at five-year intervals. In evoking the first attempt, she expresses a close sensory link to her father (his smell), along with a post-reanimation fantasy of his still being alive: [...] recroquevillée dans une penderie contre un costume de tweed qui portait encore l’odeur de mon père, j’avais ingurgité un tube d’Equanil mélangé à un litre de vodka. A mon réveil à l’hosto, j’avais murmuré à ma mère qu’elle n’était qu’une traînée, que papa, il était vivant, amnésique quelque part en Russie, qu’il reviendrait, me retrouverait, m’emmènerait sans un mot, sans un regard pour elle. Charmante petite fille! Déjà! Ensuite, régulièrement, tous les cinq ans, je remettais ça, j’avalais ma dose et je me retrouvais en réanimation [...] (p. 143)

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

113

[[...] huddled up in a wardrobe against a tweed suit that still bore my father’s smell, I’d swallowed a tube of Equaril mixed with a litre of vodka. When I woke up in hospital, I’d muttered to my mother that she was nothing but a slut, that dad was alive, had lost his memory somewhere in Russia, that he’d come back, find me, take me away without a single word or glance for her. What a charming little girl, already! After this, regularly, every five years, I’d do the same thing, I’d swallow my dose and find myself in intensive care.]

Lasting cathexis onto this father even in adulthood is evinced in the remark that only one man had ever even temporarily effaced memory of him (p. 38). And of crucial import is the construction of her cancer as, at root, a somatization of inner distress linked to the relationship with her father: D’où mon compagnonnage avec ce cher Adolphe Tsoulovski qui, à force de vouloir que je répète hagardement: ‘J’ me souviens d’ rien... J’avais trois ans quand la Gestapo est venue LE chercher... Vous croyez que j’ai réellement commis l’inceste avec mon ppâppâ?’, avait transformé une bonne et banale petite hystérie en solide tumeur... (p. 143) [Hence my visits to that dear Adolphe Tsoulovski who, through his will to get me to repeat frantically ‘Don’t remember anything... I was three years old when the Gestapo came to get HIM... Do you think I really committed incest with my ddaadd?’, had transformed a nice bit of ordinary hysteria into a solid tumour...]

The source of this construction is highly ambiguous: is it the analyst Tsoulovski’s or her own? Later on, another link is made between her inability to mourn her father properly and her cancer, their contiguity suggesting the possibility of their mutual substitution one by the other. But still the agent of this link is elusive, due to the anonymity of the narrative voice: C’est pas le cancer qui aura votre peau, ma pauvre Lola, c’est ce livre de merde que vous avez mégalomaniaquement décidé d’écrire afin que, de votre existence, il ne reste pas seulement trace dans un livre du Pr Samuel Tobman ou le dossier d’un cancéroloque: ‘Le cas Lola F..., cancer de la petite fille juive qui ne peut faire le deuil de son papa’, ou ‘Lola F... et le gaz Zyklon B’. (pp. 206–07; author’s emphasis) [It’s not the cancer that will kill you, my poor Lola, it’s this shitty book that you megalomaniacally decided to write so that traces of your existence shouldn’t be left only in a book by Prof. Samuel Tobman or in an oncologist’s file: ‘The Lola F. case, the cancer of a little Jewish girl who can’t get over her dad’s death’, or ‘Lola F. and the Zyklon B gas’.]

Another striking linkage implicit in this paragraph and concretized only two paragraphs on is that between writing, production and death: ‘En plus, vous vous êtes donné un nouveau moyen de souffrir: écrire, produire ou périr. Ecrire, produire et périr?’ (p. 207; author’s emphasis) [What’s more, you’ve given yourself a new way to suffer: writing, producing, or perishing. Writing, producing and perishing?]. Initially writing and production are placed in opposition to death via use of the conjunction ‘ou’, but subsequently, via use of the differentiated conjunction ‘et’, death is posited either as the logical outcome of writing and production, or else as immune to their temporary psychological benefits. Other ref lections on writing include comments

114

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

which appear to denigrate both her literary abilities and her motives for writing, suggesting just that exploitation of cancer which I have raised as an unavoidable ethical stake in exegesis of this novel: ‘Entre deux malaises, deux angoisses, deux testaments, vous vous projetiez écrivaine ou grand reporter comme Pauline. Vous n’auriez eu un cancer que par voyeurisme’ (p. 327; author’s emphasis) [In between two bouts of discomfort, two bouts of anxiety, two wills, you planned to become a writer or a great reporter like Pauline. Perhaps you developed cancer through voyeurism alone]. Here the narrator confronts head-on the charge of unseemly prurience. That charge could in itself derive from a perennial guilt-complex rather than from genuine self-knowledge, or, alternatively, it could form a caricature of what her paranoia leads her to believe others may think — both hypotheses being strengthened by the outlandishness of the surmise. Earlier on in the narrative, Lola had clearly implied that her (Lacanian) psychoanalyst had succeeded in setting loose her death drive and in nurturing an obsession with victims of the gas chambers. Her exclamatory sentence suggests an erotic kick on his part deriving from this manipulation: Ce cher Tsoulovski, ce cher Adolphe, lacanien du Quatrième Groupe, qui avait si merveilleusement libéré en moi la pulsion de mort et m’avait fixée à jamais sur ces corps nus, emmêlés les uns aux autres dans cette chambre à gaz. Very erotic, madame Friedländer, cette partouze familiale au Zyklon B. (p. 237) [That dear Tsoulovski, that dear Adolphe, a Lacanian of the Fourth Group, who had so brilliantly liberated the death drive in me and fixated me forever on naked bodies jostling together in that gas chamber. Very erotic, Mrs Friedländer, that Zyklon B. family orgy.]

The satire descends into amusing burlesque, sending up the caricaturally grasping Lacanian analyst’s emphasis on language and the chain of signifiers in a blackly humorous and increasingly delirious network of words: ‘Lui abandonnant trois cent balles en remerciement de ses déclarations bibliques, je m’étais enfuie pendant qu’il répétait: “Méta. Méta. Métaphore. Métastase. Mise en scène. Mise en corps. Mise en bière” ’ (p. 238) [Handing over three hundred francs to him in thanks for his biblical statements, I’d run off while he repeated ‘Meta. Meta. Metaphor. Metastasis. Mise en scene. Mise en body. Mise en coffin’]. But black humour is also traded between cancer patient and oncologist, the latter being a figure the narrative establishes as morally exemplary and a bulwark against despair: Alors je lui racontai en Yiddish l’histoire de Yenkle qui rencontre Moshe et lui demande: ‘Nou? Qu’est-ce qu’il en a dit le Doktor? — Le Doktor, il en a dit que j’en avais le Kannser. — Aï! Aï! Aï! répond joyeusement Yenkle, Kannser! Shmannser! Du moment qu’on en a la santé!’ (p. 71) [So I told him in Yiddish the story about Yenkle who meets Moshe and asks him ‘Nou? What did the Doctor say about it?’ ‘The Doctor, he said I got cancer.’ ‘Aï! Aï! Aï!’ replied Yenkle merrily, ‘Cancer Schmancer! As long as you’ve got your health!’]

Indeed, towards the end of the novel, the trope of Jewish humour as aiding survival comes as close to literalization as is possible: [...] je lui [à Samuel, le grand cancérologue] racontais chaque fois une nouvelle blague juive, la plus bête, la plus sinistre, une qui le faisait pourtant rire aux

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

115

larmes et l’aidait peut-être à supporter l’horreur de cette longue succession de malades en danger de mort [...] Depuis que j’étais malade, je les collectionnais. On me téléphonait du monde entier pour m’en raconter, des vieilles, des archiconnues mais inédites pour moi. Et ça m’aidait à survivre. (pp. 358–59) [[...] each time I told him a new Jewish joke, the silliest, the most sinister, one that nonetheless made him laugh till he cried and maybe helped him to bear the horror of that long succession of invalids threatened with death [...] I’d been collecting them since I’d been ill. People would phone me from all around the world to tell me them, old ones, really well-known ones but new for me. And that helped me to survive.]

Ultimately, humour is the only weapon left to Lola, who some readers will view as profiting from her double victimization. Other readers will laud her courage in fighting two consecutive and intimately linked forms of suffering. Between these two diametrically opposed responses, one element forms common ground: the recognition that Francos dares intermittently to treat two hyper-sombre topoi (second-generation trauma and breast cancer) in the register of humour. It is, however, imperative to recognize that when humour is used, it usually stands in a complex relationship with tragedy; and that sometimes what appears to be humour is a form of stylized levity which can bespeak unavowable despair. Patricia Finaly’s Le Gai Ghetto (1970)70 also challenges the ethics of solemnity which understandably tend to prevail in first- and second-generation writing. However, her iconoclasm is far more provocative than either Clément’s or Francos’s. Le Gai Ghetto recounts the first twenty or so years of its homodiegetic narrator’s life, from her birth to a single Jewish woman (her father having been deported) in Germany, to her childhood and adolescence in France, including a post-war spell in Israel. This path mirrors what is said on the dust jacket of the author Finaly’s own life trajectory, promoting the inference that the text is autobiographical or at the very least autofictional. Of roughly equal length, Le Gai Ghetto’s two parts treat of WWII and of the post-war period, and anti-Semitism during the former is certainly evidenced. Complaining that her foster family during the war use her as slave labour, she is told she is part of the accursed race (p. 65); and at the convent where she stays brief ly, a nun tells her that the people of Israel killed Jesus Christ (p. 74). Yet the book contains proportionately more satire of Jewry itself, including the children of Jewish deportees; and as one of those children, one of Finaly’s chief targets is in fact her younger self. Cutting through the robust ridicule and often barbed comedy of the surface text, a clinical reading would posit a sub-text of denial, defence mechanisms, negative identity-formation, psychic numbing, and even rage responses. And it is true that Finaly’s self-presentation as basely materialist, indeed corruptly venial, could be viewed as self-abjection deriving from unacknowledged trauma. The central question raised by Le Gai Ghetto is: does the anti-social behaviour and discourse of the child and adolescent along with her ironic treatment of Jews and Jewish persecution indicate second-generation symptomatology? Or does such a clinical diagnosis crassly misconstrue legitimate existential and behavioural choices? Revolt may be a healthy choice, after all, and as previously commented, Jewish humour has long been emblematic of humour as

116

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

a psychological survival mechanism. Any answers will be tentative, and must be preceded by attention to the (con)textual specificities of Finaly’s satire, irony and humour. Of vital importance is the admission in the very first paragraph that the author lives in a constant state of anxiety (p. 11), which may lead us to see her ensuing, sometimes vitriolic humour as a self-protective psychic carapace. If we consider Finaly’s stance as indicative of psychic numbing, then her exploitation of victim status becomes less objectionable; but exploitation it certainly is: ‘je voulais faire bonne impression en disant que j’avais beaucoup souffert pendant la guerre. Le tableau aurait été complet si j’étais arrivée à avoir l’œil humide mais je n’avais pas (à l’époque) la larme facile. Manque de bol toujours!’ (p. 99) [I wanted to make a good impression by saying that I’d suffered a lot during the war. The picture would have been complete if I’d managed to have moist eyes but I couldn’t (at the time) just turn on the waterworks. I’ve always had rotten luck!]. Further, she relays in reported speech her emotionally manipulative spiel to the authorities, calculated to prompt their pity and indulgence: Ma pauvre et brave mère avait échappé à la ‘sauvage tuerie’ qui avait déferlé sur l’Europe et vivait dans une petite piaule près du Faubourg-Montmartre où elle cousait des manteaux de fourrure pour d’autres coreligionnaires qui avaient sauvé leur peau avec celle de leur petit astrakan. J’allais la voir tous les jeudis. On prenait, avec les copains qui avaient des rescapés dans leur entourage, le train sur la ligne des Sceaux. J’en profitais pour évaluer la cote ‘enfants de déportés’ (p. 99) [My poor brave mother had escaped the ‘savage slaughter’ which had swept through Europe and was living in a small rented room near the FaubourgMontmartre where she sewed fur coats for other Jews who’d saved their own skin along with their little astrakhan’s. I’d go and see her every Thursday. With friends who had survivors in their family circle, I’d take the train on the Sceaux line, taking advantage of this to evaluate the ‘deportees’ child’ share-price.]

Similarly, she appears to trivialize second-generation trauma, although the butt of her satire may equally be Jewish charity dispensers: Le titre ‘enfant de déportés’ était en sérieuse perte de vitesse. Les séquelles de la ‘tourmente’ qui me restaient oficiellement — officieusement j’avais la nostalgie de la vraie guerre — étaient celles que des bonnes femmes de la haute finance juive essayaient d’éponger. On les surnommait nos marraines de guerre. Je ne pouvais pas blairer la mienne. (p. 116) [The ‘child of deportees’ title was going seriously downhill. The after-effects of the ‘torment’ that I officially retained — unofficially I was nostalgic about the real war — were those that the do-gooder wives of Jewish high finance tried to mop up. They were nicknamed our war godmothers. I couldn’t stand mine.]

Exploitation of sensitive material is a risky strategy, of course, and certain readers will undoubtedly be offended by her metaphor of second-generation victimhood as a currency to be used for personal gain: Le taux des trois mots: ‘enfant de déportés’, bien qu’en baisse permettait encore quelques transactions. Imprégnée de la gravité de la partie de poker, je me

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

117

suis avancée vers l’estrade avec mon regard à-la-ghetto-de-Varsovie: — Voilà monsieur! Je suis seule dans la vie. L’essentiel de ma famille s’est vaporisée en fumée quelque part du côté de Dachau. (p. 174) [Although in decline, the rate of the three words ‘child of deportees’ still allowed a few more transactions. Imbued with the gravity of this game of poker, I approached the platform with my Warsaw-ghetto look: ‘Sir! I’m alone in life. Most of my family went up in smoke somewhere near Dachau.’]

Indeed, Finaly’s re-construction of her childhood self goes far beyond avoidance of sentimentality, by wilfully insisting on her ruthless materialism as a child. After a visit from an uncle who fails to provide the food she has requested, she tells the authorities ‘— S’il y a encore des gens qui se prétendent de ma famille et qui veulent me voir dites-leur que ça m’intéresse absolument pas’ (p. 42) [It there are any more folk who claim to be family and want to see me, tell them I’m absolutely not interested]. This image of base venality is reinforced by readiness to discard her Jewish identity in order not to have to share food: ‘Je veux bien être une “goy” si c’est la condition pour pas partager. Moi, je fais des affaires, j’échange... Je partage pas’ (p. 43) [I’m happy to be a ‘goy’ if that’s the condition for not sharing. I do business, I exchange things... I don’t share]. Thus the stereotypical image of the mean Jew with a good head for business and profit is ambiguously deployed. Is it complicit with anti-Semitic discourse, or a defiant parody thereof? Or, given the fact that the joke is on her, is it simply a manifestation of low self-esteem, also a common symptom of second-generation syndrome? The image is certainly mitigated by her self-righteous follow-up remark: ‘Finalement, j’étais quand même sympa puisque j’envoyais la moitié du colis à ma mere qui était internée dans un camp à Gaillac’ (p. 43) [When all’s said and done I was nice enough, since I’d send half my parcel to my mother who was interned in the Gaillac camp]. Yet there is further f lirtation with Jewish stereotypes in which some would see ridicule of, others endorsement of anti-Semitism. When she is told that Jews don’t take account of the Second Testament, she infers that ‘mes coreligionnaires avaient voulu économiser un peu de papelard pour ne pas faire les frais d’un gros bouquin’ (p. 161) [my fellow Jews had wanted to save a bit on paper so as not to have to fork out for a big book]. And when informed that a Zionist organization will pretend she’s a student to get a cut-price ticket for Israel, she opines that ‘décidément, les sionistes n’étaient pas juifs pour rien’ (p. 180) [Clearly, Zionists weren’t Jews for nothing]. Is Finaly’s recirculation of the grasping-Jew cliché an instance of ‘l’autodérision, si fréquente dans l’humour juif ’ [self-derision, so frequent in Jewish humour],71 or, rather, an instance of internalized anti-Semitism? Before answering this question, we need to know whether there is any counterbalancing of such injurious Jewish clichés. There are in fact several examples of less dubious, if still wry ‘Jewish’ humour in Le Gai Ghetto where the historical misfortunes of Jews are treated in comic mode without pejorative connotations. One example is the realization upon finally learning Hebrew that the prayers she had previously recited with mechanical incomprehension all consisted in pleas ‘au Bon Dieu de préserver son peuple de la malédiction des hommes. C’était vraiment pas la peine, si j’en juge par le résultat’ (pp. 15–16) [to the Good Lord to preserve

118

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

his people from the curse of men. It really wasn’t worth the effort, if you judge by the result]. Another is the remark apropos a gentile maid that ‘Je trouvais qu’elle n’avait pas le bol de ne pas être juive et de travailler tellement’ (p. 39) [It seemed to me she was unlucky not to be Jewish and still to be so hard-worked]. Later on, in reference to being told that God wrote down the name of those destined to die within the year, she comments ‘Je me dis aujourd’hui qu’il ne devait pas y avoir de pénurie de papier au ciel, pendant la guerre. Parce que la liste était quand même impressionnante’ (p. 39) [Today I think that there must have been no shortage of paper in heaven, during the war. Because the list was pretty impressive]. Revealingly, even the one instance of something approaching self-compassion uncompromised by irony or satirical humour is articulated in a low register suggesting gruff inurement to hardship: ‘Chaque fois que, dans ma vie, on a recensé des victimes, je faisais partie du troupeau. J’avais quatorze ans et pas un exemple contraire à me foutre sous la dent’ (p. 144) [Each time in my life that a list of victims has been drawn up, I’ve been part of the herd. I was fourteen and without a single damned example of the opposite]. Yet in counterpoint to this more neutral use of Jewish misfortune as source of humour is serious, indeed fairly vicious critique of Jewish snobbery and prejudice, with or without the sugar- (or saccharine-)coating of humour. At a Jewish home for children whose parents had disappeared during the war, class discrimination is seen to penalize working-class orphans. The children are supposedly classed by age, but ‘Nous, les petits juifs, c’était sans distinction, tous ensemble’ (p. 17) [We Jews of no account were all heaped together, no distinctions made]. The staff in the home actually address this economically disadvantaged category of children as ‘les petits juifs’: ‘Les petits juifs faites ça, les petits juifs faites ça, les petits juifs, vous savez bien que vous avez pas le droit’ (p. 17) [You Jews, you’re of no account, do this, do that, you know full well you’re not allowed to]. Even as a small child, she too is interpellated into such exclusionary discourse: when her mother visits, she shouts ‘Je ne veux pas dire bonjour à cette bohémienne’ (p. 31) [I don’t want to say hello to that tramp of a woman]. The intersection of marginalized class with marginalized ethnicity is shown to be highly fraught. It engenders at once a latent desire to participate in a robust Jewish community — the Zionist youth movement — and a resentment of the contingent privilege perceived in one of its members, a middle-class Jewish girl. One additional target of Finaly’s fire is the entire infrastructure of Jewish welfare aid in France. She conveys a sense of having been treated as a mere object both during the war by the Union Générale des Israélites de France and after the war by the organization to which it passed her on: the Œuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE). Both are Jewish organizations, but both are presented as dehumanizing: ‘j’étais devenue une valise à qui on demande pas son avis’ (p. 97) [I’d become a suitcase whose opinion isn’t wanted]. The official image of the OSE was of tolerance, as Jean Laloum has observed: ‘L’OSE [...] résolut de respecter toutes les sensibilités de la vie juive en organisant côte à côte des maisons de stricte observance et d’autres dans lesquelles régnait l’esprit le plus libéral’72 [The OSE [...] resolved to respect all sensibilities in Jewish life by organizing side by side some devout homes and

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

119

others which were entirely liberal]. A rather more damning perspective is furnished by Finaly. The ideological dogmatisms of the post-war Jewish community are suggested by the comic scene of interrogation to which the child is subjected by the OSE in 1945: ‘— Est-tu pour l’assimilation du peuple juif selon la théorie de Karl Marx ou pour le regroupement du people hébraïque selon les principes de Chaïm Weizmann?’ (p. 98) [‘Are you for the assimilation of the Jewish people according to Karl Marx’s theory, or for the reunification of the Hebrew people according to Chaïm Weizmann’s principles?’]. Her blackly humorous response, pragmatic given historic Jewish experiences, is ‘— Je suis pour celui qui n’est pas juif!’ (p. 98) [I’m for whoever isn’t Jewish!’]. Similarly, she sends up the alleged sectarianism of the Jewish community at the children’s home: when it is discovered that she has been reading Sartre, she is ‘obligée de faire la vaiselle collective pendant quinze jours pour que “ça m’apprenne à être existentialiste”!’ (p. 167) [forced to do everyone’s washing up for a fortnight — ‘that’ll teach me to be an existentialist’!]. Finally, any lectorial hope that residual Jewish solidarity might be discerned somewhere in this recalcitrant second-generation subject is scuppered by the fact that the new State of Israel, in which Jews worldwide invested deep hope, fares no better than French Jewry under Finaly’s discursive scalpel. Jaundiced reference to ‘la maffia sioniste, rue de Téhéran’ (p. 180) [the Zionist mafia, in the rue de Teheran] encodes the Israeli embassy of the time in damning terms. Israel itself is denigrated as a small and boring country — ‘Israël est un pays si petit qu’on le visite le matin et que le reste du temps on s’emmerde’ (p. 181) [Israel is such a small country that you visit it in one morning and are bored to death the rest of the time] — and its kibbutzim as economically primitive and exploitative (p. 182). Defiant to the end, Finaly closes her narrative with the hope that, ten years after the Liberation, now that the capital she can squeeze out of her victimhood status in everyday life is so much reduced, she will at least make money out of the book we have been reading (p. 186). The provocation on which Finaly ends her text may leave a sour taste in some readers’ mouths. As with Francos, although to a far greater degree, we may not unreasonably feel that Finaly has degraded the potential for readerly compassion and empathy. But it is equally possible to view Finaly’s systematically disrespectful treatment of the Shoah, of second-generation trauma and of Jewry as an autoplastic as opposed to an alloplastic adaptation which has allowed her to survive psychologically. In this she recalls the Rebecca of L’Homme rouge des Tuileries by Anissimov, an author otherwise at the antipodes of Finaly. Between Anissimov’s sacralization of pain and its desacralization by Finaly, the inscription of second-generation trauma covers a nuanced spectrum. That spectrum embraces the affective autism coupled with sensory overload of Rabinovitch and the more entre-deux cases of Clément’s ironic and Francos’s tragi-comic texts. Ultimately, that spectrum reveals only one certain truth: that just as second-generation trauma manifests itself in manifold ways, so its subjects survive such trauma through a plurality of psychological strategies, some of which at least may lie entirely beneath the level of consciousness. As with the firstgeneration authors of Chapter 1, all, however, rely fundamentally on language.

120

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

Notes to Chapter 2 1. Elie Wiesel, Entre deux soleils (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970), p. 174. 2. Ellen S. Fine, ‘Transmission of Memory: The post-Holocaust Generation in the Diaspora’, in Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory after Auschwitz, ed. by Efraim Sicher (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), pp. 185–200 (p. 186). 3. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 22. 4. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, L’Ecorce et le noyau (Paris: Flammarion, 1987; first published 1978). 5. Colin Davis, ‘Charlotte Delbo’s Ghosts’, in French Studies, 59, 1 ( January 2005), 9–15 (p. 9). 6. Abraham and Torok, p. 449. 7. Hirsch, p. 22. In this extract, Hirsch’s reference to the ‘gaping black hole of the unmentionable years’ derives from Nadine Fresco, ‘Remembering the Unknown’, International Review of Psychoanalysis, 11 (1984), 417–27 (p. 418). Fresco’s article had originally appeared in the Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse, 24 (1981), 205–20, under the title ‘La Diaspora des cendres’. 8. Thomas Nolden, ‘Myriam Anissimov’, in Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia, 2005 . 9. Mark Eilkan, ‘Le Sentiment “minoritaire” et identitaire dans la création romanesque de Myriam Anissimov’, Colloquium Helveticum: Cahiers suisses de littérature comparée, 22 (1995), 41–53 (p. 44). 10. Hirsch, p. 22. 11. Susan Robin Suleiman, ‘The 1.5 Generation: Thinking About Child Survivors and the Holocaust’, American Imago, 59, 3 (2002), 277–95 (p. 1). 12. Myriam Anissimov, Rue de nuit (Paris: Julliard, 1977). See Nardo Zalko, ‘Entretien avec Myriam Anissimov’, Amitiés France-Israël, March 1977, pp. 35–37. 13. Anna Whitehead, Trauma Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), p. 86. 14. Gilles Pudlowski, ‘Comment va Myriam?’, Nouvelles littéraires, 18–24 November 1982, p. 40. 15. Theodor Adorno’s claim that to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric is considered to be the foundational instance of this undermining: see his ‘Commitment’, in Theodor Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics, trans. by Francis McDonagh (London: Verso, 1977), pp. 177–95 (p. 188). He did later on modify this claim, recognizing that ‘perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems’. See Negative Dialectics, trans. by E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1966), p. 362. 16. Zalko, p. 35. 17. See especially H. Barocas and C. Barocas, ‘Wounds of the Fathers: The Next Generation of Holocaust Victims’, International Review of Psychoanalysis, 6 (1979), 331–40; and Robert M. Prince, ‘Second Generation Effects of Historical Trauma’, Psychoanalytic Review, 72, 1 (Spring 1985), 9–29. 18. Dori Laub, ‘Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening’, in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, ed. by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 57–74 (p. 67). 19. Caruth, p. 4. 20. Whitehead, p. 7. 21. Whitehead, p. 84. 22. Henke, p. xii. 23. Myriam Anissimov, L’Homme rouge des Tuileries (Paris: Julliard, 1979). 24. Myriam Anissimov, La Soie et les cendres (Paris: Payot, 1989). 25. Aaron Hass, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Second Generation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 131. 26. Roland Barthes coined this photographic term in La Chambre claire: note sur la photographie (Paris: Gallimard, 1980). It designates a chance detail (that is, not a feature deliberately included by the photographer in order to produce a particular reaction) in a photograph which pierces the viewer unexpectedly, on an affective and/or imaginative rather than an intellectual level. Importantly, the punctum is, if not quite outside language, then extremely difficult to encapsulate in words: ‘Ce que je peux nommer ne peut réellement me poindre’ (p. 84). [What I can name cannot really

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

121

prick me] (Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. by Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 1993), p. 51). 27. The ‘emotional resonance of clothes’ is a prominent feature too of The Clothes on their Backs (London: Virago, 2008) by Linda Grant, also a second-generation Jewish writer. See Jane Shilling’s review in The Times, 24 January 2008. 28. Marianne Hirsch, ‘Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory’, The Yale Journal of Criticism, 14, 1 (2001), 5–37 (p. 12). 29. Pierre Nora, ed., Les Lieux de mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–93). 30. Hirsch, Family Frames, p. 22. 31. Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 20 (author’s emphasis). 32. Landsberg, p. 2. 33. Myriam Anissimov, Dans la plus stricte intimité (Paris: Seuil, 1992). 34. Thomas Nolden, In Lieu of Memory, p. 144. 35. See Alain Finkielkraut, Le Juif imaginaire (Paris: Seuil, 1980), p. 13. 36. Alain Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew, trans. by Kevin O’Neill and David Suchoff (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), p. 7. 37. Finkielkraut, p. 23. 38. Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew, p. 15. 39. Anne Fuchs, Phantoms of War in Contemporary German Literature, Films and Discourse: The Politics of Memory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 49. 40. Henri Raczymow, ‘La Mémoire trouée’, Pardes, 3 (1986), 177–82. 41. Fresco, ‘La Diaspora des cendres’, p. 209. 42. See Fresco, ‘La Diaspora des cendres’, p. 206: ‘L’emprise, ce fut d’abord celle du silence. A la maison, on ne parlait jamais des années de la guerre. Silence de mort, en vérité — et la révélation était venue très tard, à l’adolescence’ [The first kind of emprise was that of silence. At home no one ever mentioned the war years. There was a deathly silence on the subject — and the revelation came very late, during adolescence] (Fresco, ‘Remembering the Unknown’, p. 418). It is noteworthy that even this tendency to silence proves subject to intergenerational transmission. As Sabine Kraenker comments, ‘[l]e silence entre la génération des parents et des enfants, le silence sur la guerre et ce qui a préexisté à la guerre sont des raisons qui peuvent amener à l’écriture les descendants d’adultes silencieux dont Karin Bernfeld est un bon exemple’ [[t]he silence between the generation of the parents and of the children, the silence about the war and what had existed before it are reasons which can lead the descendants of silent adults, of whom Karin Bernfeld is a good example, to writing] (Sabine Kraenker, ‘Des écrivains à l’identité hybride, représentants d’une littérature-monde d’aujourd’hui et de demain: Karin Bernfeld, Nina Bouraoui, Assia Djebar, Amin Malouf, Wajdi Mouawad’, Synergies Pays Riverains de la Baltique, 6 (2009), pp. 219–27). What Kraenker does not specify is that Bernfeld (whose Les Portes de l’espérance is examined in Chapters 3 and 4 below) is a third-generation Jew; it is this fact that suggests how the pledge to silence imposed on second-generation children can be transmitted to their own children, at two removes from the Shoah. 43. Myriam Anissimov, Sa Majesté la mort (Paris: Seuil, 1999). 44. Jean-Rémi Barland, ‘Les Témoins de la barbarie nazie’, Lire, September 1999, p. 67. 45. Nolden reports that ‘She initially took the name Anissimov because the producer of a record she was making pronounced the name Frydman as being too Jewish. She therefore picked a name at random from the telephone directory, and has used it ever since’. Nolden, ‘Myriam Anissimov’. 46. Nolden, In Lieu of Memory, p. 96. 47. It is worth noting the prominence of the ghost figure in the writings of Derrida, most notably in the very title of Spectres de Marx (Paris: Galilée 1993), but also informing the metaphorical economy of other works, such as Feu la cendre (Paris: Des Femmes, 1987), where the figure is explicitly invoked on p. 8 to represent a haunting concern with ashes: ‘Pendant près de dix ans, allées et venues de ce spectre, visites inopinées du revenant’ [For nearly ten years, this spectre’s comings and goings. Unforeseen visits of the ghost] ( Jacques Derrida, Cinders, trans. by Ned Lukacher (Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), p. 22).

122

Second Generation: The Transmission of Trauma

48. Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx, p. 15. 49. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. by Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), p. xix. 50. Derrida, Spectres de Marx, pp. 15–16. 51. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. xix. 52. Jacques Derrida, Poétique et politique du témoignage (Paris: L’Herne, 2005), pp. 45–46. 53. Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, trans. by Outi Pasanen, ed. by Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), p. 82. 54. In his Matière et mémoire (first published in 1896), the French philosopher Henri Bergson posited two types of memory: ‘habit memory’ and ‘pure memory’. ‘Habit memory’ is produced via the repetition of certain unref lecting, mechanical forms of behaviour which become part of the body’s performative repertoire. See Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. by N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991). 55. Nolden, In Lieu of Memory, p. 144. 56. Anne Rabinovitch, Les Étangs de Ville-d’Avray (Paris: Actes Sud, 1987). 57. Nolden, In Lieu of Memory, p. 209. 58. Catherine Clément, Cherche-Midi (Paris: Stock, 2000). 59. Clément’s father was Catholic, but it is important to note that traditional Jewish law deems Jewishness to pass through the mother. 60. Joseph Joffo, Un sac de billes (Paris: Édition spéciale, 1973). 61. Brodzki, p. 157. 62. Prince, p. 12. 63. An asthma attack is also the somatized reaction to discovery of what it means to be Jewish experienced by the young Irène Némirovsky. This occurs in her daughter Elisabeth Gille’s imagined memoirs of Némirovsky, Le Mirador (Paris: Presses de la Renaissance, 1992), treated in Chapter 3 below. 64. Hirsch and Spitzer, p. 151. 65. Simon Critchley, ‘Introduction’, in The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, ed. by Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 1–32 (p. 23). 66. Rothberg, p. 18. 67. Ania Francos, Sauve-toi, Lola! (Paris: Barrault, 1983). 68. Bernard Hœrni, 16 May 2002 . 69. Robert Antelme, L’Espèce humaine (Paris: Gallimard, 2004; first published in 1949), p. 48. 70. Patricia Finaly, Le Gai Ghetto (Paris: Gallimard, 1970). 71. Joseph Klatzmann, L’Humour juif (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1998), p. 5. 72. Laloum, p. 256.

CHAPTER 3

v

Nation/Deracination: Gendered Experiences of Diaspora and the French Republic The first part of this chapter examines a representative sample of Jewish femaleauthored writings which retrace, often in autobiographical or autofictional mode, the diasporic, largely pre-1945 trajectories of Ashkenazic women. The pattern of migration in these texts is typically from Central and Eastern European nations to France, but there are variations, and France is not always the endpoint. Notably, half of the texts considered — three out of six — have titles which connote departure, travel, or threshold: Il faut toujours quitter la Pologne, La Passagère sans étoile, Les Portes de l’espérance. The mechanisms of migration are thus foregrounded from the very outset by one verb of movement (quitter: to leave), one noun indicating movement (passagère: passenger), and one noun indicating movement through (portes: gates).1 Particular attention will be paid to the prominent trope of irony. Pre-WWII Ashkenazic Jews often came to France as the first country of exile, attracted by its post-Revolutionary status as a country of liberty and refuge, but frequently ended up as victims of Vichy France’s active connivance in the Final Solution. The second part of this chapter also examines a representative sample of diasporic writings, but this time authored by Sephardic women in the post-WWII period. It foregrounds the ‘welcome’, or lack thereof, reserved for new inf luxes to France of Sephardic Jews who were either expelled from Egypt (1956/57), more or less forcibly ‘repatriated’ as pieds-noirs from Algeria (1962), or were migrating to France from home countries in which they had become unwelcome after independence from French protectorate status (Tunisia in 1955, Morocco in 1956). This second part of Chapter 3 identifies and analyses the psycho-political tropes of transculturation, dislocation, displacement, and space as a gendered category. It also ref lects on the tensions between these women’s national identity as French citizens and their ethnic identity as Sephardim, a state of cultural diglossia which in the French context specifically is mirrored in the dichotomies of républicanisme [republicanism] or universalisme [universalism] versus communautarisme [communitarianism/multiculturalism] or particularisme [particularism]. As in section one, irony is a prominent trope, but the irony here differs from that of the Ashkenazic experience. For whilst the main reason for the Sephardic exile in the post-war period was Arab hostility to Jews

124

Nation/Deracination

in the home country, in France Arabs and Sephardic Jews were often conf lated, and indeed shared more common cultural ground with each other than with their Western European ‘hosts’. This common cultural ground could perhaps be theorized as cultural exchange (a concept articulated as early as 1905 by Aby Warburg),2 although with the caveat that exchange does not necessarily imply cordiality. Apropos theorization, two points should be borne in mind. First, whether explicitly or implicitly, both parts of this chapter will be informed (although not led) by two discrete theoretical predicates. One is ‘the ways in which gender combines with race, class, sexuality, economic power and cultural capital in determining diasporic subjectivity’.3 The other, less systematically applicable, is the precept that exile, normatively considered a traumatic and melancholic experience, does in fact have a positive potentiality. This precept is effectively summarized by Alexander Stephan: [...] Anna Seghers is among the small band of refugees who pointed out that exile can also have positive aspects — for example by freeing women from the narrow confines of middle-class homes — a suggestion that follows the same lines as cultural models discussing multidirectional exchanges, cross fertilization (in Greek the scattering of seed is dia-speirein, from which ‘diaspora’ derives), and the ‘odyssey’ as a form of ‘territorial conquest or “exploration” ’ as well as Edward Saïd’s remarks about ‘the pleasures of exile,’ which include ‘originality of vision,’ ‘awareness of simultaneous dimensions’ and the dismantling of ‘orthodox judgement.’ [...] Still others, like René Schickele, reveal ‘double (and even plural) identifications’ which can be seen to challenge ‘the monologic exclusivity on which dominant versions of national identity and collective belongings are based’ [...]4

The second point about theorization that the reader should bear in mind is already adumbrated by my parenthetical ‘although not led’, which reiterates a resistance to the fetishization of theory already f lagged in my Introduction. That Introduction emphasized that this book does not prioritize theory to shape arguments which are merely serviced by the primary texts; rather, priority is given to exposition and interrogation of the primary texts on their own terms, with recourse to theory only when theory is genuinely enlightening. That qualified recourse especially applies to the present chapter, which deals inter alia with the concepts of hybridity, ambivalence and memory. Hybridity is a much-discussed cultural phenomenon, but rather than in the specifically postcolonial sense in which it is now commonly understood, the present chapter interprets it at a degree-zero level to mean the combination of multiple, often dissonant elements of identity from different cultures. Thus, while Chapter 3 does refer where appropriate to one of the founding fathers of hybridity studies, Homi Bhabha, it does not aim to map out the vast existing critical literature on hybridity. For readers requiring an introduction to this field, a compendious starting point is Peter Burke’s Cultural Hybridity (2009).5 Equally, with respect to theorization of memory and its ambivalence, I refer where appropriate (as previously in Chapter 1) to Tzvetan Todorov, not because he is the most prominent theoretician of memory (far from it), but because he is one of the most illuminating for our particular primary texts. Again, I do not attempt to give any comprehensive overview of the equally vast critical literature on memory.

Nation/Deracination

125

An excellent point of entry here is Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz’s edited collection, Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates (2010).6 Reverting to the methodology of Chapter 1, analysis in Chapter 3 will proceed chronologically, by publication date of the texts in question. This is because the historical timeline of exile and its reverberations down the decades after physical departure from the country of origin may well foster particular writerly inf lections according to the historical moment in which the text is written — a point which will become especially fulgent in the case of Karine Tuil’s Douce France (2007).7 Ashkenazic Exiles Based on the life of the author’s parents, Reine Silbert’s novel Il faut toujours quitter la Pologne8 (1980) provides an exemplary paradigm of Ashkenazic exile. This thirdperson narrative charts the multiple displacements during the 1930s of Hannah, born in 1918, from her home country of Poland. Her border crossing first takes her through Berlin and thence to Paris, where she marries childhood friend Yankel. When WWII breaks out and Yankel is killed fighting for France, Hannah is driven out of the ‘host’ country as the Polish situation of Jewish persecution begins to reproduce itself in France and the wearing of the yellow star becomes obligatory. Displacement next occurs from France to Spain, then to England via Portugal, and finally to America. Silbert’s elucidation of her title — ‘je pense qu’il faut toujours quitter la Pologne, quitter père et mère, son nid, même s’il est chaud, l’enfance pour l’âge adulte, aller vers ce qu’on croit être la liberté’9 [I think you always have to leave Poland, leave your father and mother, your nest, even if it’s warm, childhood for adulthood, and go towards what you think is freedom] — posits Poland as a metaphor for the familiar, for a home and for roots which must inevitably be left behind one day in the name of adult freedom. Hannah’s initial self-exile from Poland had, however, hardly been an act of freedom, being based largely on a virulent anti-Semitism already driving countless other Polish Jews out of their erstwhile home. Silbert’s additional comment also merits attention: ‘je ne suis pas tout à fait sûre d’avoir quitté la Pologne’ (p. 133) [I’m not entirely sure I’ve left Poland]. In fact, Silbert had been born in France in 1942. Her comments thus imply strong identification with her exiled Polish parents, along with an intergenerational transmission of the sense of (lost) homeland, belonging, and estrangement. Silbert’s deterritorialized sense of origins finds a refracted representation in her character Hannah, as the latter faces departure from her home country Poland and home town Radom: ‘voilà qu’elle quittait la Pologne. Et pour toujours, sûrement! [...] Elle sanglota, éperdue, sur elle, sur sa famille. Sur Radom, condamnée à mort’ (p. 100) [so there she was, leaving Poland. And for always, surely! [...] She sobbed, distraught, for herself and her family. For Radom, condemned to death]. In darkly prophetic tones, the decimation of Polish Jews both within and without Poland is foreshadowed in the sinister image of the giant trap awaiting them (p. 101). Ambivalence marks Hannah’s arrival in Paris, where she feels she has arrived back home and come full circle. This impression derives from the almost overwhelming greeting extended by other Polish immigrants, (stereotypically) Jewish tailors who

126

Nation/Deracination

now form a strong Yiddish-speaking community in Paris: Comme ils remontaient l’escalier, bras dessus bras dessous, sur chaque palier ou presque, Yankel et Hannah furent interpellés par des hommes dont certains portaient encore un centimètre autour du cou et par des femmes en tablier, très volubiles. [...] Et parmi les congratulations et les effusions, les souhaits et les salutations en yiddish, parmi ces visages déjà familiers et ces gens dont les mains s’agitaient aussi vite que les phrases, Hannah eut un instant l’illusion de n’avoir parcouru tout ce chemin que pour tourner en rond et revenir à Radom. (p. 167) [As they went upstairs again arm in arm, on each landing or as good as Yankel and Hannah were hailed by men, some still wearing a tape measure around their neck, and by women in aprons, very voluble. [...] And among the congratulations and outpourings, the good wishes and the greetings in Yiddish, among those already familiar faces and those peoples whose hands moved about as fast as their sentences, for a moment Hannah felt as if she had travelled all this way only to go round in circles and end up back in Radom.]

The use of ‘tourner en rond’ connotes a form of frustration at having failed to find freedom from her small-town roots which is consolidated in the next paragraph: ‘Oui, Hannah était de retour, chez elle, là où était sa véritable place. Parmi les siens’ (p. 168) [Yes, Hannah was back, back home, in her proper place. Amongst her own]. Whether she is happy at being reinserted into her so-called place in life remains unconfirmed. Her experience at this point certainly does not support Saïd’s remarks on the possibility of exile offering ‘originality of vision’ and a challenge to ‘orthodox judgement’. Paradoxically, although Hannah has border-crossed in terms of national boundaries, from Poland to France, she finds no difference between the limited socio-cultural habitus of her Polish compatriots in Poland and in Paris. Given this circularity, one may wonder why Hannah left Poland for France in the first place. Among her various motives, the most decisive had been the distress of witnessing a brutal attack by gentile Poles on a young Hassidic man, which had induced in her a sense of deep insecurity (p. 76). As adumbrated in my introduction to the present chapter, the choice of France as the locus for her new life is, with the retrovision of the post-Shoah reader, deeply ironic, as is the extravagantly idealistic view of France held by fellow Polish Jews. In the early 1930s, her love-object Bolek endorses her brother Menachem’s view of France as being ‘peut-être [...] la seule terre de liberté’ (p. 24) [perhaps [...] the only land of liberty], adding of his own volition ‘Émile Zola, la Révolution française, les Droits de l’Homme’ (p. 24) [Émile Zola, the French Revolution, the Rights of Man]. The two young Jewish men’s romantic illusions are also inherent in the naïve trust of would-be Polish immigrants to France: ‘Chacun savait que les Français sont de braves gens’ (p. 43) [Everyone knew that the French are decent people]. Naïve admiration for the French is so systemic in Il faut toujours quitter la Pologne that the novel even inclines towards exoneration of Vichy France. Contrary to irrefutable historical evidence, blame for the anti-Semitic ‘Statuts des juifs’ [ Jewish Statutes] is ascribed to the occupying Germans rather than to Vichy France (p. 227). In the following extract, the indigenous French Republican values of secularism and equality regardless of private religion or race are tacitly highlighted as foils to

Nation/Deracination

127

such anti-Semitic measures — which of course elides the dissolution of the French Republic in 1940 and its replacement by the Vichy regime: Simultanément, les Allemands ordonnèrent un recensement des Juifs. [...] Dans le seul département de la Seine, ils furent ainsi 149 734 Juifs, 85 664 Français, 64 070 étrangers, à se faire connaître de leur futurs bourreaux. Dans un pays où l’état civil ne mentionne pas la religion et encore moins la ‘race’, leur tâche s’en trouverait grandement facilitée! (p. 227–28) [Simultaneously, the Germans ordered a census of Jews. [...] In the Seine department alone, 149 734 Jews, 85 664 of them French, 64 070 of them foreign thus made themselves known to their future executioners. In a country where one’s civil status makes no mention of religion and even less of ‘race’, their task was to be made much easier by this!]

A similar historical solecism is found in ‘Le 7 juin, les Allemands décrétèrent que désormais les Juifs devaient porter l’étoile jaune’ (p. 250) [On 7 June, the Germans decreed that from now on Jews would have to wear the yellow star]. Interestingly, however, this initial naivety is intermittently inf lected by an awareness of indigenous French anti-Semitism — as manifested in, for example, its print media: Et au lendemain de l’arrestation de M. Flaichman, Sylvette lui avait montré, rouge de colère, le commentaire de Paris-Soir: ‘Cinq mille Juifs étrangers ont passé leur première nuit dans un camp de concentration. Cinq mille parasites de moins dans le grand Paris qui en avait contracté une maladie mortelle. La première ponction est faite, d’autres suivront.’ (p. 232) [And the day after Mr Flaichman’s arrest, Sylvette, red with anger, had shown him the commentary in Paris-Soir: ‘Five thousand foreign Jews have spent their first night in a concentration camp. Five thousand fewer parasites in greater Paris, which had caught a mortal disease from them. The first inroads have been made, others will follow.’]

So, while the narrative sections focalized on or giving voice to Hannah tend to adopt an ingenuous position disculpating the French of all anti-Jewish charges, other, more free-f loating narrative fragments are less credulous. And in fairness to Silbert, questions of national loyalties are certainly explored, if not necessarily probed with much conceptual nuance. The old prejudice that Jews have no national loyalties, adhering instead to a mythical Jewish ‘nation’, is sharply countered by Hannah’s determination to fight for her home country with ‘les Polonais libres’ [the free Poles] based in London (p. 296). Hannah stoutly advances the resistance credentials of Jews all over the world, and adduces fear of Polish anti-Semitism as the reason for the relative paucity of Jews joining the Free Polish forces (p. 297). Further, she asserts her own patriotism, even in the face of her country’s anti-Semitism: ‘— Moi, j’aime la Pologne. Ma famille est en train de mourir en Pologne. Je suis née en Pologne. Pourquoi ne resterais-je pas fidèle à ma patrie?’ (p. 297) [‘I love Poland. My family is dying in Poland. I was born in Poland. Why wouldn’t I stay faithful to my homeland?’]. What emerges forcefully is an irreducible antinomy between recognition of Polish anti-Semitism and pride in being Polish, amply evinced in the following egregious remark: ‘S’ils n’avaient pas été aussi viscéralement antisémites, Hannah les aurait trouvés bien sympathiques, tous ces Polonais, avec leur bravoure,

128

Nation/Deracination

leur courage, leur panache, leur opiniâtreté et leur bonne humeur dans la lutte’ (p. 320) [If they hadn’t been as instinctively anti-Semitic, Hannah would have thought them rather nice, all those Poles, with their gallantry, their courage, their panache, their stubbornness and their good humour in the struggle]. In fact, Hannah’s experience of displacement, dislocation and confrontation with different national and ethnic challenges ultimately prompts a desolidarization vis-àvis Jewry. On the boat journey from Portugal to London where she intends to join ‘les Polonais libres’, she hears the harrowing account of a French Jewish woman’s gradual destitution of rights and family under Vichy. Hannah reacts by affirming she has more in common with cheerful Polish resisters than with doleful Jews (p. 304). Clearly a psychological survival-mechanism, this could nonetheless be viewed as a selfish rejection of her own persecuted people, which is strengthened by the following detail: ‘Hannah n’avait guère envie de se mêler aux Juifs qui, taleth, châle de prière sur le dos, priaient et se lamentaient sur le pont inférieur. Elle ne tenait nullement à écouter les innombrables récits de leurs malheurs’ (p. 309) [Hannah had little desire to mix with the Jews who, with tallith and prayer shawl on their backs, were praying and lamenting on the lower deck. She really didn’t want to listen to their countless tales of woe]. Saïd’s belief in the potential of exile to offer ‘originality of vision’ and a challenge to ‘orthodox judgement’, which had appeared so inapt earlier on in Silbert’s narrative (p. 168), here takes on a new, if ethically ambivalent relevance. The triumphalist rhetoric of the narrative presents such originality of vision and contestation as one element in her liberation as a woman from paternalism (recalling Anna Seghers), from fears, and from dependency on others. Her traditional Jewish community, in Poland as in Paris, is framed as the matrix of all those negative traps, as well as purveyor of a parochial, Jewish-fixated view of the world (pp. 309–10). Although for very different reasons, deracination from Judaism is also a feature of Rina Geftman’s Guetteurs d’aurore (1985).10 Part devotional, part autobiographical, Guetteurs d’aurore is unique in our entire corpus by virtue of its dialogical form. It comprises a series of meditations on the part of Geftman, an ethnic Jew born in Russia in 1914 who subsequently became a French citizen. Her ref lections form responses to questions from her old friend Gilbert, originally named Elie. Given the fact that both are Jewish converts to Christianity, it is striking that she draws attention to the Talmudic style of the book which is generated by their dialogue (p. 12). And whilst her religious framework is now Christian, her book ref lects both a persisting sense of Jewish as opposed to Judaic identity and an overriding wish to syncretize Christianity and Judaism (or, more pressingly, to reconcile Christians and Jews). More to the point for the present chapter, Guetteurs d’aurore powerfully inscribes motifs of homeland, exile, loss, and belonging. Geftman recounts a childhood spent in transition between various countries: Russia, Turkey, Austria, Germany and France. She also registers her ultimate displacement, this time freely undertaken as an adult (in fact at the relatively advanced age of fifty-five, in 1966) when she moved to Jerusalem, co-founded Neve Shalom (‘the village of peace’), and became director of the Mambre Centre, whose aim was to promote better understanding of Judaism among Christians. In her synthesis — by no means always

Nation/Deracination

129

satisfactory or incontestable — of Jewish and Christian paradigms of thought, Geftman illustrates and indeed performs not just trans-nationality but also transculturality. Her text reveals a border-crossing that is both spatial and ideologicospiritual; I will examine each in turn. Geftman informs her interlocutor Gilbert that she was born in Russia to a rich and assimilated Jewish family with no Zionist allegiances: after the Russian revolution, the family had migrated successively to other European countries, never considering what was then Palestine as a country of asylum (p. 22). It is made clear that the family had endured exile rather than embraced migration: ‘comme pour des milliers d’autres Russes, il n’y avait pas d’autre porte de salut que l’exil [...] nous sommes parties le plus tard possible et vers une terre de refuge très proche’ (p. 29, my emphases) [as for thousands of other Russians, there was no other gate of salvation than exile [...] we left as late as we could and went to a very close-by land of refuge]. Emphasis is placed on enforced nomadism, statelessness, and uncertainty (p. 30). However, this is immediately followed by assertion of a specific Jewish gift for cultural adaptation and indeed dynamism in the face of such ordeals (p. 30). She attributes this putative gift and dynamism to both the religious and the ethnic Jew, suggesting both god-given ‘nature’ and human ‘nurture’ — or in one sense, the opposite of nurture: gentile rejection and persecution of Jews may have been the environmental factor fostering such Jewish adaptation and dynamism, in the name of simple survival. In pursuing the narrative of her own Jewish family’s experience of exile, Geftman also stresses resilience: ‘A chaque étape de notre itinéraire de réfugiés, nous avons essayé de rebâtir un foyer et lorsqu’un pays nous rejetait, nous allions plus loin’ (p. 31) [At each stage of our refugee route, we tried to rebuild a home and when a country rejected us, we travelled further]. This experience had indeed been long and arduous: six months in Turkey, a short halt in ex-Yugoslavia, two years in Austria, a further two years in Germany, and finally France — the end of their wandering. It is worth noting what is either baleful word-play or stunning blind spot in Geftman’s relaying of her father’s statement to his family on leaving Germany for a reconnaissance trip to Paris: ‘ou je réussis et vous venez me rejoindre, ou c’est un échec et je reviens et nous ouvrons le gaz’ (pp. 34–35) [either I succeed and you come to join me, or it’s a failure and I come back and we turn on the gas]. Analeptic reference to the gas chambers seems implausible, but the semantic coincidence cannot help but be read as prophetic of the fate some twenty years on of millions of other Jews in Germany. As it happens, his impressions of Paris are favourable, leading to settlement there of first the immediate nuclear family, then eventually (in 1924) the extended family. Geftman is at pains to stress that despite material hardships, the family were on the whole well received by the French. However, this French amenity was less to do with the absence of anti-Semitism than with the presence of a reactionary mythology of the White Russian émigrés as ‘des aristocrates ruinés, des officiers en exil’ (p. 39) [ruined aristocrats, officers in exile], and thus reveals snobbery rather than tolerance in Third Republic France. Not immaterial either was the French perception of a certain Slavic exoticism in these new refugees (p. 39), which is also registered in Elisabeth Gille’s Le Mirador of 1992 (p. 303: see

130

Nation/Deracination

discussion below). In fact, these glamorous assets do not break down the barrier to integration posed by the fact that all of her family’s friends in Paris were Russian Jews, albeit non-observant. Even she, very different from her French schoolmates, found that her only real friends were relatives (p. 46). It could be argued that at least one factor in her quest for religion, not a priority in her moderately de-Judaized Jewish family, was the need for a security lost through uprooting. Such need may be indirectly inferred by reprise of the word ‘errance’ [wandering] to evoke the immediate post-WWII years, when, having lost its home and property, her family had to wander from one cheap boarding house to another (p. 118). The literal migrations and peregrinations of Geftman’s life stand out, but what of the figurative? Geftman insists that becoming Christian did not mean loss of her Jewish (ethnic) identity. Quite the contrary: as an act of solidarity with her people, she had registered herself as Jewish with the Vichy authorities, in full knowledge of the dangers thereby incurred (pp. 86–87). But she had early on discovered that spiritual border crossing was no simple task. Truly belonging to a community of indigenous Christians having proved impossible (p. 64), she located herself at a new point of conjuncture and cross-fertilization, within the spiritual community of Jewish converts to Christianity led by a priest of Jewish origin (p. 64). Such spiritual and identitarian hybridity as a member of the Hebrew Catholic community is later on deceptively simplified in the rather pat formula ‘ma double identité — juive et chrétienne’ (p. 116) [my double identity — Jewish and Christian]. Less superficial is the desire as a Christian convert to participate not just in the exile of her ethnic people, but also in their return to a homeland, Jerusalem (p. 116). Alongside explicit reference to religious exile and homeland, the geographical and temporal delocalizations of her life are also evoked in religious terms: ‘Partie des rives de la mer Noire pour aboutir, à travers révolution, guerres, holocauste, à Jérusalem, j’ai l’impression d’être une petite f lèche que Dieu a lancée et qui a atteint son but’ (p. 13) [Having started my journey from the shores of the Black Sea only to end up in Jerusalem after a revolution, wars, and a Holocaust, I feel like a little arrow thrown by God has that has reached its goal]. The trope of exile figures overtly on the very first page of her memoir via Gilbert’s reference to the rivers of Babylon. Her response activates the polysemy of the word ‘Israël’, which can refer to the state of Israel, the biblical homeland of Jews, and the Jewish people collectively: Tout ce qui n’était pas Israël me paraissait terre d’exil. C’est sur les rives de la Seine, à Paris, que l’appel de Sion a retenti en moi avec une force véhémente à laquelle il était impossible de résister. Tout d’un coup, je me suis souvenue de Sion, alors que je ne la connaissais pas et que l’on ne m’avait jamais appris à l’aimer dans sa réalité terrestre. C’était comme une mémoire ancestrale qui resurgissait en moi. (p. 22) [Everything that was not Israel appeared to me a land of exile. It’s on the banks of the Seine, in Paris, that the call of Zion rang inside me with a vehement force that it was impossible to resist. Suddenly, I remembered Zion, even though I didn’t know it and had never been taught to love it in its earthly reality. It was like an ancestral memory resurfacing in me.]

After defining a Jew as he or she born of a Jewish mother, she also offers a definition

Nation/Deracination

131

of the Jew’s vocation in richly exilic and memorial terms: ‘il est l’homme du passage de l’exil vers la Terre promise et son existence est encadrée par la mémoire des épreuves passées et l’espérance messianique future’ (p. 23) [he is the man passing from exile towards the Promised Land and his existence is framed by the memory of past ordeals and future messianic hope]. Beyond its dialogical form, the distinctiveness of Geftman’s work lies in its fusion of geographical and spiritual migrations into a symbiotic unity that is more than the sum of the two parts. What is generated is a complex creolization that disrupts normative conceptions of national and spiritual identity. Although Nine Moati also inscribes exile (mainly territorial but also affective) in her novel La Passagère sans étoile,11 she differs from Silbert and Geftman in that the peripatetic route of her chief protagonist, a young French woman named Jeanne, is atypically from France to other European countries, and then eventually back to France. Jeanne’s only wholly voluntary displacement is her first, from Paris to Vienna, in order to join her Jewish lover Carl. After Carl’s arrest and deportation to Dachau, her nomadism is motivated by solidarity with other endangered Jews, particularly Carl’s sister Elise and her children, whom she accompanies to Hungary, the former Yugoslavia, Turkey, and Austria. Yet no re-rooting is permitted. Due to the Vichy regime’s hounding of Jews, she initially seeks refuge in Venice with an aunt but is finally forced to return once more to France when she begins to fear for her mother’s safety in Paris. After the traumatic caesura of the mother’s arrest in the ‘raf le du Vel d’hiv’ (see Chapter 2 above), the pattern of displacement is reactivated. Jeanne leaves Paris in an effort to protect a group of Jewish children whom she eventually places in a safe home in Chambon-sur-Lignon, and ends up in Nice, where she becomes a member of the Resistance. There is a disturbing hiatus in La Passagère sans étoile between its ostensible designation of Jeanne as a non-Jew and the reader’s belated discovery (on p. 111 of a 339-page novel) that her mother is in fact Jewish — which, in traditional Jewish law, of course renders Jeanne herself Jewish. There is therefore a major structural irony in the narrative. On the one hand, Jeanne is mediated as gentile, the suggestion being that she disinterestedly chose solidarity with Jews even though she was herself non-Jewish and could have gone safely home to Paris from Vienna (p. 128). Some two-thirds of the way into the novel, in allusion to its title, we learn that Jeanne is a ‘passagère sans étoile jaune’ (p. 223) [passenger without a yellow star], and on the next page this information is placed contiguously with her sense of being ‘coupable de ne pas être considérée comme juive’ (p. 224) [guilty about not being considered Jewish]. On the other hand, once her mother’s Jewishness is revealed, her own Jewishness becomes undeniable, at least from the perspective of traditionalist Judaism. The key hermeneutic question is why Moati creates this enigma. Is she offering up for lectorial critique a (fictional) French Jew who is so assimilated that she effectively denies her Jewishness? There seems to be no conscious narrative irony in the text to support such a reading. Instead, Moati prioritizes a rather monotonous chronicling of multiple displacements; yet within that chronicling is also an intermittent testimony to the unequal stakes for Jews, based on class and economic differentials, in escaping persecution.

132

Nation/Deracination

The first mention of exile centres on German and Austrian Jews f leeing persecution under the Nazi regime in the 1930s and seeking sanctuary in France. The narrative stresses their desperation to distance themselves from their homeland (p. 19); and Carl’s remark (p. 24) that in the late 1930s those Austrian Jews who could escape from the country did so implies that exile was actually a relative privilege for Jews, being dependent on possession of money and foreign contacts. This impression is shored up by his later remark, prompted by British restriction of immigration to only prosperous, educated Jews: ‘Ce qui veut dire en termes clairs qu’un juif pauvre qui veut fuir le nazisme n’a aucune chance d’être accueilli. Vraiment aucune’ (p. 32). [Which in plain language means that a poor Jew who wants to escape Nazism has no chance of being taken in. Really none]. In addition to this literal exile, he also evokes the emotional and domestic exile suffered by his sister Elsie when her non-Jewish husband throws her out in order to protect his own reputation and career (p. 24). Elsie’s brother-in-law Eric exhorts her to self-exile, pointing to the increasing difficulty in crossing frontiers and advising Switzerland as the safest bet for those, like her, who have a passport. German Jews without a passport try to enter France clandestinely via Belgium — at the risk of prison or detention camp if caught illegally passing a frontier (pp. 30–31). Eric’s comments echo Carl’s earlier ones in evoking the inequitable challenges faced by Jews in escaping persecution, including social class, economic status, and, increasingly dependent on the latter, factors such as the ability or inability to obtain a passport. America itself, the muchvaunted destination of choice for would-be Jewish immigrants, is also presented as hardly operating an open-door policy. In contrast with Eric’s optimistic prediction that Elsie would have no problems in obtaining a visa (p. 31), Carl the realist points to the often colossal sums exacted from Jews wishing to obtain a passport, followed by the arduous task of acquiring a visa for the mythical land of liberty (pp. 37–38). One striking image in Moati’s novel is of the no-man’s-land, without ownership, nationality or soul, to be seized by those exiled from their own land: ‘C’était une terre du bout du monde, une terre morne du Danube qui ignorait si elle était autrichienne, tchèque ou hongroise, une terre sans nationalité et sans âme. Terre à saisir pour ceux qui n’en avaient plus’ (p. 79) [It was a land at the end of the world, a gloomy land of the Danube that didn’t know whether it was Austrian, Czech or Hungarian, a land without nationality or soul. A land to be grabbed by those who no longer had one]. It is in this unidentifiable, quasi-oneiric space that the Jewish refugees subsist in a transit camp while waiting for a boat to take them to an elusive land of asylum. Significantly, Jeanne feels alienated from this community brought together through anguish and exile. Her alienation is grounded in her sense of Frenchness — as if Frenchness were an antonym of these words: ‘Elle se demandait pourtant si elle pourrait, elle la Française, la Parisienne, vivre dans cette communauté soudée par l’angoisse l’exil’ (p. 83) [She did however wonder if she the Frenchwoman, the Parisienne, could live in this community bound together by the anguish of exile]. Yet sensitive precisely to the mutually supportive ethos of this makeshift community of exiles, she tries to contribute something towards it by teaching French. France’s reputation — soon to be given the lie — as a land of asylum and tolerance for Jews is foregrounded: ‘Elle entreprit de donner ce qu’elle

Nation/Deracination

133

savait, ce qu’elle pouvait: le français. Une langue, elle en était certaine, dont ils pourraient tous, ces exilés, avoir un jour besoin’ (p. 85) [She undertook to give what she knew, what she could give: French. A language, she was sure, that all those exiles might one day need]. Reference is made to the generosity of the Jews of Bratislava, who donate what food they can to the refugees (pp. 87–88). The first time Jeanne and Elsie feel excluded from the community of refugees is during preparations for the Shabbat (p. 89), but they find themselves warmly invited to join in the event and its meal despite their avowed lack of observance. Does Moati promote a rose-coloured-spectacles perspective here, or rather, does she justifiably recall Judaism’s tradition of hospitality (hospitality being a mitzvah, or commandment, for the observant Jew)? Whatever the answer to this question, she clearly depicts solidarity as vanishing when it is a question of escape. When the boat finally docks, the law of the jungle dominates as all scramble to get onto it, the symbol of escape and freedom, indeed, of life as opposed to death (p. 93). Accent is placed on the indelible mark that will be left on these Jewish refugees by their experience of exile and the transit camp: Elle se demandait souvent comment cette tragédie se terminerait pour chacun d’eux. Ils portaient tous une telle histoire qu’il lui semblait impossible qu’un jour ils se banalisent, qu’ils redeviennent anonymes et transparents. Quels que soient les détours de la vie, et surtout de l’Histoire, ils n’en effaceront jamais les séquelles et les stigmates. (p. 117) [She often wondered how this tragedy would end for each of them. They all bore such a history that it seemed to her impossible they would one day be ordinary, become anonymous and transparent again. Whatever the twists of life, and particularly of History, they will never erase the repercussions and the scars of this experience.]

There is here an ambiguous oscillation between emphasis on the tragedy of their experience on the one hand, and, on the other, the distinctive, transcendent quality this lends them. What is entirely unambiguous is the recording of the appalling physical conditions with which Jewish refugees had to contend; in fact, there is a parallel between such conditions and those of the concentration and death camps (p. 149). With the sole exception of the Jewish refugee’s non-banality, La Passagère sans étoile patently does not support the stress of a Seghers or a Saïd on the potentially positive aspects of exile. While it contains elements of the family saga and romance genres, it is also a hard-hitting record of the distress and psychic mutilations of enforced exile, with a steely insistence on the mechanics of double discrimination: all Jews were fairly unwelcome asylum seekers from the 1930s to the mid 1940s, but some (the economically weaker) were even more unwelcome than others, and thus more vulnerable to deportation and death.12 In apparent contrast, the chief protagonist of Elisabeth Gille’s Le Mirador (1992), based on the real-life personage Irène Némirovsky, initially appears to enjoy an entirely empowering experience of exile. The sombre irony of the text and of the historical reality it ref lects is that she is ultimately deported from an initially welcoming French state by its own policemen, and sent to her death in Auschwitz. Yet even before that nadir, the narrative also reveals rather less enriching aspects

134

Nation/Deracination

to her experience of exile. Le Mirador is presented as the ‘mémoires rêvés’ [imagined memoirs] of Némirovsky, Gille’s mother, but is intercalated by short fragments written in the third person from the perspective of the actual author, Gille. The fantasized Némirovsky first recalls her wealthy family’s enforced exile to France as a function of anti-Semitic pogroms in pre-revolutionary Russia. The figure of irony is also salient in the reference to Némirovsky’s husband Michel’s faith in France as a haven for Russian Jewish refugees, a country where their child can grow up without being singled out along national (Russian) or ethnic ( Jewish) lines (p. 35). Or at least this is the charitable interpretation of Michel’s words. What he actually expresses is gratitude for the fact that in France, the child need never know that her parents are Russian and Jews. This clearly springs both from Némirovsky’s bitter memories of Jewish pogroms in Russia and from a Republican tradition in France in which their foreign and Jewish origins are theoretically of no import. More disturbing is the implication that, even in 1929, before the exponential growth of fascism in France, the parents assume their child’s happiness and safety is conditional on ignorance of her national and ethnic roots (p. 35). Naïve extolling of Republican France is later reprised in ‘Nous avons le bonheur de vivre en France où, depuis la Révolution, les Juifs, quand ils l’ont souhaité, ont pu sans mal s’assimiler. Mon mari ne se sent guère plus israélite que moi’ (p. 70) [We have the good fortune to live in France where, since the Revolution, Jews have been able to assimilate easily when they’ve wanted to. My husband hardly feels more Jewish than I do]. This Jewish self-alienation, not to say bad faith, is slightly mitigated by recognition of a duty imposed by French Republicanism always to demonstrate their Frenchness before their Jewishness: Il faudrait être de mauvaise foi pour prétendre qu’une quelconque xénophobie s’exerce à présent vis-à-vis des gens comme nous. Mais la situation a sa contrepartie: l’obligation où nous sommes de montrer à tout moment qu’avant d’être juifs — et qu’est-ce que ce mot signifie encore pour nous, sinon une filiation obscure qui se perdra bientôt dans les brumes du temps? — nous sommes français. (p. 71) [You’d have to be insincere to claim that any kind of xenophobia was now being practised against people like us. But this comes at a price: the obligation we’re under to show at all times that before being Jews — and what does this word mean now for us, other than an obscure filiation that will soon be lost in the mists of time? — we are French.]

Gille here mediates her mother’s sense of Jewish identity as so tenuous that it is virtually denied, or its demise at least predicted. The ideological disciplining of the exilic Jewish subject also emerges in Némirovsky’s urging new Jewish immigrants to France to discretion (p. 72). Lack of solidarity between different social classes of Jews finds more stark expression in the words of philosopher Emmanuel Berl at a dinner party in her home in 1933: ‘il ne reprochait pas moins aux autorités françaises d’accorder la naturalisation aux réfugiés “avec une générosité folle”: les Juifs intégrés en France depuis des générations, comme sa propre famille, ne pouvaient, disaitil, qu’en souffrir’ (pp. 353–54) [he was no less critical of the French authorities for granting naturalization to refugees ‘with a crazy generosity’: Jews who had been integrated in France for generations, like his own family, could only suffer from

Nation/Deracination

135

this, he said]. Those new Jewish immigrants to early 1930s France, predominantly poor, working class, and Yiddish-speaking, were the antithesis of Berl’s own social position. A middle-class Jew reproaching the French Republic for its perceived largesse with new working-class Jews is one more accretion to the dominant figure of irony f lagged up in the introduction to the present chapter. Worse, Némirovsky admits that she had shared Berl’s views, and that their myopia had only became evident under Vichy. In bittersweet elegiac tone she mourns the death of her former illusions about France, shared by thousands of other Jewish asylum seekers over the decades (pp. 354–55). Her earlier credulity, in which she was hardly alone — her case emblematizes that of most assimilated Jews in France in the interwar period — is lyrically reiterated and then succinctly debunked: ‘Nous pensions, nous, laïques qui considérions le judaïsme comme une survivance du passé, que, mis à part une poignée d’extrémistes, la France des Lumières y verrait dorénavant aussi clair que nous. Jamais nous n’aurions imaginé qu’elle pût nous trahir’ (p. 355) [We secular Jews who considered Judaism to be a relic of the past thought that apart from a handful of extremists, Enlightenment France would from now on see things as clearly as us. We would never have imagined that it could betray us]. Significantly, she locates this fatal gullibility not just in assimilated Jews but also in various groups of migrants, be they political or economic, some Jewish, others perhaps not (pp. 355–56). She also reveals a lack of Jewish solidarity across social classes, indeed an exclusion of the putatively lower elements: Chez nous, tout le monde insistait sur la distinction que Maurras lui-même faisait entre ‘les Juifs bien nés’, ceux qui vivaient en France depuis des générations, qui avaient donné leur sang pour la patrie, et ces gens dont nous disions nous-mêmes qu’il s’agissait d’une ‘immigration de déchet’. (p. 359) [Among ourselves, everyone insisted on the distinction that Maurras himself made between ‘well-bred Jews’, those who had been living in France for generations, who had given their blood for their homeland, and those people we ourselves said were ‘immigrants from the bottom of the barrel’.]

Such class-inf lected anti-Semitism appears to have been internalized very earlier on and in a different, non-French context by Némirovsky herself, who as a child in Russia had perceived non-assimilated, religious, working-class Jews as dirty, sickly, and furtive (p. 68). She admits — and the fact that she recognizes this is an admission is in itself telling — that she had had the same reaction of mistrust and even repulsion when confronted in Paris by the 1930s wave of working-class, observant Polish and German Jewish immigrants, whose Jewish alterity relative to Republican France was so visibly and linguistically obvious (p. 69). Her reaction to this confrontation with the visible and aural inscription of Jewish alterity is highly negative: mental anguish accompanied, intriguingly, by asthmatic attacks recalling those of Catherine Clément in Cherche-Midi, discussed in Chapter 2 above. Némirovsky’s childhood preceded the gas chambers by some time — she was born in 1903 — but the anguish linked to Jewish identity takes the same form as the second-generation Clément’s. It is as if the danger of that identity within invariably anti-Semitic environments causes a sense of suffocation, of literally having one’s

136

Nation/Deracination

life force — oxygen — taken away. In addition, Némirovsky’s asthmatic attacks specifically suggest she almost literally cannot breathe the same air as those who are so palpably Jewish, in contrast to her own discreet, assimilated, almost non-existent Jewishness: Une angoisse indéfinie me prend, qui s’accompagne souvent, au retour, d’une crise d’asthme. Je suis consciente d’avoir une attitude plus froide à l’égard de ces gens qu’avec, par exemple, les mendiants bien français qui tendent la main le dimanche à côté de chez moi, sur les marches de Saint-François-Xavier. (p. 69) [An undefined anguish takes hold of me, often accompanied on the way back by an asthma attack. I’m aware of having a colder attitude towards these people than, for example, towards the thoroughly French beggars who hold out their hand on Sundays just by my house, on the steps of Saint-François-Xavier.]

Crucial here is the distinction between Jewish and non-Jewish members of the working class. She is repulsed not so much by poverty, provided it is stamped with Frenchness, as by working-class people who are too obviously Jewish, and, in her view, anti-modernity. In tension with that compulsion towards assimilation into a mythical Frenchness is the memory of highly ambivalent feelings upon arrival in the land of asylum: relief at feeling safe, bitterness about having been forced into exile (pp. 233–34). Her elegiac memories of the lost Russian homeland prompt a resolve to resist any further uprooting, which will ultimately prove fatal when it prevents her from leaving France in time to escape deportation (p. 235). Proleptic irony also permeates the young narrator’s infatuation with the indigenous French, bourgeois family of her friend Madeleine. The calm happiness and unity of this family is mistaken for a microcosm of France at large, a country abstractly characterized by virtues such as moderation, freedom and generosity, which in her early twenties she ingenuously believes to have embraced her (p. 275). The irony is richly compounded when she rejoices in having made the so-called good choice of staying in France rather than emigrating to America, as her father had suggested in 1926 (p. 275). Némirovsky’s gradual disillusionment is charted by wry self-citation in 1942, when her daughter is forced to wear the yellow star: ‘L’étoile jaune qu’elle porte depuis un mois sur la poitrine montre bien que la France, “pays de la mesure, de la liberté, de la générosité aussi”, a de singulières façons d’adopter ceux qui l’aiment’ (p. 283) [The yellow star that she’s been wearing on her chest for a month now shows that France, ‘country of moderation, of freedom, and of generosity too’, has a strange way of adopting those who love it]. In the third person, she questions her oblivion to precursory warning signs of rising fascist movements some twenty years earlier: ‘Ne les voyait-elle donc pas, dès 1921 ou 1922, quand elle sortait de la Sorbonne, ces camelots du roi en béret basque qui arpentaient le boulevard Saint-Michel la canne plombée à la main et ces étudiants de l’Action française qui venaient perturber les cours des professeurs juifs?’ (p. 283) [So did she not see them, as early as 1921 or 1922, when she came out of the Sorbonne, those Camelots du roi pacing up and down the boulevard Saint-Michel in their basque berets and carrying walking sticks with lead tips and those Action française students who came to disrupt Jewish teachers’ classes?]

Nation/Deracination

137

This uncomfortable self-interrogation ignites a memory of the prestigious journal Les Nouvelles littéraires having referred to her Jewish appearance: ‘Beau type d’Israélite’ (p. 296) [Attractive Jewish type]. Whilst f lattered at the time, she is now disturbed by the alienating focus on her ethnicity. She sardonically reprises the ‘compliment’ in reference to the Palais Berlitz exhibition in which photographs of numerous Jewish public figures had been cynically manipulated to repulsive effect (p. 301). She also highlights the irony of a slippery exoticizing discourse which in the past had complimented and now humiliates her: ‘D’exotique, de délicieusement slave, suis-je devenue youtre au point d’en être méconnaissable?’ (p. 303; cf. Rina Geftman’s Guetteurs d’aurore, p. 39) [From exotic, from delightfully Slavic, have I become such a Yid that they don’t even recognize me?]. This reveals the sudden vacillation that can occur from consciousness of one site of difference, her Russian origins, which had been romanticized, to another, her Jewishness, now transformed into ugly defect in public opinion (or the public opinion constructed by Gille’s apostrophe to ‘vous’). Horrified by the political situation in 1939, she goes ahead with baptism (pp. 382–83). Her explanation of this defection reiterates estrangement from her Jewish roots and desire to be accepted into that mythically full Frenchness: A présent, j’étais surtout lasse du tombereau d’insultes qui se déversait tous les jours sur les Juifs, fauteurs de guerre, et si, peut-être lâchement, je désirais trancher mes derniers liens avec un peuple dont l’étrange identité m’avait toujours paru incompréhensible, c’était pour franchir l’ultime étape vers la nationalité de mon choix et protéger mes enfants. En Russie, il suffisait d’être baptisé pour ne plus tomber sous le coup des lois antisémites. (p. 383) [By then, I was above all tired of the countless insults being f lung daily at Jews, warmongers all, and if, perhaps cravenly, I wanted to cut my last ties with a people whose strange identity had always seemed to me incomprehensible, it was in order to get through the final stage towards a nationality of my own choice and in order to protect my children. In Russia, you only needed to be baptized to not come under anti-Semitic laws.]

Recalling her novel Les Chiens et les loups’s expression of a universal sense among Jews of harbouring ‘un passé plus long que celui de la plupart des hommes’ (p. 384) [a longer past than most people’s], she asserts that it was with this past that she had wished to impose a decisive rupture through baptism. As the real author Gilles observes in the postface, her mother had aspired above all to integration in France. L’identité juive a toujours été vécue par elle comme un poids. [...] Elle considérait l’identité juive comme une rémanence de traditions ancestrales qui avaient perdu tout leur sens. Je ne sais pas pourquoi elle s’est fait baptiser, alors qu’il n’y a aucune trace de foi religieuse dans son œuvre ni dans ses lettres. [...] Elle a dû se faire baptiser par désir d’intégration... (p. 419) [She always experienced Jewish identity as a burden. [...] She considered Jewish identity as a persistence of ancestral traditions which had lost all meaning. I don’t know why she got baptized, when there was no trace of religious faith in her writings or in her letters. [...] She must have got baptized because she wanted to be integrated.]

138

Nation/Deracination

Given France’s slide towards Vichy’s exclusionary measures, this aspiration was to prove a bitter pipe dream. Rupture and exclusion are also key topoi in Yveline Stephan’s Elise B. (1998). In this novel, the main protagonist Lïa (like the Léa of Gille’s Un paysage de cendres, discussed in Chapter 1) had been torn at a very young age from Jewish parents who were to perish in the Shoah. This has resulted in a permanent inaptitude for interpersonal relationships. However, the principal interest of this novel for the present chapter lies not in Lïa but rather in the exile of Lïa’s paternal grandmother, Fajda Borenstein. The significance of this exilic experience to the general narrative economy of the novel is signalled by a change of narrative voice from third person focalized mainly on Lïa to first person spoken by Fajda, an Orthodox Jewish woman whose strict observance is visibilized by her wearing of a wig (p. 76). Accompanying the shift of narrative voice is a temporal shift from the post-WWII period back to the 1930s, when Fajda ref lects on her situation as a Polish exile in France. She presents herself initially as what in contemporary idiom would be called an economic migrant. However, her very next sentence — ‘On m’a dit aussi qu’il n’y avait pas de pogroms. Ici, personne ne sait ce qu’est un pogrom’ (p. 55) [I was also told there were no pogroms. Here, nobody knows what a pogrom is] — anticipates what the reader soon realizes was her real reason for self-imposed exile: avoidance of the Jewish massacres whose memories still haunt her. Je suis partie. Je n’ai pas le goût du malheur. Pourquoi la vie ne nous serait-elle pas possible? Devons-nous demander la permission de vivre? En France, on ne m’interdit pas d’avoir de la mémoire. Je peux chanter toutes les chansons que je veux. Je peux pratiquement cuisiner tout ce que je veux. Quand j’allume les bougies le soir de Shabbat je n’ai pas peur. C’est bien de ne plus avoir peur. Ici, mon fils a pu faire ses études. D’où je viens, il n’aurait pas pu... Ici, je peux vivre mon temps. Mon temps à moi. Mais ce n’est pas facile de vivre dans un pays où l’on n’est pas né. (p. 56) [I left. Unhappiness doesn’t appeal to me. Why shouldn’t life be possible for us? Do we have to ask permission to live? In France, I’m not forbidden to have a memory. I can sing all the songs I want. I can cook practically all I want. When I light candles on Shabbat night I’m not scared. It’s good not to be scared any more. Here, my son has been able to study. Where I come from, he wouldn’t have been able to... Here, I can live in my own time. My own time. But it’s not easy to live in a country where you weren’t born.]

The last sentence conveys the difficulty of exilic existence, even when the exile has been ‘chosen’ as the lesser of two evils, and even when the host country appears relatively benign. Fajda’s problem lies in her cultural, affective, and linguistic disorientation. Confrontation with cultural difference is pronounced in the case of religion, for even in a country like France with a strong secular tradition, she finds that omnipresent Christian signifiers reinforce the world dominance of Gentiles: ‘C’est un pays où il y a des clochers à tous les coins de rue et des Saints tous les jours de l’année. Les jours fériés sont des fêtes pas très laïques! Ces fêtes ne signifient rien pour moi. Elles me rappellent seulement que les goyim dominent le monde’ (p. 56) [It’s a country with church towers at every street corner and Saints for every day

Nation/Deracination

139

of the year. The public holidays aren’t very secular holidays! These holidays mean nothing for me. They only remind me that goys dominate the world]. Affectively, Fajda is prey to a deep nostalgia for her home country, for its landscapes, smells, colours, and its people — their main value in retrospect being that she knew them, with their familiarity forming a social fabric of which she is bereft in France. Linguistic barriers are especially detrimental: because she is branded as foreign by virtue of her Polish accent when she ventures outside the domestic realm, she prefers to stay cocooned in the home (p. 55). Her exteriority to the French language is the main barrier to integration and socialization in France. Interestingly, she comments that translated words are altered, alienated words: Avec mes voisins, on se raconte notre ailleurs. On se raconte avec nos mots. Ces mots, il n’y a que nous pour les comprendre. Quand on les traduit, ce n’est plus pareil. Dans nos mots, on se retrouve, on se reconnaît. (p. 57) [With my neighbours, we describe the home we’ve left behind. We describe ourselves with our words. Only we understand these words. When they’re translated, it’s not the same. In our words we find ourselves again, we recognize ourselves.]

It is important to note that she is not entirely isolated, for the neighbours with whom she talks of origins are fellow Yiddish-speaking immigrants. These migrant women use storytelling as a vital means of preserving their sense of roots and identity. Language is of course fundamental to narrative, and the centrality of language to Fajda’s sense of identity is underscored by the final paragraph of the chapter devoted to her: ‘Ma terre, ma famille, mon histoire, ma foi sont dans ma langue, dans mes recettes de cuisine. Moi, Fajda Borenstein, je me les garde. Mon accent avec’ (p. 62) [My land, my family, my history, my faith are in my language, in my cooking recipes. I, Fajda Borenstein, keep them all. And my accent along with them]. Fajda’s sense of identity is, of course, not solely linguistic. It also inheres in her cultural heritage, where language is one element among others (even if it is arguable that language is logically prior to those other elements). Her determination to preserve this cultural heritage is plain in outrage at her husband’s opposition to their son Itzhak being bar-mitzvad (p. 66). Her cultural conservatism, her fear of the unknown, in a word, her insularity are evinced via reversion to a more distanced and potentially more critical third-person voice, which registers her panic at the discovery that Itzhak’s intended fiancée has an unfamiliar name (Elise) and is of a different social class: Fajda panique et pense: prénom inconnu, pas de chez nous. Qui est-elle pour avoir un prénom pareil? Les Beaux-Arts! Une artiste! Oï! Sait-elle faire la cuisine au moins? Où vit sa famille? En Alsace. Que font ses parents? Ils sont industriels. Mamélé fait la moue et lance un drôle de coup d’œil à son communiste de mari. (p. 71) [Fajda panics and thinks: I don’t know that name, it’s not from home. Who is she with such a name? The School of Fine arts! An artist! Oï! Can she cook at least? Where do her family live? In Alsace. What do her parents do? They’re industrialists. Mamelé pulls a face and throws a strange kind of glance at her communist husband.]

140

Nation/Deracination

Thus the middle-class, integrated French Jew Elise is constructed as negative Other by the working-class, observant Jewish immigrant Fajda. The latter is alarmed by other signs of Elise’s outsiderhood to her narrow, close-knit community. Elise is Jewish but not Yiddish-speaking, unable to prepare the classic Jewish dish of Gefilte fish, and ipso facto an inadequate woman according to the hyper-conservative mores of the community; moreover, she is an artist — unheard of for a woman in this community (p. 74). In contrast, for Fajda the ideal daughter-in-law is literally just round the corner, and the latter’s ideal qualities are reducible to hackneyed attributes of constructed femininity: cuteness and culinary expertise: ‘La fille de Sziffra est si mignonne! Elle serait une belle-fille parfaite. Absolument parfaite. Elle cuisine à merveille’ (p. 75) [Sziffra’s daughter is so cute! She’d be a perfect daughterin-law. Absolutely perfect. She cooks like a dream]. Fajda’s observance of religious mitzvot is at least partly motivated by desire as an exile to sustain some connection to her lost homeland and lost way of life: ‘Je fais tout ce qui est dans le Livre, presque tout. Comme ça, je me sens moins loin de chez moi. Je me sens fidèle. Tout ce respect, c’est ma liberté’ (p. 95) [I do everything that’s in the Book, or almost everything. That way, I feel less far from home. I feel faithful. All this respect is my freedom]. Curiously, the choice to honour what to the French secular subject may well appear to be an archaic and patriarchal system is experienced as a form of personal liberty, rather than entrapment and stasis. (This may be paralleled — ironically, given the long-standing tensions between Jews and Muslims — with the situation of certain Muslim women in twenty-first-century France who vindicate veiling as a form of personal freedom.) The real paradox, however, is that it is Fajda the uneducated, Yiddish-speaking housewife who shows more political acumen than the privileged, educated, yet politically naïve Elise, who like most assimilated French Jews has complacent faith in the Republic (p. 96). Even Fajda’s linguistic solecism of ‘La ville des illuminés’ (p. 59) [the city of cranks] to denote Paris, based on semantic slippage from the expression ‘pays des Lumières’ [land of the Enlightenment], implies a certain folly in Parisians which takes on a proleptically sinister validity in the historical context of the narrative: the lead-up to WWII and the Shoah. Fajda is the one who predicts dangers on the horizon (p. 94); and the unfolding of the story reveals her pessimism to have been all too justified. Pathos saturates the details of her stoically continuing to clean her house from top to bottom on the Friday (thus, the day leading up to Shabbat) when the building is raided for a round-up of Jews. Even as knocks and shouts reverberate around the building, she pursues her task until it is completed to her satisfaction — as if by cultivating an impervious concentration on religious and domestic duty, she can somehow transcend the imminent danger. This pathos is compounded by the detail that she packs two dresses, one for the summer and one for the winter, ‘Au cas où ils resteraient longtemps’ (p. 106) [In case they were going to stay for some time]. The irony consists in the fact that Jews of her age did not normally stay long in the camps, usually being gassed upon arrival. Elise B. thus conveys pungently the melancholic longing for the lost country, the observant Jewish exile’s difficulty in integrating into French Republican norms, and, interestingly, the lucidity of a working-class, uneducated Orthodox Jewish

Nation/Deracination

141

woman about the corruptibility of those norms. As was the case for Némirovsky, whose far higher socio-economic status ultimately proved meaningless in the face of her Jewishness, Third Republic France as land of asylum proves to be the antechamber to the gas chambers. In contrast to the single exilic path of Stephan’s Elise B., Karin Bernfeld’s Les Portes de l’espérance (2003)13 interweaves three narrative strands which each relay multiple displacements. It is both an autobiographical14 and a biographical text chronicling the personal histories of author/first-person narrator Karin and of her family. These histories comprise the perilous peregrinations of Karin’s maternal grandparents within interwar Europe, followed by their even more perilous journey to Palestine as refugees in 1946 (involving the dramatic shipwreck of the Rafiah); her paternal grandparents’ migration from Romania to France and thence to Israel in 1960; and her own journey from France, her country of birth, to Israel, on a visit whose mission is to retrace and unify her multiply diasporic roots. My analysis will bear on each of these patterns of exile and migration in turn. Beginning with Karin’s maternal grandparents, also of Romanian origin, the reader is immediately struck by the poignancy pervading Karin’s portrait of the 785 Jewish refugees boarding the Rafiah in Yugoslavia in 1946. Their faces are marked by months of fatigue, hunger and anguish; many are survivors of the camps, and all have been subject to Nazi persecution. They too are ‘[v]ictimes de la guerre’ (p. 13) [victims of war], even if they did not die in it. As in Moati’s La Passagère sans étoile, disturbing parallels emerge between the transit camps and the concentration/death camps, since exiles trying to get to safe havens were also surrounded by barbed wire (p. 14). Figuratively, such entrapment connotes the impasse in which the refugees find themselves, wanting to leave a Europe so impervious to their suffering and yet prevented at least temporarily from so doing by that same Europe. It is not immaterial that the maternal grandmother Ella had also experienced pre-war exile. Having run away from Romania in 1938 to the USSR to join what still seemed like a revolutionary cause, she had been summarily disabused of her ideals by being thrown into jail on suspicions of spying (p. 44), then placed under house arrest in the Caucasus (p. 47); two years of hard labour ensued (p. 48). With the signing of the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact and the outbreak of war in the USSR, she was exhorted as a Jew to f lee for her own safety (p. 49). Thus began a long period of involuntary wandering (p. 49), followed by a more voluntary period, this time of self-imposed exile, when after finally reaching home she decided to leave her husband: ‘L’errance continue. Des routes, des champs, des reliefs à encaisser. Les rails. Des trains [...]’ (p. 51) [The wandering continues. Roads, fields, different terrains to put up with. The railtracks. Trains [...]]. Ella’s nomadism included a stay in a transit camp (p. 59) before arrival in Uzbekistan (formerly part of the USSR), where she met her future husband. In order to elude arrest as a Jew, the maternal grandfather Joseph had also crossed many a frontier. Similar to the maternal grandmother’s itinerary, this is encoded in f lat, telegrammatic style; in both accounts the word ‘errance’ features prominently. Despite these ordeals, within the USSR they have at least been spared the Nazi-implemented Jewish genocide, news of which reaches them only after WWII (p.70). Finally, they decide

142

Nation/Deracination

to undertake one last migration: from Europe to Palestine (p. 73). As clandestine immigrants to a country under British mandate, they know they face a long and arduous challenge, but are prepared to leave Europe definitively (p. 73). As for the paternal grandparents, their national border-crossings had paradoxically begun with one that involved no physical movement at all. Karin’s paternal grandfather Oscar had been born in Bukovina, a part of the former AustroHungarian empire; but in 1918, with the reconfiguration of territorial boundaries following WWI, he and it became Romanian (p. 102). The rapid succession of rulers in this homeland — Austro-Hungarian, Romanian, Russian, German, Romanian again, Russian again, and finally Ukrainian — leads the narrator Karin to affirm that her Jewish family are not uprooted, but rootless: ‘Ils ne sont pas déracinés. Leurs racines sont mortes, introuvables dans ce magma de conquêtes et d’anéantissement’ (p. 104) [They’re not uprooted. Their roots are dead, nowhere to be found in this muddle of conquests and destruction]. Use of the word ‘anéantissement’ also connotes both the anti-Semitic persecutions which became rife in Romania during the 1920s and 1930s, and the Jewish deportations of WWII from which the family only escaped because Karin’s paternal grandmother Gouzi, a chemist, was deemed useful to the German economy (p. 103). She was thus able to get her family out of the ghetto serving as ante-chamber to the camps, after which the family survived the war hidden in a cellar for months. In the post-war period, geopolitical reconfigurations result in Oscar being drafted into mine-clearing in the USSR. He and Gouzi decide to return thence to Romania (p. 135), but find themselves living in a Soviet police state blighted by fear of surveillance, denunciations, and arrests (p. 135). In 1960, along with many other Jews in Bucharest, the family tries to leave for Israel, but as in the fascistdominated Europe of the 1930s depicted in La Pasagère sans étoile, so in the Sovietdominated Romania of the post-war period Jewish emigration comes at a price — a very expensive visa. In 1960, Oscar, Gouzi and their son Micky, Karin’s father, are authorized to leave for France. Yet the stay in France is brief, and the Wandering Jew paradigm is reactivated only a few months later when the family leave France for Israel (p. 159). Despite material and linguistic hardships, in the historic Jewish homeland they finally feel genuinely at home, and free: ‘Oscar, mon grand-père, avait cinquante-cinq ans et ils devaient alors tout recommencer. Retrouver un travail, un logement, apprendre encore une nouvelle langue. Mais au moins, ici, ils avaient leur place. Ils étaient libre’ (p. 166) [Oscar, my grandfather, was fifty-five and they had to start everything from scratch again. Find another job, somewhere else to live, learn yet another new language. But at least here they had a place. They were free]. This long enumeration of grandparental and parental displacements is vertiginous enough. But situated in their interstices is Karin’s own, albeit voluntary odyssey — a visit to Israel some thirty years later, whose objective is to prompt, listen to, and record personal testimonies from her family (p. 163). Although deprived of Oscar and Gouzi’s testimony because they were long dead, she does have access to her great-aunt Lo, who had secured the family’s unofficial asylum in France. Karin’s proclaimed goal in visiting the older generations of her family in Israel is to make

Nation/Deracination

143

some kind of meaning out of suffering. Transmission of trauma, studied in its second-generation form in Chapter 2, emerges forcefully here in third-generation form via reference to Karin’s mental health problems: depression and anorexia nervosa. Her narrative implies the aetiology of these problems in the suffering of her family as diasporic Jews in 1930s and 1940s Europe: ‘Je viens aussi pour donner un sens à la souffrance. [...] Une soignante m’a poussée à comprendre: t’es névrosée à cause de l’histoire familiale. Deux générations après, je serais atteinte par ces trucslà?’ (p. 164) [I’m also coming in order to give a meaning to suffering. [...] A nurse tried to get me to understand: you’re neurotic because of your family history. Two generations on I was apparently still affected by all that stuff?]. Initially sceptical about this diagnosis, Karin recalls a number of family refrains which are common in the experience of second- and third-generation children: Dans mon cerveau, des phrases: le devoir d’être heureux parce qu’eux ne l’ont pas été, le devoir de manger parce qu’eux crevaient de faim? Ils ont échappé cent fois à la mort, toi tu n’arrives pas à jouir de la vie, paraît même que tu aimes ressembler à une morte vivante. Un crime d’être vivant? Comme les survivants des camps? (p. 164) [Sentences in my head: the duty to be happy because they weren’t, the duty to eat because they died of hunger? They escaped death a hundred times, and you can’t manage to enjoy life, it even seems you want to look more dead than alive. A crime to be alive? Like the survivors of the camps?]

The last three sentences indicate symptoms presented by a third-generation subject which were located in Chapters 1 and 2 above in first- and second-generation subjects respectively: depression, dysphoria, anorexia, and guilt-feelings. There is also evidence of a differential impact of this family heritage according to generation. The second generation, Karin’s parents, have sought stability and enracination by living more than thirty years in the same place (France). Indeed, they have problems in packing cases for the most ordinary of journeys, through an almost atavistic fear of never being able to return home (pp. 17–18). In contrast, the third generation, represented by Karin, has long wished to leave France without her family for a country oddly unidentified at this point, designated by a deictic ‘là-bas’ [[over] there] which the reader retrospectively infers as being Israel,15 in a quest for roots she herself judges to be irrational. Again, the link between forebears and selfidentity is highlighted: Voilà plus de trente ans que mes parents vivent en France; ils ont sans doute leurs raisons. Moi, ça fait des années que je veux partir là-bas sans eux. J’ai plusieurs missions. Incapable d’en définir le contenu exact. Ma quête de racines est irrationnelle. Les connaître, eux, pour me rencontrer, moi? (p. 19) [It’s over thirty years now that my parents have been living in France; they no doubt have their reasons. For years I’ve wanted to go there without them. I have several missions. I can’t define their exact content. My search for roots is irrational. Do I want to get to know them in order to get to know myself ?]

As with Gille’s parents at the start of the twentieth century, the attempts of Karin’s parents towards the end of that century to inculcate a sense of identity and belonging in their daughter centre exclusively on, again, a mythology of full Frenchness

144

Nation/Deracination

(p. 29). In typical Republican spirit, this has meant a refusal of Jewish specificity and an exaggerated claim to French identity (p. 29). Even though Karin cannot provide a substantive definition of Jewishness, she can indicate affiliation to a persecuted people: ‘J’appartiens à un peuple pourchassé’ (p. 31) [I belong to a hounded people]. In subsequent musings, she recalls a family dictum conf licting sharply with her father’s drumming into her of her Frenchness: an insistence, precisely, that her ancestors were not French: ‘ “Nos ancêtres ne sont pas les Gaulois”, avais-je appris petite. Plutôt Moïse et la reine de Saba alors?’ (p. 166) [‘Our ancestors aren’t the Gauls’, I had learnt as a child. More Moses and the queen of Sheba, then?]. In this ultimate question, she posits Jewishness as a lineage or ethnicity which may or may not be accompanied by Judaic faith (none of her family members appears to be a practising Jew). Finally, it is worth noting Karin’s layering of linguistic exiles among Jews. One such exile is her alienation from the Hebrew language, gateway to a form of communication with her extended family members in Israel which is largely foreclosed due to her limited knowledge of that language. Particularly striking in this context is the piercing sadness arising from the failure of communication with her maternal grandparents, which is partly cultural, partly affective, but also partly language-based: Déjà le langage me confond, j’utilise dans la même phrase un mot d’hébreu, un mot de français, un d’allemand et une tournure anglaise. [...] Tristesse de l’incommunicabilité. Je ne sais pas comment établir un vrai dialogue avec eux. Trop plein d’amour. Ils m’ont répété mille fois leur bonheur de me voir, que c’était long, quatre ans... (pp. 167–68) [Already the language is confusing me, in the same sentence I use one word of Hebrew, one word of French, one of German and an English turn of phrase. [...] The sadness of not being able to communicate. I don’t know how to establish a real dialogue with them. Too much love. They’ve told me a thousand times how happy they are to see me, that fours years is a long time...]

Even back ‘home’ in France, Karin gives the impression of being (to borrow Homi Bhabha’s term) linguistically ‘unhomed’,16 as she muses that those who have endured territorial exile give birth in the ‘host’ country to children who may be alienated from their mother’s mother tongue: ‘C’est quoi, une langue “maternelle”? [...] chez nous, la langue maternelle n’est pas celle de la mère. Ma mère ne parlait pas la même langue que moi. Elle-même ne parlait pas celle de sa mère’ (p. 195) [What is a ‘mother’ tongue? [...] in our family, the mother tongue isn’t the mother’s. My mother didn’t speak the same language as I do. She herself didn’t speak the same one as her mother]. In Les Portes de l’espérance, dislocation of origins, both geographic and linguistic, leads to a crisis of identity stemming from the very excess of that identity’s elements.

Nation/Deracination

145

Sephardic Exiles The reasons for the exile of the Ashkenazic women discussed in section one differ sharply from those prompting the exile of the Sephardic Jews considered in this second section. Chief ly, the former had not included the occidental/oriental, colonial power/colonial subject binaries that are manifest in the diasporic patterns of these Sephardic Jewish women, who often had more in common with the Arabs of their homeland than with the western Europeans of their host country. As signalled in my introductory remarks, such commonality presents yet another irony, given that it was Arab anti-Semitism in the newly decolonized Maghreb (as well as in Egypt) that triggered the exile of these Sephardic Jews in the first place. In 1971, Jewish sociologist Doris Bensimon-Donath had wondered ‘pour quels motifs les Juifs nord-africains ont quitté en masse des pays, somme toute hospitaliers, sans qu’aucune persecution les ait obligés’17 [on what grounds North African Jews left en masse countries which were on balance hospitable without being forced to do so by any persecutions]. Bensimon-Donath’s belief that anti-Semitism had not been a factor in the immigration of Jews after decolonization of the Maghreb is, however, sharply contradicted by the writers under scrutiny here, even if, as we shall see in the case of Marlène Amar, anti-Semitism was not the only factor at stake, the other being economic. One possible reason for this discrepancy may be the temporal lag between Bensimon-Donath’s study, fieldwork for which was conducted between March 1966 and March 1967, and the considerably later publication dates of the literary texts to be examined here. It could be that the resurgence of Jewish selfaffirmation from the 1980s onwards in France, partly fostered by France’s recognition, albeit belated and incomplete, of its own anti-Semitism under Vichy, has fostered a greater willingness on the part of Jews generally to expose and denounce their own experiences of anti-Semitism, however incommensurate with the Shoah such experiences were in the case of Sephardic Jews. Another, very different reason could be that, due to differing gendered codes of the socially acceptable, women are on the whole more likely to admit to trauma than men. Male resistance to such admission would have been particularly acute in the highly traditional, patriarchal societies of North African Jewry from which Bensimon-Donath’s interviewees originated; and it is notable that there were markedly fewer female than male respondents in Bensimon-Donath’s study. Much more recent studies also undermine BensimonDonath’s inferences. In 2008, Antoine Spire noted that ‘[l]’extrême diversité des situations politiques n’empêchent pas que ce qui explique l’exode des centaines de milliers de Juifs soit ce statut infériorisé de dhimmi qui marque toute l’histoire des Juifs en pays arabo-musulman’18 [the extreme diversity of political situations doesn’t alter the fact that the exodus of hundreds of thousand of Jews was caused by the inferior status of the dhimmi that marks the whole history of Jews in Arab-Muslim countries]. Spire also refers to Nathan Weinstock’s demonstration in 2004 that ‘le réveil nationaliste arabe s’accompagne souvent d’un antisémitisme d’importation se réclamant pourtant d’un fondement islamique’19 [the rise of Arab nationalism often came with a form of anti-Semitism that was imported but nonetheless claimed to have Islamic bases].

146

Nation/Deracination

The coexistence of Arab anti-Semitism and a paradoxically greater affinity between Arabs and Jews than between Jews and their metropolitan French ‘hosts’ features prominently in Marlène Amar’s La Femme sans tête (1993).20 Amar’s autofictional novel forms a non-linear narrative with numerous analeptic and proleptic twists in which the narrator charts the displacement of her Jewish family in the 1950s, when she was only six, from Algeria to France. Stress is laid on, precisely, the family members’ difficulty in adapting to Western, French norms — a difficulty hypostatized in the fate of the narrator’s older sister, to whom the title refers. The very first line of the novel sets a plaintive tone: ‘Tout le monde pleurait à B. quand on est partis’ (p. 11) [Everyone in B. was crying when we left]. The homodiegetic narrator — as far as paratextual material would suggest, based on Amar — intuits the dreadful finality of this departure and somatizes her fear through trembling (p. 11). The exact trigger to the family’s exile is only elucidated about one third of the way into the text: the bombing of the father’s shop in 1954, at the start of the Algerian War (p. 32), and the subsequent expropriation of his business. It is important to appreciate that in the Algerian context, the postulate of Arab antiSemitism needs nuancing. It may reasonably be inferred that the father had been targeted by the Algerian Front de libération nationale [National Liberation Front] because all Jews since 1870 were, under the Crémieux decree, French citizens, and for this reason resented by the indigenous Arab subjects of French rule. Despite the received historical idea that there had been hostility since 1870 between Jews and the indigenous Algerians, Amar’s narrative suggests that the converse obtained, at least until the outbreak of the Algerian War: ‘La méfiance s’installait. On parlait bas, rasait les murs, hésitait à adresser la parole à ceux qui avaient été nos voisins, nos frères, nos amis’ (p. 34; my emphasis) [Mistrust settled in. We would speak quietly, hug the walls, hesitate to speak to those who had been our neighbours, our brothers, our friends]. In Amar’s account, anti-Semitism springs largely from the rising Arab nationalist movement, rather than having deeper historical roots. Historians may find this account one-dimensional, but La Femme sans tête is an autofictional novel rather than a historical or political study. To that extent, it succeeds in conveying a personal, subjective, but not for all that necessarily unrepresentative testimonial of Sephardic trauma. That personal, subjective stamp is clear in the proleptic melancholy conferred on the family’s experience of exile by the mother’s comment as they cross the Sahara in a night bus: On a traversé le Sahara dans la nuit, et ma mère nous a dit de bien regarder, que jamais plus nous ne verrions des paysages aussi beaux, aussi doux et sauvages. [...] ses yeux ont plongé dans les dunes au loin comme si elle voulait les emporter avec elle. C’est à ce moment qu’elle a pleuré et les larmes ont coulé, silencieuses, sur ses joues. (p. 35) [We crossed the Sahara in the night, and my mother told us to take a good look, that we’d never again see such beautiful, gentle and wild scenery. [...] her eyes sank into the far-off dunes as if she wanted to take them with her. It was then that she started crying and tears f lowed silently onto her cheeks.]

Nation/Deracination

147

The haunting mirage experienced by the narrator of a smiling camel takes on a strange quality of reality in her memory (pp. 11–12). In contrast, the actual reality of the country in which the family arrives takes on a quality of unreality, as if they are phantoms merely pretending to be alive in France (p. 12). And whilst most of her family appear with time to have forgotten the past, her own memories of home retain a somatic grip: ‘J’avais honte de la vivacité de mes souvenirs, de la langueur qui me prenait parfois, je me taisais’ (p. 12) [I was ashamed of how vivid my memories were, of the languor that sometimes took hold of me, and I’d fall silent]. Within a single family, there is both memorial hypertrophe (the narrator’s) and amnesia (that of most of the other family members), with the latter recalling Andreas Huyssen’s diagnosis of ‘the virus of amnesia that at times threatens to consume memory itself ’.21 This discrepancy militates against viewing the family as one of the primary vectors of ‘collective memory’, as advanced by Maurice Halbwachs in his groundbreaking work Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925).22 His observation in La Mémoire collective (1950) that although group memories will not appear to all individual members of the group with the same intensity, the memories themselves are still ‘des souvenirs communs, et qui s’appuient l’un sur l’autre’23 [mutually supportive of each other and common to all]24 is clearly inadequate to account for the memories of Amar’s family, which endure for only some of its members. Granted, Halbwachs makes an important concession: ‘Nous dirions volontiers que chaque mémoire individuelle est un point de vue sur la mémoire collective, que ce point de vue change suivant la place que j’y occupe, et que cette place elle-même change suivant les relations que j’entretiens avec d’autres milieux’25 [I would readily acknowledge that each memory is a viewpoint on the collective memory, that this viewpoint changes as my position changes, that this position itself changes as my relationship to other milieus change].26 But even this concession does not account for the complete eradication, albeit the result of repression, of many memories by other members of Amar’s dispossessed family. As Anna Whitehead remarks, ‘[o]ther critics have sought to respond to Halbwachs by providing a more nuanced terminology, which might enable a more precise conception of the relationship between individuals and collectives’.27 For all its objective validity and improvement on Halbwachs’s rather blunt foundational concept of collective memory, Avishai Margalit’s much more recently (2002) articulated concept of a ‘shared memory’ that ‘integrates and calibrates the different perspectives of those who remember [an] episode... into one version’28 proves no more applicable to the memorial dissensus of Amar’s family, in which two members suffer from an excess of memory and the rest from either no memory or denial thereof. This failure of the family to function as a vehicle of collective group memory only serves to accentuate that family’s fragmentation, produced by the trauma of exile. Only the narrator’s older sister along with the narrator herself defect from the willed amnesia of the other family members. After their departure and the mother’s one paean to the Algerian landscape, ‘il n’a plus été question de déserts, de dunes, de paysages doux et sauvages. Il n’a plus été question que d’oublier jusqu’à leur nom, et quand on en parlait, on disait “là-bas” ’ (p. 35) [there was no more talk of deserts,

148

Nation/Deracination

dunes, gentle and wild scenery. What mattered now was forgetting even their name, and when we spoke about them, we said ‘back there’]. Only the sister talks of Algeria, much to the rest of the family’s discomfort, as if they fear the return of a communal repressed (p. 12). That communal, exilic repressed is confirmed in an evasive parental response to photos taken on the narrator’s return to Algeria many years later (p. 37) and in her siblings’ conspicuous indifference to her trip (p. 37). Yet despite assiduous efforts to erase their foreign antecedents, the family display an irremediable alterity relative to the indigenous French. As will be the case in Karine Tuil’s Douce France, no amount of effort to assimilate proves sufficient — a point driven home by the spatial metaphor of ‘fossé’ (p. 41) [gulf ]. The source of this unbridgeable gulf between them and the indigenous French lies, inter alia, in a radically different phenomenological relation to the world: Nos yeux n’avaient pas vu les mêmes couleurs, nos mains n’avaient pas touché les mêmes matières, nos narines n’avaient pas respiré le même air. Nos plaisirs prenaient leur source dans la blancheur du sable et l’ardeur du soleil, les leurs, dans les forêts verdoyantes et les églises au creux de villages assoupis. (p. 41) [Our eyes hadn’t seen the same colours, our hands hadn’t touched the same matter, our nostrils hadn’t breathed in the same air. Our pleasures took their source in the whiteness of the sand and the heat of the sun, theirs from green forests and churches in the depths of sleepy villages.]

The suspicion prompted by alterity is expressed via negation in an itemization of all that they are perceived to lack by their French ‘hosts’: ‘Nous étions d’un autre monde, nous qui n’avions ni propriété familiale, ni grand-mère à confitures, ni arbre généalogique. Suspects à tous égards’ (p. 42) [We were from another world, we who had neither family property nor a jam-making granny nor a family tree. Suspect in all respects]. Yet despite this obsession with acceptance and integration, after thirty years of exile her parents are still bemused by their host country and its values, the mother is still financially dependent on her husband, has never used a cheque book, is accompanied by her husband to shop in the Jewish quarter, and when alone together they still converse in a mixture of French and Arab. The very f latness of the author’s style reinforces her message of their complete social isolation: ‘Ils vivent en vase clos, presque en clandestins’ (p. 96) [They lived cut off from the world, almost like illegal workers]. As the narrative unfolds, the sister comes to emblematize both lost origins generally and, more specifically, the gendered ravages of exile from east to west. For the narrator, the sister’s appearance had originally incarnated Eastern woman (p. 13). And for a short period of time in France, the sister’s body had allowed synaesthesic access to the lost homeland: Parfois, elle se mettait à danser en écoutant la radio et je suivais ses déhanchements en plissant les yeux, jusqu’à ce que revienne l’odeur âcre et épicée de la place de Chameaux après le marché et que j’entende le bruit du vent agiter doucement les palmiers, le soir venu, dans le silence du désert. (p. 13) [Sometimes, she’d start to dance while listening to the radio and I’d follow her hip movements while screwing up my eyes until the pungent spicy smell of Chameaux Square after market-days came back to me and I could hear the

Nation/Deracination

149

sound of the palm trees swaying gently in the wind, once evening had come, in the silence of the desert.]

But the sister soon falls prey to the disciplinary codes of canonical femininity operant in France. Nolden is right to suggest that La Femme sans tête ‘presents, metaphorically speaking, the decapitation of a Jewish woman from Algeria as the ultimate subordination of the immigrant to her new surroundings’.29 Given the stress on the sister’s former indomitability (p. 27), why does she so quickly capitulate to pressures annihilating the pleasures of bodily self-affirmation she had savoured in Algeria? One obvious although insufficient answer is the hegemony of western norms even in a postcolonial context; indeed, perhaps particularly in such a context, given the distancing from eastern origins of the formerly colonized which is the price of their acceptance in postcolonial western society. After fond recall of a preexilic incident in which her family had been amused by the sister’s insubordination, the narrator implies a world of difference from the family’s attitude in France: À B. l’anecdote fit beaucoup rire et j’y repense chaque fois comme à un moment d’une extrême liberté. Ma sœur se conduisait là-bas comme quelqu’un qui se sent chez soi. L’exil n’est pas seulement l’apprentissage d’un nouveau territoire, c’est aussi celui de la soumission, de la subordination. Une sorte d’obligation de réserve. (p. 80) [In B. the story caused much laughter and I always think about it as a moment of extreme freedom. Back there my sister behaved like somebody who feels at home. Exile isn’t only learning about a new territory, it’s also learning about submission and subordination. A sort of duty to be reserved.]

In the case of the sister, geographical exile is never psychologically overcome, but rather translated into a bodily exile attesting subordination. Her natural Mediterranean beauty is rejected and her body submitted to the feminine ‘ideal’ depicted in French women’s magazines. Weight loss turns her into a shadow of her original self, and it is significant that the narrator implies a pathology in her sister’s new thinness by saying that she contracted it, as one contracts an illness (p. 15). The sister’s self-transformation — or self-erasure — goes further than dieting, however: she dyes her hair blonde, wears blue contact lenses, and undergoes plastic surgery to reduce her breasts, to change her nose-shape, and finally to change the whole of her face. This could be conceptualized as the negative obverse of Gloria Anzaldúa’s mestiza identity,30 which ‘is primarily characterized by its openness towards difference’.31 Whereas the sister is certainly ‘open’ to western differences relative to her eastern upbringing, she repudiates the difference she herself represents in the west as a Maghrebi Jewish woman. The result is an artificial and deeply unhealthy hybrid. My use of the word ‘hybrid’ here and by implication of its cognate ‘hybridity’ shows dissensus vis-à-vis Homi Bhabha’s theory of the ‘third space’: [...] for me the importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity to me is the ‘third space’ which enables other positions to emerge. The third space displaces the

150

Nation/Deracination histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives, which are inadequately understood through received wisdom.32

In the particular cultural instance of the sister’s hybridization, the ‘third space’ opened up is an acutely disempowering locus. The narrator avers that in achieving her goal of being less obviously eastern and less obviously Jewish, the sister has become more banal, and visibly scarred to boot (p. 15). As Nolden aptly observes, Amar’s La femme sans tête participates in the literature that speaks to the very physical aspect of anti-Semitism. Sander Gilman has shown in detail that inscribed in the history of anti-Semitism is a history of constructing the Jewish body as the anti-body, foreign both to nature and society.33

From a different theoretical perspective, the sister could be seen to drift towards cultural monolinguism rather than other options open to migrants, such as cultural segregation34 or cultural diglossia. It could, of course, be countered that both cultural segregation and cultural diglossia refer to practices of adaptation (alimentary, linguistic, vestimentary, and so on) which are essentially impermanent. In contrast, the sister’s bodily homologation to western norms are not easily reversible: one does not lose or gain weight, change eye- or hair-colour, reduce or enlarge breasts, or alter nose-shape in the space of a day, which is the rough timescale implied by the typical practices of cultural segregation/diglossia (eating certain foods, speaking certain languages/dialects, wearing certain clothes, and so on). From another theoretical optic, the sister’s visceral scream when the narrator dares to express preference for the sister’s original nose-shape (p. 15) could be construed psychoanalytically as a hysterical reaction. I am deeply wary of the gendered asymmetries surrounding the use of the term ‘hysteria’ and its cognates. But that mistrust for one element of Freudian psychoanalytic theory does not preclude receptiveness to other, more convincing elements. The return of the repressed seems to be paralleled in Amar’s text by fantasized return to the past. Desire for her sister to return to the past in particular is entirely untenable, for she can no more recover pre-exilic life in Algeria than she can recover her pre-operative body. For the narrator, the sister’s physical metamorphoses signal the slow death of an originary self. The emphasis she places on her sister’s pre-operative nose as having been a trace of that self recalls the dubiously iconic status accorded the Jewish nose in caricature. However, it also partakes of a more subtle discourse recalling the paronomasia of ‘nez’ [nose]/‘né’ [born] found in the work of another, celebrated Algerian Jewish woman writer, Hélène Cixous.35 The almost morbid and certainly regressive nature of these self-imposed metamorphoses is conveyed by the image of a butterf ly returning to the state of a silk worm: ‘Une autre femme était éclose, mais la métamorphose avait opéré de façon singulière. Quelque chose de rétréci. Une métamorphose à l’envers. Un papillon devenu ver à soie’ (p. 17) [Another woman had hatched out, but the metamorphosis had worked in a peculiar way. Something shrunken. A metamorphosis in reverse. A butterf ly that had become a silk worm]. The transformation of the sister’s nose has a dramatic effect on her family, apparently placing an embargo on any further reference to her, as if she no longer existed and had indeed never existed. Thus the sister’s willed denial of her roots produces one

Nation/Deracination

151

more form of exile, this time from her family. The family had willed the first form of exile from geographical origins but cannot understand or accept what may in the case of the sister be a form of involuntary acting-out, a compulsive repetition of this deracination which uses her own body as the stage of re-enactment. The conceptual framework of psychoanalysis is again connoted, though never explicitly denoted, in a figuring of the sister’s loss of originary physical markers as a family bereavement for which, instead of proper mourning, there is melancholic silence (p. 17). In sombre symmetry is the evolution, or rather devolution, of the sister’s adult life. After the collapse of her seven-year marriage, contracted uniquely through fear of ending up a spinster, she embraces no career or activity of her own and lives off her alimony (p. 47). Significantly, her sole intellectual and creative project, the writing of a play, is aborted by sexual predation by the male literary critic to whom she shows it (p. 63). Here there is a negative correlation between silencing of the sister’s writerly voice by the male critic and silencing of the narrator’s writerly voice by a patriarchally dominated family: On n’a jamais évoqué les articles que j’écrivais, dans ma famille, on ne m’a jamais posé de questions, jamais émis le moindre avis. [...] Il m’a fallu entreprendre ce récit pour comprendre. Comprendre que dire était déjà de trop — alors écrire — dans cette famille qui avait choisi l’effacement comme la manière la plus sûre de se fondre dans la masse, de réussir à s’intégrer. La méthode caméléon. Un des leitmotive [sic]: ‘Motus et bouche cousue.’ (p. 49) [In my family nobody has ever mentioned the articles I wrote, nobody has ever asked me any questions, ever expressed the slightest opinion. [...] I had to start this narrative in order to understand. To understand that speaking was already too much — so, writing — in this family that had chosen self-effacement as the surest way of blending into the crowd, of succeeding in becoming integrated. The chameleon method. One of the leitmotifs was ‘Don’t breathe a word’.]

Not immaterial in this connection is the narrator’s later remark that during her teenage years she went through periods of aphasia, a medically recognized symptom of trauma, when she would remain completely silent for days (p. 60). An important revelation is that her fear of speaking arose from hearing her father adjure her sister to silence (p. 108). The end of the novel reiterates that paternal injunctions to silence had targeted her sister disproportionately: ‘Le “tais-toi” de mon père s’adressait pourtant davantage à ma sœur, à ses débordements de mots, de rires, à tout ce qui, en elle, trahissait la terre d’où l’on venait’ (p. 109) [My father’s ‘Be quiet’ was above all addressed to my sister, to her rush of words, of laughter, to everything in her that betrayed where we came from]. Ultimately, both the sister and the narrator effectively contest the paternal edict of silence, the sister in corporeal mode, the narrator in writerly mode. Yet neither achieves affective resolution, and it is worth noting that the key tonality of Amar’s novel is a painfully bleak f latness. The family’s experience of exile indeed appears to have blocked all affect, leading to a sclerosis of affection or at least of its expression: ‘Chez nous, il y a comme une raideur qui s’est installée après l’exil. On s’embrasse du bout des lèvres, on ne se dit jamais de mots gentils, on n’exprime jamais rien de tendre. Chacun reste à

152

Nation/Deracination

sa place, dans son coin’ (p. 48) [In our family there’s a sort of stiffness that set in after exile. We kiss each other reluctantly, we never say nice things to each other, we never say anything affectionate. Everyone stays in their place, in their corner]. Exile, repression of loss, failure to mourn that loss, and a desperate desire for assimilation into French society have thoroughly pathologized this family — or at least its female members. As we have seen, the narrator has periods of aphasia, and she is unable in adult life to settle in one place (p. 108). Her nameless sister not only surgically manipulates her appearance, but even pretends she has cancer (p. 64). The other daughter, Pépita, is in adult life aff licted by an obsession with cleanliness and tidiness (p. 68) which would probably now be labelled OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder). Like the nameless eponymous sister, Pépita too has attempted to efface all traces of her eastern origins, to the point where she (like Bernfeld’s family) is not so much uprooted as without roots, almost a product of cultural parthenogenesis: ‘Elle parle avec pondération, s’habille d’ensembles coordonnés. Si ce n’est sa peau mate, rien en elle ne trahit l’Orient. Je ne l’ai jamais entendue évoquer le passé. Jamais. B. n’existe pas. Elle me fait parfois l’effet de venir de nulle part’ (p. 68) [She speaks in a level-headed way, dresses in coordinated outfits. Were it not for her olive skin, nothing in her would betray the East. I’ve never heard her refer to the past. Never. B. doesn’t exist. Sometimes she seems to have come from nowhere]. Even the narrator is progressively estranged from familial origins: ‘Quand j’entendais ma mère dire “malgré que”, je la reprenais avec une sécheresse indignée, lui signifiant du même coup que nous n’étions plus du même bord. Elle me regardait apeurée, mais avec une infinie bonté dans les yeux. J’avais oublié d’où je venais’ (p. 75) [When I heard my mother say ‘despite that’, I would pull her up with indignant curtness, at the same time giving her to understand that we were no longer of a kind. She would look at me in fear, but with infinite kindness in her eyes. I’d forgotten where I came from]. Not one of the female members of the family presents a healthy psychological profile. Depression aff licts the mother in France as she finds herself bereft of both the solar and the community warmth of Algeria (p. 38), bearing out Homi Bhabha’s contention that ‘[t]o be unhomed is not to be homeless’:36 the mother has a physical home in France, but is no less spiritually ‘unhomed’ for all that. However, it is decidedly the unnamed sister whose affective damage is most pronounced, and she who crystallizes her family’s dis(-)ease. In fact it is from the father’s trenchant dismissal of his elder daughter that the title of Amar’s novel derives: Mon père disait toujours d’elle: ‘Elle est tête en l’air’, ‘elle a perdu la tête’, ‘elle n’a pas la tête sur les épaules’, ou encore ‘elle n’a pas de tête’. Des histoires de tête, tout le temps. Et puis, il ne la nommait pas. Il disait simplement ‘elle’. La femme sans tête n’avait pas de nom, naturellement. (p. 52) [My father would always say of her ‘She’s got her head in the clouds’, ‘she’s lost her head’, ‘her head isn’t on her shoulders’, or ‘where’s her head’. Always things to do with heads. And then, he wouldn’t name her. He’d simply say ‘she’. The woman without a head had no name, naturally.]

The connotations of this title range from the father’s sexist slight that his daughter has no common sense or intelligence to the sinister suggestion that she has been

Nation/Deracination

153

figuratively decapitated. Equally menacing is the stripping of identity resulting from refusal to confer on her a proper name, a destitution committed by the father but in which the narrator is oddly complicit (choosing to name her other sister, Pépita, but not the sister who is the centre of her narrative gravity). From exuberant and sociable, the sister starts almost visibly to shrink in an attempt at auto-retraction aimed at taking up less space (p. 70). This adumbrates the weight loss and anorexia that set in when her marriage breaks down (pp. 73–74). The narrator herself implies that nostalgia for the lost homeland and its cosmic stability are the source of her sister’s malaise in France, ‘Un monde à des annéeslumière de B. là où elle n’avait peur de rien [...], où rien ne changeait jamais, ni les soleils, ni le ciel, ni les dunes, dans ce désert planté là pour l’éternité’ (pp. 78–79) [A world light years away from B. where she was scared of nothing [...], where nothing ever changed, not the suns, not the sky, not the dunes, in that desert standing there for ever]. Only very late on do we learn that the sister’s plastic surgery was preceded by a blatantly psychosomatic symptom — a persistent loud cough with no apparent physical cause, which ceased when the plastic surgery began: ‘La métamorphose se faisait progressivement, sous nos yeux. Sans un bruit désormais, sans un mot. Dans un silence de mort’ (p. 83) [The metamorphosis happened progressively, before our very eyes. Henceforth without a sound, without a word. In a deathly silence]. Reprise of the word ‘mort’ reiterates the topos of the originary self ’s death, here under the surgeon’s knife. The narrator too somatizes psychic distress: appalled by the morbidity of her sister’s surgically transformed nose, she vomits all night (pp. 85–86). Response to the sister’s pain after further surgery leaving her with bloody eyelids is equally somatic, but includes terse notation of affect: ‘Nausée. Envie de la prendre dans mes bras. Je ferme les yeux. Ma tête se vide’ (p. 86) [Feel sick. Want to take her into my arms. I shut my eyes. My head empties]. The semantic concomitance of that last sentence (‘Ma tête se vide’) with the title of the novel (La Femme sans tête) suggests an empathic merging of identities between the two sisters that is annulled even as it is constituted, due to their mutual miscomprehension. Somatization of the pain of exile is a wider phenomenon in La Femme sans tête than the reader might first assume. The toxicity and even fatality of that pain emerges in the narrator’s remark that since leaving Algeria for France, many of her fellow immigrants have died, some of unknown illnesses from which doctors have created a broad category called ‘maladies des gens d’Afrique du Nord’ (p. 88) [North African people’s illnesses]. Yet it is telling that the narrator only reports female cases of such illness. Judicious juxtapositioning of observations coupled with a telling adverb, ‘officiellement’ [officially], imply that one of her aunts had literally died of loneliness in exile (p. 90). The aunt’s somatization of exilic pain to the point of developing a fatal cancer is extreme, but not unique. Eventually, a truth that will have been growing upon the attentive reader is made overt: that the law of silence and repression imposed by the family’s exile is met by the bodily rebellion of its female members specifically: ‘Je crois que le mal de dos de ma mère et les métamorphoses de ma sœur veulent dire la même chose: une rébellion de la chair contre la loi du silence imposée par l’exil. Comme si, en l’absence des mots, les corps se mettaient à parler’ (p. 93) [I believe that my mother’s backache and my sister’s

154

Nation/Deracination

metamorphoses mean the same thing: a revolt of the f lesh against the law of silence imposed by exile. As if, in the absence of words, bodies began to speak]. Deprived of a literal voice, these women articulate suffering through their bodies. Given that the male members of the family are also subject to this law of silence, we might wonder why Amar presents the embodiment of suffering in such highly gendered terms. Association of woman with the body as opposed to man with the mind is of course a pervasive cultural cliché, but rather than endorsing it, Amar suggests the greater subordination of women to the law of silence, casting the father himself as the legislator (p. 96). The father’s own relative disempowerment is clearly less acute than his wife’s and daughters’ — a point borne out by the narrator’s disturbing sense of invisibility in the face of this paternal law. It will by now be clear that Amar’s mediation of exile is strongly genderinf lected. To what extent does it bear a Jewish specificity, though? In presenting her sister’s irreversible transformation into model French woman, the narrator foregrounds the sister’s repudiation of Jewish rather than more generally Algerian roots: ‘Ma sœur, en se transformant, a fini par l’être pour de bon. Plus française que nature, même. Aujourd’hui, elle lit le Nouveau Testament et dit “israélite” en parlant d’un juif ’ (p. 96) [In transforming herself, my sister ended up being it [i.e. a model French woman] for good. More French than the French, even. Today, she reads the New Testament and says ‘Israelite’ when talking about a Jew]. The exceptionality of the sister’s stance is implied in what closely follows: the anecdote of an uncle who, having recalled a Jew who converted to Catholicism through love for his wife but still called for a rabbi on his death bed, concludes that ‘il faut rester entre nous. Ça ne marche jamais avec “eux”. Il ne sert à rien d’oublier qui on est. Ça nous rattrape toujours un jour ou l’autre’ (pp. 96–97) [we have to stick together. It never works with ‘them’. There’s no point in forgetting who you are. It always catches up with us sooner or later]. Emphasis is thus placed on the inviolability of Jewish origins and the unbridgeable gulf between Jews and non-Jews. This is succeeded by comments on the unrootedness of second-generation Algerian Jews, their dispossession of origins, and finally, on the return of the nostalgic repressed (p. 97) — the latter recalling David Lowenthal’s apt remark that the massive migration of the post-WWII period has tended to ‘sharpen nostalgia’.37 In her raw rendering of exile, Amar herself eschews any kind of sentimentalizing nostalgia for the homeland. Algeria is certainly not mourned as paradise lost, and some aspects of it are implicitly critiqued. Bhabha has rightly averred that ‘the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; [...] even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew’.38 What Amar does is precisely to translate for a French readership (axiomatically, she has no need to appropriate) signs of an idealized Algerian homeland only to rehistoricize and read them anew. That new reading, with a critically gendered edge, shows how culture-specific aesthetic norms can be modified in surprising ways by new historical factors, such as the post-war development of the plastic surgery industry. Thus, for instance, the traditional Maghrebi woman, normatively associated with unspoilt nature, in France becomes an alienated, self-policing subject whose relationship with her body is far from natural. Rather than being horrified by her

Nation/Deracination

155

daughter’s self-mutilation in recourse to endless plastic surgery, the Maghrebi Jewish mother bestows tacit approval in the claim that ‘Il faut souffrir pour être belle’ (p. 99) [You have to suffer to be beautiful]. She is also baff led by her younger daughter’s (the narrator’s) philosophical acceptance of natural ageing processes in refusing to die her greying hair (pp. 100–01). A lineage passing from mother to older daughter in league against their own bodies is asserted: ‘Ma mère aspirait à l’éclat éternel, militait pour une féminité intemporelle. Et dans ce domaine, ma sœur était, sans aucun doute, sa meilleure disciple’ (p. 100) [My mother aspired to eternal radiance, campaigned for a timeless femininity. And here my sister was without any doubt her best disciple]. What is disturbing in this portrait is the antinomy of the hypostatized eastern woman full of sensuality and vitality on the one hand, and on the other hand a woman who rejects her body in its natural state and natural ageing processes. Crucially, it is not at any point suggested that the mother’s quest for eternal youth comes after her exile from Algeria. Any glorification of the indigenous Maghrebi culture before the corrupting inf luences of Western culture is thereby eschewed. Three years after La Femme sans tête, Amar published Des gens infréquentables (1996).39 This ostensibly impassive yet emotionally hard-hitting text forms both a sequel and an antidote to La Femme sans tête. It takes up the same family’s story, but restores those memories of that family’s antecedents in Algeria which had been silenced by parental, and more particularly paternal, decree in the earlier text. Just as Des gens infréquentables fills the gaps of memory, so it dispels the anonymity of both the eponymous woman of La Femme sans tête and the name of the home town from which the family was exiled. The elder sister, Graziella, is identifiable as the nameless titular sister of La Femme sans tête, and the Algerian home town designated only by the initial ‘B.’ in La Femme sans tête is revealed to be Béchar (p. 22). Des gens infréquentables is divided into two sections, the first reinstating the censored preexilic family history, the second focusing on the family’s exilic existence in France (beginning in the late 1950s). These two divisions are not entirely watertight, with intermittent crossover between the content of the two. Des gens infréquentables bears a resonant epigraph from F. Scott Fitzgerald: ‘C’est ainsi que nous avançons, barques luttant contre un courant qui nous rejette sans cesse vers le passé’ [So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past].40 Through Scott Fitzgerald’s words, Amar accentuates voyage over fixity and posits the inescapability of the past. Her narrator’s experience of metaphorical new waters in France was a constant journey rather than an arrival, and never a fixing. Once in France the family’s ethnic difference refers them constantly to their originary past, making them ultimately unassimilable despite all the will in the world. In fact, Des gens infréquentables mobilizes an interplay of alterities: those dividing gentiles from Jews, but also those dividing European Jews from non-European Jews. The trope of cultural clash emerges in the very first page, which generates a dichotomy between Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews (colourfully mediated before Amar by Paule Darmon in Baisse les yeux, Sarah of 1980).41 An Ashkenazic Jew deplores what he — ironically, given that he himself ‘parlait fort’ (p. 17) [spoke loudly] — views as the loudness, excitability, and general vulgarity of Sephardic Jews: ‘Il n’aimait pas les Juifs d’Afrique du Nord. Il les appelait “la

156

Nation/Deracination

smala du Sentier”. Un jour, il m’a dit: “Ils ne peuvent rien faire sans crier, s’agiter, gesticuler, sans faire de bruit. Ce sont des gens infréquentables” ’ (p. 17) [He didn’t like North African Jews. He called them ‘the Sentier tribe’. One day, he said to me ‘They can’t do anything without shouting, getting agitated, gesticulating, making a noise. They’re not people you mix with’]. The titular words ‘des gens infré­ quentables’ assert an unbreachable gulf between the two major divisions of Jewry: North African Jews are people you don’t mix with, beyond the pale, inferior. In symmetry with its opening, towards its close Des gens infréquentables returns to the Ashkenazic/Sephardic divide, evoking a family wedding reception where interstitial ethnic stereotypes are reinscribed: sobriety, hushed voices and careful table manners on the Ashkenazic side, vivid colours, loud voices and joyful uproar on the Sephardic (pp. 110–11). Significantly, the Ashkenazic Jews are described as conducting themselves like perfect French people (p. 111). The opposition is spatially underscored by the seating of the two groups on different sides of the dining room. What is more, the narrator’s marriage to an Ashkenazic Jew, LouisFerdinand Brenner, seems destined to failure from the wedding onwards, and indeed she eventually leaves him (p. 117). This pattern recurs in a second ill-starred relationship to another Ashkenazic Jew, Basil, which declines from the day she moves in with him. When she falls pregnant and is refused an abortion, he insists he does not want a child from a Sephardic woman (p. 125) — an egregious example of inter-ethnic racism. Eventually, worn down by Basil’s verbal assault on her day and night, she gives in and, as she acidly puts it, finds a doctor willing to kill the child (p. 125). After the abortion she leaves him, and the parallel with the rupture from Louis-Ferdinand is reinforced by Amar’s syntax. Of Louis-Ferdinand, the narrator recalls ‘Je l’ai quitté un été sans rien dire. Je suis partie visiter ma famille en vacances dans le midi. Je ne suis pas revenue’ (p. 117) [I left him one summer without saying a thing. I left to visit my family on holiday in the south. I didn’t return]; of Basil, ‘Puis un matin, je me suis levée comme une automate, j’ai fait ma valise et je suis partie. Je ne suis plus jamais revenue’ (p. 126) [Then one morning, I got up like a robot, packed my bags and left. I never again returned]. In both cases, the assertion ends with the irreversibility of her departure; and in both cases, there is no verbal announcement of that departure. Words appear never to have acquired a two-way value in her relationships with these Ashkenazic men, both of whom appropriated for themselves the Logos. Of Louis-Ferdinand, she has informed us ‘il était très bavard’ (p. 115) [he was very talkative]; of Basil, that he had a ‘façon doucereuse de me couper la parole’ (p. 124) [smooth way of interrupting me], and that during her pregnancy, he verbally beat her into submission: ‘Après, il ne m’a plus laissée dormir. Pendant quinze nuits d’affilée, il a parlé. Non et non, il ne voulait pas de l’enfant’ (p. 125) [Afterwards, he didn’t let me sleep anymore. For a solid fortnight, he spoke. No and no again, he didn’t want the child]. On the one hand this appropriation of the Logos by the male coincides entirely with gendered stereotypes, but on the other hand the attribution of loquacity to the Ashkenazic Jew and of taciturnity to the Sephardic Jew subverts standard Jewish stereotypes. The interaction of gender and ethnicity here is complex, but what is clear is Amar’s reprise of the Jewish male silencing of Jewish women which had previously featured in La Femme sans tête.

Nation/Deracination

157

In fact the edict of silence laid down by the father in La Femme sans tête is reinscribed in Des gens infréquentables both as the very origin of the story the narrator is about to tell, and as the veil covering the family’s past in Algeria: ‘L’histoire commence par un silence. Jusqu’à la mort de Samuel, personne n’a jamais parlé de la vie là-bas. Personne ne se souvenait. C’était l’oubli, un oubli sidéral’ (p. 21) [The story begins with a silence. Until Samuel’s death, nobody ever talked about life back there. Nobody remembered it. Oblivion, star-like oblivion]. Similarly, the few images she herself has retained of the Algerian desert are ‘Des impressions qui voguaient devant mes yeux comme des nébuleuses obsédantes. Les sortilèges d’un monde englouti’ (p. 21) [Impressions drifting before my eyes like haunting nebula. Spells from a world that’s been swallowed up]. The ‘monde englouti’ reiterates the oblivion to which her parents have consigned her Algerian origins, whereas the noun ‘sortilèges’ conversely implies the enduring, almost magical power of memories about these origins. The tension between such recollections and their denial is only broken by her cousin Samuel’s death, when she at last cajoles her parents into speaking and thereby into an unlocking of memory. It is partly this unlocking which endows Amar’s second autofictional novel with a much stronger Jewish specificity than her first. The first maternal memory recorded, from the early twentieth century, evokes the end of a Shabbat with the maternal grandfather’s prayers, followed by Arab extortion of money and his f light, provoked by extreme anti-Semitism and even Judaeocide on the part of the Berber chiefs (pp. 23–24). The reader thereby learns that Amar’s maternal grandfather had been forced into exile within his very own country, to a different town, Colomb-Béchar (pp. 24–25), soon to be followed by the rest of the besieged Jewish community from Tafilalet. In Des gens infréquentables, recollections of the lost Algerian homeland which bear a distinctly Jewish signature constitute a collage of autobiography, family historiography and ethnography. A series of reminiscences about her North African childhood, and particularly about experiences shared with her cousin Samuel, are structured loosely around the prompt of the family photograph (recalling a similar mnemonic device deployed by Anissimov, discussed in Chapter 2). From a gendered perspective, of particular interest are the eidetic references to the female teamwork of Amar’s mother and her three sisters in cleaning the house and preparing meals for special religious occasions such as marriages, circumcisions, and Bar Miztvahs. Specific points in the Jewish calendar preceded by female toil are also mentioned, such as Pessah, Purim, and the weekly Shabbat (pp. 62–63). In evoking this Jewish women’s world of intimate sorority in domestic and culinary activities, Amar both reconstitutes a Jewish female habitus and provides a wealth of close-up images which, in addition to the photographic, confer a cinematographic, mobile property on her narrative. Elles ont des mains agiles, des mains d’artiste, élégantes et précises. Je les vois préparer la viande du shabbat. La pétrir. Emincer les oignons. Faire tremper le pain rassis dans l’eau [...] Je les vois s’essuyer le front avec leur tablier quand elles ont chaud. Je les vois sourire et plaisanter. Je les vois toujours gaies [...] (p. 63)

158

Nation/Deracination [They have agile hands, artist’s hands, elegant and precise. I see them preparing the Shabbat meat. Kneading it. Thinly slicing the onions. Soaking the stale bread in water [...] I see them wiping their forehead with their apron when they’re hot. I see them smile and joke. I see them always cheerful [...]]

In contrast, other memories bear a more generally North African rather than specifically Jewish stamp, and some make uncomfortable reading for at least the western feminist. Des gens infréquentables reveals inversion of aesthetic ideals of femininity relative to La Femme sans tête, in which the nameless sister, inf luenced by Western corporeal ideals, had sought to be unhealthily thin; in their home country, the exact opposite had been women’s goal (p. 40). While eastern ideals of feminine beauty in extreme corpulence obviously demanded less self-denial than their western counterpart of extreme thinness, both are seen to instrumentalize women’s bodies. Further memories which may disturb the western feminist reader who refuses the potential ethical quiescence of cultural relativism are the narrator’s mother’s and three aunts’ engagement at the age of five and their marriage at the age of fifteen (p. 59).42 Ethnic tensions first explored in La Femme sans tête are further developed in Des gens infréquentables. In the latter, reference is made to relics of fairly recent French imperial racism in the Algerian Colomb-Béchar’s Café Conti: ‘Sur la devanture, l’inscription “Interdit aux Juifs et aux Arabes” a été repeinte il n’y a pas longtemps’ (p. 45) [On the shop window, the notice ‘No Jews or Arabs’ was repainted not long ago]. This French conf lation of Arabs and Jews in colonial Algeria is reproduced in postcolonial France when, years later, the narrator’s Jewish mother is subjected to verbal racism and refused service in a market because she is (initially) mistaken for an Arab (p. 89). However, a step change in the racist abuse occurs when the stallholder, noticing the mother’s star of David, turns to racist physical attack (p. 90). This incident suggests a hierarchy of xenophobic hatred, whereby being Jewish is regarded by the white French as more repugnant than being Arab. The consequences of this traumatic attack are profound: the mother becomes reclusive, depressed, and loses weight. The narrator’s memory of this negative transformation is presented poignantly through a lexicon of shadow and darkness, and the mother’s isolation even from members of her own family is conveyed forcefully in the image of them as mere blots projected far away from her own suffering: Les images que j’ai d’elles après sont empreintes d’ombre. Ma mère se cache, rentre en elle, se replie. Silhouette figée. Les yeux sont las, rougis. Le corps est amaigri. Elle reste des heures, le visage contre la fenêtre du salon, à scruter les gens qui passent. Parfois, elle nous regarde aller et venir, tourmentée et pensive, comme si nous étions des éclaboussures projetées au loin de son chagrin inconsolable. (p. 90) [The images I have of her are tinged with darkness. My mother is hiding away, turning in on herself, withdrawing into herself. A frozen figure. Her eyes are weary, reddened. Her body is thinner. She stays for hours with her face against the living-room window, scrutinizing people who pass by. Sometimes, she watches us come and go, tormented and pensive, as if we were blots projected far away from her inconsolable grief.]

Nation/Deracination

159

This anti-Semitic assault renders her mother not only agoraphobic and sociophobic but phobic tout court. Cumulative sentence-structure underscores the countless objects of her fear: ‘Elle a peur de tout à présent. Elle a peur de sortir dans la rue, de demander son chemin, de prendre le métro. Elle a peur de se perdre, d’ouvrir la porte quand on sonne, de prendre l’ascenseur, de croiser quelqu’un dans l’escalier, d’aller se promener le dimanche’ (pp. 90–91) [She’s frightened of everything now. She’s frightened of going into the street, of asking her way, of taking the underground. She’s frightened of getting lost, of opening the door when it rings, of taking the lift, of crossing somebody on the stairs, of going for a walk on Sundays]. Her fear even extends to insentient matter like the sunless sky, buildings, cars, red lights (p. 91). Her sense of existential void is expressed in the terse, elliptical ‘Tout a été englouti. Elle ne reconnaît rien. Le monde est devenu souterrain, hostile’ (p. 91) [Everything has been swallowed up. She recognizes nothing. The world has become underground, hostile]. As in Amar’s first novel, mental distress is also somatized: ‘Ici, elle marche le dos voûté. Sa peau est devenue d’une blancheur extrême, presque bleue’ (p. 91) [Here, she walks with her back bent. Her skin has become very white, almost blue]. Finally, that distress is indirectly diagnosed as a wish for self-vaporization (p. 91). And when the mother’s younger sister Sultana dies prematurely, the deterioration of the mother’s eyesight is interpreted by the narrator as an unconscious wish no longer to see in an alien, occidental world: ‘Peu à peu, elle a vu de moins en moins bien. Une façon peut-être de “se voiler la face”. Comme les femmes le faisaient en Orient’ (p. 133) [Little by little, she saw less and less well. One way, perhaps, of ‘veiling her face’. As women used to do in the East]. As in La Femme sans tête, the dis(-)ease of Jewish Maghrebi exile in Des gens infréquentables is not restricted to female subjects. Somatization of psychic distress is strongly suggested in the case of two male Jewish immigrants from Algeria (p. 98). But in both novels, physical and mental dysfunction in response to exile is far more marked in Jewish women than Jewish men. Further, the mother and her two sisters age dramatically within a few months of deracination (p. 98). All three feel disorientated by the size and impersonality of Paris, and consigned to social non-existence by its inhabitants (p. 99). Yet the mother’s two sisters’ visit to the lost homeland brings its own form of distress, for it too stimulates only feelings of outsiderhood. They find that in post-independence Algeria their former homes are now occupied by Arab families, the Jewish cemetery has been desecrated, the tomb of their parents and their uncle half destroyed, and that the family’s formerly devoted Arab servant spits on them (pp. 101–02). Their quest to regain a putative paradise lost meets only with further loss; in fact, all traces of that former life have been erased (p. 102). The painful absurdity of their attempt to reverse history is conveyed by an image of endless, vertiginous walking under a bald, relentless sun (p. 102). The spare observation that the only remaining Jews are those too old to leave (p. 102) is amplified by its desperate articulation in the character of Perlette, who describes her current, post-independence existence in Algeria as ‘un enfer’ (p. 103) [a hell] in the face of Arab animosity to Jews. Thus the mother’s sisters depart from a homeland which no longer exists other than in their memories (p. 103),

160

Nation/Deracination

going back to a supposed host country which is not a genuine home, reminding one of those ‘paranational’ communities who, in Azade Seyhan’s words, ‘are estranged from both the home and the host country’.43 The sisters’ predicament prompts the question as to how a subject can sustain a sense of identity intimately bound up with a homeland that no longer exists as it is remembered. In their case, memory seems to consume the remembering subjects, in whom something fundamental has been broken by the mismatch between their idealized recall and the reality of their homeland: ‘Depuis le retour de Fifine et Sultana de Béchar, quelque chose s’était cassé en elles’ (p. 104) [Since Fifine and Sultana’s return from Béchar, something in them had been broken]. Interestingly, for the four sisters exiled in Paris not just spatial but also temporal markers of identity have been destabilized, indeed dissolved: On aurait dit qu’elles avaient renoncé à abolir les distances qui les séparaient. Elles avaient cessé de compter les jours. Elles ne savaient plus depuis combien de temps elles étaient ici. Peut-être ne vivaient-elles plus qu’une seule et unique journée sans fin dont elles ne sortiraient pas. Pour elles, il n’y avait plus de jour ni de nuit, plus de ciel ni de terre. Il n’y avait plus qu’un magma sans fond dans lequel elles disparaissaient peu à peu. (p. 104) [It was as if they had given up trying to overcome the distances separating them. They had stopped counting the days. They no longer knew how long they’d been here. Maybe all they were living now was a single, unique day without end from which they would never emerge. For them, there was no more day or night, no more sky or earth. All that was left was a fathomless jumble into which they were gradually disappearing.]

However, false nostalgia is again avoided, by a striking analogy with their own mother’s experience of literal clandestinity and imprisonment in Algeria. This additional memory compromises the ideality of their imaginary lost community, revealing that community to have been as anti-Semitic as the Parisian market in which the mother was verbally and physically attacked simply for being Jewish (pp. 104–05). Like the family represented in La Femme sans tête, these women have learnt to be as imperceptible and noiseless as possible, and to censor any articulation of the homesickness at their emotional core (p. 105). The one, temporary respite from this alienation is the visual and olfactory stimuli of the Jewish quarter in the Marais, in which they exult together, spiritually lightened by re-encounter with the familiar and the familial (p. 107). But the respite is transient, and when they have to return home alone they are again engulfed by a sense of deracination, radical isolation, and alienation: Mais il venait toujours un moment où il fallait se dire au revoir, se séparer et repartir chez soi, là où il n’y avait plus de jour ni de nuit, plus de ciel ni de terre, plus de lune ni de soleil, là où il n’y avait qu’une seule journée sans fin, dans le silence et la solitude illimitée, coupées de tout à nouveau, loin, loin, loin. Au bout du monde. (p. 108) [But there always came a moment when they had to say goodbye to each other, to separate and to go back home, where there was no more day or night, no more sky or earth, no more moon or sun, where there was only a single

Nation/Deracination

161

unending day, in silence and unlimited solitude, where they were cut off from everything again, far, far, far away. At the end of the world.]

It is significant that the narrator, who represents the next generation of Jewish women, chooses to end her text by both replicating and positively resignifying the first generation’s behaviour. So she goes to the Marais, buys its Sephardic Jewish community’s products, drinks mint tea in a local café, observes the dark-eyed passers-by, and through sensory stimuli accesses memories that mentally transport her back to Algeria. Here, crucially, there is no mention of an inevitable return to the cold, grey, outer city of Paris. The text ends with the narrator enjoying a mental return to origins, in an enclave which shuts out the reality of irreversible exile (pp. 142–43). It could be argued that while this represents a nostalgic regression, it is also, in some respects, a final triumph over the Law of the Father: in this case, the paternal attempt to silence memory and thereby to annul the primary basis of identity. The opposite process occurs in Chochana Boukhobza’s Pour l’amour du père of 1996. As its title suggests, in this novel love for the father is a central organizing principle, but the father’s own love for his daughter Alice wreaks a form of psychological damage which is never quite repaired. The father in question, whose wife had died just before his immigration to France in 1955, is a Jew permanently scarred by the experience of exile from Tunisia; as Catherine Slawy-Sutton puts it, ‘un veuf qui n’a jamais complètement surmonté la tragédie de l’exil’ [a widower who has never completely got over the tragedy of exile].44 ‘Le père n’arrive pas à guérir de la Tunisie’ (p. 10) [The father can’t recover from Tunisia] is a synecdoche which ostensibly presents Tunisia itself as the illness but in fact implies the real illness to be the father’s failure to come to terms with deterritorialization. The third-person narrative largely focused on the youngest of his four daughters Alice records his compulsive and invariably negative comparisons of everything in France with that idealized lost homeland: il passe son temps à comparer, il compare la saveur des fruits qu’il a mangés là-bas avec ceux qu’il achète sur le marché de Clichy; il dit qu’au soleil la vie était plus facile, qu’elle avait du goût, que la pauvreté était légère à supporter. A Paris, celui qui manque de quelque chose, répète-t-il, est dans la détresse. La ville est trop grande, l’homme n’y a point de voisin et sa vie est dure. (p. 10) [he spends his time comparing, he compares the f lavour of the fruits he ate back there with those he buys at the Clichy market; he says that life was easier in the sun, that it had some f lavour to it, that it was easy to bear poverty. In Paris, he repeats, people in need are in distress. The city is too big, man has no neighbours and his life is hard.]

This echoes the sense that France lacks human warmth and a sense of community previously expressed in the 1979 novel Mémoire illettrée d’une fillette d’Afrique du Nord à l’époque coloniale by another Tunisian exile, Katia Rubinstein.45 But what is distinctive about Boukhobza’s approach is its stress on the destructive consequences for children of obsessive parental entrapment in a lost past and inadaptation to a new environment. For in Pour l’amour du père, the father’s insistence on his outsiderhood within France has robbed Alice of her childhood, inducing a pain that in its turn has prompted suicidal impulses (p. 11).

162

Nation/Deracination

Even in adulthood Alice is still in thrall to paternal judgement. As a highly successful barrister, but an unmarried and childless woman, she is judged negatively by this father who, shaped by his patriarchal, working-class and traditional Jewish upbringing, denigrates what he sees as her excessive worldly success (p. 11). It is perhaps significant that Alice sums her father up as Eastern rather than Jewish in his inability to treat her as anything but a child so long as she has no children of her own (p. 34). North African men of Jewish or Arab origin are here hypostatized as a homogeneous cultural type irrespective of religious differences. It is worth pondering whether such religious differences would have been more obvious to an observant Jewish son, who by virtue of his status as male would have had more access to the distinctive facets of Judaism through Talmudic study and rabbinical commentary. No answers are provided by Boukhobza, but it is not immaterial that the father’s only son, Gérard, chooses to emigrate to Israel, thereby embracing the state in which such differences are more crucial than anywhere else in the world (p. 46). Whilst there is little evidence for the father’s enduring adherence to Judaism, there is plenty for his enduring ties within France to Maghrebi patriarchal tradition. Thus he subjects his daughters to despotic rule until they marry, at which point they pass from his yolk to that of their husband (p. 143); and the happiness of an individual woman is considered less important than that of children (p. 183). As in the work of one further Jewish Tunisian exile, Annie Fitoussi’s La Mémoire folle de Mouchi Rabbinou (1985),46 psychological damage is caused by a Jewish father’s (in Pour l’amour du père, apparent) banishing of a daughter (in Pour l’amour du père, Sassou) for having dishonoured a patriarchal order: ‘En vingt-cinq ans, jamais le père n’a prononcé son nom. Pour lui, Sassou est morte. Elle n’existe plus. Le père n’imagine pas l’imperceptible fracture qui s’est créée dans l’esprit d’Alice le jour où il a chassé sa sœur’ (p. 15) [In twenty-five years, never has the father uttered her name. For him, Sassou is dead. She no longer exists. The father has no idea of the imperceptible split opened up in Alice’s mind the day he banished her sister]. And as in the novels of the Algerian-Jewish Amar, the paternal imposition of silence spawns obsession, in an inevitable return of the repressed: ‘Sassou dont le père ne parle plus, Sassou qui est sa hantise’ (p. 19) [Sassou the father no longer speaks about, Sassou who is her obsessive fear]. But the banishing of Sassou, the central linchpin in a powerful narrative mechanism of deferral and hermeneutic teasing, is not all it seems. At an early point, the narrative relays what the reader only very belatedly discovers is probably a false memory. Yet it is presented with no such warnings, as if it were diegetic fact. According to Alice’s memory, the elder sister Juliette had urged the father to discipline, indeed to beat (p. 40), and to issue an ultimatum to the supposedly errant younger sister Sassou. Sassou’s putative crime had been to have sex at the age of twenty with a Gentile whom she intended to marry and who was in fact willing to be circumcised. Again according to Alice’s memory, Juliette had urged the father to cloister Sassou away and to marry her off to a Jewish man (p. 42). Initially, the reader is given to understand that the father had reluctantly submitted to the religious imperatives voiced by his eldest daughter. So, for Alice the eldest sister

Nation/Deracination

163

Juliette had assumed the role of a Jewish mother as guardian of the family’s honour, in blatant disregard for her younger sister’s happiness. But in direct contrast to this version of events is what Edmée, another sister, tells Alice much later: in summary, that Sassou had arrived home one evening with a banal Frenchman who happened to be rich, announced to her father and three sisters that she had had enough of her family and of its poverty and that the Frenchman could offer her an easy life and love (pp. 164–68). In f lagrant contradistinction to this boast, Sassou had been revealed by Juliette to be covered by bruises inf licted by the French suitor, who despised immigrants. Finally, Sassou had left with her Frenchman, never to be seen again by her devastated family. If Edmée is to be believed, the thirteen-year-old Alice had been too traumatized by the death of her mother just before the Jewish exodus from Tunisia and then by Sassou’s departure for the two older sisters ever to broach the latter subject. This narrative volte-face breaks the implicit fiduciary contract between reader and narrator, leaving the reader troubled by the two competing versions of the ‘truth’: who is victim, who is perpetrator? However, eight pages later Edmée’s reconstruction of the past is vindicated by the father’s confirmation that Sassou had indeed disowned her impoverished immigrant family in favour of a prosperous Frenchman. The father’s relaying of Sassou’s snobbery and internalized racism — and, interestingly, her own conf lation of North African Jew with Arab — is particularly poignant: ‘Un soir, elle est venue avec lui. Elle m’a dit qu’elle ne supportait plus de vivre dans une grotte, à cinq, comme des bêtes. Lui, il était riche. Lui, il était français. Avec lui, elle allait vivre comme une princesse... Nous, on était rien... Des Arabes...’ (pp. 176–77) [One evening, she appeared with him. She told me she could no longer stand living in a den, five of us, like animals. He was rich. He was French. With him, she was going to live like a princess... We were nothing... Arabs...]. As an enigmatic coda to this rendering of memory’s fallibility is an odd juxtaposition of extreme happiness with another instance of memory failure. When Alice’s lover Pascal calls out her name during love-making, she is overcome with joy but finds her memory is muddled and then shattered: ‘Mon Dieu... Jamais elle n’a connu un tel bonheur. La mémoire se brouille, se pulvérise’ (p. 182) [My God... Never has she known such happiness. Her memory becomes muddled, pulverized]. Boukhobza’s central point seems to be that limit-experiences, be they of trauma as in exile or joy as in love, induce amnesia and/or distortions of memory. Memory is also imbricated in the topos of exile in Pour l’amour du père. Although Alice avoids her father’s constant verbalization of it, the trauma of exile is also indelibly inscribed in her own memory. And she, unlike her father, does not suppress those memories that counter idealization of the home country. For what stands out in her recollection of exile is the spoliation of personal belongings to which Jews f leeing from post-independence Tunisia were subject even on their boat journey out of the country: Le drame de l’exil commençait là, avec ces hommes qui mettaient les mains dans le linge, qui soulevaient culottes, robes, pantalons, examinaient les jouets, les livres, toutes les babioles qu’on n’avait pas eu le cœur d’abandonner, de vendre ou de jeter, avant de fouiller les corps.

164

Nation/Deracination Ils cherchaient l’or. Les gens pouvaient partir, mais l’or devait rester au pays. Ils disaient avec morgue aux gens, laissez votre or. Les gens juraient qu’ils n’avaient rien; du linge, des couvertures, quelques provisions. Les douaniers rétorquaient, qu’avez-vous fait de vos bijoux? (p. 48) [The tragedy of exile began there, with those men who fingered their clothes, picked up knickers, dresses, trousers, examined the toys, the books, all the trinkets the family hadn’t had the heart to abandon, sell or throw away, before doing the body searches. They were looking for gold. The people could leave, but the gold had to stay in the country. They said to the people arrogantly, leave your gold. The people swore they had nothing; clothes, blankets, a bit of food. The customs officers retorted, what have you done with your jewels?]

While the word ‘juif ’ is eschewed, the fixation upon hidden gold and jewels ineluctably evokes a similar Nazi fixation, founded on the myth of the devious moneyed Jew. Although Alice does not tell herself this precise story, she is permanently marked by the memory, and the reader may well wonder whether this example of absolute injustice was not the major, if subconscious, reason for her choice of a career in the legal profession: in French, la justice. ‘Les douaniers ont marqué la mémoire d’Alice. Ils représentent l’arbitraire, le pouvoir absolu de l’Etat, son irréductible injustice’ (p. 51) [The customs officers left their mark on Alice’s memory. They represented arbitrariness, the absolute power of the State, its implacable injustice] This surmise is soon validated: Cette violence dont elle a été le témoin l’a poussée à choisir le métier d’avocate. Son cœur la portait sans cesse vers les plus pauvres, les plus démunis des hommes, ceux qui étaient broyés par le système, qui tremblaient pour un permis de séjour, qui erraient du commissariat à la préfecture de police, qui vivaient dans la clandestinité. Son cœur allait vers les vaincus, tous les perdants. Les défendre, les protéger. A chaque procès, il lui semble qu’elle s’oppose aux douaniers: une bague glisse d’une paume à l’autre. Alice marchande le droit de vivre en France, le droit d’être un étranger. (pp. 51–52) [That violence she had witnessed had driven her to choose the career of lawyer. Her heart constantly led her to the poorest, the most helpless of people, those who were crushed by the system, who trembled over a simple residence permit, who wandered from police station to police headquarters, who lived in hiding. Her heart went out to the defeated, to the disadvantaged. Defending them, protecting them. At each trial, it seems that she’s pitting herself against the customs officers: a ring slips from one palm to another. Alice haggles over the right to live in France, the right to be a foreigner.]

It would seem that Alice’s entire career as a defence lawyer is a form of abreaction, albeit nobly sublimated. This both converges and diverges with the career of magistrate Simone in Fitoussi’s La Mémoire folle de Mouchi Rabbinou, for in Fitoussi’s equally autofictional novel Simone instead chooses to become a prosecuting lawyer. Despite this relatively minor difference, both of these Tunisian immigrant women lawyers are at root driven in their professional lives by a fight against injustice. An outraged sense of injustice certainly animates the main protagonist of

Nation/Deracination

165

Egyptian-Jewish Paula Jacques’s tragi-comic novel Gilda Stambouli souffre et se plaint (2002),47 whose very title connotes both suffering and its contestation. Jacques’s is a polyphonic text comprising third-person narrative, letters, and official documents which ludically draws attention to its own constructedness.48 In cinematic terms the narrative forms a split screen set partly in France, partly in Israel. The central character is the eponymous Gilda Stambouli, the thirty-six-year-old Jewish widow of a high-ranking lawyer who has been driven from her home country Egypt by the anti-Semitic measures of Gamal Abdel Nasser, President of Egypt from 1956 until his death in 1970. A secondary narrative focalization is on her thirteen-yearold daughter Juliette, who is living in an Israeli kibbutz. The third, more minor narrative focalization, on social worker Bertha Fromkine, a French Ashkenazic Jew and Shoah survivor, provides a satirical perspective on Gilda and oblique insights into the plight of Juliette. Despite Nasser’s physical expulsion of Gilda along with thousands of other Jews from Egypt, the insistency of a particular memory suggests her psychological in­ability to leave behind the home land: ‘son esprit est resté prisonnier là-bas’ (p. 31) [her mind remained a prisoner back there]. Nasser is nonetheless explicitly located in a historical lineage of extreme anti-Semites, and his juxtapositioning with Hitler may startle readers familiar with the persecution of Ashkenazic rather than Sephardic Jews: ‘Le travail de Bertha Fromkine consiste à corriger les erreurs de l’Histoire qui, depuis Pharaon, Hitler et Nasser, persécute et bannit les juifs de leur pays natal’ (p. 38) [Bertha Fromkine’s work consists in correcting the errors of History which, since the Pharaoh, Hitler and Nasser, persecutes and banishes Jews from their country of birth]. But through the free indirect style focalized upon Bertha, France is also inculpated in this most recent purge of Jews. For France is blamed for having at least indirectly turned Egyptian Jews into stateless persons, first through economic greed over the Suez Canal and second through refusal to grant these refugees French nationality (p. 39). Later on in the novel, to the indictment charge is added France’s inhospitality to foreigners generally. A nonidentifiable narrative voice, aligned with neither Gilda nor Bertha nor Juliette and thus appearing relatively objective, conveys the profound disillusionment of the Egyptian Jewish refugees, and their sense that of all of the Republic’s undesirable foreigners, foreign Jews are the least desirable for the French: La France est loin d’être cette démocratie encensée par les livres, les journaux, les lettres des émigrés optimistes. Ils se persuadent, non sans raison, qu’il est terriblement dur d’être un étranger en France et que rien n’est plus dur en France que le sort du juif étranger. Ils ont l’impression d’être devenus des étrangers pour tout le monde et, avant tout, pour eux-mêmes. (p. 152) [France is far from being that democracy acclaimed by books, newspapers, letters from optimistic emigrants. They convince themselves, not without reason, that it’s terribly hard to be a foreigner in France and that nothing is harder in France than the fate of a foreign Jew. They feel they’ve become foreigners for everyone and, above all, for themselves.]

Conspicuous here is the self-estrangement caused by the objectification and even abjection of foreign communities within the so-called host country: ‘On dirait

166

Nation/Deracination

qu’ils ne sont plus les mêmes. Qu’ayant tout perdu ils se sont perdus eux-mêmes. Ça doit venir de la façon dont les autres les perçoivent, comme des objets, des poussières qu’on ne se donne même pas la peine de balayer’ (p. 152) [It’s as if they’re no longer the same people. That having lost everything they’ve lost themselves. This must come from the way others see them, as objects, as dust you don’t even bother to sweep away]. Despite her critical perspective on French foreign and immigration policy, Bertha does to some extent represent the French state, so complete is her assimilation of its Republican ethos. Her sympathy for the plight of foreign Egyptian Jews does not preclude distaste for their obvious difference relative to the mythical unified Republic of French citizenry. Underlying this distaste are the sort of tensions between assimilated French Ashkenazim and newly arrived Sephardim previously discerned in the work of Amar above (and previously signalled in the work of Paule Darmon). The Ashkenazim, represented by Bertha, perceive the Sephardim through highly hackneyed cultural lenses: ‘Elle comprend la nature excessive des émigrés orientaux. Elle leur pardonne l’arrogance, l’impatience, la puérilité, l’ingratitude’ (p. 39) [She understands the excessive nature of the eastern emigrants. She forgives their arrogance, impatience, childishness, ingratitude]. This same prejudice is institutionalized in the report which Bertha writes in her capacity as an officer of the ‘Service social du Casar’ (the Casar being the Parisian body charged with aiding and integrating the Egyptian refugees): ‘Nous notons que, malgré un niveau d’instruction élevée, Mme S. s’exprime de façon puérile et capricieuse’ (p. 42) [We note that, despite a high level of education, Mrs S. expresses herself childishly and temperamentally]. What is more curious is the fact that Gilda, herself an Egyptian Jew, subscribes at least indirectly to some of these stereotypes about Egyptian Jews as excitable, loud and melodramatic — in fact, exactly what Bertha had summarized as ‘la nature excessive des émigrés orientaux’ (p. 39) — which she presents as trans-class traits: Bien que venant de milieux très différents, les réfugiés d’Egypte présentent des caractéristiques assez communes. A peine évadés de leur logement sombre et triste, ils s’interpellent d’une table à l’autre, rient, pleurent, s’enfièvrent comme si un rat, échappé de leur assiette, les avait mordus. Mais tout cela ne serait rien s’ils ne portaient pas leur querelle dehors, à la vue des passants français, dont l’hilarité égale alors l’étonnement. (pp. 44–45) [Although coming from very different backgrounds, the Egyptian refugees present fairly common characteristics. Barely have they escaped from their sad and gloomy lodgings than they hail each other from table to table, laugh, cry, get worked up as if a rat jumping from their plate had bitten them. But all that wouldn’t matter at all if they didn’t carry on their quarrels outside, in full sight of French passers-by, who are amused and amazed in equal measure.]

Thus Gilda involuntarily supports Bertha’s prejudices in asserting the indiscretion of Jewish Egyptian refugees and regretting their incongruity with the French. However, Gilda does go on to underline the pathos of their situation, which is the f lip side to their apparent conceit and f lashiness. Her ethnographic musings also contain a gendered edge which suggests the reduction of Egyptian women refugees

Nation/Deracination

167

to cheap simulacra of their former aspirations: ‘Et je vous fais grâce des bijoux de Prisunic que leurs épouses baladent tels des joyaux de la reine d’Angleterre. Triste parade! Ils ont des trous à leur semelles et leurs poches sont vides. Le vide qu’ils éprouvent au cœur est tout aussi insupportable’ (p. 45) [And I’ll spare you the cutprice jewels that their wives trail around like the Crown Jewels. A sad show! They have holes in their soles and their pockets are empty. The emptiness they feel in their heart is just as unbearable]. It is noteworthy that despite her critical and often satirical perspective, Gilda feels bound to the other Egyptian refugees as to a family (p. 184), and even attempts a poetic evocation of exile: ‘Si je n’étais pas hostile aux comparaisons lyriques, je dirais que l’exil est à la raison humaine ce que le nuage est au soleil’ (p. 184) [If I didn’t dislike lyrical comparisons, I’d say that exile is to human reason what cloud is to sun] — a bathetic formulation struggling clumsily to assert the human non-sense of exile. For Gilda, the suffering of exile is exacerbated by the contempt of the indigenous French for the Jewish Egyptian refugees, whom they, like the assimilated French Ashkenazim, regard as uncivilized: ‘les hôteliers effarés à notre vue comme s’il s’agissait d’une invasion de nègres, de poux, de chèvres voraces prêtes à fondre sur un parterre de pivoines’ (p. 56) [hotel keepers alarmed at the sight of us as if we were an invasion of negroes, of lice, of greedy goats ready to swoop down on a bed of peonies]. Gilda’s perspective is countered by the Eurocentric optic of Bertha, where alignment with the French state largely prevents any solidarity with Jews who have, like herself, been subject to anti-Jewish persecution: ‘[Gilda] explose soudain contre la lenteur de nos services. Avec cette nervosité provocante dont font preuve beaucoup de ses compatriotes. C’est à coup sûr un travers fort regrettable chez les juifs orientaux, car il est superf lu dans un pays qui les a généreusement accueillis...’ (p. 60) [[Gilda] suddenly explodes in anger about the slowness of our services. With that provocative touchiness that many of her compatriots display. It’s certainly a highly regrettable trait among eastern Jews, for it’s unnecessary in a country that has taken them in them so generously]. On the other hand, when focalized upon Gilda the narrative voice ascribes a form of callousness to the survivor Bertha: ‘Bertha Fromkine appartient à l’espèce tragique des rescapés des camps de la mort qui, ayant trop pleuré leurs morts, n’ont plus de larmes pour les vivants’ (p. 173) [Bertha Fromkine belongs to that tragic species of survivors of the death camps who, having cried too much over their dead, have no tears left for the living]. Bertha’s position is shared by the director of the Casar, Mr Blumenfeld, who extols what he regards as the generous and enlightened civilization of France (p. 176). In contrast, the Jewish Egyptian refugees who have just lost one of their number after a gas leak in their miserable hostel rise up in arms against such supposed French philanthropists as Blumenfeld and his charity, insinuating deliberate sabotage of the building for insurance gains, and comparing themselves to Shoah victims gassed to death in the camps (p. 177). This comparison incenses Bertha, a survivor who views such parallels as desecrating the memory of the Shoah dead, and the hardships of the Egyptian refugees as derisory compared to the suffering of life in the camps (p. 177). In her anger she vocalizes a form of mordant racism which has hitherto remained unspoken: ‘Vous vous croyez où? Dans un souk? Pour qui vous prenez-vous?’ (p.

168

Nation/Deracination

177) [Where do you think you are? In a souk? Just who do you think you are?]. The semi-comic tableau — all of this takes place at a funeral — serves the serious function of highlighting the extreme sensitivities involved in erecting any hierarchy of Jewish suffering. Later on, Gilda acknowledges non-European Jews’ relative nescience of Shoah-related suffering, attempting with all the delicacy of which she is capable (that is, not much) to evoke their tendency to incredulity (p. 245). Gilda’s encounters with other Ashkenazim are less obviously conf lictual, but no less redolent of mutual incomprehension. When she finally gets a much-needed job in an Orthodox Jewish school, she meets her complete antithesis in both religious and (sub)ethnic terms: the headmaster’s wife Lékha Lipinsky, an Ashkenazic Hassidic Jew. As a female Hassid, Lékha is entirely subordinate to her husband and children. Separation of the sexes in the Hassidic synagogue appears to be symbolic of a gulf far wider than the merely spatial: ‘Donc, Gilda se dirige vers l’endroit où les femmes marchent séparées des hommes — où seuls les enfants impubères ont le droit de franchir la ligne tracée dans la poussière à l’encre sympathique mais inaltérable, entre les deux sexes’ (p. 286). [So, Gilda heads for the spot where the women walk separated from the men — where only pre-pubescent children are allowed to cross the line between the two sexes traced in the dust in pleasant but permanent ink]. However, the tongue-in-cheek free indirect style conveys Gilda’s own form of gender stereotyping, or at least endorsement of disciplinary masculine codes, in her patronizing objectification of the male Hassidim from whom she is desperately seeking paid employment: Pourquoi tant de haine? Tant de souffrances? [...] Elle est devenue athée à Paris, figurez-vous! Quelle ironie, hein, si elle venait à s’employer chez ces fanatiques à la mentalité de ghetto qui portent des boucles de fillette autour des oreilles? Vous vous rappelez? Ils venaient chez nous demander l’aumône et nos domestiques les chassaient! (p. 156) [Why so much hatred? So much suffering? [...] She became atheist in Paris, believe it or not! What an irony, eh, if she were to get a job with these fanatics with a mentality ghetto who wear girly curls around their ears? Do you remember? They used to come to our house to beg for charity and our servants would drive them away!]

For Lékha, the stumbling block is not geo-cultural differences nor even the liturgical differences between Ashkenazim and Sephardim, but Gilda’s lack of religious commitment (p. 82). So, while the secular Jew Gilda pragmatically obeys the wig-wearing Orthodox Jewish woman’s command to cover her hair (p. 79), the Orthodox Jew Lékha diagnoses the real barrier to Gilda’s working for the rav Lipinksy as her secularity (p. 81). Ever resourceful, Gilda appeals to a basic solidarity firstly among women, but more importantly among Jews, based upon their common history of persecution (pp. 82–83). Gilda’s meeting with Lékha’s husband, the ‘rav’ (a modern Hebrew term for ‘rabbi’), is a comedic set piece bringing out the ironies of the two Jewish communities’ mutual prejudices. While the Ashkenazim notoriously condescend to the Sephardim as uncivilized, Gilda finds the lingua franca of the former, Yiddish, to be primitively untouched by the civilizing inf luence of French, the language of educated Egyptians (pp. 96–97). Similarly humorous is the scene

Nation/Deracination

169

in which another Ashkenazic Jew, Samuel Kalman, who is later to become Gilda’s lover, surmises that she is at heart an Arab Jew because she dislikes his dog and ‘Les Arabes considèrent que le chien est l’animal le plus impur de la création d’Allah’ (p. 101) [Arabs consider dogs to be the most impure animal created by Allah]. To this, she briskly ripostes ‘Ah, les Arabes considèrent cela? Eh bien, je ne leur donnerai pas tort pour une fois’ (p. 101) [Arabs think that, do they? Well, for once I’ll agree with them]. Here, the ‘pour une fois’ gives the lie to Ashkenazic conf lation of Sephardim and Arabs, with the mutual dislike of the latter two groups for dogs being the exception that proves the rule of their mutual animosity. The fissuring of Jewry occasioned by such Ashkenazic conf lation of Sephardic Jews with Arabs, which privileges shared geo-cultural experiences and habitus over the shared ethnicity of all Jews, is more somberly reprised towards the end of the novel. Gilda writes in the following vein to Bertha about the repercussions of the Algerian War: ‘C’est qu’avec sa finesse habituelle la police parisienne parvient à détecter le fellagha en chaque étranger et l’Arabe en chaque Juif. Quelle ironie vraiment que d’être confondus avec ceux-là mêmes qui nous ont persécutés, spoliés, bannis’ (p. 352) [With its usual subtlety, the Paris police manages to detect the fellagha in every foreigner and the Arab in every Jew. Really, what an irony to be confused with those very people who persecuted, despoiled and banished us]. Gilda’s bitterness at the confusion of victim (Egyptian Jew) with perpetrator (antiSemitic Egyptian Arab) leaves no room for empathy with Arabs persecuted within Republican France because of the Algerian independence movement. This forms a sharp contrast to the Jewish Myriam’s passionate solidarity with Arabs during the Algerian War in Sarah Frydman’s La Marche des vivants (1997),49 to be discussed in Chapter 4. However, Myriam’s personal history had not, unlike Gilda’s, brought her into hostile contact with Arabs. And in fact, even the politically naïve Gilda concedes the suffering of Arabs in France during the Algerian war: ‘Cela dit, il est terriblement dur d’être un Algèrien à Paris’ (p. 352) [That said, it’s terribly hard to be an Algerian in Paris]. Her critique of police paranoia ends with a lament on the state of the exile generally in France: ‘Bref, il devient de plus en plus pénible de surnager dans cette mer qu’est l’exil en pays français’ (p. 353) [In short, exile in France is like a sea where it’s harder and harder to keep your head above water] — the metaphor emphasizing the lack of solidity and stability in the exile’s existence on French soil. To this extent, we might endorse the view of L’Humanité that ‘Gilda paraît rassembler en elle toutes les malédictions, toute la force aussi, des exilés de tous les temps...’50 [Gilda seems to be a condensation of all the curses and also all the strength of exiles throughout time]. Yet it would be misleading to ignore later swings in Gilda’s perceptions that militate against posing her as universal and transhistoric emblem of exile. Her glimpse of a possible commonality between Algerian Arabs and Jews as disenfranchised exiles within France is later attenuated by the following critical comments: ‘L’hôtel Mondial s’ouvre à de nouveaux réfugiés, des juifs tunisiens égarés des malheurs et des violences perpétrés aux frontières algéro-tunisiennes’ (p. 358) [The Mondial Hôtel is opening up to new refugees, Tunisian Jews displaced by the calamities and acts of violence perpetrated at the Algerian–Tunisian borders]. And her resentment of the economic indigence

170

Nation/Deracination

in which the Egyptian Jews are left to f lounder by Republican France is transparent in the following sardonic remark about new Tunisian Jewish refugees: ‘On leur souhaite de ne pas connaître l’étroitesse des rêves et des réalisations qui sont les nôtres dans ce pays de prospérité et de magnifiques perspectives qu’est la France’ (p. 359) [We hope their dreams and their achievements won’t be as narrow as ours have been in this country of prosperity and wonderful prospects that is France]. Gilda’s over-determined identity as an exiled Egyptian Jew struggling to survive within a less than welcoming Republican France very much attenuates any possibility of trans-ethnic solidarity on her part. Conversely, trans-ethnic solidarity forms the ethical linchpin of Karine Tuil’s Douce France (2007). In fact, this novel is fundamentally about the crisis and fragmentation of ethnic identity. This is first manifested in performance of a false identity and subsequently revealed to stem from an exilic heritage at odds with twenty-first-century templates of French nationhood. Homodiegetic narrator Claire, a child of North-African Jewish immigrants to France (no indication of which North African country is provided, although the surname Funaro suggests Tunisia), recounts her experience of being wrongly arrested after being mistaken for a clandestine worker during an identity check. Curiously, she becomes complicit in the misprision of her identity and in her detention as, supposedly, an illegal Romanian immigrant named Ana Vasilescu. What may initially strike the reader as prurient voyeurism vis-à-vis a vulnerable social minority is gradually revealed to spring from an identification with clandestine immigrants which derives from that exilic Jewish heritage. Despite her radical act of solidarity, Claire is ultimately marked out as being very clearly privileged over this new, twenty-first century avatar of her parents’ vulnerability. When she panics after being summarily deported to Romania and phones her father, he quickly and apparently effortlessly secures her return to France. She later sees in the distance but fails to make contact with Yuri, the illegal immigrant with whom she had closely identified during her period of detention under false pretences. The epigraph to Douce France from Deuteronomy 10. 19, ‘Vous aimerez l’étranger, vous qui avez été étrangers dans le pays d’Égypte’ (p. 7) [You are to love those who are aliens, for you yourselves were aliens in Egypt], simultaneously establishes a Jewish familiarity with exile and a Jewish duty of hospitality to any other exiles or foreigners. The quotation is at once didactic and ironic, for it prefaces a text in which twenty-first-century Republican France is exposed as deeply inhospitable to the thousands of individuals who seek either political asylum or the chance to escape grinding poverty in their countries of origin. The incipit indicates Claire’s affinity for the deracinated, transnational subject. The very first sentence of the novel establishes that despite her status as a second-generation Jew born and bred in Republican France, Claire has always felt empathy for the persecuted: ‘Du plus loin que je me souvienne, je me suis toujours sentie en situation irrégulière. Il me semblait qu’à tout moment quelqu’un pouvait surgir chez moi en hurlant: Police! Contrôle d’identité! et me contraindre à le suivre’ (p. 11) [As far back as I can remember, I’ve always felt in breach of regulations. It seemed to me that at any moment somebody could burst into my home shouting ‘Police! Identity check!’ and

Nation/Deracination

171

force me to follow him]. Although Claire is obviously a fictional character whose experience of arrest and detention as a supposedly illegal immigrant is not shared by the author, Karine Tuil, there are evident continuities between the two. In an interview in 2007, Tuil remarked: J’ai toujours eu peur de l’uniforme, une peur irrationnelle, une impression d’être en situation irrégulière alors que je suis née en France. Mes parents m’ont élevé [sic] dans la crainte, ont toujours eu peur de déranger. Il ne fallait pas déranger les français [sic], disaient-ils, comme si eux-mêmes, n’étaient pas de vrais français [sic], alors qu’ils étaient naturalisés. Ils portaient par ailleurs le poids d’être immigrés et juifs. La narratrice est ainsi.51 [I’ve always had a fear of uniforms, an irrational fear, a sense of being in breach of regulations whereas I was born in France. My parents brought me up to be fearful, have always been fearful of bothering others. You mustn’t bother the French, they’d said, as if they themselves weren’t real French people, even though they’d obtained French citizenship. Moreover they carried the burden of being immigrants and Jewish. The narrator is like that.]

The conf luence of this with pp. 72–73 of Douce France is striking: [...] mes parents considéraient que nous ne devions pas déranger les Français. Nous étions ce petit personnel condamné à rester devant la porte de la chambre, attendant d’être autorisé à entrer. Ne pas déranger, ne pas faire de bruit, ne pas répondre à l’invective, ne pas susciter de conf lits, ne pas se faire remarquer, ne pas se donner en spectacle, ne pas hausser le ton, un devoir de réserve et de discrétion qu’ils s’imposaient — ironie du sort, eux qui avaient été habitués à rire bruyamment et à parler fort livraient une lutte pitoyable contre eux-mêmes [...] [[...] my parents thought that we mustn’t bother the French. We were that little workforce condemned to stay outside the door, waiting to be allowed to enter. Don’t disturb them, don’t make any noise, don’t react to abuse, don’t provoke conf lict, don’t draw attention to yourself, don’t make an exhibition of yourself, don’t raise your voice, the duty to be reserved and discreet that they imposed on themselves — what an irony of fate: they had been used to laughing noisily and speaking loudly, and were now struggling pitifully against themselves [...]

Beyond the close correspondence between narrator and author (to which we might add the close correspondence with Amar’s two narrators discussed above, equally enjoined to self-effacement), what stands out in the extract from Douce France cited above is the spatial metaphor of the door. Representing a threshold between the outside and the inside vis-à-vis ‘Frenchness’ which Claire’s family are unable to cross, this figure of speech has a crucial material referent in the lives of exiles and immigrants. As Claire comments, her parents have communicated to her their own fears: ‘Que craignaient mes parents? Quelles peurs se terraient dans ces chuchotements et comment, pourquoi, les avaient-ils greffée en moi comme un organe dont j’espérais le rejet?’ (p. 73) [What were my parents frightened of? What fears lay beneath those whispers and how, why, had they transplanted them into me like an organ I hoped would be rejected?]. The image used here is unusual: that of organ transplant, as if their fears were something entirely natural and indeed necessary to life. She, on the other hand, hopes her organism will reject

172

Nation/Deracination

the transplant, thus emphasizing her sense that it is noxious to her. Transplantation is semantically cognate with transmission, and transmission from first to second generation of immigrants of a wider sense of trauma emerges in Claire’s fear of the French police. This fear is expressed through a gendered personification of Memory: Je ne voulais pas avoir affaire à la police française, la Mémoire est une vieille Juive hystérique, tu lui dis de se taire, elle hurle encore plus fort, Souviens-toi! Souviens-toi! tu n’as plus d’autre choix que de lui obéir avec la peur que ça recommence, pas de répit pour les Préposés au Devoir de Mémoire. (p. 15) [I didn’t want any dealings with the French police, Memory is a hysterical old Jewish woman, you tell her to be quiet and she yells even louder, Remember! Remember! you’ve no choice but to obey her with the fear that it will start all over again, no respite for those who guard the Duty of Memory.]

The ahistoricity of ‘Memory’ as figured in this hysterical old Jewish woman recalls Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s seminal work Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (1982), which opines that ‘historiography, an actual recording of historical events, is by no means the principal medium through which the collective memory of the Jewish people has been addressed or aroused’.52 Five pages later Tuil consolidates the emphasis placed on Zakhor, the Jewish duty to remember, when Claire confirms the over-determination of her personal trajectory by Jewish precedents of persecution and arrest: C’était peut-être la violence, cette froide détermination avec laquelle on nous avait arrêtés, qui avaient activé certaines défenses, certains réf lexes que l’histoire, les enseignements tragiques de la mémoire juive, les mécanismes obscurs de la transmission avaient fabriqué, génération après génération, et dont je devenais, malgré moi, la pâle héritière. Aujourd’hui, avec l’abandon que l’écriture autorise, je sais que cette histoire ne pouvait arriver qu’à moi. En un sens, il s’agit de mon histoire. (p. 20; author’s emphasis) [Perhaps it was the violence, that cold determination with which we’d been arrested, which had activated certain defences, certain ref lexes that history, the tragic lessons of Jewish memory, the obscure mechanisms of transmission had produced, generation after generation, and whose pale heiress I was becoming in spite of myself. Today, with the lack of constraint that writing allows, I know that this story could only happen to me. In a sense, it’s my story.]

The enigma of why Claire does not simply reveal her true identity as a French national and so recover her freedom is dispelled by her assertion of revolt against parental efforts to fabricate a false security for her (p. 24). What stands out is a perverse determination to appropriate for herself her parents’ former identity as vulnerable refugees — in a sense, to reclaim a Jewish heritage that seems deeply undesirable. Claire’s response to police interrogation is highly resonant: Est-ce que vous avez déjà fait l’objet d’une interdiction de territoire? Oui — c’est ce que j’ai failli dire, oui, par respect dû aux morts, oui, massivement interdits, chassée en groupes hors du territoire français, les miens, mes Français dénaturalisés parce que juifs, et je me suis ravisée à temps. J’ai hoché la tête de gauche à droite. (p. 28)

Nation/Deracination

173

[Have you been refused residence before? Yes — that’s what I nearly said, yes, through respect due to the dead, yes, massively refused, driven in groups out of French territory, my family, my French people stripped of French citizenship because they were Jewish, and I changed my mind just in time. I shook my head from left to right.]

The fact that a Sephardic Jew identifies so much with the fate of Jews under Vichy, the vast majority of whom were Ashkenazim, suggests a wider solidarity with Jewry as an undifferentiated collectivity rather than with her actual forebears. In fact, reference to the dead rules out her own forebears, for North African Jews were rare in Vichy France and were not sent to the death camps of Europe from the overseas French colonies/protectorates in which they lived. Here we witness Claire’s projection with respect to these formerly deracinated Jews and her fantasized empathy with their experience of territorial expulsion, which trigger a form of psychodrama in her own ostensibly secure twenty-first century life. The impression conveyed of her forebears’ exile and perennial sense of insecurity has very little that is Sephardic-specific; the only distinction is the f leeting detail that these forebears had left North Africa because of certain ‘événements’ (p. 157) [events]. We can infer that these events had been the anti-Semitic actions prevalent in French colonies or protectorates during the 1950s, when Arab nationalist movements were on the rise. Although her parents are ascribed traits associated with North Africa and the Mediterranean (pp.151–52, 163), in its stress on memory of round-ups and arrests Claire’s rendering of their exile appears if anything to recur more to Ashkenazic memories of Nazi and Vichy regimes. Does this suggest that for Claire, and signally unlike Bertha in Gilda Stambouli souffre et se plaint, patterns of migration and exile characterizing the two separate Jewish groups have far more similarities than differences? The experiential features highlighted — fear, practice of discretion, sense of inferiority to the indigenous French (p. 12) — represent fairly standard, if not universal paradigms for Jewish immigrants to France. The narrative subverts the normative polarization of these two forms of Jewish identity: ‘quelqu’un a déjà répondu à ma place: “Tu vois bien, c’est une Roumaine”, c’était la première fois que quelqu’un me prenait pour une ashkénaze’ (p. 27) [somebody has already answered for me: ‘You can see she’s a Romanian’, it was the first time I’d been taken for an Ashkenazi]. Tuil here reveals a sense of the mobility of Jewish ‘identity’ and a desire to subvert sub-ethnic barriers. Somewhat polemically, Claire posits her personal contamination by parental shame at being Jewish as a quasi-defining feature of Jewry: ‘ “Tu es israélite?” et je rougissais, être juif, c’est avoir chaud tout le temps’ (p. 81) [‘Are you an Israelite?’ and I would blush, being Jewish means feeling hot all the time]. She also claims to have been contaminated by her parents’ longing for acceptance as children of the French Republic, even at the expense of their cultural differences: Oui, je murmurais, comme si j’avouais un secret pénible, non, je hurlais intérieurement, je ne suis pas israélite, je suis juive mais ce mot était imprononçable. Des Français parmi les Français, des fils et des filles de la République, voilà ce que nous désirions être. Nos différences, nous les voyions alors comme des obstacles à notre superbe intégration, nous les gommions jusqu’à les rendre invisibles. (p. 81)

174

Nation/Deracination [Yes, I would murmur, as if I were admitting an unpleasant secret, no, I was yelling inside, I’m not an Israelite, I’m a Jew, but you couldn’t say that word. French among French, sons and daughters of the Republic, that’s what we wanted to be. We saw our differences then as obstacles to our glorious integration, we ironed them out to the point of making them invisible.]

The distinction between the word ‘israélite’, used to refer to assimilated Jews, and ‘juif ’/‘juive’ was common under Vichy France, when long-assimilated French Jews naïvely felt themselves to be protected by this illusory pledge of respectability. Dominique Schnapper has observed of the post-WWII period that for most Jews in France ‘the term israélite was now seen as connoting the illusions of assimilation, and therefore acquired a pejorative meaning’.53 This would seem to explain Claire’s insistence ‘je ne suis pas israélite’. However, the anti-assimilationist position Schnapper ascribes to rejection of the word ‘israélite’ is precisely the opposite of Claire’s family’s aspirations in post-WWII France, which appear merely to replicate the illusions of the pre-WWII ‘israélite’. Complicating the hermeneutic further is Claire’s explicit assertion of solidarity, indeed identification with Jews betrayed by the Republic of France at different historical junctures — under Vichy but also in the late twentieth century, which witnessed a renewal of anti-Semitism: En exergue de l’un de mes romans, j’avais souhaité noter cette phrase extraite du Journal de Roger Stéphane, datée du 19 septembre 1942: ‘Ma seule certitude, c’est mon amour de la France. Contrairement à ce que je pensais à seize ou dix-sept ans, il me serait impossible de me désolidariser d’elle, même si elle devenait intégralement fasciste.’ Ma famille m’en avait dissuadée, tu devrais ne conserver que la première phrase, me disait-on. Entre-temps, les incidents antisémites s’étaient multipliés en France. La République nous avait abandonnés. J’avais renoncé. Et pourtant, il me semblait que sous son apparente provocation, eu égard aux événements tragiques dont les Juifs français avaient été victimes, cette affirmation cristallisait toutes les prétensions familiales: aimer la France de toutes nos forces, devenir de parfaits Français [...] (p. 82) [As an epigraph to one of my novels, I’d wanted to note this sentence from Roger Stéphane’s Diary, dated 19 September 1942: ‘The only thing I’m sure of is my love for France. Contrary to what I thought at sixteen or seventeen, it would be impossible for me to dissociate myself from her, even if she were to become wholly fascist.’ My family had dissuaded me, you should keep just the first sentence, they said. Meanwhile, anti-Semitic incidents had increased in France. The Republic had forsaken us. I’d given up. And yet it seemed to me that beneath its apparent provocativeness, given the tragic events of which French Jews had been victim, this statement crystallized all the family’s claims: loving France with all our strength, becoming perfect French people [...]]

Her parents’ bad faith, manifest in their advice to cut the part of the Stéphane quotation exposing fascist tendencies in France, is also revealed to be transmissible. Claire confesses childhood inability to admit that her parents were immigrants and Jews: ‘Longtemps, je n’ai pas pu avouer que mes parents étaient des immigrés. Qu’ils étaient juifs. Je me fermais lorsque mon interlocuteur pénétrait les territoires dont j’avais condamné l’accès, ces zones opaques qui menaient jusqu’à mes origines’ (p. 81) [For a long time, I was unable to admit that my parents were immigrants. That

Nation/Deracination

175

they were Jewish. I clammed up when the person speaking to me entered territory I kept out of bounds, those impenetrable zones leading back to my origins]. Curiously, spatial metaphors are used by a narrator born and bred in France to convey acute preoccupation with territory, closed access, and boundaries — the very foundations of refugee experience. And the implicit notion of revisionism here (vis-à-vis her family’s history) is later followed by explicit reference to its close but even more noxious cousin. Negationism, which denies the existence of gas chambers designed to implement the Jewish genocide during WWII, is a loaded term used by Claire in the altered sense of her denying her Jewish family’s history: ‘Des miens, je savais qu’ils avaient quitté leur pays par bateau, qu’ils étaient arrivés en France avec dix francs en poche. Je réfutais mon histoire, négationniste réactionnaire’ (p. 161) [What I knew of my family was that they had left their country by boat, that they had arrived in France with ten francs in their pocket. A reactionary negationist, I refuted my history]. Crucially, the cause of this purported negationism is the Republican imperative of integration and of Frenchification. This is followed by what seems like negation(ism?) relative to her earlier statement about why she had become a writer (‘Je suis devenue écrivain par réf lexe nomade, par fidélité envers la tradition de mon peuple, partir avec les livres pour seules attaches, tous les livres mènent au Livre, mon identité est faite de mots — je n’en ai jamais eu d’autres’, p. 84) [I became a writer through a nomadic ref lex, through faithfulness to my people’s tradition, leaving with books as your only tie, all books lead to the Book, my identity is made up of words — I’ve never had any other]: Je suis devenue écrivain pour détruire. J’écrivais contre. Contre mes origines, mon histoire, contre les miens, contre l’amour, contre nos systèmes de pensée, nos névroses, contre nos certitudes, nos unions, nos obligations. Contre nos coutumes, nos impératifs moraux, nos obsessions mémorielles, notre sens du devoir, nos complexes, contre notre susceptibilité, l’exhibition de nos failles, nos démonstrations de force. Contre moi. (p. 162) [I became a writer in order to destroy. I was writing in opposition. In opposition to my origins, my history, my family, love, our systems of thought, our neuroses, our certainties, our unions, our obligations. In opposition to our customs, our moral imperatives, our obsessions with memory, our sense of duty, our complexes, our hypersensitivity, display of our faults, our show of strength. In opposition to myself.]

The final sentence in this extract from p. 162 gives the lie to the tacit denial of her earlier claim on p. 84 to have become a writer through fidelity to her people’s tradition. For in writing against all of these Jewish-identified factors, she was ultimately writing against herself, and thus still in (negative) relation to Jewish identity. But what is irreducible is the desire to escape these origins, which is also immanent in her attraction as a Jew of Sephardic origin to non-Jewish people from Eastern Europe (p. 163). One final form of negationism, or at the very least revisionism, is ventriloquized by Claire when she exposes the internalization of disciplinary Republican norms by Sephardic immigrants to France during the 1950s and 1960s. According to her, these older immigrants rewrite their personal history, eliding the difficulties they

176

Nation/Deracination

originally faced in France, and promoting themselves as models of social cohesion and mobility (pp. 74–75). The whitewashing of their history springs from a need to differentiate themselves from newcomers to twenty-first-century France, a non-Jewish wave of illegal immigrants propelled across borders by contemporary globalizing and transnational politics. Allusion to contemporary political discourse on clandestine immigrants segues into allusion to ancient Jewish history with, again, an emphasis on the imperative of memory: ‘Le-travail-au-noir-est-une-forme-d’esclavagisme avait dit le président Chirac et tu as été esclave en Egypte, Souviens-toi!’ (pp. 97–98) [Undeclared-workis-a-form-of-proslavery, president Chirac had said and you were a slave in Egypt, Remember!]. Further reinforcement of her Jewish heritage include the references to bitter herbs — ‘Tout ce que je désirais, c’était rentrer chez moi, à Paris: j’avais assez goûté aux herbes amères’ (p. 145) [All I wanted was to go back home, to Paris: I’d sampled enough bitter herbs] — as well as to ‘[L]e dernier Juif errant’ (p. 159) [the last wandering Jew], and here Tuil’s use of exemplary memory is conspicuous. She foregrounds transmitted memory of the stateless, wandering Jew to depict the plight of contemporary, non-Jewish exiles within France, cast as metaphorical wandering Jews excluded from Frenchness. Further uses of exemplary memory are the oblique parallels with the attitude of functionaries in contemporary France and those of Vichy France or Nazi Germany, many of whom (retrospectively, in the latter two cases) use/used the excuse that they do/did not make, but simply implement/implemented the discriminatory decisions to imprison those considered alien (p. 117). Recognition of the Levinasian Other’s face, of his or her essential humanity which was implicit in the f lattening of differences between sub-categories of Jewry observed above is also present in the continued parallels between these new, nonJewish immigrants and Claire’s own family. In this case, the isomorphism lies in the sense of irremediable alterity, foreignness, and outsiderhood within France: L’accent — mes parents avaient passé une vie à le museler, à le cacher comme ces chairs f lasques qu’un vêtement trop étroit laisse ressortir, et comment les dissimuler, les gratter, les repousser ces chairs mortes jusqu’à les rendre invisibles à l’œil nu. Le nom que nous n’avions jamais voulu changer ni franciser. Fierté d’étranger. Signe ostentatoire. D’où vient ton nom? La grande question de l’identité. (p. 121) [Their accent — my parents had spent a lifetime muzzling it, hiding it like that f laccid f lesh emphasized by over-tight clothes, and how can you conceal, scrape off, reject that dead f lesh to the point of making it invisible to the naked eye. The surname we’d never wanted to change or Frenchify. Foreigner’s pride. Ostentatious sign. Where does your surname come from? The great question of identity.]

Two features stand out here. First, the narrative voice becomes f luidly indeterminate, appearing to f loat from that of the narrator to that of the archetypal, potentially xenophobic ‘Français de souche’ [born and bred Frenchman] in the remark on the foreigner’s pride and the question as to her surname’s provenance. Second, shame is expressed via a corporeal metaphor, with an incriminatingly foreign accent being

Nation/Deracination

177

presented as loose skin which one cannot cast off. In concert with this image of skin is an earlier one (p. 84) of f lesh, Jewish f lesh into which are inscribed the stigmata of exodus. Thus is signified the historical transmission of Jewish exodus which governs the functioning of a Jew’s memory: ‘Il me semblait qu’un Juif ne pouvait pas penser en homme confiant. Qu’il pensait avec son histoire, sa mémoire. Avec ses peurs. Les stigmates de l’exode gravés dans la chair, inscrits dans les gênes’ (p. 84) [It seemed to me that a Jew couldn’t think like a confident man. That he thought with his history, his memory. With his fears. The scars of exodus engraved in his f lesh, inscribed in his genes/troubles]. The pun on ‘gênes’ [troubles] and ‘gènes’ [genes] underscores the discomfort which, for Claire, forms part of Jewish genes, figuratively speaking. Later on, she implies that remembered exile is a structural component of Judaism; and to substantiate this point, she evokes the myriad lost countries and communities of Jews forced into severance from their roots largely in f light from anti-Semitic persecution (p. 164). Her suggestion that Jewish authenticity comes from espousal of migration, deracination and statelessness as atemporal, grounding features of Jewishness identity is powerful, but ignores the existence of Israel — mention of which is entirely and conspicuously absent from Douce France. But precisely, the novel is about France alone, and its welcome or otherwise of exiles, be they Jewish (and within this category, be they Sephardic or Ashkenazic) or of other ethnic background. It is clear that while Tuil’s temporal and ethnic categories can sometimes appear a little blurred, ignoring certain historical specificities, Douce France has an important ethical function. In the interview conducted by Bénédicte Arcens, Tuil states the following: Je pense que quand on est d’origine juive on ne peut jamais se sentir totalement confiant. En même temps cela ne veut pas dire que j’ai peur. Je me sens très protégée dans la société française d’aujourd’hui. Jamais complètement à l’abri malgré tout. Personne ne devrait jamais se sentir à l’abri d’ailleurs...54 [I think that when you are of Jewish origin you can never feel entirely confident. At the same time that doesn’t mean that I’m frightened. I feel very protected in contemporary French society. Never completely sheltered, despite everything. Nobody should ever feel sheltered for that matter...]

As I have commented in a previous publication, ‘[t]he parallel drawn in her last sentence between the persecution suffered formerly by her Jewish family and that suffered currently by new categories of immigrants in France’ ref lects the operation of ‘Jewish memory in a mode that Tzvetan Todorov would approvingly class as exemplary rather than literal’.55 The extent of Tuil’s transitive historical thinking is unrivalled among the authors considered in this chapter, and the fact that she is the youngest of them bar one (born in 1972, she is older only than Bernfeld, born in 1976) may not be immaterial. Could it be that temporal distance from the diasporations experienced by the older generation of Jewish women provides a more dispassionate and thus potentially more transitive purview? This question may seem like a bromide that minimizes the trauma of that older generation. On the other hand, as Anna Langfus (see Chapter 1) averred, ‘le meilleur témoin est peutêtre celui qui n’a pas assisté à l’événement’ [perhaps the best witness is somebody

178

Nation/Deracination

who wasn’t there during the event].56 If witnessing and testimony have any futureoriented function at all, it must surely lie in the ability to detect continuities between past and present injustices, and the will to combat those being perpetrated in the present, beyond all ethnic and religious factionalisms. Notes to Chapter 3 1. The titular words ‘les Portes de l’espérance’ also form a French translation of the Hebrew ‘Petah’Tikva’, the name of the Israeli town where the narrator’s maternal grandparents live (see p. 167). 2. Aby Warburg, ‘Austausch künstlerische Kultur zwischen Norden und Süden’ (1905; reprinted in his) Gesammelte Schriften (Leipzig and Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1932), pp. 179–84. 3. Emma Parker, ‘Unsettling Women’, Contemporary Women’s Writing (Special issue: Diaspora), 3, 1 (2009), 1–5 (p. 3). 4. Alexander Stephan, ed., Exile and Otherness: New Approaches to the Experience of the Nazi Refugees (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005), pp. 12–13. His quotations are, respectively, from Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur, ‘Nation, Migration, Globalization: Points of Contention in Diaspora Studies’, in Theorizing Diaspora, ed. by Jana Evans (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 1–22 (16); Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 186; and Braziel and Mannur, p. 5. 5. Peter Burke, Cultural Hybridity (Cambridge: Polity, 2009). 6. Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, ed. by Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz (Ashland, OH: Fordham University Press, 2010). 7. Karine Tuil, Douce France (Paris: Grasset, 2007). 8. Reine Silbert, Il faut toujours quitter la Pologne (Paris: Olivier Orban, 1980). 9. Sélection du Livre (Paris: Sélection du Reader’s Digest, 1982), p. 133. 10. Rina Geftman, Guetteurs d’aurore (Paris: Cerf, 1985). 11. Nine Moati, La Passagère sans étoile (Paris: Seuil, 1989). 12. This is a point also made by the Austrian survivor Ruth Kluger: ‘For one could not emigrate without money. In all the countries of the world, poor Jews were even less welcome than wealthy Jews’. Kluger, p. 13. 13. Karin Bernfeld, Les Portes de l’espérance (Paris: Flammarion, 2003). 14. Confirmed in a private interview with Cairns, 2008. 15. This reference to Israel via the deictic ‘là-bas’ also features in the writings of Esther Orner: see Chapter 4. 16. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 9. 17. Doris Bensimon-Donath, L’Intégration des Juifs nord-africains en France (Paris: Mouton, 1971), p. 34. 18. Antoine Spire, ‘L’Exode des Juifs du monde arabe’, L’Arche, June 2008, 84–85 (p. 84). 19. Spire, p. 84. Spire is referring to two works by Nathan Weinstock: Une si longue présence: comment le monde arabe a perdu ses Juifs (Paris: Éditions Plon, 2008) and Histoire de chiens: la dhimmitude dans le conflit israélo-palestinien (Paris: Éditions Mille et Une Nuits, 2004). 20. Marlène Amar, La Femme sans tête (Paris: Gallimard, 1993). 21. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), p. 7. 22. Maurice Halbwachs, Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire (Paris: Alcan 1925). In this work, Halbwachs presents the family as the first of the three main groups in which collective memory is constituted, the other two being groups based on religion and on social class: thus, chapter 5 is entitled ‘La Mémoire collective de la famille’, chapter 6 ‘La Mémoire collective des groupes religieux’, and chapter 7 ‘Les Classes sociaux et leurs traditions’. 23. Maurice Halbwachs, La Mémoire collective (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1950), p. 33. 24. Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans. by Francis J. Ditter and Vida Yazdi Ditter (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), p. 48. 25. Halbwachs, La Mémoire collective, p. 33. 26. Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, p. 48.

Nation/Deracination

179

27. Anne Whitehead, Memory (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 130. 28. Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 51–52. 29. Nolden, In Lieu of Memory, p. 188. Nolden helpfully points out that this argument is pursued by Susan Ireland in her ‘Writing the Body in Marlène Amar’s La Femme sans tête’, French Review, 71, 3 (1998), 454–67. 30. See Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco, CA: Spinsters/ Aunt Lute, 1987). 31. Paola Bono and Jasmina Lukic, ‘Editorial: Writing Across the Borders’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, 16, 4 (2009), 291–99 (p. 292). 32. Jonathan Rutherford, ‘The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha’, in Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, ed. by Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), pp. 207–21 (p. 211). 33. Nolden, In Lieu of Memory, p. 190. Nolden’s reference is to Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991). 34. Burke offers a good example of cultural segregation via reference to Japan in the second half of the nineteenth century: ‘At this time, some upper-class men, at least, began to live what has been called a “double life”, a life both Western and traditional, consuming two kinds of food according to the occasion, wearing two kinds of clothes (a kimono at home, for example, and a Western suit at the office), reading books in two kinds of script and living in traditional houses that now included a room furnished in the Western style. Segregation of this kind continues today, although the Western room in a Japanese-style apartment has gradually been replaced by the Japanese room in a Western-style apartment.’ Burke, p. 91. 35. See Hélène Cixous, La Venue à l’écriture (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1976), Le Jour où je n’étais pas là (Paris: Galilée, 2000) and Portrait de Jacques Derrida en jeune saint juif (Paris: Galilée, 2001). For a fine critical exposition of this word play, see Christa Stevens, ‘Judéités, à lire dans l’œuvre d’Hélène Cixous, International Journal of Francophone Studies, 7, 1–2 (2004), 81–93. 36. Bhabha, p. 9. 37. David Lowenthal, Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (New York: Free Press, 1996), p. 9. 38. Bhabha, p. 37. 39. Marlène Amar, Des gens infréquentables (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). 40. From The Great Gatsby (1925). 41. See Lucille Cairns, ‘Remembering the Jewish Magrebi Home in Paule Darmon’s Baisse les yeux, Sarah (1980)’, in Memories of Home: Generations and Genealogies in African Writing, ed. by Yianna Liatsos (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2010), forthcoming 2010. Darmon’s Baisse les yeux, Sarah (Paris: Grasset, 1980) treats of a Moroccan Jewish woman, but the conf lict between Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews resembles that in Amar’s novel. 42. Bensimon-Donath observes that ‘[d]ans la société traditionelle d’Afrique du Nord, les fillettes étaient données en marriage à un âge précoce (8 à 10 ans)’ (p. 100). 43. Azade Seyhan, Writing Outside the Nation (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 10. 44. Catherine Slawy-Sutton, ‘Boukhobza, Chochana. Pour l’amour du père’, The French Review, 71, 3 (February 1998), 500–01 (p. 500). 45. Katia Rubinstein, Mémoire illettrée d’une fillette d’Afrique du Nord à l’époque coloniale (Paris: Stock, 1979), p. 284. 46. For an analysis of both Rubinstein and Fitoussi’s novels, along with another of Boukhobza’s, see Lucille Cairns, ‘Hyphenated Identity: Tunisian-French-Jewish-Female Writers’, CELAAN, 7, 1/2 (2008), 58–69. 47. Paula Jacques, Gilda Stambouli souffre et se plaint (Paris: Mercure de France, 2002). 48. See notably pp. 121, 213, and 447. 49. Sarah Frydman, La Marche des vivants (Paris: Albin Michel, 1997). 50. Jean-Claude Lebrun, ‘Paula Jacques: un perpétuel exil’, L’Humanité, 23 May 2002, p. 19. 51. Karine Tuil, in Bénédicte Arcens, ‘Interview: Karine Tuil’, 22 January 2007 .

180

Nation/Deracination

52. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1996), p. 5. [First published in 1982.] 53. Dominique Schnapper, ‘Israélites and Juifs: New Jewish Identities in France’, in Webber, ed., Jewish Identities in the New Europe, pp. 171–78 (p. 177). 54. Karine Tuil, in Arcens, ‘Interview: Karine Tuil’. 55. Lucille Cairns, ‘Post-War Jewish Women’s Writing in French’, Women in French Studies, 16 (2008), 24–38 (pp. 35–36). 56. Langfus, Conférence, WIZO (Women’s International Zionist Organization), March 1963 (unpublished lecture).

CHAPTER 4

v

New Sites of Conf lict: The Personal and the Political Chapters 1, 2, and 3 of this study considered ways in which francophone Jewish women writers have represented two historically discontinuous experiences of conf lict: World War II, and French decolonization. Arranged tripartitionally, Chapter 4 considers further sites of conf lict, both political and personal, in a postWWII, post-colonial, and largely post-1968 context. The first and second sections interpret ‘the political’ conventionally, in terms of power relations between peoples at the national and supra-national level. The first section appraises texts published soon after the Six-Day War of 1967 and President de Gaulle’s infamous remark about the ‘peuple juif, peuple d’élite, sûr de lui et dominateur’ [the Jewish people, an élite people, self-confident and domineering]. These texts have been chosen for their elaboration of Jewish self-critiques unexplored in previous chapters, but also for what they reveal about new avatars of French anti-Semitism, which since the early 1990s (at the time of the Gulf War) have often tended towards a fusion of right and left in a ‘rouge-brun’1 discourse opposed to the very existence of Israel. The second section of Chapter 4 focuses exclusively on francophone Jewish women writers’ attitudes towards Israel, particularly since the Second Intifada (beginning in 2000) and 9/11, and in the light of increased anti-Israeli feeling on the worldwide political stage of the new millennium. (Although that feeling has been greatly intensified by the Gaza War of December 2008 to January 2009, the latter conf lict is too recent to be ref lected in our primary corpus.) In contrast, the third and final section of Chapter 4 approaches a more figurative form of conf lict, produced in what my introductory chapter called the interstitial relations between the personal and the political. This formulation recognizes that Jewish women’s subjectivity is shaped not only by material factors, even if material instances of conf lict have been particularly preponderant in the history of Jews generally, regardless of gender. Exegesis of this different site of conf lict takes up the second-wave feminist, and I believe still highly relevant, hermeneutic of the political as personal/the personal as political. As I suggested in a previous publication,2 gentile and Jewish women alike (or at least those reaching a minimum threshold of receptivity to cultural change and contestation) were in the post-1968 period increasingly interpellated by this second-wave feminist precept. Although ‘the personal is the political’ is an anglophone expression, the basic precept it expresses

182

New Sites of Conflict

also came to inform French second-wave feminists, whose official though certainly not undisputed forum was the MLF (‘Mouvement de libération des femmes’), formed in 1971. Thus, the final section of this monograph discusses texts which inscribe the internal, psychological conf licts experienced particularly (although not exclusively) in the post-1968 period by Jewish women between, on the one hand, their aspiration to autonomous subjecthood, and, on the other hand, the ossifying gendered constructions and constrictions of them within Judaism. This tension is crystallized and perhaps best exemplified in mythoi of the Jewish mother. Attention will be paid to textual inscriptions of cracks in the surface of what even in other cultural traditions, but in this one especially, often amounts to a symbolic vessel for primeval fantasies of origin, unicity, and indivision. New Jewish Self-critiques, New Meditations of Anti-Semitism Part picaresque tale, part dystopic parable, Sylvie Korcaz’s Ma jolie Palestine (1972)3 in some ways anticipates Georges Perec’s W. ou le souvenir d’enfance,4 whose publication three years later was to meet with huge critical acclaim. Both novels are Jewishauthored and both mediate a fantasmatic world uncannily reminiscent of the Nazi regime’s concentrationary universe. But whereas in Perec the fantasy strand is typographically separated from its more realist counterpart, with Korcaz the two are disorientingly mingled, and the admixture is further complicated by a rich seam of quirky humour. The tenuously realist framework of Korcaz’s generically entredeux [liminal] text establishes a diegetic present of late 1960s/early 1970s France, and a chief protagonist, Clémentine Ilaire, who had been born during WWII and lost her father to the Shoah (p. 191). The fantastical dimension of the novel conjures up a superficially attractive brave new world which actually conceals a totalitarian and dehumanizing regime. This is clearly the domain of allegory, and the obvious if not unique referent is that of Nazi Germany with its economic and military might concealing (or so it was alleged by many Germans after WWII) its dirty ‘little’ secret of the concentration and ultimately the death camps. In general the tone of this novel is irreverently tongue-in-cheek, not merely vis-à-vis the ideologies it puts under the microscope. It also participates in a general, precociously postmodern rupture with traditional assumptions of authorial omniscience and destabilizing of narrative logic. A good illustration of Korcaz’s merging of the realist and the fantastical is Clémentine’s journey from Paris to the remote ‘Ile aux Chèvres’5 (p. 196) [Goats Island] in a taxi that can move on water and in the air. The island’s relative proximity to Berlin (p. 152) is an obvious clue to the concentration-camp allegory into which this sequence will develop. The island appears to be a vast industrial and bureaucratic complex whose working rhythms are ruled by siren calls (p. 153) and where human beings are made forcibly active (p. 157). Like the German Reich during WWII, the island is an arms producer (p. 178) and subject to enemy attack (p. 167). Eventually the dark truth of the island is revealed to Clémentine: it uses human beings as slave labour, reducing them to productive automata. What is most chilling is the workers’ habituation to servitude, the erasure of their autonomy, and

New Sites of Conflict

183

their loss of respect for liberty. They have, in effect, internalized the will of their slave-masters: ‘Il faut voir la foule qui se presse à l’aube devant le bureau d’embauche et espère qu’on lui permettra de rester debout sur une plate-forme dix heures d’affilée, car cette plate-forme, pour certains, c’est un peu la Terre Promise!’ (pp. 189–90) [You just have to see the crowd rushing to the employment office at dawn hoping it will be allowed to spend ten hours solid standing on a platform, since this platform is for some a bit like the Promised Land!]. The last two words of this exclamation signal a dual level to the allegory. One level recalls the Nazi camps and the eventual identification of at least some of their mentally broken Jewish victims with the persecutors.6 On another level, and especially when followed by ‘jeune et nouveau pays’ (p. 190) [young and new country], the two words ‘Terre Promise’ cannot help but evoke Israel. In this context the allegory becomes lampoon of what some may posit as Israeli Jews’ brainwashing and re-enslavement, this time to nationalist hubris leading to abuse of other (referentially, Palestinian) people(s). The image of the arms industry would support this reading, given Israel’s rising military strength and its military victory in the Six-Day War of 1967, just five years before the publication of Korcaz’s novel. However, the political dimension of Korcaz’s novel is not limited to chilling parabolic recall of the Nazi camps or oblique critique of Israel. It also contains colourfully barbed censure of what the author plainly sees as the sclerotic traditions of contemporary (that is, late 1960s/early 1970s) French Jewry. The pseudo epigraph, unattributed and presumably composed by the author herself, partly subverts the generally mocking tone of the narrative, allowing a serious interpretation of ‘Palestine’ as a universal wound, be it open or secret: ‘Ici, nulle dérision: chacun porte à son f lanc, plaie ouverte ou secrète, sa Palestine’ [There’s no scorn intended here: everyone carries within him his Palestine, an open or secret wound]. The novel’s opening — ‘Le jour où sa mère mourut, dans l’heure qui suivit, Clémentine sortit de la maison. Sans hésitation, se dirigea d’un pas léger vers la boulangeriepatisserie’ (p. 9) [The day her mother died, in the following hour Clémentine left the house. Without hesitating, headed to the bakery with a spring in her step] seems to be a parody in the feminine of the opening of Albert Camus’s L’Etranger (1942), given the principal protagonist’s indifference to her mother’s death. In the context of a Jewish child, however, there is a crucial symbolic difference from Camus’s novel: the death of Jewish identity, since the Jewish mother is for many Jews that identity’s sole guarantor. In Ma jolie Palestine this inversion of Jewish cultural norms takes a broader form, in expression of an acrimonious, indeed bankrupt family life: Adrien eut une brève pensée pour cette étrange famille dont tous les membres se haïssaient sans la cordialité ni même la familiarité de rigueur lorsqu’existent les liens du sang. Il pensa que chacun naissait ici avec un sachet d’arsenic en bagage, et qu’ils s’en saupoudraient les uns les autres la vie durant [...] (pp. 86–87) [Adrien spared a brief thought for that strange family where everyone hated each other without the cordiality nor even the familiarity that’s obligatory when there are blood ties. He thought that everyone in it was born with a sachet of arsenic as baggage, and that they spent their whole lives sprinkling it over each other.]

184

New Sites of Conflict

This familial antipathy, reinforced by reference to the family members at the mother’s funeral as Clémentine’s ‘ennemis’ (p. 204) [enemies], undermines the high value placed by traditional Jewish culture on the family as vector for the preservation of Jewry itself. In fact, Clémentine seems to feel only contempt for traditional Jewish precepts — ‘Le people juif est élu mon cul’ (p. 165) [The Jewish people is chosen my arse] being a pithy example — and particularly for Judaism: — Non, quelle fête? — Hanouccah. Vindieu! V’là les Hébreux qui rappliquent avec la Loi, la Thora et tout le bastringue. (p. 13) [‘No, which holiday?’ ‘Hanukkah.’ Ye gods! There go the Hebrews showing up with the Law, the Torah and the whole caboodle.]

As these quotations illustrate, Korcaz’s satire of Jewish identity extends beyond the family to the larger collectivity, particularly in its evocation of the ‘syndicat des Vierges de Sion’ [Virgins of Zion Union], a movement campaigning for the ‘ravalement de la Sainte Muraille’ (p. 23) [renovation of the Holy Wall]. A meeting of this association allows four Jewish men to propose four different courses of action regarding the ‘Sainte Muraille’, which clearly refers to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. The four options are: to leave it in its place, intact, under the protection of the existing religious authorities; to leave it in its place but change its state and those who govern it; to change its place but leave it in its present state and guardianship; last, to leave it in its current place and state, but to change its guardianship (pp. 25–26). This propositional quartet burlesques the infinitesimal detail and hair-splitting often attributed, not least by non-religious Jews themselves, to Talmudic commentary. The so-called virgins’ proposal is framed by one of the male speakers, Oscar Brenner (advocate of the second motion), as a feminist gesture. His rhetorical support for the virgins’ initiative ostensibly serves to criticize his fellow male contestants for having exploited their Jewish womenfolk and denied them access to full religious life: [...] ne serait-ce point une résistance obscure mais tenace à l’initiative féminine qui vous aveugle ainsi? Et le soin que vous prenez depuis des siècles à les confiner dans le profane — et à les faire trimer pour vous, soit dit en passant — , ne serait-il pas le levain de votre indignation? Soyez beaux joueurs: par leur projet de ravalement du Saint Mur, les femmes de notre tribu viennent d’ériger le profane au niveau prophétique... Alors, pour une fois, ne soyez pas jaloux! (pp. 43–44; author’s emphasis) [[...] is it not perhaps an obscure but stubborn resistance to women taking the initiative that is blinding you in this way? And the efforts you’ve been making for centuries to confine them to the realm of the profane — and to keep their noses to the grindstone for your benefit, incidentally — are they not perhaps the seeds of your indignation? Let’s be good sports: through their project for the renovation of the Holy Wall, the women of our tribe have just raised the profane to a prophetic level... So, for once, don’t be jealous!]

Within Korcaz’s generally spoofing scenario, however, Brenner’s supposed feminist sympathies could well be viewed as a self-serving cooption designed to fell his male

New Sites of Conflict

185

opponents and to secure personal glory — so reinforcing the male privilege upheld in Judaism and traditional Jewish culture. For all its mordant satire of contemporary Jewish mores in 1960s–1970s France, Ma jolie Palestine is not a monochrome attack on them. The novel also humorously indicts other, more obviously anti-Jewish forces than the ‘thinking’ Jew herself or himself. As Rosette Lamont observes of what she calls ‘ce conte satirique’ [this satirical tale], we as readers ‘retrouvons des échos de Candide et des Lettres persanes (Comment peut-on être un Juif à Paris?)’ [find echoes of Candide and Persian Letters (How can one be a Jew in Paris?)].7 One such anti-Jewish force is proselytizing Christianity, conveyed via allusion to Clémentine’s wartime experience as a Jewish child whom Christians had tried to convert — unsuccessfully, for she had, as is her wont, figuratively desecrated the sacred (here, the Confirmation rite) by ripping her dress wide open (p. 17). Another such force, again presented in a humorous form that could be reproved as trivializing, is banal, everyday anti-Semitism, along with what Korcaz sends up as the Jew’s eagle eye for it. The following dialogue represents a comic performance by Clémentine of Jewish paranoia, but it is, significantly, a paranoia which the narrative will later on vindicate as having been entirely justified: Enfin — elle exulta — : de la mortadelle découpée en étoile... Le garçon connaissait son métier et tenait à le prouver: — A cinq branches ou à six branches, mademoiselle? — Six branches mon ami, six, je ne suis pas anti-sémite. — Moi non plus, mademoiselle, bien que.. — Bien qu’un juif vous ait fait les pires crasses tandis qu’un autre est votre meilleur ami. Il la regarda étonné: — C’est cela même, mademoiselle... — Je suis certaine ou à peu près que nous n’avons pas d’ami commun! (p. 109) [Finally — she was exultant — mortadella cut into star shapes... The waiter was good at his job and was keen to prove it: ‘With five or six points, miss?’ ‘Six points my friend, six, I’m not anti-Semitic.’ ‘But nor am I, miss, although...’ ‘Although one Jew has played the dirtiest tricks on you while another is your best friend.’ He stared at her in astonishment: ‘That’s exactly it, miss...’ ‘I’m sure, or as good as, that we don’t have any friends in common!’]

One particularly impactful because wryly understated instance of anti-Semitism is the French Republic’s hostility to unassimilated Jewishness. Parisian club man­ ager Von Bérélé, an Eastern European Jewish immigrant to France, typifies the Jewish immigrant’s tenuous hold over French identity: he is a wealthy, established figure in French nightlife, yet ever-susceptible to reminders of his more precarious beginnings. Upon arriving in France, he had naïvely addressed Yiddish supplications to its President not just for his naturalization as a French citizen but also for exemption from military service (p. 57). In comically hyperbolic mode, Von Bérélé recalls no fewer than seventeen such written appeals to various French presidents

186

New Sites of Conflict

(p. 58). Black humour pervades his witticisms about Yiddish, the language in which he wrote all of these missives, greenly assuming that translations could be provided: ‘Une langue qu’on ne parlait que dans la neige par moins trente degrés centigrades. Une langue qui veut qu’on ait les pieds gelés, parce que le yiddish, ça réchauffe, ça vous réveillerait un mort!’ (pp. 58–59) [A language only spoken in the snow when it’s minus thirty degrees centigrade. A language that wants you to have frozen feet, because Yiddish warms you up, it would warm up the dead for you!]. The sting in the tale is that after the Shoah, Yiddish itself was virtually dead, and symbolically the language of the dead (cf. p. 19 of Anissimov’s La Soie et les cendres, treated in Chapter 2 above). Implicit reference to the Shoah and to Jewish failure to predict it is manifest in the following remark: ‘Clémentine, captivée par la sagesse rétrospective de sa tribu, sirotait son œil de bison en prenant garde de déglutir en silence’ (p. 60) [Clémentine, fascinated by the retrospective wisdom of her tribe, sipped her buffalo’s eye, taking care to swallow silently]. The humour of Von Bérélé’s narrative should not obscure its political and pedagogical dimension, however. When his seventeenth missive arrives at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs he is summoned to a police station and charged with writing threatening letters in code — Yiddish presumably being considered an ultra-alien language (p. 62). He denies any threatening intent in his letters, which simply sought his acceptance within the French nation and the civic rights of any French citizen (p. 63). The reader may be amused by the comic delivery of the anecdote, but will perhaps also be sobered by its wider referent: the failure of the Republic to recognize as French those Juifs who, unlike the assimilated Israélites, did not, would not, or could not hide their Jewishness. (Reference here is to the inf lux of Eastern European Jewish refugees to France in the late nineteenth century and then again in the 1920s–1930s, as opposed to Jewish families long established in France.) Indeed, the dissonance between the jauntiness of tone and the sobriety of content is striking. As Lamont puts it, ‘[l]e ton cocasse de Ma Jolie Palestine, son style jarryesque — comme la Pologne d’Ubu, c’est-à-dire Nulle Part, l’Ile aux Chèvres se situe “dans le Palatinat, près de Berlin” — ne sont que l’enrobage [...] d’une nourrissante leçon’8 [the comical tone of Ma Jolie Palestine, its Jarryesque style — like Ubu’s Poland, that is to say Nowhere, the Ile aux Chèvres is situated ‘in the Palatinate, near Berlin’ — are merely the sugar coating of a wholesome lesson]. Although both authors treat of post-WWII anti-Semitism in France and of Israel, Korcaz’s take is very different from that of Sarah Frydman, author of La Marche des vivants (1997). Frydman’s novel is a long saga which follows its chief protagonists from 1944 to 1991, ref lecting many of the major historical events and movements marking this time-span. While certainly not devoid of political nuance, Frydman’s Jewish characters are far removed from the Jewish self-critique exercised by Korcaz’s main protagonist twenty-five years earlier. (This difference must, of course, be seen in the light of the tortuous turns taken by the Arab–Israeli conf lict since the early 1970s.) Frydman’s unequivocal presentation of Egyptian president Nasser’s threat in 1967 to block Aqaba port as tantamount to a declaration of war on Israel (p. 635) is predictable in view of its narrativization by the fervent Zionist Avrom. What is less predictable is the main character Myriam’s complete agreement with Avrom,

New Sites of Conflict

187

since her previous political investments had been not in Zionism but uniquely in communism. She is incensed by de Gaulle’s advice to Israel not to retaliate, and it is her bitterness with French politicking and exploitation of Israel at this historical juncture (1967) that prompts a reconfiguration of her political loyalties (mimetically ref lecting real reconfigurations: as Paula Hyman comments, ‘[t]he Six-Day War had a major impact on French Jewish consciousness and behavior’):9 Elle ouvrit la radio à temps pour entendre de Gaulle conseiller hypocritement aux Israéliens de ne pas riposter... ‘Le salopard!’ grinça Myriam entre ses dents... Elle n’avait jamais aimé de Gaulle. Elle n’oubliait ni février 1962, ni les ordres de Papon et de Frey. ‘Et qui a nommé ces crapules à ces postes? De Gaulle! Alors!’ (pp. 636–37) [She put on the radio in time to hear de Gaulle hypocritically advising the Israelis not to retaliate... ‘The bastard!’ said Myriam, gnashing her teeth... She’d never liked de Gaulle. She hadn’t forgotten either February 1962, or Papon and Frey’s orders. ‘And who appointed those crooks? De Gaulle! So!’]

Myriam’s antipathy for the French president in 1967 is justified by a striking historical irony. In February 1962, it was under the orders of de Gaulle’s appointees, prefect of police Maurice Papon and Minister of the Interior Roger Frey, that eight communist activists had been murdered for demonstrating against the OAS (Organisation de l’armée secrete), a movement opposing the Arab-Algerian independence movement. In 1967 de Gaulle, responsible if only indirectly for the slaughter of Arabs in 1961 and pro-Arabs in 1962, performed a volte-face and cynically adopted an Arab-friendly, anti-Israeli policy. (By the late 1960s, France’s political and economic interests were thought to be better served by alliance with Arab countries than by maintenance of cordial relations with Israel.) Myriam’s condemnation of de Gaulle at this juncture is no mere function of her sympathy with communists, since her anger ref lects her earlier political opposition to French imperialism in Algeria. Of signal importance here is that a now Zionist narrative voice is anxious to denounce the barbarities committed against and tortures inf licted on both Arabs and Arab sympathizers by the French army and police in the context of the Algerian War. Most of the denunciation is effected via free indirect style focalized on Myriam, but there are exceptions (such as on p. 510). Through allusion to a now iconic photograph of the little boy in the Warsaw ghetto whose hands are raised above his head in a surrender gesture, continuity is established (pp. 513, 547, and 550) between the torture and massacre of Jews in the Shoah and the torture and massacre of Arabs in the Algerian War.10 Even more so than on pp. 91–92 of Clément’s Cherche-Midi (see Chapter 2), this continuity strikingly intersects with Michael Rothberg’s linking of the two instances of French state violence in his study of ‘multidirectional memory; a process in which transfers take place between events that have come to seem separate from each other.’11 Further, the fact that Myriam has previously voiced militant defence of Arabs against French assault gives greater ethical weight to her subsequent critique of Arab countries’ later assault on Israel. The French state’s anti-Semitism is in fact represented as endemic and chronic. It is traced from the diegetic present under de Gaulle, whose November 1967 slur

188

New Sites of Conflict

is cited in the quotation below without direct attribution, back to the Vichy past of WWII: Le gouvernement français dissimulait aussi peu que possible son antisémitisme de caste: ‘Un peuple fier et dominateur...’ Pas une critique à propos des peuples arabes — réellement agressifs, voire dictatoriaux, voire fascistes, protecteurs de nazis notoires — , dont il espérait la clientèle future... Politique de marchands de tapis maintenue cyniquement par la France au nom de grands principes moraux, digne héritière de la politique vichyssoise menée vingt-sept ans plus tôt par la plupart des hommes politiques encore au pouvoir. (p. 639) [The French government did the minimum to conceal its caste-based antiSemitism: ‘A proud and domineering people...’. Not one criticism of Arab peoples — truly aggressive, even dictatorial, even fascist, protectors of notorious Nazis — who it hoped would be future customers... A policy of hard bargaining cynically maintained by France in the name of grand moral principles, a worthy heir to the Vichyite policy conducted twenty-seven years earlier by the majority of politicians still in power.]

When the Jewish restaurant Jo Goldenberg in Paris is bombed in 1982, a transformation in Myriam’s politics is triggered. In the face of this renascent anti-Semitism and the French government’s sedulous ignoring or else cynical instrumentalization of it, her previous ideal of complete integration within Republican France is bankrupted, and her loyalties migrate towards her own, beleaguered people — this despite her distaste for sectarianism (p. 756). Further support to the tacit narrative charge of governmental anti-Semitism comes from a male Gentile in reference to Couve de Murville, who has just become prime minister: ‘— Couve de Murville est un antisémite, dit Joël [...] Pardon... Un antisioniste...’ (p. 689) [‘Couve de Murville is an anti-Semite’, said Joël [...] ‘Sorry... An anti-Zionist...’]. Joël’s qualification underscores the common, if widely contested, suspicion that anti-Zionism may often be a politically correct cover for anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism masquerading as anti-Zionism is diagnosed not just in the French government but also in the French media. When Egypt and Syria attack Israel in 1973 on the most important Jewish (holi)day of the year, Yom Kippur, the French fourth estate’s blithe indifference to Israeli deaths is sarcastically implied: Enfin, après avoir donné toutes les informations possibles et imaginables sur le foot, puis le tennis, le journaliste consentit à perdre un peu de son temps, et dit: C’est pendant le Yom Kippour, la plus importante fête religieuse juive, que l’Égypte et la Syrie ont déclenché... (p. 737) [Finally, after having given all the news possible and imaginable on football, then tennis, the journalist consented to waste a bit of his time, and said: ‘It was during Yom Kippur, the most important of Jewish religious holidays, that Egypt and Syria launched...’]

That nonchalance in the face of Judaeocide is caustically universalized by Myriam as she recalls an old joke: ‘ “Un gouvernement d’Europe centrale a décidé de massacrer tous les juifs et tous les coiffeurs... — Ah?... et pourquoi les coiffeurs?” ’ (p. 737) [‘A central European government has decided to massacre all Jews and all hairdressers...’ ‘Oh?... Why the hairdressers?’]. Later on, in the run-up to the Gulf

New Sites of Conflict

189

war, Myriam discerns in the French media an attitude whose lineage she again traces back to Vichy: Des journalistes français se prélassaient dans les fauteuils du lobby. Myriam eut un rictus méprisant: — Ils viennent assister à la curée... voir Israël détruit, c’est de cela qu’ils rêvent! Depuis 1949! Et, si ce n’est eux, ce sont leurs enfants... Je me demande parfois ce qu’ont fait pendant la guerre de 40–45 les parents de certains d’entre eux. Une petite enquête serait nécessaire. Ceci expliquerait cela, dans la plupart des cas! (p. 792) [French journalists were lounging around on armchairs in the lobby. Myriam grinned contemptuously: ‘They’re coming to witness the quarry... to see Israel destroyed, that’s what they’ve been dreaming about! Since 1949! And if not them, then their children... Sometimes I wonder what the parents of some of them did during the 1940–45 war. A little investigation might be needed. The one would explain the other, in most cases!’]

And when Joël, who is a French journalist, is offered the job of press correspondent in Jerusalem, she mordantly mocks the media’s disinformation and its aprioristically anti-Israeli, pro-Palestinian bias: — Et tu feras comme les autres! Tu seras aux ordres du Quai d’Orsay ou du gouvernement... Tu ‘désinformeras’, tu ne donneras jamais les deux versions d’un événement. Seule la version palestinienne va compter pour toi... Tu choisiras soigneusement un intellectuel palestinien pour l’opposer à un sectaire religieux israélien...’ (p. 827) [‘And you’ll behave just like the others! You’ll be at the service of the Foreign Office or of the government... You’ll give false information, you’ll never give the two versions of an event. Only the Palestinian version will count for you... You’ll carefully choose a Palestinian intellectual to set against a sectarian religious Israeli...’]

It is also to a journalist that she condemns Arab sympathy with the Nazis during and after WWII: ‘Pour ma part, je n’oublie pas de quel côté étaient les Arabes pendant la guerre, ni dans quels pays les plus grands criminels de guerre ont trouvé refuge!’ (p. 794) [For my part, I don’t forget which side the Arabs were on during the war, nor which countries the big war criminals found refuge in!]. Four years later, in Une année si ordinaire (2004),12 Esther Orner also likened late twentieth-century and early- to mid-twentieth-century strains of French antiSemitism. Orner posits parallels between the extreme right-wing movements of 1930s–1940s France and the contemporary, left-wing movements in France that combine anti-globalization, anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism. To be sure, Orner concedes that beyond the obvious right–left schism, there are clear histori­ cal specificities differentiating the two types of movement, such as the left wing’s defence of ‘beurs’, who commonly support the Palestinian cause and abhor Israel. Nonetheless, contends Orner, right and left converge in their extreme anti-Ameri­ canism and anti-Semitism. Strategically, she reminds the reader of France’s now forgotten but still immense debt towards America:

190

New Sites of Conflict En voyant des manifestations à Paris contre Bush où des drapeaux américains et israéliens ont été brûlés tandis que l’on hissait des drapeaux palestiniens, je me suis demandée [sic] si cette minorité de gauchistes et de communistes qui dans le passé se détestaient connaissaient l’histoire de leur pays. Quant à moi je me verrai toujours hissé par l’oncle Roland pour embrasser les soldats américains, nos libérateurs. Et puis ces croix en Normandie de soldats étrangers en l’occurrence des Américains venus libérer l’Europe de la bête nazie. Et le fameux plan Marshall. Evidemment ce n’est pas l’histoire des beurs encadrés par des Français ‘de souche’ anti-mondialistes, anti-américains et antisionistes qui font écho à l’extrême droite d’alors, elle aussi anti-américaine et antismémites. Même combat! (p. 155) [When I saw the Paris demonstrations against Bush where American and Israeli f lags were burned whilst Palestinian f lags were hoisted up, I wondered if that minority of leftists and communists who in the past used to hate each other knew their country’s history. As for me I’ll always picture myself being hoisted up by Uncle Roland to kiss the American soldiers, our liberators. And then the Normandy crosses of foreign soldiers, to be specific Americans, who had come to free Europe from the Nazi beast. And the famous Marshall Plan. Obviously this isn’t the history of the second-generation Arabs surrounded by antiglobalization, anti-American and anti-Zionist born-and-bred French people who echo the extreme right back then, which was also anti-American and anti-Semitic. Same battle!]

Orner here implies an at least conceptual melding of right and left in a ‘rouge-brun’ discourse, where the classical anti-Semitism of the right and the anti-Zionism of the left today result in denial of Israel’s very right to exist. Other political commentators have averred that since the 1990s, such a denial has been most manifest in the hostility of French Muslims of Arab origin and of ‘altermondialistes’ towards French Jewry, because the latter is routinely conf lated with Israel. Orner also arraigns a far older brand of French anti-Semitism, along with its Christian roots in a secular Republic. It is implied that present-day Jews who zealously espouse the Palestinian cause are trying to escape their Jewishness as had Jews who converted to Catholicism before the Dreyfus affair. In both cases, the gravamen is of bad faith and spineless defection to the persecuting side. Orner’s belief is that while anti-Zionists may not consciously wish for the death of Jews, they are in fact complicit in the countless Israeli Jewish deaths perpetrated by Palestinian terrorists: Hier Shabbat je n’ai pas avalé de livre. J’ai quand même continué à lire un essai que je terminerai bientôt — Avez-vous lu Brunetière? Il est beaucoup question de conversion d’une certaine catégorie de Juifs au catholicisme, une manière de mieux s’assimiler et de s’intégrer en se reniant. Après l’affaire Dreyfus il y aura un ralentissement. Je me suis demandée [sic] comment aujourd’hui on échappait à son judaïsme. J’ai pensé que c’était par le gauchisme ou ce que le journaliste Arieh Chavit définit par la gauche lointaine. Ceux qui sont ‘convertis’ à la cause palestinienne et peu importe ce que fait Arafat il a toujours raison, comme les communistes qui défendent Staline quoiqu’il arrive. [...] Ce qui se passe aujourd’hui autour d’Israël, si ce n’est pas ‘l’affaire’, provoque un tel clivage que l’on ne peut plus continuer à fréquenter des antisionistes déclarés qui, s’ils ne désirent pas notre mort d’une manière

New Sites of Conflict

191

consciente, y participent hautement. Et d’ailleurs j’en veux avant tout aux Juifs qui sont les plus virulents comme au moyen âge les convertis. (p. 169) [Yesterday, Shabbat, I didn’t devour a book. Nonetheless I carried on reading an essay that I’ll soon finish — Have you read Brunetière? There’s a lot of reference to the conversion of a certain type of Jews to Catholicism, a way of assimilating and integrating yourself better by denying yourself. After the Dreyfus Affair there would be a slowing-down of the process. I wondered how people escape from their Judaism today. I thought that it was through leftism or what the journalist Arieh Chavit defines as the far left. Those who have ‘converted’ to the Palestinian cause so that whatever Arafat does he’s always right, like communists who defend Stalin no matter what happens. [...] What’s happening today around Israel, if it’s not the same as ‘the Affair’, is provoking such a division that we can’t carry on mixing with sworn anti-Zionists who, if they don’t consciously want our death, are making a big contribution to it. And besides, I resent most of all the Jews who are the most virulent like the converts in the Middle Ages.]

Israel Orner’s tendentious words in the above quotation provide an apt transition to the present chapter’s second axis of enquiry: namely, francophone Jewish women’s attitudes towards Israel. In complete contrast to the stances of Frydman and Orner (which are fairly similar despite the quarter of a century separating their publications) is that of Ania Francos, described by Yaïr Auron as ‘un écrivain engagé, qui à une certaine époque prit même violemment parti contre Israël’13 [a committed writer, who was at one point even violently anti-Israel]. Published one year after Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War of 1967, Les Palestiniens (1968),14 Francos’s intervention in the thorny terrain of the Arab–Israeli conf lict, is virtually a hapax in our extended corpus of primary texts (see Bibliography): an adamantly anti-Zionist plea penned by a Jew. Francos was born in Paris at the start of WWII; the dust-jacket copy of Les Palestiniens asserts that ‘Toute sa famille ayant été deportée, elle a gardé de son enfance traquée une détermination farouche à défendre la cause des opprimés: hier les Algériens, aujourd’hui les Palestiniens’ [Her entire family having been deported, she retained from her hunted childhood a fierce determination to defend the cause of the oppressed: yesterday the Algerians, today the Palestinians]. That fierce resolve leads to a rhetorical unilaterity restricted to defending Palestinians and condemning Israelis. In her introduction, she designates the text as a journalist’s report on the three years (1966–68 inclusive) she has spent among the Palestinians. Her mission is to explain why the latter are waging armed warfare and why she believes they are right to do so. Her basic argument against Israel will be that the creation of the state of Israel dispossessed millions of Arabs of their homeland. Pre-empting criticism, she admits that she has never been to Israel and that her book does not purport to explore both sides of the conf lict. The reason proffered for this onesidedness is that ‘Israël n’est pas un pauvre petit pays seul au monde, il a eu pour parrain l’impérialisme anglo-américain qui n’a pas cessé de veiller sur lui depuis sa création; il ne manque pas d’avocats pour justifier sa cause’ (p. 10) [Israel isn’t a poor little country all alone in the world, it’s had a patron in the

192

New Sites of Conflict

Anglo-American imperialism constantly protecting it since its creation; it doesn’t lack advocates to defend its cause]. Francos here articulates what was an article of faith for the French left in the late 1960s and is still prevalent today, albeit in new configurations: in its very most reductive version, a conspiracy theory of JewishAmerican world domination. While acknowledging her Jewish origins in the introduction, she proceeds to devalue the ontological integrity of Jewishness by claiming that these origins have never had much meaning for her, and by stating in terms reminiscent of Sartre’s Réflexions sur la question juive that she is Jewish because others define her as such: Il est important, me semble-t-il, de dire tout de suite que je suis d’origine juive, bien que cela n’ait jamais eu beaucoup de sens pour moi. Je le suis, comme dirait mon ami Maxime Rodinson, ‘au sens hitlérien du terme’ ou dans le sens sartrien, ‘est juif celui qui est considéré juif par les autres’. Le judaïsme fut la religion de mes ancêtres mais je suis athée, comme mes parents. (p. 11) [It seems to me important to say straight away that I’m of Jewish origin, although this has never had much meaning for me. I’m Jewish, as my friend Maxime Rodinson would say, ‘in the Hitlerian sense of the term’ or in the Sartrean sense, ‘a Jew is somebody considered Jewish by others’. Judaism was my ancestors’ religion but I’m atheist, like my parents.]

Francos also attempts to diminish the credibility of European Jewish claims to Hebrew origin, and therefore the credibility of their right to a homeland in the Middle Eastern territory historically known as Palestine: Il y a fort peu de chance pour que je sois sémite, pas plus que ne le sont la plupart des Juifs d’Europe Centrale et, même si par un incroyable miracle, je descendais des Hébreux, je ne me sentirais pas pour cela un droit historique sur la Palestine qui appartient à ceux qui y ont toujours vécu depuis deux mille ans, les Palestiniens, quelle que soit leur religion ou le nom de leur Dieu, Allah, Jésus ou Jéhovah. Les réfugiés palestiniens, musulmans ou chrétiens, ont d’ailleurs certainement dans leurs veines plus de sang hébreu que moi ou la plupart de ces Israéliens qui sont vraisemblablement les descendants des peuples européens convertis au judaïsme au cours des siècles ainsi que l’anthropologie tend à le prouver. (p. 12) [It’s very unlikely that I’m Semitic, any more so than most Jews from Central Europe and, if by some incredible miracle I were a descendant of the Hebrews, I wouldn’t for all that feel I had a historic right over Palestine which belongs to those who have always lived there for two thousand years, the Palestinians, whatever their religion or the name of their God, Allah, Jesus or Jehovah. Besides, the Palestinian refugees, be they Muslim or Christian, certainly have more Hebrew blood in their veins than I or most of those Israelis who are probably the descendants of European peoples converted to Judaism in the course of the centuries, as anthropology tends to prove.]

Her last sentence seems highly questionable, to say the least. Moreover, the refusal of Hebrew identity to any Jew apart from s/he whose ancestors have been living in Palestine for over two thousand years is an overly narrow interpretation of the word ‘Hebrew’, ignoring its more common connotation of Jews in general: Mais on peut alors se demander: à part les Juifs qui n’ont jamais quitté la

New Sites of Conflict

193

Palestine, qui descend donc des Hébreux? Eh bien, je crois que ce sont, le plus sûrement possible, les Arabes palestiniens aujourd’hui réfugiés qui vécurent en Palestine jusqu’en 1948 et jusqu’à la colonisation sioniste. (p. 31) [But then you may wonder: apart from the Jews who never left Palestine, who does descend from the Hebrews? Well, I believe it’s as sure as possible the Palestinian Arabs who are now refugees but lived in Palestine until 1948 and until Zionist colonization.]

Whilst unwilling to confer any ontological positivity on her Jewish origins, Francos admits that she would still be targeted by any new wave of anti-Semitic discrimination sweeping across Europe. But this concession is made only to shore up her main contention, that persecution does not give the right to occupy another people’s land: ‘Mais même si ces temps tragiques revenaient, je me battrais sur place pour mes droits d’être humain, mais je n’irais pas en Palestine ou dans une quelconque terre promise prendre le sol de plus faible que moi’ (p. 12) [But even if those tragic times were to return, I’d fight on the spot for my human rights, but I wouldn’t go to Palestine or to some promised land to take the soil of those weaker than me]. In fact, all she is willing to concede to her Jewish origins is the empathy they have given her with other oppressed peoples. And all that remains of her Jewishness, put under quasi erasure by the use of problematizing inverted commas, is solidarity with oppressed Jews. For her, if Jewish identity exists at all, it is not the sense of being an elect or a different people, but rather, une sorte de mémoire d’une oppression passée et millénaire, une sourde angoisse qui remonte parfois comme du ‘fond des âges’, une certaine patience et, je crois, cette sorte d’humour dans le drame et le malheur que je retrouve curieusement du côté des Palestiniens et qui fait que lorsqu’ils disent eux aussi, à présent, ‘l’an prochain à Jérusalem’, je me sens en communauté. (p. 13) [a sort of memory of a past, age-old oppression, a gnawing anxiety which sometimes returns as if from the ‘depths of time’, a certain patience and, I believe, that sort of humour in the face of tragedy and misfortune that I also come across, curiously, among the Palestinians and that makes me feel part of a community when they too now say ‘Next year in Jerusalem’.]

Further, Palestinians seem to be somewhat idealized: J’ai parfois le sentiment de l’inconfort de ma situation; non lorsque je suis avec des Arabes qui m’ont toujours reçue avec leur hospitalité coutumière — j’étais la seule journaliste autorisée à circuler librement et à rester en Syrie durant la guerre et je crois avoir l’amitié et la confiance de nombreux responsables — mais bien dans les milieux européens, récemment convertis à la cause palestinienne, pour lesquels un Juif est toujours suspect, surtout lorsqu’il refuse d’entrer dans le moule. L’antisémitisme, je l’ai ressenti en Europe, rarement chez les Arabes, jamais chez les Palestiniens. (p. 14) [Sometimes I’m aware that my situation is awkward; not when I’m with Arabs who have always received me with their customary hospitality — I was the only journalist allowed to move about freely and to remain in Syria during the war and I believe I have the friendship and confidence of numerous leaders — but in European circles, recently converted to the Palestinian cause, where a Jew is always suspect, particularly when he refuses to conform to the

194

New Sites of Conflict mould. I’ve sensed anti-Semitism in Europe, rarely among Arabs, never among Palestinians.]

The third clause of her last sentence (‘rarement chez les Arabes’) may be true in her individual case, but veils the historic reality of certain Arab countries’ support for Hitler’s Judaeocidal policies (and, by an ironic twist, for today’s reader veils too the negationism of some of those countries). While ultimately unverifiable in her individual case, the last clause makes a claim that, if she has been truly open about her ethnic Jewishness, seems highly improbable. Ten years later, in Francos’s Sauve-toi, Lola! of 1978 (discussed in Chapter 2 above), overt opposition to Israel endures in the form of the Sephardic Professor Bensoussan, who muses thus to Lola: ‘je continue de penser que la création de cet Etat fut une erreur. Nous valons mieux, n’est-ce pas, que d’être les meilleurs pilotes de bombardiers du monde?’ (p. 368) [I still think that the creation of that State was a mistake. We deserve better, don’t we, than being the best bomber pilots in the world?]. However, in this autofictional novel there is at least a nod to possible counter-arguments. Arab–Israeli conf lict fatigue is ascribed to and not denied by Lola, a character closely resembling Francos: ‘— Avouez, Lola, que vous aviez vous aussi une overdose de Palestiniens, d’Israéliens, de Juifs et d’Arabe’ (p. 365; author’s emphasis) [‘Admit it, Lola, you too had an overdose of Palestinians, Israelis, Jews and Arabs’]. Equally, Lola is aware of the muted anti-Semitism fuelling the anti-Zionist sentiments prompted by the 1982 war between Israel and Lebanon: Le pire n’était pas l’attitude des Juifs — la majorité était plus bouleversée et indignée par ce qui se passait au Liban que la plupart des Arabes. Le plus insupportable était la joie suspecte de nombreux goyim: — Israël, exultaient-ils, s’est enfin démasqué. Les rescapés des camps de la mort se comportent enfin comme tous les autres peuples: ils occupent, ils arrêtent, ils torturent, ils massacrent, ils violent les droits de l’homme. (p. 369) [The worst thing wasn’t the attitude of the Jews — the majority were more distressed and indignant about what was happening in the Lebanon than the majority of the Arabs. What was most unbearable was the suspect joy of numerous goys: ‘Israel’, they’d say exultantly, ‘has finally dropped its mask. The death-camp survivors are finally behaving like all other peoples: they’re occupying land, arresting people, torturing people, massacring people, violating human rights.’]

It was sensitivity about the same 1982 war that very nearly prevented Rina Geftman from finishing Guetteurs d’aurore of 1985 (discussed in Chapter 3 above). Geftman, a convert to Christianity who has remained loyal to her ethnic Jewish roots and emigrated from France to Israel, questions the justness of this war prosecuted by her adoptive country in retaliation for an assassination attempt on the Israeli ambassador to Britain by the Abu Nidal Organization. However, Geftman also roundly condemns what she views as the anti-Semitic lies about and attacks on Israel that proliferated during the war: Mon chant intérieur ne pouvait plus jaillir à cause de ma tristesse qui avait deux causes principales. La première provenait de l’interrogation angoissée sur la nécessité de cette guerre et sur la manière dont elle avait été menée, interrogation

New Sites of Conflict

195

que je partageais avec de vastes cercles du peuple d’Israël. La deuxième cause était due au f lot de mensonges et de calomnies qui ont déferlé dans les mass media contre notre pays. J’avais l’impression que des vannes s’étaient ouvertes et que l’on pouvait déverser sans vergogne le vieil antisémitisme que l’on avait dû dissimuler. Voici qu’il réapparaissait au grand jour, déguisé en combat — assez douteux — pour la justice. (p. 12–13) [My inner song could no longer f low out because of my sadness, which had two main causes. The first came from anxious questioning about the need for this war and about the way it had been conducted, a questioning that I shared with huge circles of the people of Israel. The second cause was the f lood of lies and slander which swept through the mass media against our country. I had the sense that the f loodgates had opened and that people could shamelessly pour out the old anti-Semitism that before they’d had to hide. Here it was reappearing in full daylight, disguised as a — rather dubious — fight for justice.]

Geftman’s ref lections manifest a wish to understand, if not necessarily to exonerate Israel’s military actions: Israël n’a pu reconstruire ce pays qu’en ayant d’une main la truelle et de l’autre l’épée, comme au temps d’Ezra et de Néhémie. Il n’est pas question de justifier toutes ces actions, mais il faut qu’on sache à quel point nos soldats sont meurtris quand ils reviennent des combats. Je les ai entendus, plus d’une fois, exprimer leur déchirement: ‘C’est terrible de devoir tuer des hommes contre lesquels je n’éprouve aucune haine, des hommes créés, eux aussi, à l’image de Dieu et à sa ressemblance.’ (p. 91) [Israel was only able to reconstruct this country with a trowel in one hand and a sword in the other, as in the time of Ezra and Nehemiah. It’s not a question of justifying all these actions, but we need to know just how morally wounded our soldiers are when they return from fighting. On more than one occasion I’ve heard them express their heartbreak: ‘It’s terrible to have to kill men I feel no hatred for, men who were also created in the image of God and in his likeness.’]

And her assessment of Israeli politics is placed in a relatively rare comparativist context: ‘Si tu prends la politique actuelle de l’État d’Israël, je te concède qu’elle enclôt pas mal d’ambiguïtés et d’erreurs. Elle n’est pas pire que celle des autres pays, mais nous aimerions qu’elle soit meilleure’ (p. 98) [If you take the State of Israel’s current politics, I grant you that it reveals a fair amount of ambiguity and error. It’s no worse than the politics of other countries, but we’d like it to be better]. Yet Geftman is no knee-jerk apologist for Israel, as the final clause of the above quotation shows. And her subject position shifts ambiguously. While professing enduring loyalty to her Jewish people on an ethnic level, her main sense of identity is as a Christian. That much may seem straightforward. What is less so is that she does sometimes distinguish herself, even if only occasionally, from Jewry rather than from Judaism. Expressing the belief that all visits to Israel should include a visit to Yad Vashem, the Shoah memorial, ‘car, autrement, il n’est pas possible de comprendre les réactions des juifs et l’importance d’Israël pour eux’ (p. 93) [for otherwise, it’s impossible to understand the reactions of Jews and the importance of Israel for them], she self-excludes from the designation ‘juifs’ by the use of ‘eux’

196

New Sites of Conflict

rather than ‘nous’. Her final comments refuting the link between the Shoah and the birth of the State of Israel are also rather questionable. It is true that Zionism preceded the Shoah by many years, but by suggesting a grand metaphysical narrative of life springing from death, Geftman occludes the political will of a historically martyred people to end its persecution and exile at the zenith of that martyrdom in the 1940s: Certains écrivains ont présenté l’État d’Israël comme une conséquence de la shoah; je crois que ce n’est pas exact. Il ne s’agit pas d’un phénomène de cause à effet, mais du déroulement d’une même histoire: de la mort sort la vie. En tant que chrétiens, nous devrions le comprendre mieux que quiconque. (p. 93) [Some writers have presented the State of Israel as a consequence of the Shoah; I don’t think this is accurate. It’s not a question of cause and effect, but of the unfolding of a common story: from death comes life. As Christians, we should understand this better than anyone.]

While entirely removed from the Christian prism of Geftman’s Guetteurs d’aurore, Chochana Boukhobza’s Un été à Jérusalem (1986)15 also presents an ambivalent and problematizing vision of Israel. In fact it goes one step further than Geftman’s text, by unequivocally condemning Israel’s offensive against Lebanon in 1982. Homodiegetic narrator Sarah (originally a Tunisian Jew exiled to France who moved with her family to Israel then returned to France, and is now on a temporary visit back in Israel)16 effects that condemnation indirectly, through an arch rhetorical question: ‘Je m’exclame, ironique: “Et papa, il soutient encore Begin? Il estime que nous avons eu raison de faire le Liban?” ’ (p. 18) [I exclaim ironically ‘And does dad still support Begin? Does he think we were right to do Lebanon?’]. Interestingly, when she admits to an Israeli taxi-driver that she no longer lives in Israel and that yes, perhaps the war frightens her, his response registers resentment of diasporic Jews and of Jewish women particularly: ‘— Toutes les mêmes, s’emporte-t-il avec amertume. Vous nous laissez tomber tandis que nous... Qu’est-ce qu’il y a de plus en Europe hein? Quand on mettra tous les Juifs dans un ghetto, alors...’ (p. 12) [‘You women are all the same’, he says, losing his temper. ‘You drop us, while we... What’s Europe got that we haven’t, eh? When they’ve put all Jews into a ghetto, well...’]. In the feminine ‘toutes’, the taxi driver strongly implies that it is women who default on solidarity with Israeli Jews fighting for their people’s survival across the world. However, other male characters in Un été à Jérusalem provide perspectives more critical of Israel. When the Israeli soldier Roger mocks disaporic Jews, he simultaneously rebukes Israel by implying that the war it is waging has no obvious rationale for its people: ‘Tu prends les manières des Juifs de Diaspora? Arrête donc de te culpabiliser. Israël avec vous ou sans vous continue à être une abstraction. Personne ne comprend pourquoi on se bat, pas même nous... Voilà la contradiction’ (p. 79) [So you’re putting on your Diaspora Jew airs are you? Come on, stop feeling guilty. With or without you Israel continues to be an abstraction. Nobody understands why we’re fighting, not even us... There’s the contradiction’]. Joseph Brami rightly states that Sarah’s multifaceted experience of conf lict (between homeland(s) and exile, tradition and modernity)

New Sites of Conflict

197

extends to the State of Israel, culminating in her severe and unambiguous condemnation of Israeli defense policies — in this case, relating to the 1983 war in Lebanon — and in a kind of pro-Palestinianism, so to speak, expressed not so much in terms of a real political analysis of the situation, but as a deep sympathy for the Arab population of Jerusalem.17

The possibility of Jewish sympathy for Arabs is a significant topos in Un été à Jérusalem, and is signposted early on by Sarah’s remark about the Arab’s subalternity in Israel (pp. 12 and 21). Sarah’s narrative emphasizes both the indigence and the pride of Arabs in Israel, which country, the narrator stresses, used to belong to them — an exceptionally polemical stance for a Jew to take publicly in Israel in 1982. In addition, Sarah’s lover, Henry, an Algerian Jewish immigrant to Israel, asserts a basic sense of kinship felt for Arabs by North African Jews arriving in Israel: ‘Dès son arrivée en Israël, le Juif en lui avait cherché l’Arabe. Il s’était introduit dans quelques cercles palestiniens, étudiait la langue, déchiffrait le Coran’ (p. 175) [As soon as he arrived in Israel, the Jew in him had sought out the Arab. He’d worked his way into a few Palestinian circles, studied the language, deciphered the Koran]. On hearing of Henry’s death in Beirut when caught up in a military conf lict, Sarah screams at Roger, symbol of the Israeli army, ‘C’est de ta faute! Tu l’as tué. Toi! Et pas l’Arabe d’en face! Toi! Toi!’ (p. 253) [‘It’s your fault! You killed him. You! And not the Arab across the road! You! You!’]. This agonized, staccato accusation crystallizes her hitherto fairly inchoate opposition to the Israeli–Arab conf lict, and reiterates the intermittent sense of affinity with the Arab rather than the Israeli that the novel had previously adumbrated. At this juncture, one very brief textual excursion should be reserved for Karin Bernfeld’s Les Portes de l’espérance (discussed in Chapter 3 above), where the reification of Israel as homeland for diasporic Jews is condemned: ‘Le Pays. Majuscule. Pourquoi serait-ce “mon pays”? Ça? Ce pays méditerranéen américanisé, où déjà enfant j’étais mal à l’aise?’ (p. 171) [The Country. With a capital letter. Why should it be ‘my country’? That Americanized Mediterranean country, where even as a child I felt uncomfortable?]. Later on, the narrator tetchily revolts against efforts to convert diasporic Jews: En discutant sur l’État d’Israël, Koki me fait un expo sur ‘le problème juif ’ depuis le début des temps. ‘Ça va mieux pour tous les juifs du monde depuis qu’Israël existe’, m’explique-t-elle. Sans doute. Mais alors qu’on nous laisse on paix si on n’a pas fait le même choix et qu’on ne veut pas avoir la même vie qu’eux. (p. 194) [When discussing the State of Israel, Koki gives me a mini-lecture on ‘the Jewish problem’ since the beginning of time. ‘Things have been better for Jews all over the world since the existence of Israel’, she explains. No doubt. But just leave us alone if we haven’t made the same choice and if we don’t want the same life as them.]

Towards the end of Les Portes de l’espérance, the Jewish narrator’s personal verdict on Israel as potential homeland is unequivocally negative: ‘J’en ai fini avec mes vagues envies de ce pays. Il n’est pas pour moi, c’est une évidence. Mon pays, ma langue, c’est ailleurs’ (p. 214) [I’ve got over my vague desires for this country. It’s not for

198

New Sites of Conflict

me, that’s clear. My country, my language, lie elsewhere]. For readers who celebrate Israel’s symbolic value as a Jewish homeland, the narrator will be seen as suffering from a self-imposed spiritual exile and/or alienation. For other readers, she will, conversely, be seen as vindicating the integrity of the diasporic Jew in a new avatar: s/he who incarnates a freely chosen decentredness vis-à-vis Israel which has nothing to do with the highly inf lammable vicissitudes of contemporary Israeli politics, and which does not have as negative obverse any distancing from Jewish identity. The foregoing commentary has explored a range of francophone Jewish women’s views vis-à-vis Israeli politics, but none has been enunciated from the subject position of a long-term Israeli citizen. I would like therefore to conclude this second section of Chapter 4 by considering the writings of Esther Orner, a Jewish writer of the French language who has now spent the major part of her life in Israel and so may lay claim to an insider’s perspective on Israel. It is important to establish from the outset that she is also a child survivor of the Shoah, whose mother was interned in Auschwitz and whose father was murdered there. Autobiographie de Personne (1999),18 winner of the Prix Wizo 2000,19 is the first part of Orner’s triptych also comprising Fin et suite (2001)20 and Petite biographie pour un rêve (2003).21 In Autobiographie de Personne it is revealed that the first-person narrator’s daughter, based on Orner, had decided at the remarkably young age of thirteen to emigrate alone to Israel, inspired by Zionist ideals (‘Je veux bâtir le pays’, p. 77 [I want to build the country]), but perhaps also caught up in a psycho-drama of love–abandonment–separation which will be discussed in the final section of this chapter. The first-person narrator herself, based on Orner’s mother, had lived only intermittently in Israel, first referred to as ‘le pays’ (p. 7) [the country]. In fact, Israel is only ever designated as ‘le pays’. Autobiographie de Personne entirely eschews both temporal markers and toponyms,22 but it would seem that the definite article ‘le’ partially breaks this anonymity by connoting the primacy of Israel in the Jewish collective imagination. The mother/narrator’s equivocal take on Israel is typical of many diasporic Jews of her generation (born in the early twentieth century). She begins by depicting the peer pressure exerted on European Jews after the Shoah to go to Israel, which at that time was presented as an earthly paradise to be populated at all costs (p. 38). This will be echoed in Orner’s Petite biographie pour un rêve, where the daughter’s emigration to Israel figures as a project of willed amnesia about a persecuted past in the diaspora. Since no agency is attributed, the reader is unsure whether the imperative of beginning a new life in a new country that needs to be built from scratch is hers or that of the Israeli pedagogues in charge of the young newcomers: Arrivée au pays elle n’avait écrit à personne. Une nouvelle vie venait de commencer dans un village pour adolescents. Elle allait oublier le passé. Elle eut des camarades qui étaient là aussi pour oublier. Personne ne parlait du passé ou alors pour le magnifier. On conjugait le présent et le futur. [...] la seule raison de son départ, c’était commencer une vie nouvelle dans un pays neuf qu’il fallait construire. (Petite biographie pour un rêve, p. 55) [Once in the country she hadn’t written to anyone. A new life had just begun in a village for teenagers. She was going to forget the past. She had friends who

New Sites of Conflict

199

were also there to forget. Nobody spoke about the past, or if they did it was to idealize it. People combined the present and the future. [...] the only reason she’d left was to begin a new life in a new country that had to be built.]

In Autobiographie de Personne, the inscription of the mother’s relationship with Israel is shot through with paradox. As a European Jew she found its climate intolerable, but on the other hand took pleasure in its coastline, its cafés, its sociability (p. 41), which are summed up as ‘La vie quoi’ (p. 43) [In short, life]. The two reasons adduced for her leaving Israel are inability to afford even a modest home of her own, and the non-availability of loans at this early point in the new state’s economic development (p. 42). The ambivalence of the diasporic Jew is plain in the observation that while she has never regretted her decision to leave Israel, she loves the country and remains spiritually faithful to it: ‘Et j’ai decidé de repartir. Je ne l’ai jamais regretté. Je suis restée fidèle au pays. Je l’aime. Y vivre, c’était autre chose. Je n’en avais pas les moyens’ (p. 42) [And I decided to leave again. I’ve never regretted it. I’ve remained faithful to the country. I love it. Living there was another story. I couldn’t afford it]. The insistence that for her, the only real obstacle was financial (in implicit contrast with those Jews who could not adapt to a country so climatically and culturally alien from their country of origin) may not entirely convince the reader when s/he learns of the mother’s later relative financial stability after receiving war reparations (p. 43). Why she did not then return to the beloved country is never elucidated. Equally enigmatic is the comment ‘Car c’est une terre qui, paraît-il, vomit ses habitants’ (p. 96) [For it’s a land that vomits out its inhabitants, it would seem]. The following remarks are no less gnomic: C’est aussi une terre qui avale ses habitants. Ceux qui l’ont cherché. Après tout il faut faire attention où on pose ses pieds. Ça c’est sûr. Une terre qui a des pouvoirs. Des qualités. Une terre qui engloutit ou mange ses habitants, ça s’est vu. Mais une terre qui vomit c’est autre chose. Je n’ai d’ailleurs jamais accusé le pays. Et certainement pas la terre. Ni même ses habitants. (pp. 98–99) [It’s also a land that swallows its inhabitants. Those who have sought it out. After all you have to be careful where you tread. That’s for sure. A land that has powers. Qualities. A land that wolfs down or eats its inhabitants, it’s been known. But a land that vomits them out is something else. I might point out that I’ve never accused the country. And certainly not the land. Nor even its inhabitants.]

It is worth noting both the convergence (in the gustatory metaphor) and the contrast (in the emetic metaphor) with Chochana Boukhobza’s novel of 2002, Sous les étoiles, in which Israel is also described as a ‘un pays qui avale ses habitants’ [a country that swallows its inhabitants].23 Whether devouring or vomiting its people, Israel is figured as active subject and Israeli citizens as powerless objects discursively acted upon, such is the overdetermination of that country as sacred, cultural, and geopolitical palimpsest. The link between Israel — ideal(ized), mythical telos — and writing emerges in a Freudian slip made by the mother once she has ad­m itted her inability to live in the promised land, referred to as the ‘pays des rêves’ (pp. 129 and 130) [country of dreams]: ‘Il va falloir que je dise à ma nièce de m’apporter du pays. Du papier, bien sûr. Quel beau lapsus’ (p. 100) [I’m going to have to tell

200

New Sites of Conflict

my niece to bring me back some country. Of course I mean some paper. What a wonderful slip]. The mother’s ambivalent relationship with Israel is also apparent in Fin et suite, but with the difference that this second part of Orner’s triptych vindicates the mother’s protestation of loyalty to Israel despite her failure ever to settle there: ‘Et si tu as dû quitter le pays, tu lui es restée attachée jusqu’à la fin de tes jours. Ne l’incriminant jamais de tes échecs. Ces échecs qui parfois nous dépassent font partie de nos pauvres vies. Tu as toujours su que nous étions un peuple divisé’ (p. 82) [And though you had to leave the country, you remained attached to it to the end of your days. Never accusing it for its failures. Those failures that are sometimes beyond our understanding are part of our poor lives. You always knew that we were a divided people]. The last sentence here reifies ambivalence and self-division as constitutive of the Jewish people, which is not inconsistent with the twinned contradictory actions of devouring and vomiting ascribed by Orner to that people’s geographical hypostasis, the State of Israel. In Petite biographie pour un rêve, the narrative voice changes from the author’s mother to Orner herself, or an autofictional representation thereof. The same eschewing of toponyms, systematic refusal to name, and deliberate imprecision marking the first two parts of Orner’s triptych are also present here. Israel is alluded to as ‘un autre pays’ (p. 31) [another country], even more vaguely than in the first two books where it had at least been distinguished by the copulation of the noun ‘pays’ and a definite article connoting signal importance. (Later on, on pp. 51 and 53, Orner will revert to the definite article, designating Israel by ‘le pays’.) Whatever the reason for this exacerbated opacity, what is clear is the thirteen-year-old girl’s complete and willed rupture with her previous family and indeed her whole past: ‘Un an plus tard elle quitta les siens pour un autre pays. Pour une autre langue. Elle n’avait plus de famille. Plus de passé. Elle allait commencer une nouvelle vie dans un pays qui n’avait pas connu ce qu’elle savait depuis sa toute petite enfance’ (pp. 31–32) [A year later she left her family for another country. For another language. She no longer had any family. No more past. She was going to begin a new life in a country that hadn’t experienced what she’d known since early childhood]. The desire to erase her past derives from the pain of that past, inhering in its explosion of identities and its fatalities — chief among the latter being her father’s murder in Auschwitz, although for forty years she will persist in the delusion that he is still alive. The information gaps of the previous two books are partially filled by this third. Unexplained and presented by the mother as unexplainable, the thirteenyear-old girl’s decision to emigrate alone to Israel is here placed in the context of Israeli emissaries to Europe who exhort Jewish teenagers to come build the new state, presenting it as an earthly paradise (echoing Autobiographie de Personne, p. 38). Seduced by the mirage, the young Orner takes a beguiling orator at his word when he interpellates them as potential pioneers and builders of a new order: Elle fréquentait alors des organisations de jeunesse. Et selon l’amie du jour elle changeait de mouvements. Des émissaires venaient leur parler du pays. Ils les incitaient à aller bâtir le pays. Un Shabbat après-midi, avant la tombée de la nuit, un émissaire à barbe blonde et yeux bleus leur a parlé dans la pénombre

New Sites of Conflict

201

pendant qu’ils mangeaient comme chaque semaine de la halah, pain sabbatique, avec une confiture aux fruits rouges. Il leur parla d’un pays ensoleillé, vrai paradis sur terre. De ce groupe qui dans la pénombre écoutait parler l’homme au parler doux, elle sera la seule à partir. (p. 54) [At that point she was involved in youth organizations. And depending on which friend she had at the time she would change groups. Emissaries came to talk to them about the country. They encouraged them to go and build the country. One Shabbat afternoon, before nightfall, an emissary with a blond beard and blue eyes spoke to them in the half light as they ate, as they did every week, the halah Shabbat bread, with red-fruit jam. He spoke to them of a sunny country, a true paradise on earth. Of that group which listened in the half light to the softly spoken man, she would be the only one to go.]

It is interesting that her reluctance to learn Hebrew due to attachment to French is not tolerated in Israel: the ‘directeur du village d’enfants où elle séjournait lui prit ses livres en français. Qu’elle apprenne la langue’ (p. 32) [head of the children’s camp where she was staying took away her French books. Let her learn the language]. This ref lects the centrality of modern Hebrew in promoting national cohesion in the new State of Israel, to which Jews from many different countries and thus speaking many different languages had made their ‘aliyah’. Particularly noteworthy is her pregnant silence at the remark that she has no real roots, but has found a form of enracination in the Hebrew language: ‘Et Maria B. lui dit un jour — tu n’es pas d’ici. Tu n’as pas de vraies racines. Mais tu en as trouvé dans notre langue. Elle ne répondit pas et garda ses paroles’ (p. 33) [And one day Maria B. said to her — you’re not from here. You don’t have any real roots. But you’ve found some in our language. She didn’t reply and kept her words to herself ]. As Foucault famously observed, silence is a constitutive part of discourse. Orner’s silence here seems to signify the difficulty of laying down new roots on the tenuous basis of a foreign language, after a traumatic start in life involving residence in three successive countries before she was thirteen (Germany, Belgium, and France). The eventual success of that enracination process is, however, attested in Une année si ordinaire (2004), a text that represents a new generic departure for Orner. Unlike the components of her triptych, which had dallied with but always qualified or partially refuted self-classification as diaries, Une année si ordinaire presents itself unequivocally as a ‘journal’ [diary] on the title page. Like Fin et suite and Petite biographie pour un rêve, its temporal span is, as its title suggests, one year (as we later discover, October 2001 to October 2002). But whereas those two previous texts had centred largely on the private domain, this fourth one, while not abandoning the personal, records and ruminates in detail upon the volatile and violent public scene of a twenty-first-century Israel blighted by the second Intifada. In contrast to all three of the preceding three texts, the rootedness of the author in what she can at last call her home country of Israel and in her religion of Judaism is uncompromised (an index to the religious rooting being the abundance of Hebrew references to Jewish holy days found in Une année si ordinaire). Une année si ordinaire’s shows marked divergences from Orner’s first three publications, but also some conf luences, not all of which mesh easily with her new practice of overt, targeted ref lections on contemporary global politics (ref lections

202

New Sites of Conflict

which, let it be clear, I merely relay rather than necessarily endorse). In her allusion to the assassination of an Israeli minister, Orner’s systematic refusal to name, a striking feature of her previous publications, means that his identity remains frustratingly — and perhaps needlessly — opaque. It would appear that the minister in question was the Israeli Tourism Minister, Rechavam Ze’evy, assassinated on 17 October 2001 by Palestinian terrorists in Jerusalem, but in the absence of any contextualization from the author this surmise cannot be corroborated. What is clear is the increased sense of vulnerability that the terrorist murder of the minister creates for the ordinary Israeli citizen: ‘Un marchand a dit — si même eux ne sont plus en sécurité alors où va-t-on?’ (p. 21) [A tradesman said — if even they aren’t safe then where are we heading?]. Orner argues that double standards are applied to victims of terrorism according to their geopolitical location, via a telling contrast between post 9/11 America and second-Intifada Israel: Eux, les Américains, ils luttent contre de vrais terroristes. Comment? En rasant des villages. Nous, nous luttons contre ‘les combattants de la paix’ qui se font sauter dans des stations de bus, dans des restaurants et des discothèques, là où il y a beaucoup de monde. [...] Deux poids deux mesures lorsqu’il s’agit d’Israël disait Nathalie Sarraute dans un article publié dans Le Monde, si je ne m’abuse. (p. 31) [They, the Americans, fight against real terrorists. How? By razing villages to the ground. We struggle against ‘peace fighters’ who blow themselves up in bus stations, in restaurants and discos, in places where there are lots of people. [...] Double standards when it comes to Israel said Nathalie Sarraute in an article published in Le Monde, if I’m not mistaken.]

The strategic invocation here of respected literary figure Nathalie Sarraute24 (also Jewish, although not inclined to thematize Jewish identity in her writing) certainly enhances possible readerly receptivity to Orner’s point — as does the location of Sarraute’s article in the leading French daily Le Monde. A similarly wry observation of linguistic and moral double standards applied to life and death matters is made five pages later: Un terroriste a mitraillé à bout portant un autobus. Plus facile sans doute que de se faire sauter. On a parlé de terrorisme aveugle car il aurait pu tuer ou blesser gravement le chauffeur arabe qui s’en est sorti avec quelques blessures superficielles. Si, que Dieu nous préserve, le chauffeur était mort, aurait-on annoncé — un innocent et deux adolescents en rentrant de l’école ont été assassinés? (pp. 36–37) [A terrorist machine-gunned a bus at point-blank range. Doubtless easier than blowing yourself up. There was talk of blind terrorism as he could have killed or seriously injured the Arab driver who came out of it with a few superficial wounds. If, God forbid, the driver had died, would it have been announced that one innocent person and two teenagers coming home from school were killed?]

Orner’s grievance derives from her sense that murderous attacks on Israeli civilians are never condemned by the global media as acts of terrorism, any more than their victims are ever seen as innocent, regardless of their status as non-military targets.

New Sites of Conflict

203

The recording of Orner’s dogged efforts to carry on with normal life amidst the omnipresent threat of new terrorist attacks demonstrates how ordinary, civilian Israelis endure a permanent state of warfare: ‘Au lieu d’attendre devant mon poste l’annonce d’une nouvelle dramatique, je suis allée voir Moulin rouge avec Maya. C’était prévu depuis samedi soir. Ne faut-il pas tenter de vivre?’ (p. 31) [Instead of waiting in front of my set for a dramatic piece of news to be announced, I went to see Moulin rouge with Maya. It had been planned since Saturday evening. Don’t you have to try to live?]. That state of warfare is reiterated, along with the inevitable psychic numbing of the unscathed to the daily death toll — a numbing which is perhaps vital to continuation of normal life: Je suis allée voir ce concert avec Maya. Quand nous sommes sorties et que nous avons vu la ville en effervescence, j’ai fait cette réf lexion — et dire que nous sommes en guerre. Et Maya de répondre — on s’amuse et quelqu’un vient d’être assassiné. Chaque jour et ses victimes. (p. 38) [I went to see this concert with Maya. When we came out and saw the town bubbling with excitement, I ref lected — and to think we’re at war. And Maya replied — we’re enjoying ourselves and somebody has just been killed. Every day and its victims.]

Shortly afterwards, what may seem like similar numbing — a spare, f latly unemotional reporting of a massacre — in fact secures strong impact precisely from such litotes, as well as from detailing of the massacre’s censorship and erasure from public consciousness: ‘A minuit le massacre. Du sang partout. Le matin la rue était propre, lavée. Quelques dégâts matériels indiquaient que quelque chose était arrivé. Mais quoi? Il fallait en être informé. Plus rien n’était visible’ (p. 51) [At midnight the massacre. Blood everywhere. In the morning the street was clean, washed down. Some material damage indicated that something had happened. But what? You had to have known about it. Nothing was visible anymore]. While the episode seems closed, it is supplemented and complemented three lines later by Orner’s wry reference to the notorious old Jewish joke about barbers: ‘demain tous les coiffeurs et tous les juifs sont priés de se rendre à Time Square [sic]. Tiens, pourquoi? Pour les tuer tous. Bien, mais pourquoi les coiffeurs?’ (p. 51) [tomorrow all hairdressers and all Jews are requested to go to Times Square. Really, why? To kill them all. Right, but why the hairdressers?]. As we have seen above, this joke also appears in Frydman’s La Marche des vivants (p. 737);25 in both cases, it serves to underscore gentile naturalization of Judaeocide. Steely avoidance of sentimentality also informs Orner’s raw message that ultimately, all human beings are more concerned with the death of their own children than with the death of other people’s children, however much the latter may also be mourned: ‘Un général à la retraite pas très politiquement correct a dit j’ai mal lorsque je vois des enfants palestiniens mourir, mais encore plus quand des enfants juifs meurent. A-t-il dit juif ou israélien? Cela ne plaira pas à ceux qui pratiquent l’angélisme jusqu’au suicide’ (p. 51) [A retired general, not very politically correct, said it upsets me when I see Palestinian children dying, but even more so when Jewish children die. Did he say Jewish or Israeli? Those who take idealism to the point of suicide won’t like this]. Her last sentence here critiques those whose

204

New Sites of Conflict

desire for ethical transcendence of such basic human impulses as the wish to protect one’s vulnerable young may lead to their own deaths. It is later revealed that, like Orner, this same Israeli general had been ‘un enfant caché’ (p. 55) in Belgium, which for those offended by his frank statement might provide mitigating circumstances: as a Jewish child in Nazi-dominated Europe, his own childhood had in effect been murdered. Much later on in the text, Orner voices stupefaction at the behaviour of certain pacifist Israelis, which she can only decipher as stemming from classic Jewish self-hatred: On voit des pacifistes près du Kikar Tsion à Jérusalem se préparer à leur manifestation, les écriteaux par terre, la police les entoure. Tout à coup la police s’en va calmement. Que s’est-il passé? Un attentat à Beith Israël. Celui où deux petits enfants sont morts si j’ai bonne mémoire. [...] Que vont faire les manifestants? Manifester? Non. Ils se dirigent, non pas vers le lieu où un kamikaze s’est fait sauter, mais vers un hôpital palestinien pour donner leur sang. Ahurissant. En plus c’est la première fois qu’ils le donnent. Ce qui en temps normal pourrait s’expliquer comme un acte humanitaire, ce jour-là, à cette heure où les gens meurent dans un massacre de plus, me paraît inqualifiable si ce n’est la fameuse haine de soi juive. (pp. 129–30) [You can see pacifists near Kikar Tsion in Jerusalem preparing for their demonstration, their signs lying on the ground, the police surrounding them. Suddenly the police go off calmly. What’s happened? An attack at Beith Israël. Where two small children were killed if I remember rightly. [...] What are the demonstrators going to do? Demonstrate? No. They head not to the place where the kamikaze blew himself up but to a Palestinian hospital to give blood. Astounding. What’s more it’s the first time they’ve given it. What during normal times could be explained as a humanitarian act seemed to me, that day at that time when people are dying in one more massacre, indescribable unless it’s that famous Jewish self-hatred.]

Purportedly self-hating Jews are not Orner’s only targets. Reporting brief ly on a documentary produced by the French television channel Arte, Orner’s emphasis on its uncommon lack of aprioristic hostility to Israel implies that the exception (French media impartiality on this one occasion) only serves to prove the rule (habitual French media bias against Israel): ‘Sur Arte un documentaire — La Peur au ventre — sur le terrorisme chez nous. Pour une fois entièrement consacré à nous, sans chercher de causes atténuantes à l’ennemi. Le documentaire montre l’horreur, l’angoisse. Rare dans les médias français’ (p. 77) [A documentary on Arte — Fear in Your Gut — on terrorism here. For once devoted entirely to us, without looking for mitigating causes for the enemy. The documentary shows the horror, the anguish. Rare in the French media]. The ascription of anti-Israeli bias to the French media generally, previously noted above in Frydman’s La Marche des vivants, is later extended to a more global plane. Even American bastions of capitalist power and inf luence, which are widely viewed as being pro-Israeli, are posited as capable of cynical elisions betraying actual impassivity to Israeli suffering: Scène insoutenable à la television, la mère du bébé assassiné à Petach Tikvah avec sa grand-mère a raconté comment la C.N.N. l’a persuadée de se laisser interviewer pour contrer la mère du tueur. Elle a fini par accepter malgré le

New Sites of Conflict

205

deuil. Et pour finir elle s’est à peine vue. L’écran n’appartenait qu’à la mère triomphante du chaïd. La fierté. Aucune douleur. Quel honneur de perdre un fils au combat moyenâgeux. Et d’ailleurs un de perdu, dix de retrouvés. La C.N.N. a dû trouver plus télévisuel cette mère vibrante face à la jeune mère effondrée. (p. 163) [An unbearable scene on television, the mother of a baby murdered in Petach Tikvah with her grandmother told how C.N.N. persuaded her to be interviewed as a counter to the mother of the killer. She ended up accepting despite her bereavement. And in the end she barely saw herself on the screen, which was devoted solely to the triumphant mother of the chaïd. Pride. No pain. What an honour to lose a son in medieval battle. Besides, one lost, ten found. C.N.N. must have found this vibrant mother more screen-friendly compared with the grief-stricken young mother.]

In Orner’s optic, the international media’s systematically anti-Israeli prejudice is ethically tainted: ‘Je relève dans un article du Monde sur la presse internationale qui “a trouvé la pétition des officiers objecteurs de conscience plus intéressante que les attentats”. Bravo! Et vive la souillure’ (p. 87) [I note an article in Le Monde on the international press, which ‘found the petition of the conscientious-objector officers more interesting than the attacks’. Well done! And long live moral muck]. The bitterness of the last two sentences here is succeeded by frank articulation of a position shared by the majority of Israelis but frequently demonized outside Israel: Je participle à cette majorité qui pense qu’ ‘Israël est l’agressé, pas l’agresseur’. [...] C’est le propre des pacifistes de préférer n’importe quoi à la guerre. A l’époque de Munich les pacifistes allemands n’avaient-ils pas dit préférer Hitler à la guerre? La suite on la connaît. Et là nos pacifistes font comme si nous n’étions pas en guerre. Et surtout ils font comme si ça ne dépendait que de nous. Certains disent même préférer Arafat à Sharon. No comment! (p. 87) [I’m part of that majority which thinks that ‘Israel is the aggressed, not the aggressor’. [...] It’s a distinctive feature of pacifists to prefer anything to war. At the time of Munich had German pacifists not said they preferred Hitler to war? The rest is history. And now our pacifists are behaving as if we weren’t at war. Most of all they behave as if all this depended on us alone. Some even say they prefer Arafat to Sharon. No comment!]

A supposedly pernicious media mechanism is identified via which the then (2001– 02) most extremist of Israeli political leaders, Ariel Sharon, is conf lated with the whole of Israel and ultimately with all Jews — leading to the legitimation of antiSemitism in left-wing, even liberal western elites: ‘Démonisons Sharon, par ce biais Israël et toujours par ce biais les Juifs’ (p. 89) [Let’s demonize Sharon, that way Israel and always that way Jews too are demonized]. As the pace of attacks increases, the double standards of global humanitarian concern are again f lagged up: Encore des enfants de quatorze–quinze ans. Qui ça intéresse vraiment quand c’est de notre côté? ‘Après tout c’est bien fait pour nous.’ Je sais je me répète. Et les attentats aussi. A la sortie du Shabbat la gauche pacifiste (pourquoi ne pas dire les pacifistes) manifeste contre qui au juste? Dans vos banderoles, j’aimerais un slogan — ‘Arrêtez vos attentats.’ Depuis longtemps ce n’est plus seulement contre ‘les colons’. (p. 90)

206

New Sites of Conflict [More children of fourteen–fifteen years. Who does this really interest when it’s from our side? ‘After all it’s good for us.’ I know, I’m repeating myself. So are the attacks. At the end of Shabbat the pacifist left (why not say the pacifists) is demonstrating against whom exactly? In your banderols, I’d like to see a slogan — ‘Stop your attacks’. For a long time it’s no longer been just against ‘the colonizers’.]

Orner is unf linching in her plain-speaking: La paix, Arafat n’en veut pas [...] On me cite des Juifs et des Israéliens qui soutiennent les Palestiniens. Répondons d’abord qu’Arafat se fiche de son peuple, c’est donc lui que l’on soutient et puis que ces Juifs sont vraiment ‘dures de comprendre’ comme on dit en Wallonie. (p. 103) [Arafat doesn’t want peace [...] People tell me about Jews and Israelis who support the Palestinians. First of all let’s say in response that Arafat couldn’t give a damn about his people, so it’s really him they’re supporting and then honestly, these Jews are really ‘hard understanding’ as they say in Wallonia.]

One point made by Orner about Hamas and other terrorist Islamic groups which is not usually given prominence by the Western liberal media is their abuse of the poor and uneducated as human bombs, and their reserving of life for the more economically privileged Palestinians: Toujours ce matin aux nouvelles — la diffusion d’une conversation téléphonique avec la femme d’un haut placé du Hamas ou d’un autre groupe islamiste. On lui demande pourquoi son fils candidat à la bombe humaine n’est pas venu. Il est malade. Alors on l’attend. Et puis zut, j’ai un fils unique, il a autre chose à faire. Quoi? Des études. Que les pauvres aillent se faire sauter. Quelle belle mentalité! (p. 199) [Again this morning on the news — the broadcasting of a phone conversation with the wife of a high-up member of Hamas or some other Islamist group. She’s asked why her son, a would-be human bomber, hasn’t come. He’s ill. So they’ll wait for him. And then damn, I’ve only got one son, he’s got other things to do. What? Studies. Let the poor go and blow themselves up. What a wonderful mentality!]

Orner’s admission that Palestinians can also be victims is, however, limited to the economically disadvantaged among them. What she will not admit of is any generalized victim status for Palestinians. The following swingeing statement alludes to Portuguese writer José Saramago’s charge in 2002 that Israelis were acting like the Nazis, transforming Ramallah into Auschwitz: Dans le taxi qui me ramenait de l’aéroport Ben Gourion [...] j’entends les propos scandaleux de Saramago. On fait à Ramallah ce qu’on nous a fait à Auschwitz. Les gens de gauche qui soutiennent les Palestiniens ont vraiment perdu la tête. (p. 110) [In the taxi back from Ben Gourion airport [...] I hear scandalous things from Saramgo. People in Ramallah are doing what was done to us in Auschwitz. People on the left who support the Palestinians have really lost their head.]

New Sites of Conflict

207

Given the fact that most of Orner’s family were slaughtered by the Nazis, readers may perhaps, whatever their resistance to her political credo, concede her refusal to engage with the traducing of historical realities and profanation of the Shoah dead. Shortly afterwards, she refers to yet one more pro-Palestinian demonstration in Paris and yet one more in New York which conf late Nazism and Israel. The contemporary facts are first noted, then juxtaposed with a reminder of the Shoah’s radically different reality of deportation and gassing to death. The reader is left to discern the complete asymmetry of this industrialized deportation and gassing of Jews in the past with Israeli treatment of Palestinian terrorists in the present: Hier manif pro-palestinienne, une de plus. C.G.T., M.R.A.P., si je ne m’abuse pas, en tête. Une pancarte — Hitler a un fils Sharon. De cette énormité il faudrait rire, mais là je perds mon humour. Et à N.Y. petite manif — L’étoile de David égale la croix gammée. Et nous approchons du jour de la Shoah dont le thème cette année ‘Leur dernière voix’. Dernières lettres ou messages arrivés des déportés à leurs familles. (p. 121) [Yesterday a pro-Palestinian demo, yet another. C.G.T., M.R.A.P. at the front, if I’m not mistaken. A placard — Hitler has a son Sharon. We should laugh at this outrageous remark, but here I lose my sense of humour. And in N.Y. a little demo — The Star of David equals the swastika. And we’re approaching Shoah Day whose theme this year is ‘Their last voice’. Last letters or messages that arrived from deportees to their families.]

It is true that Orner herself has recourse to parallels with WWII, but for diametrically opposed reasons. As fears about Israeli decimation induced by the daily bombings increase, she is haunted by the close historical precedent of the Shoah: ‘Une question me tracasse que j’ose à peine proférer — serions-nous seulement revenus à la guerre de l’indépendance en 47/48 ou alors à l’époque de la Shoah?’ (p. 118) [A question bothers me that I hardly dare utter — could it be that we’ve only gone back to the war of independence in 47/48, or in fact to the time of the Shoah?]. Referring to the French Jewish philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, Orner considers the notion that the major reproach made of Jews is to have posited the uniqueness of the Shoah, since in a humanitarian optic all suffering is suffering (p. 181). What she views as the contemporary excess of humanitarian investments is constructed as one more pseudo religion, like communism or capitalism, which targets Jews: Finkielkraut n’exige pas des Israéliens de se comporter comme des anges. Puis il a affirmé qu’il n’y avait pas de complot médiatique contre Israël, mais par contre on assistait aujourd’hui à une vraie religion de l’humanitaire imprégnée d’une ivresse de supériorité morale. Un certain narcissisme. Le reproche majeur dont on nous accable c’est d’avoir fait croire que la Shoah était singulière or pour l’humanitaire toutes les souffrances se ressemblent. Et j’ai pensé que ce trop plein de l’humanitaire se retournait contre les Juifs tout comme le communisme ou le capitalisme. Et ainsi toute nouvelle ‘religion’ a pour cible les Juifs. Je préfère la mienne, l’ancienne. Il en a été de même pour le christianisme et l’islam. (p. 181). [Finkielkraut doesn’t require of Israelis that they behave like angels. Then he stated that there was no media plot against Israel, but that on the other hand we were today witnessing a veritable religion of humanitarianism steeped in a

208

New Sites of Conflict drunken sense of moral superiority. A certain narcissism. The major criticism heaped on us is to have made people believe that the Shoah was singular whereas for humanitarianism all forms of suffering are the same. And I thought that this excess of humanitarianism was backfiring on Jews just like communism or capitalism. And thus any new ‘religion’ will have Jews as its target. I prefer mine, the old one. It was the same for Christianity and Islam.]

Four pages later Orner makes a searing indictment of humanism, which she appears to use interchangeably with ‘l’humanitaire’: ‘en mettant l’homme au centre non seulement on évacue Dieu, mais on finit par se prendre pour lui’ (p. 185) [by putting man at the centre not only do you evacuate God, but you end up thinking you’re God]. That sense of religious and ethical crisis is not unprecedented in Une année si ordinaire. A sense of quasi apocalypse just after 9/11 and during the Second Intifada had already figured powerfully in a previous fragment: Nous avons évidemment parlé de la situation. C’était au-delà du politique. Gérard faisait remarquer la mise en scène de la mort et son ivresse. Pourquoi cela s’arrêterait-il? Nous sommes en plein conf lit de civilisation. Seuls les Américains veulent bien le voir à cause du 11 septembre. (p. 119) [Naturally we spoke about the situation. It went beyond the political. Gérard remarked on the way death is portrayed and its intoxication. Why would this stop? We’re right in the middle of a conf lict of civilizations. Only the Americans are willing to see it because of 9/11.]

This point is elaborated later on with the observation that only a few Europeans have understood the true meaning of the Arab–Israeli conf lict, namely that it is a microcosm of the macrocosmic conf lict between Islamic and Western cultures: ‘Pour le reste c’est une guerre de civilisation. Le fondamentalisme contre l’Occident. Les Américains l’ont compris. Au moins à partir du 11 septembre. Quant aux Euro­ péens, certains seulement’ (p. 128) [For the rest, it’s a war of civilizations. Funda­ mentalism against the West. The Americans have realized this. At least from 9/11 onwards. As for the Europeans, only some have]. It should be noted that with the London and Madrid bombings, which occurred after the publication of Une année si ordinaire, European comprehension of the cultural caesura represented by 9/11 is likely to have increased. With reference to 9/11, a contentious claim is made that the attacks were in fact Judaeocidally motivated: Ainsi le but n’était pas les deux tours (les twins), mais Brooklyn et Williamsborough. Tuer un maximum de Juifs comme s’ils étaient les seuls dans ce quartier. Puis ils se sont dit qu’il y en aurait bien assez dans les Twins. Les Juifs n’étaient pas au rendez-vous. Ça devrait les faire réf léchir. Se tromper à ce point, ne serait-ce pas un signe? Mais puisque Dieu est grand, ils prendront leur revanche. Quant à nos Palestiniens ils projettent des attentats par des DeltaPlane (?) pour mieux tuer. Décidément on n’arrête pas le progrès. (p. 161) [So the target wasn’t the two towers (the twins), but Brooklyn and Williams­ borough. Killing a maximum of Jews as if they were the only people in that area. Then they said that there would be quite enough of them in the Twin Towers. The Jews didn’t materialize. That must make them think. Wasn’t being

New Sites of Conflict

209

so wrong a sign? But since God is great, they’ll take their revenge. As for our Palestinians, they’re planning attacks through the Delta Planes (?) all the better to kill. Oh, you can’t stop progress.]

Striking here is the alignment of potentially all Palestinians with al-Qaeda in a mission to exterminate Jews. This is slightly mitigated by what directly follows, condemning anti-Arab racism: ‘Dommage qu’Oriana Fallaci tienne des propos racistes dans son livre — dire que les Arabes se reproduisent comme des rats, inadmissible. Aurait-elle perdu la tête?’ (p. 162) [Pity that Oriana Fallaci makes racist comments in her book — saying that Arabs reproduce like rats, unacceptable. Could she have lost her head?]. This could be interpreted as pre-emptive selfexculpation from the same slur of racism. Such a reading would ignore the genuine distress of an author who had lost much of her family in one Judaeocide, and is traumatized in her mid-sixties by the daily murder of innocent Jewish civilians. Re-reading her evolving text, Orner is struck by the proliferation of references to attacks on Jews and the places in which they occur, concluding that the second Intifada has both literally and figuratively invaded all Israeli spaces (p. 185). This is tangentially shored up by the later remark ‘Le problème c’est que l’inconscient n’y échappe pas. Trop de gens autour de moi se plaignent d’insomnie et de stress’ (p. 223) [The problem is that the unconscious doesn’t escape it. Too many people around me are complaining of insomnia and stress]. For her, the second Intifada is in fact a war, and one which recalls the War of Independence in 1948 (p. 193). Orner rejects the rationale given to Palestinians’ attacks, viz. that Israelis had stolen their land, by pointing out that the same sort of attacks, both verbal and physical, had occurred well before the creation of the State of Israel in 1948: Et ce matin j’avais lu le passage où Shifra Horn dans Tamara marche sur les eaux raconte les émeutes à Jaffa bien avant la creation de l’Etat d’Israël, les mêmes paroles, les mêmes tueries. La même violence. Et malheureusement seule la riposte a arrêté l’engrenage. Ce qui ne me semble même plus être le cas aujourd’hui. (p. 197) [And this morning I’d read the passage where Shifra Horn in Tamara Walks on Water recounts the riots in Jaffa well before the creation of the State of Israel, the same words, the same slaughters. The same violence. And unfortunately only retaliation stopped the spiral. Even that doesn’t seem to me to work now.]

She consolidates her point by reference to the Arab–Nazi alliance against Jews prior to the creation of the State of Israel. The rhetorical figure of preterition in ‘je n’ose pas faire le rapprochement’26 [I don’t dare make the link] institutes a disturbing analogy between the 1930s, the 1970s, and the new millennium: En avril 1936 une grève antisioniste est déclenchée par le grand Muphti de Jérusalem El Husseini. La grève sera suivie d’émeutes. On est en pleine montée du nazisme en Allemagne. Les massacres malgré les ripostes s’arrêteront en 1939. Et ils se poursuivront en Europe par d’autres, par les nazis, grands amis du Muphti. Je n’ose pas faire le rapprochement. [...] Huit terroristes tiennent en otage onze athlètes israéliens. Deux seront descendus dès le début de ‘l’action’. Les Allemands sont lamentables tout le long du drame. [...]

210

New Sites of Conflict Et ainsi depuis lors les Palestiniens continuent à faire connaître leur cause... Et encore les Allemands relâchent les trois terroristes restés en vie jamais jugés et accueillis en héros par Kadafi de même les morts comme des martyrs. Toujours les mêmes scénarios. (pp. 200 and 219) [In April 1936 an anti-Zionist strike is launched by the grand Muphti of Jerusalem El Husseini. The strike will be followed by riots. This is right at the time when Nazism was on the rise in Germany. Despite retaliations, the massacres will stop in 1939. And they’ll soon be taken up in Europe by others, by the Nazis, great friends of the Muphti. I don’t dare make the link. [...] Eight terrorists hold eleven Israeli athletes hostage. Two will be killed right at the start of the ‘action’. The Germans’ behaviour will be pathetic throughout the whole tragedy. [...] And so since then the Palestinians continue to make their cause known... And again the Germans release the three surviving terrorists who were never tried and were greeted as heroes by Kaddafi just as the dead were treated as martyrs. It’s always the same story.]

With the peroration ‘Toujours les mêmes scénarios’, Orner homologizes Hitlerian Germany’s leniency towards the anti-Semitism of the grand Muphti in the 1930s and post-war German leniency towards the Arabs who in 1972 killed Israeli athletes in Munich. Finally, six pages to the end of her (anti)diary, Orner powerfully juxtaposes two images of tanks and Jews, once more postulating a historical continuity between them, even though their relationship has now been inverted. During WWII tanks were used by the Nazis against the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto, whereas today tanks are used by Israelis against hostile forces on their country’s borders: Et je pense aux retombées de la Shoah qui nous frappent encore et toujours. Un tank au milieu des rues vides du ghetto nous rappelle qu’on le veuille ou pas nos tanks à Jénine ou Ramallah. Ces tanks qui sont là pour notre défense quand une fois de plus on cherche à nous annihiler. Je ne pense pas que cette image dans un décor ocre qui rappelle le désert soit anodine. On nous compare assez à l’incomparable. Ne suis-je pas en train de faire un procès d’intention à Polanski? Au moins à son inconscient et au mien. (p. 231) [And I think about the repercussions of the Shoah which strike us now and forever. A tank in the middle of the empty roads of the ghetto reminds us whether we like it or not of our tanks in Jenin or Ramallah. Those tanks that are there to defend us when once more people are trying to annihilate us. I don’t think that this image in an ochre setting recalling the desert is anodyne. We’re being compared to the incomparable. Am I not putting words into Polanski’s mouth? At least into his unconscious and into my own]

The reference in the penultimate sentence is to Roman Polanski’s highly successful feature film about the Warsaw ghetto, The Pianist (2002). The reader may ponder whether Orner’s mistrust partly derives from the suspicion that his film’s visual evocation of tanks and Jewish ghettos in 1940s Poland may also, however inadvertently, evoke contemporary Israeli tanks and Palestinian ghettos. More opaque is the last sentence’s recognition that in fact the parallel may come from her own unconscious. In this case, would it be an innocent parallel based merely on

New Sites of Conflict

211

visual resemblances? Or would it represent a subliminal inf luence on even her of anti-Zionist charges? It should be acknowledged that Orner is no blind patriot, and that she does emit a number of negative conjectures about Israelis. However, it has to be said that all of these negative conjectures are attenuated by various qualifications. Those qualifications relate to the dangerously anomalous situation in which Israelis find themselves, to an Israeli relationship to difference which is alternately defensive and valorizing, and to the importance of Israelis rediscovering a distinctively Hebrew identity: Weitzmann cite Annie Goldberg: ‘Les Juifs ne sont pas faits pour la politique’. Et alors? On peut faire de l’anti-politique comme de l’anti-roman... Oui, nous sommes un pays de fous, c’est comme les Galeries Lafayette disait une amie, à chaque instant il se passe quelque chose. Sans un grain de folie, serions-nous capables de vivre une telle situation? Et ceux qui ne le peuvent s’en vont. [...] La vraie question au-delà de ces considérations reste comment être soi. Comment être Juif. Ou alors comme disait Manitou — comment redevenir Hébreu. Que c’est simple! Et surtout pas dans la normalité! (p. 58) [Weitzmann quotes Annie Goldberg: ‘Jews aren’t cut out for politics’. So what? You can do anti-politics just like you can do an anti-novel... Yes, we’re a country of madmen, it’s like the Galeries Lafayette a friend of mine used to say, there’s always something going on. Without a touch of madness, would we be able to live through such a situation? And those who can’t, leave. [...] The real question beyond these considerations remains how to be yourself. How to be a Jew. Or else as Manitou used to say — how to become a Hebrew again. How simple it is! And above all not by being normal!]

What is perhaps most nebulous is the last sentence, in which the Israeli Jew’s future ontology is predicated on abnormality. Orner’s epigrammatic style here, not uncommon in her work generally, makes it unclear what abnormality might mean in this context. The reader is thereby summoned to creative exegesis. I would postulate that Orner views Israeli society as idiosyncratic, and Jewish/Hebrew identity generally as both retrospectively and prospectively non-normative. While that difference from the norm may be a source of pride, Orner admits that it can also be seen as a form of madness. Madness, of course, is a malleable concept, and has historically been a disciplinary category suppressing both non-normativity and creativity. Such an aporia should come as no surprise from a writer who will assert but simultaneously refuse to explicate the intense and conf lictual cathexis of Israeli Jews to their homeland: On peut être amoureux de son pays, de sa terre, voir Pasternak. Nous ne sommes pas très doués pour ça. Nos voisins le sont davantage. Et comme disait un ami, lorsqu’il est question de ce pays on en parle comme d’une femme. Elle m’a fait ceci ou cela. Ce n’est effectivement pas une terre comme les autres. Il y aurait tant à dire... (p. 43) [One can be in love with one’s country, one’s land, see Pasternak. We’re not very good at that. Our neighbours are better at it.

212

New Sites of Conflict And as a friend used to say, when it comes to this country we talk about it as if it were a woman. She did this or that to me. Indeed it’s not a country like others. So much could be said...]

Israel is thus cast via a curious chiaroscuro effect as a woman alternately desired, resented, and never fully fathomed by her citizen-lovers. This gendered configuration of Jewish nationhood is constituted above all in antinomy. Such is also the case with the symbolic configuration of the Jewish mother, to which the final part of this chapter will be devoted. ‘The personal is the political’: Othering the Jewish Mother/the Smothering Jewish Mother Strangely enough, in mythology, the dragon is the mother. You meet that motif all over the world, and the monster is called the mother dragon. The mother dragon eats the child again, she sucks him in after having given birth to him. (Carl Jung, 1935.)27 Actually, the dual-mother motif occurs not only in myths but also in the dreams and fantasies of individuals who neither have two mothers nor know anything about the archetypal motifs in mythology. (Carl Jung, 1950.)28

A dimorphic relation to the mother marks Jewish culture. As previously stated, in traditional law she occupies a privileged locus as sole guarantor of authentic Jewish lineage and therefore as sole guarantor of Jewry’s survival. Yet one archetype of the Jewish mother in the cultural imaginary is rather less celebratory: that of the devouring and invasive matriarch. It should be emphasized from the outset that the following exposition of ‘the Jewish mother’ stereotype is signally not intended to endorse or reinforce that stereotype; my aim, rather, is to locate and critically to analyse its instantiations in a number of primary texts. Forming a rich seam of inspiration in Jewish humour, even in the gentile world the Jewish mother has become something of a caricature for the nurturing yet overprotective, jealous mother. Significantly, such cultural mythology attaching to the Jewish mother will often figure her by default as mother to a son rather than to a daughter. This is ref lected in the preponderance of Jewish jokes that focus on the mother–son rather than the mother–daughter rapport. In Joseph Klatzmann’s L’Humour juif, of the eight typical ‘Jewish mother jokes’ presented, six focus on that mother–son rapport. The last of these jokes crystallizes a common trope within such jokes, namely a quasi-reverence accorded by the Jewish mother to her son which has no daughterly counterpart: ‘Quelle est la meilleure preuve que Jésus était juif? A trente ans, il habitait encore chez ses parents. Il adorait sa mère et sa mère le prenait pour un dieu’29 [What’s the best proof that Jesus was Jewish? At thirty, he was still living with his parents. He adored his mother and his mother thought he was a god]. This third and final part of Chapter 4 will counter that gendered imbalance by examining Jewish mothers or Jewish motherhood as represented by Jewish daughters. It will become clear that despite their lack of cultural visibility, Jewish mother–daughter relations (as ref lected in a sample of representative texts from our broader corpus) are richly and intriguingly textured: often highly

New Sites of Conflict

213

conf lictual, and not infrequently destructive. The reasons for this are of a complex psychosocial order, as I hope will be demonstrated below. Suffice it to say in this brief introduction that the degree to which the mother in each of these six texts features as a Kleinian bad breast varies quite considerably, and the order adopted by my brief exegeses below will ref lect a gradation. Gradation implies hierarchy, and to posit a hierarchy of negative mothering poses questions about the hypothetical positive mothering from which it would derive its oppositional identity. Just as there is no univocal model of positive mothering, neither is there one of negative mothering. Yet most readers would probably concede that the worst form of mothering (or indeed of fathering, but that is not our concern here) is that which results, even if unintentionally, in the child’s literal death. The most egregious example of literally lethal mothering is found in Paula Jacques’s Gilda Stambouli souffre et se plaint of 2002 (previously discussed from a different angle in Chapter 3 above). This novel recounts the chequered fortunes of its eponymous heroine after she is widowed in her early thirties and then expelled from Egypt in 1956, along with thousands of other Jews. Gilda Stambouli is the mother of an eleven-year-old son, Robie, and a thirteen-year-old daughter, Juliette. Having initially sought refuge in Israel, which she turned out to loathe for being ‘sauvage et trop pauvre’ (p. 42) [primitive and too poor], and unable to afford to emigrate to France with both children, she chooses the son, ostensibly at least because he is the younger of the two, leaving the daughter behind in a kibbutz. Gilda is a beautiful and self-preoccupied woman whose attempts to fulfil orthodox prescriptions of Jewish mothering fail f lamboyantly. Jacques fully exploits the arsenal of ambiguity furnished by free indirect style, fostering lectorial doubt about whether what is pronounced is diegetic ‘fact’ or, rather, Gilda’s highly subjective version of reality. That version is often self-pitying, self-aggrandizing, and self-dramatizing, as in the following passage. Brief ly contemplating suicide, Gilda instantly rejects such thoughts, supposedly out of maternal love: Elle aimerait bien en finir avec cette vie qui ne donne que ce qu’elle veut, jamais ce qu’on lui demande. Ce serait si facile de s’allonger, là, tout de suite, de se cacher sous la neige comme sous une chaude couverture. Ce serait si doux... Malheureusement, outre le fait que Gilda ne croit pas vraiment qu’on puisse crever de la sorte, en plein Paris, il y a un autre obstacle à lever: c’est son cœur! Son cœur de mère aimante, opiniâtre, résolue à tous les combats, à tous les sacrifices pour ses deux enfants. (p. 25) [She’d dearly love to have done with this life which only gives what it wants, never what you ask of it. It would be so easy to lie down there, right now, to hide beneath the snow as if it were a warm blanket. It would be so soft.... Unfortunately, apart from the fact that Gilda doesn’t really believe you can snuff it like that, right in the middle of Paris, there’s another obstacle to overcome: her heart! Her motherly heart, loving, dogged, determined to face any struggle and make any sacrifice for her two children.]

The fact is that she had not been prepared to make even one sacrifice to keep Juliette with her: staying in Israel, from which she could not afford both children’s tickets to France. In fact, Gilda is an object lesson in maternal mauvaise foi. On the one hand,

214

New Sites of Conflict

she condemns lack of maternal love — ‘Il faudrait être un monstre pour ne pas aimer sa propre fille’ (p. 45) [You’d have to be a monster not to love your own daughter] — and on a conscious level does genuinely want to be reunited with her daughter (such reunion is, after all, what drives her dogged search for waged employment). But on the other hand, when a long letter from Juliette arrives she actually forgets it is there, due to anxiety about her son Robie not being home on time (pp. 105–06). She sheds tears after reading Juliette’s doleful letter, but only because she has nothing else to do while waiting for her son (p. 109). The characterization of Gilda provides ample fulcrum to the stereotype of the Jewish mother’s affective investment in the son rather than the daughter. Yet it is vital to bear in mind the deliberately caricatural tenor of Jacques’s novel. The elusive dividing line between cultural ‘reality’ and exploitation of a cultural stereotype generates epistemological indeterminacy, which again reiterates the postmodern playfulness of Jacques’s novel (see Chapter 3, note 48). Assuming the reader consents to the suspension of disbelief made necessary by that dividing line, s/he will accept as diegetic reality the confirmation of that ‘bad breast’ stereotype provided by a comment from the Agence Juive de Jérusalem. According to the Agence, Juliette ‘souffre énormément du cruel abandon maternel’ (p. 52) [is suffering greatly from her mother’s cruel desertion]. The young girl’s deep distress is partly triggered by a nurse’s verbalization of the brutal truth, for Juliette has a semi-hysterical fit when the nurse quips of Gilda ‘l’instinct maternel [...] ne l’étouffe pas’ (p. 114) [maternal instinct [...] isn’t exactly choking her]. Despite Juliette’s somatic revolt against this home truth, the narrative bears it out fully, expressing her sense that her mother had left her at the kibbutz ‘telle une encombrante valise laissée à la consigne, en promettant de venir la reprendre dans un mois ou deux, au plus tard. Cela fait exactement douze mois que Juliette attend [...]’ (pp. 117–18) [like a cumbersome suitcase somebody’s placed in left luggage, promising to come and collect it in a month or two at the latest. Juliette has now been waiting for exactly twelve months]. When a serious accident leaves her blinded in one eye and she tries in vain to phone her mother from her hospital bed, the indeterminate narrative voice very clearly posits her mother’s perceived indifference as the source of Juliette’s suicidal despair: ‘Elle pourrait être morte, sa propre mère n’en saurait rien, il ne faut pas chercher plus loin la raison de son envie de mourir’ (p. 422) [She could be dead and her own mother wouldn’t know anything about it, you don’t have to look any further for the reason why she wants to die]. When she does manage to get through to her mother’s lodgings and is hung up on seconds after being told her mother is just coming, she resorts to a form of self-harm that represents a mimétisme of maternal harm: ‘Elle sanglote en s’assénant partout de grands coups de combiné [...] — Elle ne veut pas me parler, je te dis. J’ai l’œil crevé et elle ne veut même pas me parler’ (p. 430) [She sobs as she hits herself all over with the handset [...] ‘She doesn’t want to speak to me, I’m telling you. My eye’s had it and she doesn’t even want to speak to me’]. Even in this semi-comic novel, pathos attaches to the dryly factual reporting of Juliette’s subsequent suicide. All we are told is that after her mother’s perceived refusal to speak to her on the phone, she had escaped from the hospital and run, deliberately and fatally, into an oncoming van (p. 433).

New Sites of Conflict

215

It should also be noted that before this suicide, when Gilda had at last obtained a loan to fund her daughter’s journey from Israel to France, she had begun to dread Juliette’s return to the family bosom. Momentary questioning of her maternal integrity cedes quickly to bad faith. She casuistically convinces herself of her maternal love, since such love is, she has been acculturated to believe, the imprint of the feminine soul — and Gilda sedulously cultivates classic femininity: N’est-ce pas insensé? Atteindre enfin le but pour lequel on s’est battu, on a souffert, pleuré, espéré et n’en retirer qu’une panique animale? Serait-ce d’une mauvaise mère? D’une mère dénuée de cet instinct qui distingue précisément l’être humain de l’animal? Cela ne tient pas debout, voyons! Elle n’a jamais failli à son devoir: Robie est la preuve signée. Du reste, l’amour maternel est l’empreinte de l’âme féminine, aussi précise qu’une empreinte digitale. (pp. 346–47) [Is this not insane? Finally reaching the goal for which you’ve struggled, suffered, wept, hoped and then getting only a kind of animal panic from it? Could it be that she’s a bad mother? A mother devoid of that instinct that, precisely, distinguishes human beings from animals? Come on now, that doesn’t hold water! She’s never failed in her duty: Robie is the living proof of that. Besides, maternal love is the stamp of woman’s soul, as accurate as a finger print.]

It is telling that the putative proof she has fulfilled her maternal duty is her discharging of that duty towards son rather than daughter. Frankly facing the difficulties her daughter will present, Gilda is seduced by the romantic notion of maternal sacrifice — but the very word used by the free indirect style, ‘esclavage’, betrays her secretly dim view of motherhood: Sa fille, qui vient sans crier gare habiter sous son toit, lui mènera une vie d’enfer. C’est sûr. Elle l’imagine, tel un chat sauvage, tourner en rond dans la chambre exiguë. Elle se représente l’atmosphère tendue, les reproches inévitables, les règlements de comptes, les pleurs, les douleurs qu’il faudra consoler. Commencer par là peut-être: consoler, rassurer, protéger, aimer, se sacrifier [...]. Cette idée fait son chemin dans la tête de Gilda: abnégation, tendresse, protection, elle est prête à tout donner maintenant, et sans condition, à ses deux enfants. Elle sera toute à ses enfants, à l’esclavage autrement dit de la maternité. (pp. 347–48) [Her daughter, coming with no warning to live under her roof, will make her life a misery. It’s certain. She imagines her prowling round and round the cramped bedroom like a wild cat. She imagines the tense atmosphere, the inevitable reproaches, the settling of accounts, the tears, the distress she’ll have to soothe. Maybe she should start with that: consoling, reassuring, protecting, loving, sacrificing herself [...]. The idea gains ground in Gilda’s mind: abnegation, affection, protection, she’s ready to give everything now, and unconditionally, to her two children. She’ll devote herself to her children, in other words to the slavery of motherhood.]

Gilda’s self-dramatization is blatant in the succeeding thoughts: ‘Elle réduira ses propres besoins au minimum afin que ses enfants ne souffrent ni de la faim ni du froid. Elle tremblera pour leur santé, leurs études, leurs amours un jour, tandis que, solitaire, enlaidie, amère, elle ira à son dernier souff le, c’est la règle, elle n’y fera pas exception’ (p. 348) [She’ll reduce her own needs to a minimum so that her children

216

New Sites of Conflict

don’t suffer from hunger or cold. She’ll fear for their health, their studies, for their loves one day, while she takes her last breath, lonely, her looks gone, bitter, that’s the rule, she’ll be no exception]. The reality is in stark contrast. Pregnant from an affair with the married Sam Kalman, Gilda pays for an abortion from the loan earmarked to pay for Juliette’s trip back to her mother, commenting tersely ‘Elle attendra encore un peu, voilà tout, elle n’en mourra pas, tandis que moi, moi, j’en mourrai c’est sûr’ (p. 374) [She’ll just have to wait a bit more, it won’t kill her, whereas it would certainly kill me]. The tragic irony is that in fact Juliette does effectively die of waiting for her mother. Gilda’s dichotomous feelings towards maternal love arise from tension between the sacred cow of maternal instinct, which is particularly strong in traditional Jewish culture, and a solid instinct for self-preservation (pp. 374–75). The deconstruction of the maternal myth is consummate in Gilda’s reaction to her daughter’s death and to her son’s consequent hostility. Her initial sorrow turns out to be short-lived in the face of lover Sam’s blandishments: Elle dit, au comble de ses pleurs, qu’elle veut quitter ce monde injuste où les mères sont condamnées à survivre à leur enfant. [...] Sam Kalman lui dit, en riant, que sa pâleur rehaussée par sa petite robe noire montante n’enlève rien à l’air de beauté fatale qui émane de toute sa personne. C’est vrai, ce mensonge? Les pleurs de Gilda cessent, sa tristesse se mêle peu à peu d’une espèce de gaieté. Sans doute parce qu’il y a de la joie dans toute tristesse et qu’il se trouve du bonheur dans toute souffrance. (p. 443) [At the height of her sobbing she says that she wants to leave this unfair world where mothers are condemned to outlive their child. [...] Sam Kalman tells her laughingly that her pallor brought out by the high-necked little black dress in no way detracts from the look of fatal beauty that her whole person exudes. Is it true, this lie? Gilda’s tears stop, her sadness gradually blends with a sort of cheerfulness. No doubt because there is joy in all sadness and happiness in all suffering.]

In fact, that sorrow at maternal loss is far less intense than her instinct for life and sexual fulfilment. By pastiching the fairy tale’s happy-ending formula ‘ils eurent beaucoup d’enfants’ [they had many children], the first sentence of the epilogue gives the lie to the dogma that maternal instinct is an invariable quality of the female psyche, with the adverb ‘naturellement’ presenting the natural as inhering not in motherhood but in sexual love between adults: ‘Et naturellement, Gilda Stambouli épousera le docteur Sam Kalman. Ils seront très heureux. Ils n’auront plus un seul enfant’ (p. 447) [And naturally, Gilda Stambouli will marry Dr Sam Kalman. They’ll be very happy. They won’t have a single child together]. In lowkey, tongue-in-cheek mode, Jacques debunks traditional prescriptive myths of motherhood which are integral if not exclusive to Jewish cultural scripts. In a jurisprudential framework, one step down from infanticide, whether voluntary or involuntary (and Gilda’s is clearly involuntary) would be vicious violence inf licted on a child by a parent. Such is the offence ultimately committed by the mother in Sarah Kofman’s Rue Ordener, rue Labat (1994).30 Yet Kofman’s text does proffer mitigating circumstances for this maternal abuse by inscribing it in the

New Sites of Conflict

217

context of deep trauma triggered by the particular historical conjuncture. The very title of this first-person autobiographical narrative signals a schism. Through use of the names of the two streets in which they had lived, the title metonymically designates Kofman’s two mothers, the one biological, the other unofficially adoptive, between whom she was increasingly torn as a young Jewish girl. After her Polish rabbi father’s deportation to Auschwitz, she is left vulnerable to arrest along with her mother and siblings, who had escaped the 1942 police round-up of Jews in Paris. Her orthodox Jewish mother tries to put her young daughter’s safety first by allowing her to be hidden in rue Labat by a Christian woman, but ends up detesting the latter for supplanting her maternal role and stealing her daughter’s love. In view of the bitter rift which is gradually to drive them apart, it is a poignant paradox that Sarah is devastated by the first separation from her mother. At the age of about eight she becomes an ‘enfant caché’ on a French farm where she constantly weeps and rejects food. Her rejection of pork in particular implies that obedience to paternal law — that is, observance of kashrut — was a mere pretext for return to the maternal realm (p. 30). For by refusing to eat non-kosher foods in what turn out to be various adoptive homes, Sarah manoeuvres a return to her mother. Sarah’s somatic stratagem succeeds when she is allowed back to Paris, where her desperate attachment to her mother is emphasized by the terse, adamant tone of the sentence opening the following chapter: ‘Le vrai danger: être séparée de ma mère’ (p. 33) [The real danger: being separated from my mother]. In justified fear of police raids and arrest, mother and daughter seek refuge at the home of ‘la dame de la rue Labat’ [the lady from Labat Street], a former neighbour. At great personal risk — deportation for harbouring Jews — the woman agrees to shelter them. To her credit, the woman does initially try the disinterested solution of having Sarah hidden by priests. However, the condition for this is that Sarah be baptized, which she rejects by running away. After this, the woman decides to keep her (p. 46). In a harbinger of the fusion with and de-Judaization of Sarah which she will later orchestrate, the woman re-names Sarah ‘Suzanne’ because it is the closest first name to her own in the Christian saints’ calendar. Her request that the child call her ‘mémé’ is hardly innocent, either. In French, ‘mémé’ means ‘granny’; in becoming Sarah’s so-called grandmother, Mémé also ‘becomes’ the mother of Sarah’s mother, and so reinforces her existing position of power over the latter. Even more perturbingly, the word ‘mémé’, as Solange Leibovici observes, also ‘sounds like mamme or memme, the Yiddish word for mother’.31 In adopting the figurative position of mother rather than grandmother, Mémé may have had less symbolic control over Sarah’s real mother, but she would certainly have had more control over Sarah herself. Whatever the precise symbolic status of her role, Mémé wastes no time in usurping the real mother’s authority, by declaring the kosher food she prepares for her daughter to be unhealthy and decreeing a change of diet. Ominously, the adult narrator portends from the diegetic past ‘C’est elle qui désormais allait s’occuper de moi’ (p. 48) [From then on she would be the one who took care of me]. Exploiting her position of power over the mother, knowing that the latter cannot even leave the house without risking arrest, she goes out with Sarah and ostentatiously passes her off as her own daughter.

218

New Sites of Conflict

Kofman leaves some doubt as to whether Mémé’s severance of daughter from mother is coolly calculated, but no doubt that it is successful — and is, crucially, linked to a similar severance of the daughter from Judaism: ‘A son insu ou non, mémé avait réussi ce tour de force: en présence de ma mère, me détacher d’elle. Et aussi du judaïsme’ (p. 57) [Whether she knew it or not, granny had achieved this amazing feat: driving me away from my mother in her very presence. And also from Judaism]. Mémé may have ensured the physical survival of two Jews, but she is certainly not above anti-Semitism, and does not hesitate to communicate this to Sarah (p. 57). In fact the Christian woman increasingly re-shapes Sarah, dietetically, spiritually, and ethically, by systematically denigrating her Jewish observances. Sarah’s mother, meanwhile, feels powerless to resist this other woman’s figurative abduction of her daughter from herself as mother and also from Judaism: ‘Ma mère souffrait en silence: pas de nouvelles de mon père, pas moyen de rendre visite à mes frères et sœurs, aucun pouvoir d’empêcher mémé de me transformer, de me détacher d’elle et du judaïsme’ (p. 67) [My mother suffered in silence: no news of my father, no way of visiting my brothers and sisters, no power to stop granny transforming me, driving me away from her and from Judaism]. And it is precisely the mother’s complete disempowerment that Mémé exploits: the mother cannot fight back because her and her daughter’s lives literally depend on Mémé’s protection. At Liberation the mother is concerned immediately to recover Sarah from ‘celle qui voulait lui “voler” sa fille’ (p. 68) [the woman who wanted to ‘steal’ her daughter from her]. The adult narrator’s comment here is ambiguous: ‘Ma mère n’avait plus que haine et mépris pour celle qui nous avait sauvé la vie’ (p. 68) [My mother had nothing but hatred and contempt left for the woman who had saved our lives]. If this is meant judgementally, which it surely is, it is remarkably non-empathic with respect to her humiliated mother. Symmetrically with the start of the war, at its end Sarah is once again rent asunder from a mother, this time from her adoptive mother by her real mother. And once again, she somatizes her distress and resistance through weeping and refusing to eat: ‘Ce fut un véritable déchirement. Du jour au lendemain, je dus me séparer de celle que j’aimais maintenant plus que ma propre mère [...] Je refusais de manger et passais mon temps à pleurer’ (pp. 68–69) [It was really heartbreaking. Overnight, I had to part with the woman I now loved more than my own mother [...] I refused to eat and spent my time crying]. Again the refusal of food is instrumental, since her worried mother eventually relents by allowing her to see Mémé for an hour a day (p. 69). This is where the mother–daughter dynamic takes on a patently abusive hue: whenever Sarah is even a few minutes late home from seeing Mémé, her mother beats her with a strap (p. 69). Soon she is covered with bruises and full of hatred for this biological but denatured mother — doubly denatured, the first time by a usurping Christian mother, the second time by herself, through assault on her own child. When the mother forbids any further contact with Mémé and Sarah defies her, the mother takes Mémé to court. Ironically in the light of the mother’s own abuse of Sarah, the word ‘abuser’ is used to designate what the mother accuses Mémé of having attempted vis-à-vis her daughter: ‘Aussi intenta-t-elle un procès à mémé [...] Mémé y fut accusée d’avoir tenté d’“abuser” de moi, et d’avoir maltraité ma mère’

New Sites of Conflict

219

(p. 70) [So she took granny to court [...] There Granny was accused of having tried to ‘abuse’ me, and of having mistreated my mother]. Outraged at what she sees as a travesty of the truth, Sarah in her turn accuses her mother, exposing her bruises to the tribunal. When a Jewish friend confirms that the mother indeed beats Sarah, the court gives Mémé custody of the child. Symptomatically, Sarah’s reaction is not one of unmitigated pleasure; in fact, she experiences fear and a sense of guilt — the latter being apparently vindicated when she is abducted by two men and restored to her mother, who proceeds to beat her again, screaming in Yiddish ‘ “Je suis ta mère! je suis ta mère! Je me fiche de ce qu’a décrété le tribunal, tu m’appartiens!” ’ (p. 71) [‘I’m your mother! I’m your mother! I don’t give a damn what the court decided, you belong to me!]. What is conspicuous here is the mother’s emphasis on possession of rather than love for her daughter, but this is hardly surprising given the venomous rivalry over the child between the two women, and given also the mother’s complete disempowerment in the battle until now. It is also conspicuous that despite her struggle, screams and sobs, deep down Sarah feels relieved (p. 71). Apart from such fairly conventional narrative means, Kofman also deploys a layered mise en abyme to underscore the powerful trauma of this maternal division and, in fact, overwriting of one maternal figure by another. First she takes an image from canonical art, recalling that for the cover of her first book, L’Enfance de l’art (1970),32 she had chosen a reproduction of a painting by Leonardo da Vinci, ‘The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne’ (p. 73). She proceeds to cite Freud’s view that the painting synthesizes the artist’s childhood in which he too had had two mothers, since the biological mother, Caterina, had had to surrender him to his stepmother. The second image, from Hitchcock film’s The Lady Vanishes (1938), is oneirically disturbing, again involving the replacement of one woman by another. In this case, the benevolent older woman Miss Froy is mysteriously substituted by a malevolent woman whom the young girl Iris is assured actually is Miss Froy. Alluding to her own childhood trauma of split mothering, the adult narrator Kofman comments thus: L’intolérable, pour moi, c’est toujours d’apercevoir brutalement à la place du bon visage ‘maternel’ de la vieille (tout dans le film suggère qu’elle est l’image de la bonne mère [...]), l’intolérable, c’est d’apercevoir brusquement le visage de sa remplaçante [...]; visage effroyablement dur, faux, fuyant, menaçant [...] (p. 76) [For me what’s always unbearable is suddenly to see in the place of the good ‘maternal’ face of the old woman (everything in the film suggests that she is the very image of the good mother [...]), what’s unbearable is suddenly to see the face of her substitute [...]; a horribly hard, false, shifty and threatening face[...]]

The conundrum for the reader is precisely who, biological mother or Mémé, is meant to represent the good mother, or, as Kofman goes on to put it in explicitly Kleinian terms, the good breast. And a disturbing sense of the uncanny is inspired by Kofman’s conclusion to this passage: ‘Le mauvais sein à la place du bon sein, l’un parfaitement clivé de l’autre, l’un se transformant en l’autre’ (p. 77) [The bad breast instead of the good breast, the one perfectly split from the other, the one changing into the other]. Jekyll and Hyde, the good and the bad in the same or in

220

New Sites of Conflict

the apparently same person: such is the affective and ethical puzzle which even in adulthood the still traumatized ‘child within’ cannot resolve. And there are further complexities. When the biological mother, not knowing where to leave Sarah while she goes to collect her other children, confides her despite everything to Mémé’s care, the joy of their reunion takes on a diffusely erotic tinge, at least unilaterally. While we know nothing of Mémé’s feelings beyond the rather odd (queer?) fact that she lets a twelve-year-old girl sleep in her bed, we are told in no uncertain terms that Sarah herself experienced a new state of excitation in which she felt hot, thirsty, and f lushed: Je me souviens surtout de la première nuit où mon émotion et mon excitation étaient très fortes. Me sentir simplement si près d’elle me mettait dans un ‘drôle’ d’état. J’avais chaud, j’avais soif, et je rougissais. Je n’en dis mot et j’aurais bien eu de la peine à dire quelque chose car je ne comprenais pas du tout ce qui m’arrivait. (p. 80) [I particularly remember the first night when I was feeling highly emotional and excited. Simply feeling so close to her put me into a ‘strange’ kind of state. I was hot, I was thirsty, and I was going red. I said nothing about all this and would have found it very hard to say anything because I had no idea what was happening to me.]

It is hard not to find the last sentence’s protestation of ignorance rather disingenuous. One may also wonder whether the juxtaposition of this semi-incestuous, semilesboerotic scene with the assertion ‘j’adorais ma nouvelle institutrice, mademoiselle Bordeaux’ (p. 80) [I adored my new schoolteacher, Miss Bordeaux] is entirely fortuitous. To pursue a hermeneutic of suspicion here would of course risk mobilizing models of lesbian desire based on regression to the fusion of mother and female child. As I argue elsewhere,33 such models are highly reductive, and will therefore not be revisited in the present context. After two years back in the biological mother’s home, the teenaged Sarah has lost seven kilos and stopped all religious observance. The choice of these facts among the many available to her in depicting the infernal mother–daughter conf lict is telling, since that choice appears tacitly to conf late the over-protective, jealous mother with the whole of the nurturing and religious Jewish heritage embodied in that mother. Yet as Sarah grows older the former clarities fade, and along with them her allegiance to Mémé. The last page of Rue Ordener, rue Labat is dry, f lat, and enigmatic: no explanation for Sarah’s voluntary distancing from this once adored ‘good breast’ is provided beyond the vague ‘je ne supporte plus de l’entendre me parler sans cesse du passé, ni qu’elle puisse continuer de m’appeler son “petit lapin” ou sa “petite cocotte” ’ (p. 99) [I can no longer stand hearing her talking to me constantly about the past, nor her continuing to call me her ‘sweetheart’ or her ‘pet’]. What is most remarkable about this last page, however, is the absence of any reference to her ‘real’, biological mother: summoned by negation, she is the spectral presence that haunts these words tinged with a terrible, unstated sadness. Involuntary infanticide and physical assault on one’s child are commonly classified as the worst of parental offences because they kill or literally threaten the life of a defenceless being. Yet the effects of emotional abuse on the psychological

New Sites of Conflict

221

health of the child are now also taken seriously by most jurisprudences, in the West at least. Such abuse is located in two mothers in Myriam Anissimov’s Le Marida (1982),34 but as with Kofman, these mothers are no one-dimensional villains, and mitigating circumstances may be inferred from the details of their characterization. Further, in the case of one of the two mothers, Rivka, that abuse takes the form of what could be construed as a verbal irony which is inappropriate for a child but not intentionally malevolent, and which is often juxtaposed with instances of mothering that are less destructive. Le Marida is an autofictional, polyphonic novel about an extended working-class Jewish family of Polish origin who have settled in France. Its chief protagonist is Hanah Rosenfeld, who like Anissimov herself had been born in a Swiss refugee camp during the Second World War. Hanah’s aunt Guitel provides a far more f lagrant example of emotionally abusive mothering than Hanah’s mother, Rivka, and significantly, it targets her daughters alone. When one of her daughters starts crying, Guitel expostulates ‘— Cochonne, tu me donnes envie de vomir. Va te moucher mocheté! Et arrête de pleurer! Dire que c’est ma fille!’ (p. 47) [‘You pig, you make me want to puke. Go and wipe your nose, you’re a complete fright! And stop crying! To think she’s my daughter!]. And when the cooking has been neglected by all nine of her daughters, she arbitrarily hurls a volley of spite at one of them alone: ‘— Faignante, grosse vache! Non je ne suis pas comme toi. Heureusement. Va, mais va te regarder dans la glace et tu verras. Est-ce que je porte des lunettes, moi? Est-ce que j’ai plein de boutons sur la figure et des poils? Est-ce que mon nez est tellement grand qu’on dirait qu’il va me rentrer dans la bouche? Non! [...]’ (p. 51) [‘You idle fat cow! No, I’m not like you. Thankfully. Go on, look at yourself in the mirror and you’ll see. Do I wear glasses? Do I have loads of spots and hairs on my face? Is my nose so big you’d think it was going to crash into my mouth? No!’]. Guitel’s contempt for her daughters contrasts sharply with idealization of her son, lending support to a prominent cultural stereotype of the Jewish mother f lagged up in my introduction to this section: ‘— Je savais mon-prince-adoré-le-plus-beau-dela-terre-mon-Hori que toi tu aimais ta mere. Je savais. Heureusement, toi tu es là. Il n’y a que toi dans cette maison. Ta mère sait’ (p. 53) [‘I knew that my-adored-littleprince-the-handsomest-on earth-my-Hori that you loved your mother. I knew. Thank goodness you’re there. There’s only you in this house. Your mother knows’]. The reason for this privileging of sons may be that Guitel is a practising Jew, and her demotion of the female relative to the male is of course structural to Orthodox Judaism (as it is to Christianity and Islam, the other two main monotheisms). Why, though, the particular venom towards her daughters? Perhaps the venom is an unconscious product of resentment about the material and emotional adversity she has suffered through her life, which she feels freer to vent upon those with whom she identifies more and who are accorded less respect generally by her culture: namely, her daughters. We learn that as an innocent sixteen-year-old, Guitel had been dispatched from Poland to France to marry a stranger, Yzy, who was throughout their marriage regularly to impregnate her whilst sleeping with other women, leaving her sickened both literally and figuratively: Ainsi, elle donna chaque année le jour à un nouveau bébé, puis se révolta. Elle

222

New Sites of Conflict avait tout compris. Elle savait comment on faisait les enfants. Mais il était trop tard. Elle était écœurée. Elle souffrait de la migraine, ses jambes se couvraient de grosses varices bleues. Elle pleurait et torchait ceux qui brisaient ses nerfs en hurlant jour et nuit. Yzy l’avait trahie chez sa Marie-Vache, ses mômes l’avaient vaincue en l’envahissant avec leurs langes souillés, leurs cris pour avoir leur lait, leur besoin d’affection. Elle ne pouvait pas donner à tous. Et d’ailleurs, qui lui donnait quoi que ce soit à elle, Guitel qui crevait jour et nuit? (p. 58) [So, each year she had another baby, then she rebelled. She’d understood everything. She knew how babies were made. But it was too late. She was sickened. She suffered from migraine, her legs were covered in big blue varicose veins. She cried and wiped the bottoms of those who shattered her nerves with their shrieking day and night. Yzy had cheated on her with his Marie-Cow, her kids had beaten her by invading her life with their dirty nappies, their screams for their milk, their need for affection. She couldn’t give to everyone. And besides, who gave her the slightest little thing, Guitel who worked herself to death day and night?]

Although not quite as abject as Guitel’s lot, the situation of Hanah’s mother Rivka is hardly a model of female autonomy either. As well as mother of two daughters, Rivka is a working woman who labours some fifteen hours a day in her husband Yankel’s tailoring business. Initially, she is similarly verbally abusive towards her daughter Hanah, for she and her husband Yankel make it known to her that ‘Hanah n’était qu’un pauvre schlemazel désésperant et pleurnicheur’ (p. 21) [Hannah was nothing but a poor hopeless, snivelling schlemazel]. Rivka also refuses to respond to Hanah’s plea for verbal assurance of love, reducing it to mere money-grubbing: ‘— Maman, tu m’aimes? Dis tu m’aimes! Elle ruait dans les jambes de Rivka qui se dégageait. — Tu l’aimes ton porte-monnaie, tu l’aimes ta vache à lait, hein?’ (p. 42) [‘Mum, do you love me? Tell me you love me!’ She’d f ling herself at Rivka’s legs, and Rivka would extricate herself. ‘You love your purse, you love your cash-cow, eh?’]. Conversely, Rivka does stoutly defend her daughter against other people’s insults: ‘Tu ne peux pas lui foutre la paix? Toi, Gratchok, tu sauras qu’on ne dit jamais à un enfant qu’il n’est pas beau. Tu es une grande dinde méchante et bête’ (p. 61) [‘Can’t you just leave her alone, dammit? You’ll learn, Gratchok, that you should never tell a child she’s ugly. You’re just a big nasty stupid goose’]. She also attempts to moderate her husband’s absurdly ambitious aspirations for Hanah with the remonstration ‘— Yankel, laisse-lui le temps, elle n’est pas plus bête qu’un autre, après tout’ (p. 74) [‘Yankel, give her time, she’s no more stupid than anyone else after all’]. Yet despite her intelligence and relative independence of mind, Rivka colludes in the Jewish cult of the Father’s authority (p. 86). The contradictions of her position become patent when she robustly defends her daughter against Yankel’s ire directly after having connived in the masquerade of devoted affection for the father. When Yankel barks at Hanah ‘C’est comme ça qu’on parle à son père? Dis bonjour mieux que ça!’ [‘Is that how you speak to your father? Say hello nicer than that!’], Rivka rushes to her daughter’s defence, riposting to Yankel ‘Mais fous-lui la paix. Elle n’est pas encore bien réveillée. Tu as vu qu’elle a pensé à toi en premier, ça ne te suffit pas?’ (pp. 86–87) [‘Leave her alone, dammit. She hasn’t woken up

New Sites of Conflict

223

properly yet. Didn’t you see that she thought about you first, isn’t that enough for you?]. Indeed Rivka’s attitude towards her daughter Hanah is characterized above all by contradiction. It is clear that she negotiates a difficult path between her role within a Jewish community as deferential wife and mother and, contrastingly, her personal sense of equality with her husband. In certain matters, such as proficiency in the French language, even he admits her superiority (p. 83). Her Frenchlanguage skills suggests that she alone was responsible for her children’s French acculturation; that she mediated for them between two different cultures — the Jewish culture enshrined in the Yiddish language favoured by her husband, and the French culture enshrined in the language of their adoptive country. She represents the mother tongue in more ways than one, for it is through her, the mother, that her two daughters acquire the mastery of French enabling them to claim it as their own mother tongue, and to claim too the cultural advantages contingent on that crucial sign of integration. One of those cultural advantages was social mobility, and it is significant that Rivka emphasizes to Hanah the importance of economic independence in order to avoid the harsh labour to which she herself has been subjected (p. 177). The mother’s greater cultural capital has been of benefit to her children alone, bringing no personal rewards. The weight of Jewish tradition and patriarchy confine Rivka to the conventional role of subservient wife and mother, as we see in the rhetorical questions her husband asked her before their marriage: ‘Est-ce qu’une bonne femme juive abandonne son mari et ses bébés pour courir à Paris avec les cadres du Parti? Est-ce qu’une bonne mère juive n’aide pas son mari à gagner de l’argent, pour nourrir ses filles?’ (p. 84) [Does a good Jewish wife desert her husband and children and run off to Paris with the Party bosses? Doesn’t a good Jewish mother help her husband to earn money, to feed her daughters?]. Patently, the only purpose of his questions is to convey that rather than pursuing personal ambitions, a good Jewish wife and mother devotes — and subordinates — herself to husband and children. When Yankel dies in a car crash, Rivka stoically maintains the family business, but a gulf opens up between her and Hanah. In a fantasized apostrophe to her mother, Hanah points out the anomalies of Rivka’s maternal behaviour: protecting her daughter and giving her all the material comfort she can, yet reproaching her at the same time for not showing the same sort of resourcefulness as Rivka at the same age (p. 190). While Rivka is stif lingly imbricated in her young daughter’s life, she fails to undergird that life by a sense of being loved and respected, prompting Hanah’s recurrent question from childhood to the age of seventeen: ‘Maman, est-ce que tu m’admires, est-ce que tu m’aimes au moins?’ (p. 227) [‘Mum, do you admire me, do you at least love me?’]. Placing admiration before love, the word order of this question is puzzling, but may ref lect the child’s belief in a stereotypically Jewish respect for achievement above all. What emerges powerfully is the ambivalence of the mother–daughter relationship, their mutual difficulties in achieving individuation, and the mother’s tendency both to project herself onto her daughter and to resent the new opportunities available to and unappreciated by the daughter. This tension explodes when Rivka avows to Hanah that, had she had the choice a

224

New Sites of Conflict

second time round, she would never have borne her two daughters: Je vous aime toutes les deux, bien sûr, mais si c’était à refaire, tu entends, si c’était à refaire, espèce de petite abrutie écervelée, je ne vous referais pas. [...] A cause de vous, j’ai supporté votre père qui m’a laissé trimer jour et nuit pendant quinze ans, parce qu’il se prenait pour le plus grand écrivain yiddish. A cause de vous, je rentre du travail pour que vous ne restiez pas seules. Je pourrais faire autre chose. Je continue de travailler comme une brute pour vous payer des études et des chaussures de chez Charles Jourdan. Parce que ‘les deux princesses’ sont devenues difficiles. (p. 206) [I love you both, of course, but if I had my time over again, do you hear, if I had my time over again, you birdbrained little idiot, I wouldn’t have you. [...] Because of you, I put up with your father who let me slave away day and night for fifteen years, because he thought he was the greatest of Yiddish writers. Because of you, I come home from work so you’re not left on your own. I could do other things. I carry on working like a dog to pay for your studies and for Charles Jourdan shoes. Because ‘the two princesses’ have become choosy.]

The economic exploitation of women within the institution of marriage (at least as she experienced it, and she is depicted as a fairly typical working-class Jewish woman) is implicit in her blunt peroration to this tirade: ‘une bonne situation vaut tous les maris du monde’ (p. 207) [‘a good job is worth all the husbands in the world’]. Returning brief ly to the fraught question of mother–child individuation which is highlighted in Anissimov’s Le Marida, it is worth adding a few words on Karine Tuil’s Du sexe feminine (2002).35 In this comically satirical novel, the narrator Emma’s mother Nina is a consummate example of the smothering Jewish mother cliché. Unusually, however, this Jewish mother finally manages in her sixties to break the mould. The self-consciously postmodern ending of Du sexe féminin, where Emma finds herself imprisoned in the paper and printed characters of the book in which she realizes she is a mere fictional character, contains an oblique reference to motherhood: ‘je ne suis qu’un modèle, un simple personnage de roman engendré par l’imagination d’un auteur — ne sommes-nous pas tous condamnés à vivre sous la dépendance de la personne qui nous a éveillés au monde?’ (p. 206) [I’m only a model, a simple character in a novel created by the author’s imagination — aren’t we all condemned to spend our lives subordinated to the person who awakened us to the world?]. Here Tuil insinuates that while the mother may achieve liberation from the servitude of her maternal role, the child will never transcend dependence on its mother. The mother Nina’s escape here is, of course, the exception that proves the rule, and the narrative economy of Du sexe féminin works simultaneously to critique and (re-)instantiate the Jewish mother as paradigm of oppressive overinvestment in — indeed, figurative devouring of — the child. One might question if such features do not also manifest themselves in non-Jewish mothers; what of the Italian mama, for instance? A fitting riposte might be: have you heard the one about the Jewish mother? ‘Quelle est la différence entre une mère italienne et une mère juive? La mère italienne dit: “Si tu ne manges pas, tu meurs!”. La mère juive dit: “Si tu ne manges pas, je meurs!” ’36 [What’s the difference between an Italian mother and a Jewish mother? The Italian mother says ‘If you don’t eat, you’ll die!’.

New Sites of Conflict

225

The Jewish mother says, ‘If you don’t eat, I’ll die!’]. No comment: sometimes, as the cliché has it (and we are of course dealing above all in clichés, which are nonetheless revealing of norms if not always of not realities), less is more. Although depicted f lippantly, Nina’s f lamboyant liberation from the shackles of normative Jewish motherhood form a conceptual bridge to Eliette Abécassis’s more serious probing of the extent to which motherhood, or at least certain elements of motherhood, might be deleterious to the mother rather than to the child. In her 2005 novel Un heureux événement,37 the homodiegetic narrator Barbara, a doctoral student of philosophy enamoured of liberty as well as her partner Nicolas, finds that the birth of their first child is the antithesis of the eponymous happy event, for it leads to a loss of individual, non-relational identity: C’est elle qui a accouché de moi. Un autre moi: lourd, conscient, désabusé. Qu’y avait-il à savoir de la vie quand on a donné la vie? Je n’avais plus d’ambition personnelle, je n’en avais plus le temps, ma vie ne m’appartenait plus. Je n’étais plus qu’un creux, un vide, un néant. Désormais, j’étais mère. (p. 75) [She’s the one who gave birth to me. Another me: heavy, lucid, disillusioned. What is there to know about life when you’ve given life? I had no more personal ambition, I had no more time for that, my life no longer belonged to me. I was nothing more now than a hollow, a void, a nothingness. Henceforth, I was a mother.]

A telling antecedent to this baleful prognosis is Barbara’s dysfunctional relationship with her own mother, in which communication has broken down (p. 9). Further indices to this troubled relationship include the fact that she had still been in thrall to her mother at the age of twenty: ‘J’étais encore un bébé sous la coupe de sa mère. J’écoutais tout ce qu’elle disait, sans regard critique’ (p. 79) [I was still a baby under its mother’s thumb. I listened to everything she said, uncritically]. However, the difficulties in achieving individuation generally ascribed to the child are here located in the mother too: ‘Les psychologues de l’enfance ont démontré que le nourisson ne fait pas la différence entre la mère et lui. La réciproque était également vraie dans le cas de ma mère’ (p. 168) [Child psychologists have shown that the unweaned infant makes no distinction between itself and its mother. The converse was true in my mother’s case]. Alongside this fusional drive to incorporation, there is also a sadistic drive in this mother, who in her constant undermining of her daughter Barbara recalls the insulting mothers in Anissimov’s Le Marida (Guitel and, to a lesser degree, Rivka). Although little in Barbara’s experience of motherhood is obviously Jewishencoded, it is nonetheless clear from various cultural references that Barbara is Jewish. However, she is a very assimilated and non-practising Jew, which renders her iconoclastic take on maternity proportionately less disarming than if she had been a Jewish Orthodox mother (of whom the novel does contain one example, Myriam Tordjmann). Barbara’s feelings for her newborn child Léa are extremely mixed, at once protective and resentful: protective because of the infant’s complete dependence on her, resentful because the infant drains away her life, or at least her previous life (pp. 69 and 70). And yet there is also a form of lyricism, albeit anguished, in her inscription of a post-parturition interdependence:

226

New Sites of Conflict J’étais sa mère et elle était la mienne. Je naissais à elle, je naissais au monde par elle, elle m’avait accouchée et j’en étais douloureuse, bouleversée, cabossée. Je naissais de la naissance de ma fille [...]. C’était une aventure et nous allions la partager, nous étions condamnées à la vivre ensemble désormais. (p. 70) [I was her mother and she was mine. I was being born to her, being born to the world through her, she’d given birth to me and as a result I felt distressed, overwhelmed, battered. I was being born through my daughter’s birth [...]. It was an adventure and we were going to share it, we were condemned to experience it together from now on.]

Subversively, in Abécassis’s text the devouring monstrous figure invoked in the Jungian epigraph to this final section of Chapter 4 turns out to inhere not in the mother but in the infant child: Léa. Ce monstre d’égoïsme et d’indifférence, cette manipulatrice qui ne m’utilisait qu’à ces fins personnelles, cet être qui n’était obsédé que par sa propre survie sans jamais avoir aucune attention pour autrui, cette gloutonne mono-obsessionnelle n’avait qu’une idée dans la vie: manger. [...] J’étais son esclave, elle était mon maître. (pp. 85–86) [Léa. That monster of selfishness and indifference, that manipulator who only used me for her own ends, that being who was obsessed only by her own survival without ever having a thought for anyone else, that self-obsessional glutton had only one idea in life: eating. [...] I was her slave, she was my master.]

Consonant with this infantile co-option of Barbara’s entire life, erotic investment is displaced from her partner Nicolas to her baby. After joining a group promoting breastfeeding, she discovers new forms of jouissance: [l’allaitement] [....] me procurait une telle satisfaction, un plaisir de donner si intense, si fusionnel, si complet, que je n’avais besoin de rien d’autre. Je n’avais plus besoin de faire l’amour avec mon compagnon car j’avais mon bébé qui était vis-à-vis de moi dans une telle demande qu’il était impossible de lui résister. C’était un accomplissement sensuel, émotionnel et orgasmique. (pp. 115–16) [[breastfeeding] [...] gave me such satisfaction, such an intense, fusional, complete pleasure in giving that I didn’t need anything else. I no longer needed to make love with my partner because I had my baby who needed me so much that it was impossible to resist her. It was a sensual, emotional and orgasmic fulfilment.]

Whilst the narrative certainly f lirts with burlesque in its parody of the earnest self-help group (p. 116), there is also a serious quality to Barbara’s meditations on breastfeeding, which touch on philosophical questions of genesis and origins: ‘Car l’allaitement, plus que la naissance, est peut-être la seule chose humaine qui n’ait pas changé depuis que le monde est monde, le seul fait archaïque qui nous rattache à notre passé préhistorique, à notre condition primaire [...]’ (pp. 116–17) [For breastfeeding, more than birth, is perhaps the only human thing that hasn’t changed since the world was created, the only archaic fact that links us to our prehistoric past, to our primary condition]. As a wry aside, it is worth noting the rather more pragmatic take on breastfeeding provided by Myriam Tordjmann, who as a Loubavitcher represents Hassidic Judaism, one of the largest Jewish (ultra-)

New Sites of Conflict

227

Orthodox movements in the world. She is certainly observant of its rules, having scrupulously obeyed the injunction to procreate on the Sabbath: at the age of thirtyfive she already has ten children. But the number would have been even higher had she not exploited the fact that breastfeeding ‘est aussi un moyen de contraception naturel, c’est pour cela que je les allaite longtemps...’ (p. 121) [is also a natural means of contraception, that’s why I breastfeed them for ages...]. Her position here is, to say the least, rather inconsistent, since she also insists that she and her husband will have as many children as God gives them, and that they as Loubavitchers do not use any means of contraception (p. 124). As for Barbara’s experience of motherhood, it transfigures her entire subjectivity. Existentially, it is a paradoxical sensation of being alienated, yet it also feels like freedom from previous constraints (p. 141). It obviates any temptations of nihilism: ‘Je n’avais plus besoin de poser des questions sur le sens métaphysique de la vie car le sens de la vie, que je le veuille ou non, c’était elle’ (p. 143) [I no longer needed to ask questions about the metaphysical meaning of life as the meaning of life, whether I liked it or not, was her]. Emotionally, motherhood has forged an immutable hierarchy at whose apex the baby reigns supreme (p. 144). The downside of this is that the baby’s all-consuming presence has distanced her both from Nicolas and from her friends, and the same page ends on the grim rhetorical question ‘Que vaut la vie si l’amour n’existe pas et si l’amitié est un leurre?’ (p. 144) [What’s life worth if love doesn’t exist and if friendship is an illusion?]. Sexually, motherhood has spelt death, beyond the short-lived erotic pleasures of lactation (p. 148). Parturition and its modern-day management have, in fact, desexualized everything, even her own sexual organs (pp. 156–57). This series of metamorphoses prompts Barbara to note a discursive deficit. No philosopher has yet accounted for the fact — at least as she sees it — that whilst the birth of a child socially consecrates love between a man and a woman, on a private level it kills that love (pp. 186–87). A further philosophical lacuna is the silence on infancy and motherhood as conduits to metaphysical, ontological and ethical truths: Il a beaucoup à nous apprendre, ce mystère du visage humain, ce sourire du bébé comme quintessence de l’autre, mais oui, c’est possible, il existe une communication, l’intersubjectivité existe, et je me dis que les philosophes se sont trompés parce qu’ils n’avaient pas de bébé, Socrate, Kant, Sartre, personne n’avait eu de bébé pour comprendre la vie, l’altérité, l’amour, la haine, la folie, la perte du réel, et comment bien souvent — Rousseau, lui, savait — le sentiment premier de l’homme est la pitié. Lorsqu’elle pleurait, lorsqu’elle était en demande, lorsqu’elle était loin de moi et moi loin d’elle, j’avais pitié de Léa. [...] Le lait et le sein, c’est cette générosité-là. (p. 208) [It has much to teach us, this mystery of the human face, this baby’s smile like the quintessence of the other — but yes, after all, it is possible, communication does exist, intersubjectivity does exist, and I tell myself that philosophers got it wrong because they didn’t have a baby, Socrates, Kant, Sartre, nobody had had a baby to understand life, alterity, love, hatred, madness, loss of the real, and how so often — Rousseau, now, he knew this — the first feeling of a human being is pity. When she cried, when she wanted something, when she was far

228

New Sites of Conflict away from me and I from her, I felt pity for Léa. [...] Milk and breast constitute that kind of generosity.]

What are the major features emerging from this broad overview of Jewish motherhood in a representative sample of French-language female-authored writing? We have considered two French mothers (Abécassis’s Barbara and Barbara’s own mother, neither of whom have any apparent belief in god); two Polish mothers (Anissimov’s Rivka, unobservant, and Kofman’s unnamed mother, orthodox); one Egyptian mother ( Jacques’s Gilda, who has only a superficial belief in god); one German mother (Tuil’s Nina, observant); and one presumably Dutch or Danish mother, judging from the surname Tordjmann (Abécassis’s Myriam, who is ultra-orthodox). One key point to emerge is that despite the national and cultural heterogeneity of their maternal protagonists, all of the texts mediate Jewish mothering as at best conf lictual and at worst abusive, sometimes dangerously so. The foregoing analysis has evinced various forms of damage inf licted by these mothers, including involuntary infanticide, physical violence, constant denigration of a child that saps self-confidence, refusal to express love, and overt preferential treatment of sons over daughters. This, of course, is not the whole picture, and as well as such damage there is also, at least in certain cases, genuine love. But even love can be abusive, particularly in the French sense of ‘abusif ’ as over-possessive; and indeed, prominent topoi in this canvass of Jewish mothering are invasiveness and problems of individuation. Problems of individuation correlate with blurred boundaries between self and other, and these are vividly illustrated by our texts in the relation between mothering and feeding, including breastfeeding, where there is literal incorporation of one body by another (or the f luids of one body by the mouth of the other). In Abécassis’s Un heureux événement, Barbara has explicit recourse to the term ‘fusionnel’ in her reference to breastfeeding. Yet even when the infant has been weaned onto solid food and the privileged physical link with the mother’s body sundered, there will often be vestiges of that primal link in the mother’s continued preoccupation with nourishing her child. The aspirant mother Mémé in Kofman’s text exemplifies this when she cannily bans the kosher food provided for Sarah by her biological mother and substitutes for it her own lovingly prepared French fare. It is significant that Sarah’s first intuition of transferring filial affections from her mother to Mémé occurs when, following the removal of the child’s tonsils, her mother laments (a caricaturally Jewish response to disaster, note), while Mémé serenely promises copious ice-cream (pp. 52–53). Kofman’s text also inscribes an interesting psychic metonymy between mother and food, for when deprived of her mother, be it the biological mother in early childhood or the adoptive mother in adolescence, Sarah refuses food, as if mother and food were coterminous. On the other hand, Hanah in Anissimov’s Le Marida seeks to break the link between mother, child and feeding, and refuses her mother’s food for two reasons: to claim the right to selfdetermination, and to resist her mother’s perceived use of ostentatious nurturing in order to enhance her maternal image (pp. 237–38). However, the hermeneutic layers to the triadic trope of mother–child–food are numerous; a different angle still would focus on the isomorphism of what Hanah becomes — cadaverous — and the

New Sites of Conflict

229

fate of those Jews who perished in the Nazi death camps. In coming physically to resemble these victims, Hanah is willy-nilly re-confronting Rivka with the trauma of having lost virtually her entire family in the Shoah. That loss had led to a new accent on Rivka’s responsibility for renewing Jewish life by literally nurturing it in her own children. Fixation upon feeding is not of course peculiar to Jewish mothers, but, given the horror of death by starvation in the Nazi camps if not by gassing which provides the backdrop to this particular Jewish family, neither is it an emotionally neutral feature. Two main conclusions may be drawn from the foregoing. First, despite the mother’s privileged status in Jewry, based on the definition of a Jew as he or she born of a Jewish mother, her composite portrait in the cross-section of texts considered above is far from f lattering. Second, all the writers in question are Jewish daughters, and textual mediations of the Jewish mother by Jewish sons may well be different. Bearing in mind the cultural cliché of the Jewish mother’s preferential treatment of the son, it would not be surprising if accounts of the Jewish mother by sons, even if still critical,38 evinced less raw-nerved conf lict. In this connection, the words of Karine Tuil’s narrator Emma about her mother Nina in Du sexe féminin are resonant: ‘indulgente et compréhensive envers son fils, sévère et intransigeante avec moi’ (p. 34) [indulgent and understanding towards her son, harsh and uncompromising with me]. From resonant they become pungent when she continues: ‘J’étais une fille et, dans l’esprit de ma mère, les filles ne valaient rien. Quand quelqu’un lui annonçait la naissance d’une fille, elle se lamentait, plaignait la mère comme si on l’eût annoncé que l’enfant était mort ou présentait une tare’ (p. 34) [I was a girl and, in my mother’s mind, girls were worthless. When somebody told her about the birth of a girl, she would lament, pitying the mother as if she’d been told that the child was dead or had a defect]. But it is important to recall that Jewish male authors, as well as on the whole appearing to be accorded more respect as sons rather than daughters, will never themselves have to assume the dubious honour of Jewish maternity and its onerous expectations. These Jewish daughters’ critiques of Jewish mothers may signify a refusal, conscious or unconscious, to connive in occlusion of the abuse that can stem from the pressures to which the Jewish mother has traditionally been subject. They certainly seem to repudiate complicity with the cultural templates of maternity which could come to frame and delimit their own identities when, or if, they themselves become mothers. The unicity of such templates, their failure to allow for differing subjectivities, agencies, and socio-politico-economic overdeterminations, is exploded by the authors we have examined above, to the extent that the sole constant to be discerned is ambiguity. I would like to end this chapter by probing that trope of ambiguity in Esther Orner’s Autobiographie de Personne, where its causality has a uniquely Jewish imprint: the affective damage inf licted on the mother qua Jew in Auschwitz. Autobiographie de Personne has been justly lauded by Le Monde as distinctive within Shoah writing: ‘ce qui distinguerait ce texte bref, concentré, de la plupart des confessions concernant la catastrophe du judaïsme européen, serait justement son exceptionnelle qualité littéraire’39 [what might be said to distinguish this short, concentrated text from the majority of confessions concerning the catastrophe of European Judaism is

230

New Sites of Conflict

precisely its exceptional literary quality]. As noted above, Autobiographie de Personne is written from the viewpoint of Orner’s mother. Inter alia, it inscribes the difficult, ambivalent relationship between mother and daughter (and in this respect recalls Anissimov’s Le Marida). In keeping with the nominative and onomastic blanks (none of the characters or countries mentioned is given a proper name), there is even gendered imprecision, with the narrator’s curious reference in the masculine to her daughter — grammatically logical, since the noun ‘enfant’ [child] is masculine in French, but deliberately misleading in the first few pages. What seems like a conscious misprision of one crucial aspect of her child’s identity, viz. the child’s gender, sets the tone for a narrative of love but also of distances, grudges, and mutual lack of communication between mother and daughter. Given this communication gap, the insistence that it was the daughter who had prompted the narrative we are reading by urging the mother to tell her life-story (p. 26) seems like a rather tortuous conceit. The narrator’s question as to why the daughter can’t just tell the story herself is a gentle joke on the reader, for although the daughter Orner is not technically telling her mother’s tale, she is at the very least its scribe, and effectively its source. The mother-character constructed by the firstperson narrative voice is of course the author’s fiction, however much based on the real life personage of Orner’s mother. Similarly tongue-in-cheek is the suggestion that the mother herself would have had no interest in telling her own story, which she believes serves only her daughter — the author Orner: ‘Je ne sais même plus pourquoi je raconte. Pour qui? D’ailleurs, c’est son affaire. Déjà qu’elle m’utilise’ (p. 86) [I don’t even know why I’m telling this story any more. For whom? Besides, it’s her business. She’s already using me]. Despite the mother’s insinuation that she is being exploited by her daughter, the latter’s exhortation to narrative actually comes at least periodically to unite the two women (p. 96). This incitement of the mother to narrative reverses a previous trend, as in her younger years the daughter had been unable to bear listening to her mother’s life experiences. Whenever her mother had tried to evoke Auschwitz, her daughter had resisted: ‘Si seulement elle avait voulu écouter. Pu. Je lui aurais raconté. Pas tout bien sûr. Il lui arrivait de poser une question. Jamais directement. Et quand je commençais à répondre, elle avait déjà quitté la pièce ou alors son regard s’éloignait. Se perdait’ (p. 101) [If only she’d wanted to listen. Been able to. I’d have told her. Not everything of course. Sometimes she’d ask a question. Never directly. And when I began to answer, she’s already left the room or else her gaze got remote. Got lost]. Diegetically, the daughter’s earlier failure to act as secondary witness to the mother’s Auschwitz testimony may well have prompted her later summoning of the mother’s written narrative — or, extra-diegetically, prompted Orner’s later imagining of her mother’s censored trauma. That censored trauma has corroded the post-war mother–daughter rapport. They remain distanced (p. 33), and while the mother superficially blames what seems like permanent separation on the daughter’s studies, she in fact goes on to hint at this deeper-rooted causality: Bien sûr, nous avons été séparées bien avant. Mais alors c’était autre chose. D’ailleurs après ça, rien n’a plus jamais été pareil. Tout a basculé. Un seuil

New Sites of Conflict

231

avait été franchi. Et ma vie n’évoluait plus. [...] J’étais là en attente. De quoi? Je n’ose même pas le dire. Vouée à l’attente. Et dire que lorsque je suis revenue de ‘là-bas’, je n’avais que trente-cinq ans. (pp. 43–44) [Of course, we’d been separated well before that. But then it was different. Moreover after that, nothing was ever the same again. Everything changed dramatically. A threshold had been crossed. And my life was no longer evolving. [...] I was there, waiting. For what? I don’t even dare say it. Doomed to wait. And to think that when I returned from ‘there’, I was only thirty-five.]

Admittedly, the language used here is oblique, and could be read as meaning that the real reason for the permanent gulf between them was the originary separation arising from the child’s placement in a non-Jewish family for her own safety. However, the logic of what follows ‘Tout a basculé’ (that is, ‘Un seuil avait été franchi [...] je n’avais que trente-cinq ans’) leads back to the mother’s own psychic wounding by internment in Auschwitz (Auschwitz being signified by the deictic ‘là-bas’, recalling Francine Christophe’s same usage to designate Bergen-Belsen: see Chapter 1). The mother’s enduring trauma is stylistically ref lected by the staccato rhythm of her utterances and by the loaded non-dit of ‘J’étais là en attente. De quoi? Je n’ose même pas le dire’. This trauma forges a paradigm of relational breakdown. For instance, the mother construes the daughter’s departure for Israel as filial abandonment (p. 50). However, it is clear that the mother is not always a reliable narrator. We may ponder the veracity of her claim that if she had allowed her daughter to go to Israel alone aged only thirteen, it was really because this would oblige her to follow at some point (p. 49). This may betray bad faith, bolstering up an idealized image of herself as faithful to daughter and to the mythical homeland of Israel, whereas in reality she appears to have become psychologically habituated, perhaps even dependent on, separation from her daughter, and does not settle in Israel when she is finally able to. What is clear in her compulsive repetition of past, unintegrated traumas is that she is engaged in acting out. Thus she attempts to co-opt the daughter’s action into the familiar schema of abandonment, this time inverting it: whereas her daughter had previously felt abandoned by her parents, now the mother feels abandoned by the daughter (p. 50). And on the very next page, a powerful link in this psycho-behavioural chain is revealed when the narrator refers to a dream which had given her the will to fight for her life in Auschwitz: that of her little girl begging her to come back and not abandon her (p. 51). Finally, almost teleologically, the mother implies that the daughter has abandoned her in an old people’s home at the end of her life (p. 71). The ambivalence continues even in the home: on the one hand she is proud of her daughter when she visits, on the other hand she is bitter about being institutionalized by that daughter (p. 77). The pain and the inevitability of their separation is verbally revisited, reconfigured, but never psychically integrated: Enfin cette histoire de partir, de revenir. De toujours devoir se séparer. Toute notre vie, c’est comme ça. Et même avant, nous avons été séparées. Abandonnée à cinq ans. Pas par notre faute. Après on aurait pu vivre ensemble. Au moins deux. Non, à treize ans elle est partie. Qui a vu ça? Je vais bâtir le pays. (p. 77)

232

New Sites of Conflict [Anyway this business of leaving, of coming back. Of always having to separate from each other. All our life it’s been like that. And even before, we were separated. Abandoned at five. Not our fault. Afterwards, we could have lived together. At least the two of us. No, at thirteen she left. Have you ever heard of such a thing? I’m going to build the country.]

Perversely, the mother projects lack of demonstrative affection for her daughter onto the daughter herself (p. 45). She is also quick to point out faults in her own daughter’s mothering, as if this might level out the emotional playing field (p. 48). But once the point-scoring is completed, she reverts to a more compassionate position, even if it is still defensive position — as witnessed by anticipation of her daughter’s sneering and inability to forgive her for having returned from Auschwitz without her father: ‘Je sais qu’elle ne m’a pas pardonnée d’être revenue sans lui’ (p. 48) [I know she hasn’t forgiven me for returning without him]. If her final surmise here is true, the aetiology of the tortured mother–daughter relationship becomes clear, and the role of the mother virtually untenable: how could she have even begun to re-build a loving, harmonious relationship with a daughter who had resented her for surviving when her husband, the daughter’s father, had not? The nexus of love, absence or perceived abandonment is a complex one in which each element impacts upon and often irritates the others. While the mother mainly depicts the daughter as distant and mistrustful, she also acknowledges that her child would probably like to die before her so that she would not one day have to mourn her — or feel abandoned once again (p. 88)? In her characteristically brusque, antiintellectual style, the mother acknowledges the intergenerational transmission of trauma as crashingly obvious — and perhaps her dismissiveness here is a function of regret, even of guilt, faced with this poisoned legacy of hers to her child (p. 52). Further sources of inchoate guilt are the mother’s tendency to withhold praise where praise was due. This is shown to be the case even years later, in a remark that her daughter isn’t gifted in languages (p. 39), which is contradicted by the peritextual information of the dust jacket copy: that from 1983, Orner taught translation at university level and Hebrew to new immigrants to Israel. In the knowledge that subsequent efforts to remedy that tendency to withhold due praise have been abortive, the mother defends her position, but also implicitly concedes that it may have led to a lack of self-esteem in the daughter (p. 28). This maternal economy with the filial truth suggests unavowed and probably unconscious resentment harboured by the mother against a daughter who had had chances denied to her (not unlike the mother Rivka’s situation in Anissimov’s Le Marida, discussed above). Mother–daughter rivalry is, of course, a common phenomenon, and in this case may well have been exacerbated by the extreme deprivation of all rights suffered by the mother as a deportee. Such rivalry is uniquely gendered, having no counterpart in the mother–son relationship, because the obvious differences between the opportunities open to girls and boys in the time period concerned (early- to midtwentieth century) invalidate any measurement of a son’s achievements against those of the mother. Further, the mother overtly throws into her daughter’s face the premium placed upon the son in Jewish culture:

New Sites of Conflict

233

De toute manière je n’en ai qu’une. Je ne devrais pas me plaindre. Si seulement elle avait eu un garçon. Il y aurait continuité. [...] Combien de fois n’ai-je pas répété devant mon enfant — si au moins j’avais un fils, il aurait continué le nom de son père. Elle ne disait rien. Elle me regardait. [...] Il paraît que je n’aurais jamais dû lui dire une chose pareille. Je la niais. Je n’ai jamais dit un fils à sa place. Mais c’est ce qui on découlait. En toute logique. En tout cas c’est comme ça qu’elle l’a pris. (pp. 59–60) [At any rate I’ve only got one. I shouldn’t complain. If only she’d had a boy. There would have been continuity. [...] How many times have I repeated in front of my child — if at least I had a son, he’d have continued his father’s name. She’d say nothing. She’d look at me. [...] Apparently I should never have said such a thing to her. I was denying her. I never said a son instead of her. But that’s what followed. Logically. In any case that’s how she took it.]

In Fin et suite, Orner’s second text, the dichotomy of their radical difference as individual women and their proto-identity as mother and daughter is expressed in recursion to staccato prose: ‘On ne s’est jamais vraiment comprises. Toujours séparées. Trop différentes. Pas si différentes que ça. Enfin. C’est ma fille. Je suis sa mère. Rien de plus proche’ (p. 78) [We’ve never really understood each other. Always separated. Too different. Not so different as all that. Oh well. She’s my daughter. I’m her mother. Can’t get closer than that]. This laconic observation could serve as an epigraph to the entire text, condensing as it does the complexities and the painful pressure points of a mother–daughter relationship wounded by the Shoah and its affective fall-out. Yet Orner has hinted at efforts to breach that gulf between mother and daughter, commenting in her interview with Braester of the book’s title: ‘J’avais d’abord intitulé ces lettres à ma mère Suite et fin, mais lorsque j’en parlais, je disais toujours Fin et Suite. C’était ça le titre. Après la fin, il y avait une suite. L’écriture peut-être?’ [At first I’d entitled these letters to my mother Suite et fin, but when I talked about them, I always said Fin et Suite. That was the title. After the end, there’d be a sequel. Writing, maybe?] A tentative rapprochement of mother and daughter does indeed appear to be under way towards the end of Autobiographie de personne: ‘la dernière fois qu’elle est venue, elle était plus gentille. Plus conciliante’ (p. 113) [the last time she came, she was nicer. More conciliatory]. The daughter reacts positively to the mother’s claim that she is going to start writing stories instead of recounting her own experiences (p. 121); and sixteen pages to the end, the reconciliation seems to be gathering pace: ‘Elle est vraiment plus gentille. La dernière fois quand elle est venue, il fallait voir comment elle s’occupait de moi’ (p. 135) [She’s really much nicer. The last time she came, you should have seen how she looked after me]. Finally, the text ends on an image of mother and daughter together, the latter reading, correcting, and copying her mother’s text, which the reader is prompted to assume was later published as the text s/he is currently reading. Such an assumption reactivates the kind of suspension of disbelief also required by Paula Jacques’ text discussed above. What is certain is that within the singular diegetic economy of Orner’s first text, the conclusion to the narrative of mother–daughter separation is a final reconciliation and communion, achieved in writing and anamnesis. This ending will, however, be contradicted by the ending of Fin et suite, where Orner confirms that the book, Autobiographie de

234

New Sites of Conflict

personne, had in fact been authored by her and kept a secret from her mother (Fin et suite, pp. 118–19). So, the reconciliation and communion of mother and daughter at the close of Autobiographie de personne turn out by the close of Fin et suite to have been, if not illusory, then an admixture of truth, fantasy and wish-fulfilment. Once more, the ambiguities and tensions of the mother–daughter are underscored. A key to this aporetic template may be contained in an allegory which Orner introduces and glosses directly after revealing her deception over the ‘mother’s’ manuscript. The tale referred to, which may possibly be a part of Jewish folklore/legend, stresses the perenniality of mother–child tensions: Pourtant il y a cette histoire énigmatique que ma tante, ta sœur, m’a racontée dans laquelle un oiseau doit choisir entre sa mère et ses oisillons. Qui faire traverser le f leuve lorsque l’oiseau n’a de place sur ses ailes que pour ses propres enfants? L’oiseau laissera sa propre mère de l’autre côté du f leuve. Les enfants d’abord... Ne serait-ce pas une des raisons pour lesquelles on a toujours quelque chose à régler avec sa mère? Ta sœur prétendait que cette histoire faisait partie de nos sources. Je ne l’ai trouvée nulle part. Une légende peut-être. Ou alors elle a arrangé l’histoire à sa manière. (p. 119) [Yet there’s that puzzling story that my aunt, your sister, told me in which a bird has to choose between its mother and its f ledglings. Who should be helped to cross the river when the bird only has room on its wings for its own children? The bird will leave its own mother on the other side of the river. Children first... Could that not be why we always have some account to settle with our mother? Your sister used to claim that this story formed part of our origins. I haven’t found it anywhere. Maybe its a legend. Or else she adapted the story in her own way.]

A variant of the same story, however, has a significantly different outcome that symbolically incites care for the continuity of Jewry. Here, a mother bird saves only the f ledgling who promises to save not his mother but his own future children, just as the present mother will do for this one wise child. The tale is followed by the following observation: Et la continuité est assurée. A vrai dire dans cette version il s’agit d’un père et de ses enfants. Par ailleurs il est bien écrit qu’il faut honorer ses père et mère. S’en occuper, ne pas les délaisser. Ne serait-ce pas contradictoire? T’ai-je au moins honorée? Si peu. Peut-être dans un récit où tu as pu réaliser un rêve enfoui — écrire. (p. 120) [And continuity is assured. Truth be told in this version it was a father and his children. Moreover it’s written that you should honour your father and mother. Look after them, not abandon them. Couldn’t this be seen as contradictory? Have I at least honoured you? So little. Perhaps in a narrative where you were able to fulfil a hidden dream — to write.]

Have Orner’s tortuous inscriptions and reinscriptions of the authorship of Autobiographie de personne all been in a final effort to honour her mother in at least one respect, by conferring on her the status of writer? This is the ultimate, perhaps the only great gift the daughter has been able to offer — apart, of course, from a genuine but highly fraught love, which was compromised by an originary and

New Sites of Conflict

235

eventually reciprocal pattern of involuntary abandonment. Yet the ending of Fin et suite confers another, disinterested and generous gift: the suggestion that Orner owes her own genuine status as author to her mother: Mais pour finir, Gitele, j’aurais aimé te poser deux questions — quel effet ça fait d’écrire un livre que l’on n’a pas écrit? Et crois-tu qu’il suffise d’avoir eu une mère pour devenir écrivain? Sans doute pas. Mais au moins une mère comme toi. (p. 125) [But to finish, Gitele, I’d have liked to ask you two questions — what does it feel like to write a book that you haven’t written? And do you think it’s enough to have had a mother to become a writer? Probably not. But at least a mother like you.]

From trauma and conf lict is creativity thus born. The same might be said of all the texts examined in this monograph, as is attested by their very existence. Those texts turn Jewish women into fully enfranchised ‘People of the Book’. This is, to be sure, a different kind of ‘Book’ from the sacred texts historically reserved for Jewish men. As Sonia Sarah Lipsyc explains, L’étude la la Thora est l’un des commandements les plus importants de la tradition juive [...] Or, dans la loi et l’histoire juives, les femmes ont été dispensées, écartées et exclues, voire ‘interdites’ de ce commandement de l’étude de la Thora, en particulier du Talmud, jusqu’au début du XXe siècle.40 [Studying the Torah is one of the most important commandments of the Jewish tradition [...] Now, in Jewish law and history, right up to the start of the twentieth century, women have been exempted, distanced and excluded from this commandment to study the Torah, particularly the Talmud, indeed they’ve been forbidden to do so.]

Even in the twenty-first century, the situation in France is still little better. Lipsyc notes that in 2004, ‘en France, il n’existe pratiquement aucun cours de Talmud ouvert aux femmes dans les écoles juives, les synagogues ou les centres communautaires!’41 [in France, there are virtually no Talmud classes open to women in Jewish schools, synagogues or community centres!]. She footnotes a slight improvement by 2008, by which time the number of Talmudic classes open to women in France seemed to have reached the grand total of... three. That derisory number attests to the enduring exclusion of French (if not all francophone) Jewish women from the realm of sacred writings and their study. The writings appraised in this monograph, then, help to turn francophone Jewish women into fully enfranchised ‘People’ of a different and collective kind of ‘Book’: a literature largely secular in orientation, but one in which francophone Jewish women are finally finding their own voice, along with an audience for that voice. Notes to Chapter 4 1. The adjective ‘rouge-brun’ is used to describe a political party, a trades union or any other kind of organization of the left (‘rouge’) which implicitly or explicitly allies itself with an extreme right-wing (‘brun’) organization in order to wage a campaign of common concern to both. 2. Cairns, ‘Post-War Jewish Women’s Writing in French’, p. 34.

236

New Sites of Conflict

3. Sylvie Korcaz, Ma jolie Palestine (Paris: Denoël, 1972). 4. Georges Perec, W. ou le souvenir d’enfance (Paris: Denoël, 1975). 5. As Keith Reader has helpfully pointed out to me, the island dystopia is a not uncommon trope; see for example H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Anatole France’s L’Île des Pingouins (1908) and Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel (1940). 6. See Bruno Bettelheim, ‘Individual and Mass Behaviour in Extreme Situations’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 38 (1943), 417–52. 7. Rosette C. Lamont, ‘Korcaz, Sylvie. Ma Jolie Palestine’, The French Review, 47, 3 (1974), 659–60 (p. 660). 8. Lamont, p. 660. 9. Paula E. Hyman, The Jews of Modern France (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), p. 203. 10. This may be paralleled with Catherine Clément’s Cherche-Midi, pp. 91–92. 11. Rothberg, p. 197. 12. Esther Orner, Une année si ordinaire (Geneva: Éditions Metropolis, 2004). 13. Yaïr Auron, Les Juifs d’extrême gauche en mai 68 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998), p. 74. 14. Ania Francos, Les Palestiniens (Paris: Julliard, 1968). 15. Chochana Boukhobza, Un été à Jérusalem (Paris: Balland, 1986). 16. For further information on the topos of exile in Un été à Jérusalem, see Cairns, ‘Hyphenated Identity’. 17. Joseph Brami, ‘Chochana Boukhobza (1960– )’, trans. by Ralph Tarica, in Sartori and CottenetHage, eds, Daughters of Sarah, pp. 251–52 (p. 252). 18. Esther Orner, Autobiographie de Personne (Geneva: Éditions Metropolis, 1999). 19. The Wizo Prize was created in 1978 to promote French literary works of Jewish interest, and since 1986 it has also been awarded as an Israeli prize aimed at promoting contemporary Israeli literature translated into French. Orner won the prize in 2000 as an Israeli citizen. 20. Esther Orner, Fin et suite (Geneva: Éditions Metropolis, 2001). 21. Esther Orner, Petite biographie pour un rêve (Geneva: Éditions Metropolis, 2003). 22. See ‘Esther Orner — voix majeure dans la littérature israélienne francophone contemporaine’. Entretien de Marlena Braester avec Esther Orner’, 2004 . 23. Chochana Boukhobza, Sous les étoiles (Paris: Seuil, 2002), p. 185. 24. It seems likely that in this reference, Orner has confused Nathalie Sarraute with her daughter Claude Sarraute, a journalist for Le Monde. 25. The basic formula of this joke seems to be a locus classicus of Jewish humour, with slight variations: for instance, Joseph Joffo substitutes shoemakers for barbers in his highly successful Un sac de billes, p. 193. 26. I allude here to the figure of preterition as identified by Susan Suleiman: ‘I propose to call the paradoxical figure of affirmation and denial, of saying and not saying, by its rhetorical name: preterition. The emblematic form of preterition is a sentence of the type: “I will not speak about X,” where X is named and designated precisely as the thing that will not be said’. Susan Suleiman, Crises of Memory and the Second World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 206. 27. Carl G. Jung, The Symbolic Life: Miscellaneous Writings, trans. by R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), p. 91. 28. Jung, p. 658. 29. Klatzmann, p. 104. 30. Sarah Kofman, Rue Ordener, rue Labat (Paris: Galilée, 1994). 31. Solange Leibovici, ‘Remembering, acting-out, working through: the Case of Sarah Kofman’, Psyart Journal: an Online Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, 2004 . 32. Sarah Kofman, L’Enfance de l’art: une interprétation de l’esthétique freudienne (Paris: Payot, 1970). 33. See Cairns, Lesbian Desire in Post-1968 French Literature (New York, Ontario and Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2002), pp. 17–18. 34. Myriam Anissimov, Le Marida (Paris: Seuil, 2000). [First published by Julliard, 1982.]

New Sites of Conflict

237

35. Karine Tuil, Du sexe féminin (Paris: Plon, 2002). 36. Klatzmann, p. 102. 37. Eliette Abécassis, Un heureux événement (Paris: Albin Michel, 2005). 38. The eminent Jewish writer and philosopher Alain Finkielkraut constructs Jewish sons as effete victims of maternal over-nurturing. See his Le Juif imaginaire, p. 22. 39. Edgar Reichmann, ‘L’Écriture ou la mort: Autobiographie de Personne d’Esther Orner’, Le Monde des livres, 18 February 2000, p. iv. 40. Sonia Sarah Lipsyc, ‘L’Accès des femmes au Talmud: le point de vue traditionnel en question’, in Femmes et judaïsme aujourd’hui, ed. by Sonia Sarah Lipsyc (Paris: Éditions In Press, 2008), pp. 23–68 (p. 23). 41. Lipsyc, p. 25.

CONCLUSION v

The introductory chapter of this monograph stressed the primacy of the primary texts over the secondary texts it proposed to examine. Taking a different tack, this concluding chapter will concentrate on identifying the theoretical insights immanent in its predecessors. It is addressed specifically to the theory-oriented reader, but it also has significant political implications. The main foci of the following ref lections are conceptually proximate and in fact mutually enmeshed: memory, history, archive, and canon. The principal theoretical schema emerging from Chapter 1 was the allegedly aporetic relationship of atrocity to language. This is hardly original. However, four points merit articulation. First, the very presence of that schema in our primary corpus suggests the correspondence of francophone Jewish women’s writing with a larger paradigm. Second, that aporia is subverted by the very existence of the abundant language powerfully evoking trauma found in these primary texts. Third, in the same scriptorial breath these texts both avow and disavow that aporia: their tenor is one of paradox, of cognitive perversity. Fourth, in these literary testimonies the ‘devoir de mémoire’ [duty to remember] ultimately prevails over ethico-epistemological reservations about speaking the horrifically ‘unspeakable’. This is surely a welcome prevalence. For if pursued to their logical conclusion, such reservations could only result in the witness’s silence and thus in memorial death. A theoretical synthesis of Chapter 2 also needs to foreground memory, or rather postmemory, since this chapter examines writing of the second generation. Yet the hiatus between the (primary) memory of Chapter 1’s texts and the postmemory of Chapter 2’s is slighter than it might at first appear. From the evidence of the primary texts scrutizined in Chapter 2, the prevalence of strong bodily symptoms of trauma in postmemorial subjects could fruitfully be linked to Cathy Caruth’s Freudianbased precept that the original traumatic event was never fully experienced. It could be contended that with postmemory, the subject’s dissociation from the original traumatic event is bound to be greater than is the case with primary memory. This is because the subject of postmemory literally did not experience the event, was not a direct recipient of its shock, and so would arguably be all the more liable obsessively to (re)visit it via mnemonic f lailings. The findings of Chapter 2 invite the forging of an additional theoretical link, this time between postmemory and Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire. As Anna Whitehead states, [i]n his introductory essay, Nora clearly positions the lieux de mémoire as substitutes for an authentic and immediate collective memory be it individual or collective; they represent ‘the rituals of a ritual-less society; f leeting incursions of the sacred into a disenchanted world’.1

240

Conclusion

Even if they are inferior ‘substitutes’ for Nora, lieux de mémoire may be vindicated by other thinkers as useful mnemonic aids for the postmemorial subject, who by definition cannot have had ‘authentic and immediate’ memory. Of course, the use of lieux de mémoire as mnemonic aids would only be of relevance to a postmemorial subject seeking (consciously or unconsciously) to consolidate the parentally transmitted memories of, in our case, the trauma of the Shoah and/or exile. My point is that, where such conditions are fulfilled, mediation of memory through a particular site, be it literal or symbolic, may have more psychological fulcrum for s/he who has no personal, primary memory of the past event, experience or entity symbolized by that site. The concept of postmemory treated in Chapter 2 can in its turn be linked to an inf luential (and now densely overwritten) concept introduced in Chapter 3, and indeed mentioned by Nora in the above quotation: the concept of collective memory. The quotation below from the originator of that concept, Maurice Halbwachs, is highly pertinent in this respect. Durant le cours de ma vie, le groupe national dont je faisais partie a été la théâtre d’un certain nombre d’événements dont je dis que je me souviens, mais que je n’ai connus que par les journaux ou par les témoignages de ceux qui y furent directement mêlés. Ils occupent une place dans la mémoire de la nation. Mais je n’y ai pas assisté moi-même. Quand je les évoque, je suis obligé de m’en remettre entièrement à la mémoire des autres, qui ne vient pas ici compléter ou fortifier la mienne, mais qui est la source unique de ce que j’en veux répéter. Je ne les connais souvent pas mieux ni autrement que les événements anciens, qui se sont produits avant ma naissance. Je porte avec moi un baggage de souvenirs historiques, que je peux augmenter par la conversation ou par la lecture. Mais c’est là une mémoire empruntée et qui n’est pas la mienne.2 [During my life, my national society has been theater for a number of events that I say I ‘remember’, events that I know about only from newspapers or the testimony of those involved. These events occupy a place in the memory of the nation, but I myself did not witness them. In recalling them, I must rely entirely upon the memory of others, a memory that comes, not as corroborator or completer of my own, but as the very source of what I wish to repeat. I often know such events no better nor in any other manner than I know historical events that occurred before I was born. I carry a baggage load of historical remembrances that I can increase through conversation and reading. But it remains a borrowed memory, not my own.]3

Like the collective memory adumbrated here, postmemory is essentially vicarious memory. To that extent they are similar. There is, however, one apodeictic difference between them: unlike the subject of collective memory, the subject of postmemory experiences — illusorily — what is in effect Halbwachs’ ‘borrowed memory’ as her or his own. Chapter 4 also contributes, although more tangentially, to the memory nexus which has been unfolding in the previous three chapters. Two of the three principal foci of Chapter 4, namely Israel and the Jewish mother, could also be construed as lieux de mémoire in the sense of topoi that are fundamental to traditional Jewish memory. In this hermeneutic, Israel is a real, physical place that embodies ancestral

Conclusion

241

Jewish memory of origins. In contrast, the Jewish mother is a symbolic site that is equally, albeit differently, fundamental to memory of Jewish origins (because in traditional Jewish law the mother rather than the father is the vector through which Jewishness is passed on). Both topoi elicit highly ambivalent responses from Jews, ranging from adoration to execration, sacralization to desecration. With respect to Israel, that ambivalence is consummately illustrated in a remark by Esther Orner previously cited in Chapter 4: ‘Et comme disait un ami, lorsqu’il est question de ce pays on en parle comme d’une femme. Elle m’a fait ceci ou cela. Ce n’est effectivement pas une terre comme les autres. Il y aurait tant à dire...’4 [And as a friend used to say, when it comes to this country we talk about it as if it were a woman. She did this or that to me. It really isn’t a land like others. There’s so much that could be said...]. Israel is here figured as woman; and woman has historically been the predominant synecdoche for mother (which is not to suggest that all actual as opposed to symbolic women are, or should be, mothers). Recall that until the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, Jewry, an ethnico-religious group defined through the site of the mother, had not had the luxury of a fixed physical abode, of national identity or of the psychological securities that such topographical and identitarian fixings can seem to offer. In response, Jews have historically preserved their identity through the maternal, hence through the female, and preserved both their memory and the identity it produces through intense investment in written (sacred) texts, hence their reputation as the People of the Book. So, the present book is a book about the female, often neglected half of the People of the Book, and about the construction of a female francophone memory for that people. In my Introduction, I posited the ideality of my book as a figurative sound archive for previously unheard or silenced voices. In these final ruminations I will pursue that metaphor of archive, but in another direction, because here the archive will feature in opposition to the canon. In this opposition I follow the lead of Aleida Assmann: ‘I will refer to the actively circulated memory that keeps the past present as the canon and the passively stored memory that preserves the past past as the archive’.5 As Schwartz and Cook observe, ‘[c]ultural theorists, most notably Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, see “the archive” as a central metaphorical construct upon which to fashion their perspectives on human knowledge, memory, and power, and a quest for justice’.6 I evidently converge with Foucault and Derrida in using the word ‘archive’ metaphorically, but equally evidently I diverge from them in my particular variant on that metaphorical usage. For Foucault, ‘[l]’archive, c’est d’abord la loi de ce qui peut être dit, le système qui régit l’apparition des énoncés comme événements singuliers’7 [[t]he archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events].8 His closest approach to a concise definition is the following: ‘[c]’est le système général de la formation et de la transformation des énoncés’9 [[i]t is the general system of the formation and transformation of statements].10 Foucault’s vision of the archive, which in some respects closely resembles his concept of the episteme,11 obviously has very little to do with my own. With Derrida, there is much more potential intersection. Granted, this intersection is not easy to map out precisely, given the multifaceted,

242

Conclusion

mercurial way in which Derrida plays with the trope of the archive. Indeed, his Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne (1995)12 repeatedly insists on the indeterminacy of the concept: ‘Nous n’avons pas de concept, seulement une impression, une série d’impressions associées à ce mot’13 [We have no concept, only an impression, a series of impressions associated with a word];14 ‘Rien n’est moins sûr, rien n’est moins clair aujourd’hui que le mot d’archive’15 [Nothing is less reliable, nothing is less clear today than the word ‘archive’].16 Yet despite Derrida’s characteristic refusal to assign a clear, singular meaning to the concept, Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne is of particular relevance for the present study because many of its deployments of the word ‘archive’ have especially strong resonances for Jews. Inter alia, archive becomes metaphor for memory, trace, heritage,17 and return to origin.18 In the most specifically Jewish permutation of all, one form of archive turns out to be circumcision: ‘l’archive singulière nommée “circoncision” ’19 [the singular archive named ‘circumcision’].20 Circumcision is, of course, reserved for Jewish men alone. Derrida himself draws attention to the exclusion of Jewish women from another of his metaphorical archives: ‘phylactères, ces archives de peau ou de parchemin couverts d’écriture que les Juifs, là encore, et non les Juives, portent au plus près du corps’21 [phylacteries, those archives of skin or parchment covered with writing that Jewish men, here too, and not Jewish women, carry close to their body].22 Such exclusion of women from figurative archives based on signs of the body is ironic given Western philosophy’s binaristic thinking (most famously critiqued by Derrida himself ), which has equated woman with body and man with mind. (It is also ironic given that the association of writing and the body — in the case of phylactery-wearing, the strips of parchment inscribed with quotations from the Hebrew Scriptures worn by Jewish men in small boxes on the forehead and the left arm during morning worship — is an association that has been aesthetically and politically appropriated by women writers via the practice of écriture féminine specifically.) My own figurative invocation of the archive contests that gendered imbalance. I will use the word archive as metaphor for the totality of texts held in a state of latent functionality as vehicles of francophone Jewish women’s cultural memory. In that usage, I implicitly contrast this figurative archive with the totality of texts which, by virtue of their canonical status, are actively functional vehicles of more mainstream cultural memory, be it francophone, Jewish, or androcentric cultural memory. As Assmann explains, [e]lements of the canon can also recede into the archive, while elements of the archive may be recovered and reclaimed for the canon. It is exactly this interdependence of the different realms and functions that creates the dynamics of cultural memory and keeps its energy f lowing.23

My Introduction contended that francophone female Jewish writers are doubly marginalized: largely ignored by their own community because of their gender, and by the international intellectual and academic community because of their Jewishness, with the latter often being all too easily if not always consciously confused with unpopular Israeli politics. Given that the texts in my figurative archive are written by a social group that is underrepresented, it is worth citing John Ridener’s comment regarding the postmodern ‘Questioning paradigm’ (a paradigm

Conclusion

243

which views ‘archival theory as a theory of communication. [...] Within each step of communication lies the possibility for interpretation between transmission and reception of information’).24 According to Ridener, this Questioning paradigm ‘derives its motivation, in part, from the study of identity politics and diversity, both of which came to the forefront of academic study in the 1980s and 1990s’. 25 As Ridener adds, ‘[i]n fact, many of the questions that are asked of the archive within the Questioning paradigm are about diversity and representation in the archive’.26 To be sure, the metaphoricity of my trope lies in the fact that literal archives are carefully chosen collections of records or documents which are generally nonliterary in nature, and are usually understood as broadly ‘historical’ documents which may contribute to the shaping of collective memory, whereas my primary corpus consists in literary texts not brought together in any material collection. In contrast to the archive stands the canon, which is indissociable from power. While Assmann conceives of archive and canon as (differentiated) repositories of cultural memory, we should note that literature is a key bearer of cultural memory. So it is no category error to refer to archive and canon in terms of literature as well as in terms of memory — or indeed in terms of history, which has an intimate relationship with memory (although it should not be confused with it). In fact all three of these phenomena — literature, (cultural) memory, and history — form the ontology, be it actual or potential, of the primary texts analysed in this monograph. But I would like now to take the first of these phenomena, literature, and to return to the question of the power which is inextricably bound up with the canon. I fully share Antonio Gramsci’s scepticism about the literary canon, based on his belief that the intellectuals who are its architects are never free from the inf luence of the hegemonic social group — hence his disdain for ‘that social utopia by which the intellectuals think of themselves as “independent”, autonomous, endowed with a character of their own’.27 Even Harold Bloom, a staunch defender of ‘the Western Canon’, concedes — or perhaps more accurately, rejoices — that ‘[a]ll canons, including our currently fashionable counter-canons, are elitist’.28 While Bloom insists that the sole basis of this elitism is aesthetic value, even he cannot, and moreover would probably not wish to, deny that canon formation rests on the precept of exclusion. While the Introduction to this monograph posited the double exclusion of Jewish women writers, in neither case was that exclusion due to a lack of aesthetic merit. Not all of the forty-five primary texts treated in my study are of great aesthetic merit, but a sizeable number of them are. Further, all forty-five leave — to use the terminology of Jakob Burckhardt — valuable historico-memorial ‘traces’, as opposed to ‘messages’, within counter-hegemonic materials forming a figurative archive. As Assmann has observed: It is the task of others such as the academic researcher or the artist to examine the contents of the archive and to reclaim the information by framing it within a new context. The archive, therefore, can be described as a space that is located on the border between forgetting and remembering; its materials are preserved in a state of latency, in a space of intermediary storage (Zwischenspeicher). Thus, the institution of the archive is part of cultural memory in the passive dimension of preservation. It stores materials in the intermediary state of ‘no longer’ and ‘not yet,’ deprived of their old existence and waiting for a new one.29

244

Conclusion

None of the primary texts treated in this monograph has achieved canonical status within the cultural field of French literature. Leaving aside the question of how just or unjust that state of affairs may be, I aver that all of these texts have the potential to contribute to both a collective memory for and a history of twentieth- and twenty-first-century French-speaking Jews. Fully aware of the need to distinguish between memory and history, I nonetheless believe that memory, in the form of testimony, and for our purposes literary testimony, be it of the first, second, or third generation, can make a valuable contribution to historiography. At this juncture it would be intellectually dishonest not to acknowledge possible tensions between literature, memory, and historiography. The anglophone Jewish historian Yosef Yerushalmi contends that ‘Jewish historiography cannot replace an eroded group memory which, as we have seen throughout, never depended on historians in the first place’.30 He also believes that ‘[t]he very image of the historian in modern literature is, by and large, a tarnished one’.31 In negative symmetry with that second statement is the suspicion about individual literary testimony manifested by many historians, summed up by the francophone Jewish historian Annette Wieviorka: ‘les historiens ont peu écrit à partir des témoignages des survivants du génocide, envers lesquels ils ont manifesté beaucoup de méfiance’32 [historians have not written much that is based on testimony from genocide survivors, for whom they have shown a good deal of mistrust]. Notwithstanding these possible tensions, it seems to me that literary testimony of the sort found in our primary texts can be a useful tool alongside others in the historian’s resources, provided it is treated as an individual perspective on collective trauma (in our case, the Shoah and enforced exile following French decolonization). Similarly, memory and history need not function antagonistically; ideally, they would both inform and benefit from each other. The metaphorical construct of the archive is eminently apt for ‘the People of the Book’. My aim in taking these primary texts out of the archives has not been merely to insert them into the canon of ‘great’ French literature, or even into a counter-canon of, for instance, French-language Jewish women writers. Even the less particularized counter-canon of French-language women writers is as yet recognized largely in intellectual circuits of power outside France, for the French university system, and even to some extent the French literary establishment, tends in true Republican universalist spirit to resist any hint of identity politics. My goal in this study has been, rather, to facilitate due recognition of these francophone Jewish women writers as a previously occluded part of Jewish and gendered cultural memory at a transnational, albeit francophone level. In making possible transferences between the canon and the archive of such collective memory, we are in turn rendering it a more autonoetic — a more self-aware and self-ref lexive33 — form of memory. To that extent, it becomes a more fully Jewish memory. Notes to the Conclusion 1. Whitehead, Memory, p. 143. 2. Halbwachs, La Mémoire collective, pp. 36–37. 3. Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, p. 51.

Conclusion

245

4. Orner, Une année si ordinaire, p. 43. 5. Aleida Assmann, ‘Canon and Archive’, in Erll and Nünning, eds, Cultural Memory Studies, pp. 97–107 (p. 98). 6. J. M. Schwartz and T. Cook, ‘Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory’, Archival Science, 2 (2002), 1–19 (p. 4). 7. Michel Foucault, L’Archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), p. 170 (author’s emphasis). 8. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. by A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock, 1972), p. 128. 9. Foucault, L’Archéologie du savoir, p. 171. 10. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 130. 11. ‘I would define the episteme retrospectively as the strategic apparatus which permits of separating out from among all the statements which are possible those that will be acceptable within, I won’t say a scientific theory, but a field of scientificity, and which it is possible to say are true or false.’ Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. and trans. by C. Gordon et al. (Brighton: Harvester Press; Harlow: Pearson Education, 1980), p. 197. 12. Jacques Derrida, Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne (Paris: Galilée, 1995). 13. Derrida, Mal d’archive, p. 51. 14. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. by Eric Prenowitz (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 29. 15. Derrida, Mal d’archive, p. 141. 16. Derrida, Archive Fever, p. 90. 17. ‘La judéité [...] peut survivre au judaïsme. Elle peut lui survivre comme héritage, c’est-à-dire, en quelque sorte, non sans archive’ (Derrida, Mal d’archive, p. 115; author’s emphasis) [ Jewishness [...] can survive Judaism. It can survive it as a heritage, which is to say, in a sense, not without archive] (Derrida, Archive Fever, p. 72). 18. ‘un désir compulsif, répétitif et nostalgique, un désir irrépressible de retour à l’origine, un mal du pays, une nostalgie du retour au lieu le plus archaïque du commencement absolu’ (Derrida, Mal d’archive, p. 142) [a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement] (Derrida, Archive Fever, p. 91). 19. Derrida, Mal d’archive, p. 69. 20. Derrida, Archive Fever, p. 42. 21. Derrida, Mal d’archive, p. 69. 22. Derrida, Archive Fever, p. 42. 23. Assmann, pp. 104–05. 24. John Ridener, From Polders to Postmodernism: A Concise History of Archival Theory (Duluth, MN: Litwin Books, 2009), p. 117. 25. Ridener, p. 156. 26. Ridener, p. 156. 27. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), p. 8. 28. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and Schools of the Ages (New York: Riverhead Books, 1994), p. 35. 29. Assmann, p. 103. 30. Yerushalmi, p. 94. 31. Yerushalmi, p. 88. 32. Annette Wieviorka, L’Ère du témoin (Paris, Plon, 1998), p. 14. 33. Harald Welzer, ‘Communicative Memory’, in Erll and Nünning, pp. 285–98 (p. 289).

BIBLIOGRAPHY v Section 1 lists primary texts discussed in this study; sections 2 to 5 list further primary texts germane to Chapters 1 to 4 but not discussed in them. Section 6 lists other creative works cited which do not form part of the corpus of Jewish women’s writing in French, but which are discussed as points of comparison; finally, section 7 lists secondary texts. Unless otherwise stated, place of publication is Paris. §1. Corpus of primary texts Abécassis, Eliette, Un heureux événement (Albin Michel, 2005) Amar, Marlène, La Femme sans tête (Gallimard, 1993) —— Des gens infréquentables (Gallimard, 1996) Anissimov, Myriam, Dans la plus stricte intimité (Seuil, 1992) —— L’Homme rouge des Tuileries ( Julliard, 1979) —— Le Marida (Paris: Seuil, 2000) [first published by Julliard, 1982] —— Rue de nuit ( Julliard, 1977) —— Sa Majesté la mort (Seuil, 1999) —— La Soie et les cendres (Payot, 1989) Arban, Dominique, La Cité d’injustice ( Julliard, 1945) Bernfeld, Karin, Les Portes de l’espérance (Flammarion, 2003) Boukhobza, Chochana, Un été à Jérusalem (Balland, 1986) —— Pour l’amour du père (Seuil, 1996) —— Sous les étoiles (Seuil, 2002) Christophe, Francine, Après les camps, la vie (L’Harmattan, 2001) —— Une petite fille privilégiée (L’Harmattan, 1996) Clément, Catherine, Cherche-Midi (Stock, 2000) Darmon, Paule, Baisse les yeux, Sarah (Grasset, 1980) Finaly, Patricia, Le Gai Ghetto (Gallimard, 1970) Fitoussi, Annie, La Mémoire folle de Mouchi Rabbinou (Mazarine, 1985) Francos, Ania, Les Palestiniens ( Julliard, 1968) —— Sauve-toi, Lola! (Barrault, 1983) Frydman, Sarah, La Marche des vivants (Albin Michel, 1997) Geftman, Rina, Guetteurs d’aurore (Cerf, 1985) Gille, Elisabeth, Le Mirador (Presses de la Renaissance, 1992) —— Un paysage de cendres (Seuil, 1996) Hassan, Yaël, Souviens-toi Leah! (Eden, 2004) Jacques, Paula, Gilda Stambouli souffre et se plaint (Mercure de France, 2002) Kofman, Sarah, Rue Ordener, rue Labat (Galilée, 1994) Korcaz, Sylvie, Ma jolie Palestine (Denoël, 1972) Langfus, Anna, Les Bagages de sable (Gallimard, 1962) —— Le Sel et le soufre (Gallimard, 1960) Maous, Françoise, Coma Auschwitz, no. A.5553 (Le Comptoir, 1996) Moati, Nine, La Passagère sans étoile (Seuil, 1989) Novac, Ana, Les Beaux Jours de ma jeunesse (Gallimard, 1996) [first published by Julliard, 1968]

Bibliography

247

Orner, Esther, Une année si ordinaire (Geneva: Éditions Metropolis, 2004) —— Autobiographie de Personne (Geneva: Éditions Metropolis, 1999) —— Fin et suite (Geneva: Éditions Metropolis, 2001) —— Petite biographie pour un rêve (Geneva: Éditions Metropolis, 2003) Rabinovitch, Anne, Les Étangs de Ville-d’Avray (Actes Sud, 1987) Rubinstein, Katia, Mémoire illettrée d’une fillette d’Afrique du Nord à l’époque coloniale (Stock, 1979) Silbert, Reine, Il faut toujours quitter la Pologne (Olivier Orban, 1980) Stéphan, Yveline, Élise B (Éditions de l’Aube, 1998) Tuil, Karine, Douce France (Grasset, 2007) —— Du sexe féminin (Plon, 2002)

§2. Further primary texts germane to Chapter 1 Boukhobza, Chochana, Les Herbes amères (Balland, 1989) Desarthe, Agnès, Les Peurs de conception (L’École des loisirs, 1992) Elgey, Georgette, La Fenêtre ouverte (Fayard, 1973) Fitoussi, Annie, La Mémoire folle de Mouchi Rabbinou (Mazarine, 1985) Forrester, Viviane, Ce soir, après la guerre (Fayard, 1997) Garnier, Dominique, Nice, pour mémoire (Seuil, 1980) Hertz, Julienne, L’Étoile (Calmann Lévy, 1960) Kahn, Annette, Robert et Jeanne sous l’Occupation (Payot, 1990) Kofman, Sarah, Rue Ordener, rue Labat (Galilée, 1994) Lamblin, Bianca, Mémoires d’une jeune fille dérangée (Balland, 1993) Malraux, Clara, Le Bruit de nos pas, vols 5–6 (Grasset, 1973 and 1979) Mesnil-Amar, Jacqueline, Ceux qui ne dormaient pas (Éditions de Minuit, 1957) Moati, Nine, Les Belles de Tunis (Seuil, 1984) —— L’Orientale (Seuil, 1985) —— La Passagère sans étoile (Seuil, 1989) Muller, Annette, La Petite Fille du Vel d’hiv (Denoël, 1991) Piat, Colette, Adieu Moïse (Belfond Pierre, 1991) Silbert, Reine, Il faut toujours quitter la Pologne (Olivier Orban, 1980) Torrès, Téreska, Les Années anglaises: journal intime de guerre, 1939–1945 (Seuil, 1981) —— Le Choix: mémoires à trois voix (Desclée de Brouwer, 2002) Traube, Anna, Evadée du Vel’ d’hiv (Le Manuscrit, 2006)

§3. Further primary texts germane to Chapter 2 Anissimov, Myriam, Comment va Rachel? (Denoël, 1973) —— Le Marida ( Julliard, 1982) —— Le Resquise (Denoël, 1975) —— Vie et mort de Samuel Rozowski (Denoël, 2007) Axelrad, Catherine, La Varsovienne (Gallimard, 1990) —— Vies et morts d’Esther (Gallimard, 1993) Boukhobza, Chochana, Le Cri (Balland, 1987) Dana, Jacqueline, Le Regard de Myriam (Seuil, 1981) Frydman, Sarah, La Marche des vivants (Albin Michel, 1997) Garnier, Dominique, J’attendrai la nuit et le jour (Seuil, 1988) Garrel, Nadèjda, Ils reviennent (Mercure de France, 2002) Golse, Nickie, Dans le jardin de mon père (Grasset, 1980)

248

Bibliography

Halimi, Gisèle, Une embellie perdue (Gallimard, 1994) Kahn, Annette, Personne ne voudra nous croire (Payot, 1991) Kahn, Michèle, Le Grand Dragon (Bibliophane-Daniel Radford, 2002) Rabinovitch, Anne, Comme si les hommes étaient partis en voyage (L’Harmattan, 1995) Wajsbrot, Cécile, La Trahison (Zulma, 2005)

§4. Further primary texts germane to Chapter 3 Anissimov, Myriam, Vie et mort de Samuel Rozowski (Denoël, 2007) Cohen, Annie, Le Marabout de Blida (Actes du Sud, 1996) Fitoussi, Annie, La Mémoire folle de Mouchi Rabbinou (Mazarine, 1985) Frydman, Sarah, La Marche des vivants (Albin Michel, 1997) Langfus, Anna, Les Bagages de sable (Gallimard, 1962) Maritain, Raïssa, Les Grandes Amitiés (Desclée de Brouwer, 1949) —— Journal de Raïssa (Desclée de Brouwer, 1962) —— Lettre de nuit, La Vie donnée (Desclée de Brouwer, 1939) Rubinstein, Katia, Mémoire illettrée d’une fillette d’Afrique du Nord à l’époque coloniale (Stock, 1979)

§5. Further primary texts germane to Chapter 4 Abecassis, Eliette, La Répudiée (Albin Michel, 2000) Anissimov, Myriam, La Soie et les cendres (Payot, 1989) Bernfeld, Karin, Les Portes de l’espérance (Flammarion, 2003) Boukhobza, Chochana, Les Herbes amères (Balland, 1989) Finaly, Patricia, Le Gai Ghetto (Gallimard, 1970) Fitoussi, Annie, La Mémoire folle de Mouchi Rabbinou (Mazarine, 1985) Gille, Elisabeth, Le Mirador (Stock, 1992) Gervais-Marx, Danièle, La Ligne de démarcation (Hachette Littératures, 2004) Hassan, Yaël, Souviens-toi Leah! (Eden, 2004) Rabinovitch, Anne, Les Étangs de Ville-d’Avray (Actes Sud, 1987)

§6. Other creative works cited Antelme, Robert, L’Espèce humaine (Gallimard, 2004) [first published by R. Marin, 1949] Cixous, Hélène, La Venue à l’écriture (Christian Bourgois, 1976) —— Le Jour où je n’étais pas là (Galilée, 2000) Delbo, Charlotte, Aucun de nous ne reviendra (Geneva: Gonthier, 1965) Grant, Linda, The Clothes on their Backs (London: Virago, 2008) Guéno, Jean-Pierre, ed., Paroles d’étoiles (Librio and Radio-France, 2002) Joffo, Joseph, Un sac de billes (Édition spéciale, 1973) Kluger, Ruth, Landscapes of Memory: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (London: Blooms­ bury, 2003) [first published by The Feminist Press, 2001] Morhange-Bégué, Claude, Chamberet, trans. by Austryn Wainhouse (Marlboro, VT: Marlboro Press, 1987) Némirovsky, Irène, Suite française (Denoël, 2004) Perec, Georges, W. ou le souvenir d’enfance (Denoël, 1975) Vercors, Le Silence de la mer (Minuit, 1942) Wiesel, Elie, Entre deux soleils (Éditions du Seuil, 1970)

Bibliography

249

§7. Secondary texts Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok, L’Ecorce et le noyau (Flammarion, 1987) Adorno, Theodor, ‘Commitment’, in Theodor Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics, trans. by Francis McDonagh (London: Verso, 1977), pp. 177–95 —— Negative Dialectics, trans. by E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1966) Anzaldúa, Gloria, Borderlands/La Frontera, the New Mestiza (San Francisco, CA: Spinsters/ Aunt Lute, 1987) Arcens, Bénédicte, ‘Interview: Karine Tuil’, 22 January 2007 Assmann, Aleida, ‘Canon and Archive’, in Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, ed. by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), pp. 97–107 Auron, Yaïr, Les Juifs d’extrême gauche en mai 68 (Albin Michel, 1998) Barland, Jean-Rémi, ‘Les Témoins de la barbarie nazie’, Lire, September 1999, p. 67 Barocas, H., and C. Barocas, ‘Wounds of the Fathers: The Next Generation of Holocaust Victims’, International Review of Psychoanalysis, 6 (1979), 331–40 Barthes, Roland, La Chambre claire: note sur la photographie (Gallimard, 1980) —— Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. by Richard Howard (London: Vin­ tage, 1993) Baskin, Judith R., ed., Women of the Word: Jewish Women and Jewish Writing (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1994) Bensimon-Donath, Doris, L’Intégration des Juifs nord-africains en France (Mouton, 1971) Bergson, Henri, Matière et mémoire: essai sur la relation du corps à l’esprit (F. Alcan, 1896) —— Matter and Memory, trans. by N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991) Bettelheim, Bruno, ‘Individual and Mass Behaviour in Extreme Situations’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 38 (1943), 417–52 Bhabha, Homi, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994) Bitton, Michèle, Poétesses et lettrées juives: une mémoire éclipsée (Publisud, 1999) Bloom, Harold, The Western Canon: The Books and Schools of the Ages (New York: Riverhead Books, 1994) Bono, Paola, and Jasmina Lukic, ‘Editorial: Writing Across the Borders’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, 16, 4 (2009), 291–99 Braester, Marlena, ‘Esther Orner — voix majeure dans la littérature israélienne francophone contemporaine’, 2004 Brami, Joseph, ‘Chochana Boukhobza (1960– )’, trans. by Ralph Tarica, in Daughters of Sarah: Anthology of Jewish Women’s Writing in French, ed. by Eva Martin Sartori and Madeleine Cottenet-Hage (Teaneck, NJ: Holmes & Meier, 2006), pp. 251–52 Brauner, David, Post-War Jewish Fiction: Ambivalence, Self-Explanation and Transatlantic Connections (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001) Braziel, Jana Evans, and Anita Mannur, ‘Nation, Migration, Globalization: Points of Contention in Diaspora Studies’, in Theorizing Diaspora, ed. by Jana Evans (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 1–22 Brison, Danièle, ‘Une enfance saccagée’, Magazine littéraire, September 1996, pp. 68–69 Brodzki, Bella, ‘Trauma Inherited, Trauma Reclaimed: Chamberet: Recollections from an Ordinary Childhood’, The Yale Journal of Criticism, 14, 1 (2001), 155–67 Burke, Peter, Cultural Hybridity (Cambridge: Polity, 2009) Cairns, Lucille, ‘Hyphenated Identity: Tunisian-French-Jewish-Female Writers’, CELAAN, 7,1/2 (2008), 58–69

250

Bibliography

—— Lesbian Desire in Post-1968 French Literature (New York, Ontario and Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2002) —— ‘ “La Mémoire de la Shoah”: The Contentious Case of Soazig Aaron’s Le Non de Klara’, French Studies, 64, 4 (2010), 438–50 —— ‘Post-War Jewish Women’s Writing in French’, Women in French Studies, 16 (2008), 24–38 —— ‘Remembering the Jewish Magrebi Home in Paule Darmon’s Baisse Les Yeux, Sarah’, in Memories of Home: Generations and Genealogies in African Writing, ed. by Yianna Liatsos (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2010) Caruth, Cathy, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) Cixous, Hélène, Portrait de Jacques Derrida en jeune saint juif (Galilée, 2001) Cory, Mark, ‘Comedic Distance in Holocaust Literature’, Journal of American Culture, 18, 1 (1995), 35–40 Cottenet-Hage, Madeleine, ‘Anna Langfus (1920–1966)’, in Sartori and CottenetHage, eds, Daughters of Sarah, pp. 95–98 Critchley, Simon, ‘Introduction’, in The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, ed. by Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 1–32 Davis, Colin, ‘Charlotte Delbo’s Ghosts’, in French Studies, 59, 1 ( January 2005), 9–15 Delpech, Jeanine, ‘Prix Goncourt. Anna Langfus: une voix coléreuse. Une interview par Jeanine Delpech’, Les Nouvelles littéraires, 22 November 1962, pp. 6–7 Derrida, Jacques, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. by Eric Prenowitz (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995) —— Cinders, trans. by Ned Lukacher (Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press, 1991) —— Feu la cendre (Des Femmes, 1991) —— Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne (Galilée, 1995) —— Poétique et politique du témoignage (L’Herne, 2005) —— Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, trans. by Outi Pasanen, ed. by Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005) —— Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. by Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994) —— Spectres de Marx (Galilée, 1993) Des Pres, Terrence, ‘The Dreaming Back’, Centerpoint: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, 4, 1, 13 (1980), 13–18 —— ‘Holocaust Laughter?’, in Writing and the Holocaust, ed. by Berel Lang (New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1988), pp. 216–33 Eilkan, Mark, ‘Le Sentiment “minoritaire” et identitaire dans la création romanesque de Myriam Anissimov’, Colloquium Helveticum: Cahiers suisses de littérature comparée, 22 (1995), 41–53 Erll, Astrid, and Ansgar Nünning, eds, Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008) Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub, eds, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992) Fine, Ellen S., ‘Le Témoin comme romancier: Anna Langfus et le problème de la distance’, Pardès, 17 (1993), 93–109 —— ‘Transmission of Memory: The Post-Holocaust Generation in the Diaspora’, in Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory after Auschwitz, ed. by Efraim Sicher (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), pp. 185–200 Finkielkraut, Alain, Le Juif imaginaire (Seuil, 1980) —— The Imaginary Jew, trans. by Kevin O’Neill and David Suchoff (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994)

Bibliography

251

Foucault, Michel, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. by A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock, 1972) —— L’Archéologie du savoir (Gallimard, 1969) —— Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. and trans. by C. Gordon et al. (Brighton: Harvester Press; Harlow: Pearson Education, 1980) Fresco, Nadine, ‘Remembering the Unknown’, International Review of Psychoanalysis, 11 (1984), 417–27 [first published as ‘La Diaspora des cendres’, Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse, 24 (1981), 205–20] Fuchs, Anne, Phantoms of War in Contemporary German Literature, Films and Discourse: The Politics of Memory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) Gilman, Sander, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991) Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971) Gurewitsch, Bonnie, Mothers, Sisters, Resisters: Oral Histories of Women Who Survived the Holocaust (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999) Haft, Cynthia, The Theme of Nazi Concentration Camps in French Literature (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1973) Halbwachs, Maurice, Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire (Alcan, 1925) —— La Mémoire collective (Presses universitaires de France, 1950) —— The Collective Memory, trans. by Francis J. Ditter and Vida Yazdi Ditter (New York: Harper and Row, 1980) Hass, Aaron, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Second Generation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996) Heinemann, Marlene E., Gender and Destiny: Woman Writers and the Holocaust (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986) Henke, Suzettte A., Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life-Writing (London: Macmillan, 1998) Hirsch, Marianne, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1997) —— ‘Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory’, The Yale Journal of Criticism, 14, 1 (2001), 5–37 Hirsch, Marianne, and Leo Spitzer, ‘The Witness in the Archive: Holocaust Studies/ Memory Studies’, Memory Studies, 2, 2 (2009), 151–70 Hœrni, Bernard, 16 May 2002 Horn, Pierre, Modern Jewish Writers of France (Lewiston, Queenston and Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1997) Horowitz, Sara R, ‘Memory and Testimony of Women Survivors of Nazi Genocide’, in Women of the Word: Jewish Women and Jewish Writing, ed. by Judith R. Baskin (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1994), pp. 258–82 Hutton, Margaret-Anne, Testimony From the Nazi Camps: French Women’s Voices (London and New York: Routledge, 2005) Huyssen, Andreas, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York and London: Routledge, 1995) Hyman, Paula E, The Jews of Modern France (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998) Ireland, Susan, ‘Writing the Body in Marlène Amar’s La Femme sans tête’, French Review, 71, 3 (1998), 454–67 Jankélévitch, Vladimir, L’Imprescriptible: Pardonner? Dans l’honneur et la dignité (Seuil, 1986) Jung, Carl G, The Symbolic Life: Miscellaneous Writings, trans. by R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977)

252

Bibliography

Kansteiner, Wulf, ‘Genealogy of a Category Mistake: A Critical Intellectual History of the Cultural Trauma Metaphor’, Rethinking History, 8, 2 (2004), 193–221 Kansteiner, Wulf, and Harald Weilnböck, ‘Against the Concept of Cultural Trauma (or How I Learned to Love the Suffering of Others without the Help of Psychotherapy)’, Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, ed. by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), pp. 229–40 Kaplan, Marion, Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dignity and Despair (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) Klatzmann, Joseph, L’Humour juif (Presses universitaires de France, 1998) Kofman, Sarah, L’Enfance de l’art: une interprétation de l’esthétique freudienne (Payot, 1970) Kraenker, Sabine ‘Des écrivains à l’identité hybride, représentants d’une littératuremonde d’aujourd’hui et de demain: Karin Bernfeld, Nina Bouraoui, Assia Djebar, Amin Malouf, Wajdi Mouawad’, Synergies Pays Riverains de la Baltique, 6 (2009), 219–27 LaCapra, Dominick, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1998) —— Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001) Laloum, Jean, ‘La Création des maisons d’enfants: l’exemple de la commission centrale de l’enfance auprès de l’UJRE’, Pardès, 16 (1992), 247–70 Lamont, Rosette C., ‘Korcaz, Sylvie. Ma Jolie Palestine’, The French Review, 47, 3 (1974), 659–60 Landsberg, Alison, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004) Langfus, Anna, ‘Entretien: Anna Langfus’, La Nouvelle Critique, June 1965, 45–51 —— ‘Prix Goncourt. Anna Langfus : une voix coléreuse. Une interview par Jeanine Delpech’, Les Nouvelles littéraires, 22 November 1962, 6–7 Lappin, Adah, ‘Front Nightmare to Fairy Tales’, The Reconstructionist, 31 May 1963 Laub, Dori, ‘Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening’, in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, ed. by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 57–74 Lazare, Lucien, ‘La Résistance a choisi de se taire’, L’Arche, September 2009, pp. 134–37 Lebrun, Jean-Claude, ‘Paula Jacques: un perpétuel exil’, L’Humanité, 23 May 2002, p. 19 Leibovici, Solange, ‘Remembering, acting-out, working through: The Case of Sarah Kofman’, Psyart Journal: An Online Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, 2004

Lejeune, Philippe, L’Autobiographie en France (Armand Colin, 1971) —— Le Pacte autobiographique (Seuil, 1975) Lévy, Clara, Écritures de l’identité: les écrivains juifs après la Shoah (Presses universitaires de France, 1998) Levinas, Emmanuel, ‘La Mémoire d’un passé non révolu: entretien avec Foulek Ringelheim’, Revue de l’Université de Bruxelles (1987), 11–20 Leys, Ruth, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000) Lifton, Robert, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (New York: Random House, 1967) —— The Life of the Self (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976) Lipsyc, Sonia Sarah, ‘L’Accès des femmes au Talmud: le point de vue traditionnel en question’, in Femmes et judaïsme aujourd’hui, ed. by Sonia Sarah Lipsyc (Éditions In Press, 2008), pp. 23–68 Lowenthal, David, The Life of the Self (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976) —— Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (New York: Free Press, 1996) Margalit, Avishai, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard Uni­ versity Press, 2002)

Bibliography

253

Maurice, Marc, ‘Les Bagages de sable, par Anna Langfus’, Les Lettres françaises, 23–29 August 1962, p. 3 Niederland, William G, ‘Clinical Observations on the “Survivor Syndrome” ’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 49 (1968), 313–15 Nolden, Thomas, In Lieu of Memory: Contemporary Jewish Writing in France (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2006) —— ‘Myriam Anissimov’, in Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia, 2005

Nora, Pierre, ed., Les Lieux de mémoire (Gallimard, 1984–93) Ofer, Dalia, and Lenore J. Weitzman, eds, Women in the Holocaust (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1998) Parker, Emma, ‘Unsettling Women’, Contemporary Women’s Writing (Special issue: Diaspora), 3, 1 (2009), 1–5 Poznanski, Renée, Propagandes et persécutions: la résistance et le ‘problème juif’, 1940–1944 (Fayard, 2009) Prince, Robert M., ‘Second Generation Effects of Historical Trauma’, Psychoanalytic Review, 72, 1 (1985), 9–29 Pudlowski, Gilles, ‘Comment va Myriam ?’, Nouvelles littéraires, 18–24 November 1982, 40 T .R., ‘Roman: Souviens-toi Leah! Par Yaël Hassan’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 10–16 June 2004, p. 62 Raczymow, Henri, ‘La Mémoire trouée’, Pardes, 3 (1986), 177–82 Radstone, Susannah, and Bill Schwarz, eds, Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates (Ash­ land, OH: Fordham University Press, 2010) Reichmann, Edgar, ‘L’Écriture ou la mort: Autobiographie de Personne d’Esther Orner’, Le Monde des livres, 18 February 2000, p. iv Ricœur, Paul, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, trans. by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984) Ridener, John, From Polders to Postmodernism: A Concise History of Archival Theory (Duluth, MN: Litwin Books, 2009) Rittner, Carol, and John Roth, eds, Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust (New York: Paragon House, 1993) Rothberg, Michael, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009) Rousset, David, L’Univers concentrationnaire (Éditions du Pavois, 1946) Rutherford, Jonathan, ‘The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha’, in Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, ed. by Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), pp. 207–21 Said, Edward, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000) Santayana, George, The Life of Reason, vol. 1 (London: Constable, 1905) Sartori, Eva Martin, and Madeleine Cottenet-Hage, eds, Daughters of Sarah: Anthology of Jewish Women’s Writing in French (Teaneck, NJ: Holmes & Meier, 2006) Sartre, Jean-Paul, Réflexions sur la question juive (P. Morihien, 1946) Schnapper, Dominique, ‘Israélites and Juifs: New Jewish Identities in France’, in Jewish Identities in the New Europe, ed. by Jonathan Webber (London and Washington: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1994), pp. 171–78 Schulte Nordholt, Annelise, ed., Témoignages de l’après-Auschwitz dans la littérature française d’aujourd’hui : enfants de survivants et survivants-enfants (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2008) Schwartz, J. M., and T. Cook, ‘Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory’, Archival Science 2 (2002), 1–19

254

Bibliography

Seyhan, Azade, Writing outside the Nation (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton Uni­ versity Press, 2001) Slawy-Sutton, Catherine, ‘Boukhobza, Chochana. Pour l’amour du père’, The French Review, 71, 3 (1998), 500–01 Solomon, Norman, ‘Judaism in the New Europe: Discovery or Invention?’, in Jewish Identities in the New Europe, ed. by Jonathan Webber (London and Washington: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1994), pp. 86–98 Spire, Antoine, ‘L’Exode des Juifs du monde arabe’, L’Arche, June 2008, pp. 84–85 Stephan, Alexander, ed., Exile and Otherness: New Approaches to the Experience of the Nazi Refugees (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005) Stevens, Christa, ‘Judéités, à lire dans l’œuvre d’Hélène Cixous, International Journal of Francophone Studies, 7, 1–2 (2004), 81–93 Suleiman, Susan, ‘The 1.5 Generation: Thinking About Child Survivors and the Holocaust’, American Imago, 59, 3 (2002), 277–95 —— Crises of Memory and the Second World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006) Todorov, Tzvetan, Les Abus de la mémoire (Arléa, 1998) Veil, Simone, ‘Une difficile réf lexion’, Pardès, 16 (1992), 271–82 Warburg, Aby, ‘Austausch künstlerische Kultur zwischen Norden und Süden’, in Gesammelte Schriften (Leipzig and Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1932), pp. 179–84 [first published in 1905] Webber, Jonathan, ‘Modern Jewish Identities’, in Jewish Identities in the New Europe, ed. by Jonathan Webber (London and Washington: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1994), pp. 74–85 Weinstock, Nathan, Histoire de chiens: la dhimmitude dans le conflit israélo-palestinien (Éditions Mille et Une Nuits, 2004) —— Une si longue présence: comment le monde arabe a perdu ses Juifs (Éditions Plon, 2008) Welzer, Harald, ‘Communicative Memory’, in Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, ed. by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), pp. 285–98 Whitehead, Anne, Memory (London: Routledge, 2009) —— Trauma Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004) Wieviorka, Annette, L’Ère du témoin (Plon, 1998) Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1996) [first published in 1982] Young, James, ‘Interpreting Literary Testimony: A Preface to Re-reading Holocaust Diaries and Memoirs’, New Literary History, 18, 2 (1987), 402–23 —— ‘Modern Jewish Culture’, Contemporary Literature, 28, 2 (1987), 278–83 Zalko, Nardo, ‘Entretien avec Myriam Anissimov’, Amitiés France-Israël, March 1977, pp. 35–37

Index ❖

Abécassis, Eliette 225–26, 228, 237 n. 37, 246, 248 Abraham, Nicolas 65, 87, 120 nn. 4 & 6, 249 Abu Nidal Organization 194 Action française 136 Adorno, Theodor 94, 120 n. 15, 249 Agence Juive de Jérusalem 214 Amar, Marlène 145–47, 150–52, 154–57, 159, 162, 166, 171, 178 n. 20, 179 nn. 29, 39 & 41, 246–47, 251 Anissimov, Myriam 65–68, 70–71, 74, 77, 80–81, 84–86, 89–91, 94–95, 99, 103–06, 119, 120 nn. 8, 9, 12 & 23, 121 nn. 33, 43 & 45, 157, 186, 221, 224–25, 228, 230, 232, 236 n. 34, 246–48, 250, 253–54 Antelme, Robert 110, 122 n. 69, 248 Anzaldúa, Gloria 149, 179 n. 30, 249 Arban, Dominique 7, 28–32, 60 n. 5, 246 Arcens, Bénédicte 177, 179 n. 51, 180 n. 54, 249 Assmann, Aleida 241–43, 245 nn. 5, 23 & 29, 249 Auron, Yaïr 191, 216, 236 n. 13, 249 Auschwitz 7, 14, 16–17, 19–23, 27, 34, 51–53, 55–56, 58, 60 n. 2, 61 nn. 26 & 27, 62 nn. 44 & 47, 64, 72, 77, 81–82, 85–86, 94–96, 99, 100, 104–06, 108, 110–12, 120 nn. 2 & 15, 133, 198, 200, 206, 217, 229–32, 246, 250, 252–53 Baldwin, James 41 Barland, Jean-Rémi 121 n. 44, 249 Barocas, Carol B. 120 n. 17, 249 Barocas, Harvey A. 120 n. 17, 249 Barthes, Roland 120 n. 26, 121 n. 26, 249 Begin, Menachem 196 Bensimon-Donath, Doris 145, 178 n. 17, 179 n. 42, 249 Bergen-Belsen 43–44, 46–47, 49, 63 n. 54, 231 Bergson, Henri 97, 122 n. 54, 249 Berl, Emmanuel 134–35 Bernfeld, Karin 49, 121 n. 42, 141, 152, 177, 178 n. 13, 197, 246, 248, 252 Bettelheim, Bruno 236 n. 6, 249 Bhabha, Homi 124, 144, 149, 152, 154, 178 n. 16, 179 nn. 32, 36 & 38, 249, 253 Bibliothèque Medem 92 Birkenau 19, 22, 82, 100, 110 Bloom, Harold 243, 245 n. 28, 249 Boukhobza, Chochana 161–63, 179 nn. 44 & 46, 196, 199, 236 nn. 15, 17 & 23, 246–49, 254 Brami, Joseph 196, 236 n. 17, 249

Brauner, David 4, 6 n. 20, 249 Braziel, Jana Evans 178 n. 4, 249 Brison, Danièle 62 n. 46, 249 Brodzki, Bella 20, 61 n. 32, 103, 122 n. 61, 249 Burckhardt, Jakob 243 Burke, Peter 124, 178 n. 5, 179 n. 34, 249 Cairns, Lucille 6 n. 15, 178 n. 14, 179 nn. 41 & 46, 180 n. 55, 235 n. 2, 236 nn. 16 & 33, 249 Caruth, Cathy 3, 6 n. 14, 13, 60, 61 n. 22, 69, 120 n. 19, 239, 250 Chambon-sur-Lignon 131 Christophe, Francine 8, 43–51, 60 n. 8, 63 n. 52, 231, 246 Cixous, Hélène 150, 179 n. 35, 248, 250, 254 Clément, Catherine 66, 102–09, 115, 119, 122 nn. 58 & 59, 135, 187, 236 n. 10, 246 Cook, Terry 241, 245 n. 6, 253 Cory, Mark 25, 62 n. 38, 250 Cottenet-Hage, Madeleine 1, 5 n. 3, 8, 14, 61 n. 13, 236 n. 17, 249–50, 253 Critchley, Simon 108, 122 n. 65, 250 Darmon, Paule 155, 166, 179 n. 41, 246, 250 Davis, Colin 65, 120 n. 5, 250 Delbo, Charlotte 17–18, 61 n. 29, 120 n. 5, 248, 250 Delpech, Jeanine 61 n. 20, 250, 252 Derrida, Jacques 93–95, 121 n. 47, 122 nn. 48, 49, 50, 51, 52 & 53, 179 n. 35, 241–42, 245 nn. 12–22, 250 Des Pres, Terrence 25, 27, 62 nn. 37, 39 & 42, 250 Deuteronomy 170 Drancy (camp) 17, 32, 36, 48, 85–86 Dreyfus, Alfred 98–99, 190–91 Eilkan, Mark 120 n. 9, 250 Fallaci, Oriana 209 Felman, Shoshana 120 n. 18, 250, 252 Final Solution (cf. Wansee Conference) 28–29, 41, 47, 74, 80, 85, 123 Finaly, Patricia 66, 115–19, 122 n. 70, 246, 248 Fine, Ellen S. 9, 61 n. 15, 64, 120 n. 2, 250 Finkielkraut, Alain 85, 121 nn. 35, 36, 37 & 38, 207, 237 n. 38, 250 Fitoussi, Annie 162, 164, 179 n. 46, 246–48 Foucault, Michel 201, 241, 245 nn. 7, 8, 9, 10 & 11, 245 n. 10 & 11, 251

256

Index

Francos, Ania 66, 109–12, 115, 119, 122 n. 67, 191–94, 236 n. 14, 246 Free Zone 7, 32 Fresco, Nadine 89, 120 n. 7, 121 nn. 41 & 42, 251 Front national 101 Frydman, Sarah 169, 179 n. 49, 186, 191, 203–04, 246–48 Fuchs, Anne 87, 121 n. 39, 251 Gaulle, Charles de 33, 62 n. 48, 109, 181, 187 Geftman, Rina 128–31, 137, 178 n. 10, 194–96, 246 Gestapo 7, 9, 81, 113 Gille, Elisabeth 7, 32–33, 43, 53, 60 n. 6, 122 n. 63, 129, 133–34, 137–38, 143, 246, 248 Gilman, Sander 150, 179 n. 33, 251 Goncourt (Prize) 14, 61 n. 20, 250, 252 Gramsci, Antonio 243, 245 n. 27, 251 Grant, Linda 121 n. 27, 248 Guéno, Jean-Pierre 62 n. 44, 248 Haft, Cynthia 61 n. 27, 251 Halbwachs, Maurice 147, 178 nn. 22, 23, 24, 25 & 26, 240, 244 nn. 2 & 3, 251 Hass, Aaron 78, 120 n. 25, 251 Hassan, Yaël 8, 51–52, 54, 57, 60 n. 9, 63 n. 56, 246, 248, 253 Hebrew Catholic community 130 Henke, Suzettte A. 21, 61 n. 34, 63 n. 60, 74, 120 n. 22, 251 Hirsch, Marianne 14, 60, 61 n. 25, 63 n. 63, 64–66, 80, 105, 120 nn. 3, 7 & 10, 121 n. 28, 122 n. 64, 251 Hitler, Adolf 28, 108, 111, 165, 192, 194, 205, 207, 210 Hœrni, Bernard 122 n. 68, 251 Horn, Pierre 8, 60 n. 10, 251 Hôtel Lutétia 36, 52, 105 Hutton, Margaret-Anne 2, 5 n. 8, 20, 61 nn. 24, 28, 30, 33 & 36, 63 n. 59, 251 Huyssen, Andreas 147, 178 n. 21, 251 Hyman, Paula E. 187, 236 n. 9, 251 Ireland, Susan 179 n. 29, 251 Jacques, Paula 165, 179 nn. 47 & 50, 213–14, 216, 228, 233, 246, 252 Jankélévitch, Vladimir 42, 251 Jean Freustié Prize 90 Jewish Statutes (cf. Statuts des Juifs) 31, 35, 64, 98, 126 Joffo, Joseph 102, 122 n. 60, 236 n. 25, 248 Jung, Carl G. 212, 226, 236 nn. 27 & 28, 251 Kansteiner, Wulf 4, 6 nn. 18 & 19, 60, 63 n. 61, 252 Kaplan, Marion 2, 5 n. 9, 252 Karmel, Ilona 61 n. 19 Klatzmann, Joseph 122 n. 71, 212, 236 n. 29, 237 n. 36, 252

Kluger, Ruth 61 n. 27, 178 n. 12, 248 Kofman, Sarah 216–19, 221, 228, 236 nn. 30, 31 & 32, 246–47, 252 Korcaz, Sylvie 182–86, 236 nn. 3 & 7, 246, 252 Kraenker, Sabine 121 n. 42, 252 Kratzau (camp) 22 LaCapra, Dominick 3, 6 nn. 16 &17, 15, 61 n. 26, 252 Laloum, Jean 32, 62 n. 45, 118, 122 n. 72, 252 Lamont, Rosette C. 185–86, 236 nn. 7 & 8, 252 Landsberg, Alison 80, 121 nn. 31 & 32, 252 Langfus, Anna 7–16, 33, 38, 52, 60 nn. 1 & 10, 61 nn. 13, 14, 15, 17, 20 & 23, 177, 180 n. 56, 246, 248, 250, 252–53 Lanzmann, Claude 83, 99 Lappin, Adah 61 n. 16, 252 Laub, Dori 69–70, 120 n. 18, 250, 252 Lazare, Lucien 62 n. 50, 252 Lebrun, Jean-Claude 179 n. 50, 252 Leibovici, Solange 217, 236 n. 31, 252 Lejeune, Philippe 2, 5 n. 12, 8, 60 n. 11, 91, 252 Le Magazine littéraire 32, 62 n. 46, 249 Le Monde 202, 205, 229, 236 n. 24, 237 n. 39, 253 Le Nouvel Observateur 51, 63 n. 56, 253 Les Nouvelles littéraires 61 n. 20, 120 n. 14, 137, 250, 252–53 Levinas, Emmanuel 27, 62 nn. 40 & 42, 108, 122 n. 65, 176, 250, 252 Leys, Ruth 3, 6 n. 15, 252 L’Humanité 169, 179 n. 50, 252 Lifton, Robert 61 n. 21, 68, 71, 252 Lipsyc, Sonia Sarah ix, 235, 237 nn. 40 & 41, 252 Lowenthal, David 154, 179 n. 37, 252 Mambre Centre 128 Mannur, Anita 178 n. 4, 249 Maous, Françoise 7, 14–24, 44, 49, 60 n. 2, 246 Margalit, Avishai 147, 179 n. 28, 252 Maurice, Marc 61 nn. 14 & 23, 253 Milice 17, 33–34 MLF (Mouvement de libération des femmes) 182 Moati, Nine 131–33, 141, 178 n. 11, 246–47 Morhange-Bégué, Claude 61 n. 32, 248 Nasser, Gamal Abdel 165, 186 Némirovsky, Irène 62 n. 47, 122 n. 63, 133–36, 141, 248 Neve Shalom 128 Niederland, William G. 7, 60 nn. 4 & 7, 253 Nolden, Thomas 1, 5 n. 4, 66, 84, 91, 99, 120 n. 8, 121 nn. 34, 45 & 46, 122 nn. 55 & 57, 149–50, 179 nn. 29 & 33, 253 Nora, Pierre 80–81, 121 n. 29, 239–40, 253 Novac, Ana 7, 20–28, 44, 48, 58, 60 n. 3, 105, 246 Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants 118

Index Orner, Esther 49, 178 n. 15, 189–91, 198, 200–11, 229–30, 232–35, 236 nn. 12, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22 & 24, 237 n. 39, 241, 245 n. 4, 247, 249, 253 Papon, Maurice 39, 48, 109, 187 Parker, Emma 178 n. 3, 253 Perec, Georges 182, 236 n. 4, 248 Pithiviers (camp) 36, 57–58 Plaszow (camp) 21, 22, 26 Plonsk (Polish political prison) 12 Polanski, Roman 210 Pope Pius XII 35 Poznanski, Renée 62 n. 50, 253 Prince, Robert M. 120 n. 17, 122 n. 62, 253 Prix Wizo (cf. Wizo Prize) 198, 236 n. 19 Pudlowski, Gilles 67, 120 n. 14, 253 Rabinovitch, Anne 66, 99, 101, 103–06, 119, 122 n. 56, 247–48 Raczymow, Henri 87, 121 n. 40, 253 Reichmann, Edgar 237 n. 39, 253 Resistance movement 9–10, 17–19, 33, 39, 41, 62 n. 50, 131, 252–53 Resnais, Alain 50 Ricoeur, Paul 60, 63 n. 62, 253 Ridener, John 242–43, 245 nn. 24, 25 & 26, 253 Rothberg, Michael 27, 48, 62 n. 43, 63 n. 55, 109, 122 n. 66, 187, 236 n. 11, 253 Rousset, David 63 n. 53, 253 Rubinstein, Katia 161, 179 nn. 45 & 46, 247–48 Said, Edward 124, 126, 128, 133, 178 n. 4, 253 Santayana, George 62 n. 42, 253 Saramago, José 206 Sarraute, Claude 236 n. 24 Sarraute, Nathalie 202, 236 n. 24 Sartori, Eva Martin 1, 5 n. 3, 61 n. 13, 236 n. 17, 249–50, 253 Sartre, Jean-Paul 4, 6 n. 21, 29, 41–42, 104, 119, 192, 227, 253 Schickele, René 124 Schnapper, Dominique 174, 180 n. 53, 253 Schwartz, Joan M. 241, 245 n. 6, 253 Seghers, Anna 124, 128, 133 Semprun, Jorge 45–46 Seyhan, Azade 160, 179 n. 43, 254 Sharon, Ariel 205, 207 Silbert, Reine 125, 127–28, 131, 178 n. 8, 247 Slawy-Sutton, Catherine 161, 179 n. 44, 254

257

Solomon, Norman 4, 6 n. 23, 254 Spire, Antoine 145, 178 nn. 18 & 19, 254 Spitzer, Leo 14, 60, 61 n. 25, 63 n. 63, 105, 122 n. 64, 251 SS 27, 83, 111–12 Statuts des Juifs (cf. Jewish Statutes) 28, 64, 126 Stephan, Alexander 124, 178 n. 4, 254 Stéphan, Yveline 62 n. 44, 138, 141, 247 Stevens, Christa 179 n. 35, 254 Suleiman, Susan 67, 120 n. 11, 236 n. 26, 254 Third Reich 7, 182 Todorov, Tzvetan 27, 62 nn. 41 & 42, 124, 177, 254 Torok, Maria 65, 87, 120 nn. 4 & 6, 249 Treblinka 91 Tuil, Karine 125, 148, 170–73, 176–77, 178 n. 7, 179 n. 51, 180 n. 54, 224, 228–29, 237 n. 35, 247, 249 Union Générale des Israélites de France 118 Vercors 10, 61 n. 18, 63 n. 57, 248 Vichy (regime) 3, 7, 28–30, 32, 35–36, 40, 42, 62 n. 44, 64, 66, 69, 73–74, 89, 96, 98, 102–05, 109, 111, 123, 126–28, 130–31, 135, 138, 145, 173–74, 176, 188–89 Visau (camp) 22 Wannsee Conference (cf. Final Solution) 29 Warburg, Aby 124, 178 n. 2, 254 Warsaw Ghetto 9–10, 117, 187, 210 Webber, Jonathan 4, 6 nn. 22 & 23, 180 n. 53, 253–54 Wehrmacht 81 Weilnböck, Harald 60, 63 n. 61, 252 Weinstock, Nathan 145, 178 n. 19, 254 Weizmann, Chaïm 119 Welzer, Harald 245 n. 33, 254 Whitehead, Anne 67, 71, 73, 120 nn. 13, 20 & 21, 147, 179 n. 27, 239, 244 n. 1, 254 Wiesel, Elie 64, 120 n. 1, 248 Wieviorka, Annette 244, 245 n. 32, 254 Wizo Prize (cf. Prix Wizo) 198, 236 n. 19 Yad Vashem 195 Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim 172, 180 n. 52, 244, 245 nn. 30 & 31, 254 Young, James 22, 61 n. 35, 62 n. 49, 254 Zalko, Nardo 120 nn. 12 & 16, 254