Writing Occupation: Jewish Émigré Voices in Wartime France 1503613674, 9781503613676

Table of contents :
Cover
WRITING OCCUPATION
Title
Copyright
Dedication
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
INDRODUCTION Jewish Émigré Writers and the French Language
1 A Jewish Poetics of Exile: Benjamin Fondane’s Exodus
2 Accents in Jean Malaquais’s Carrefour Marseille
3 European Language and the Resistance: Romain Gary’s Heteroglossia
4 Buried Language: Elsa Triolet’s Bilingualism
5 Displacing Stereotypes: Irène Némirovsky in the Occupied Zone
EPILOGUE Memory, Language, and Jewish Francophonie
Notes
Index
Back Cover

Citation preview

W R I T I N G O CC U PAT I O N

Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture

WRITING O C C U PAT I O N

Jewish Émigré Voices in Wartime France

o JULIA ELSKY

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Stanf or d U niv er s i t y Pr e s s Stanford, California

Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

©2020 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. The opinions expressed in this book are those of the author and are not necessarily those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Elsky, Julia, author. Title: Writing occupation : Jewish émigré voices in wartime France / Julia Elsky. Other titles: Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2020. | Series: Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020025606 (print) | LCCN 2020025607 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503613676 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503614369 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: French literature—Jewish authors—History and criticism. | French literature—20th century—History and criticism. | Jewish authors—France—Language—History—20th century. | French language—Political aspects—History—20th century. | World War, 1939–1945—France—Literature and the war. | France—History— German occupation, 1940–1945. Classification: LCC PQ150.J4 E47 2020 (print) | LCC PQ150.J4 (ebook) | DDC 840.9/21296—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020025606 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020025607 Typeset by BookComp, Inc. in 10.25/15 Adobe Caslon Pro Cover design by Rob Ehle

Cover credit: Rouzes | iStock

For my parents, Martin and Harriet Elsky, and in loving memory of my grandmother, Elaine Sloan

CO N T EN T S

Acknowledgments

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Introd uction Jewish Émigré Writers and the French Language

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1 A Jewish Poetics of Exile: Benjamin Fondane’s Exodus 2 Accents in Jean Malaquais’s Carrefour Marseille

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3 European Language and the Resistance: Romain Gary’s Heteroglossia 93 4 Buried Language: Elsa Triolet’s Bilingualism

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5 Displacing Stereotypes: Irène Némirovsky in the Occupied Zone 165 Epil ogue Memory, Language, and Jewish Francophonie Notes 213 Index 259

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AC K N OW LED G M EN T S

In writing a book about French as an adopted language, I have also received an education in writing in my own tongue. For this, and for so much more, I thank Alice Kaplan. Without her guidance, endless generosity, and expertise, this book would not have been possible. I also thank Maurice Samuels for his kind support throughout the process. Maurice Samuels, Bruno Cabanes, and Thomas C. Connolly gave substantive feedback in this project’s early iterations. I am grateful to them and to my professors Christopher L. Miller and Edwin Duval for all that they taught me, not least about intellectual rigor. In some ways I set off on this project when Serge Gavronsky told me about the rediscovery of Irène Némirovsky during my time as his student at Barnard College. I thank my professors at Barnard, Laurie Postlewate, Serge Gavronsky, and Peter Connor, as well as Elizabeth Castelli and Tim HalpinHealy in Barnard’s Centennial Scholars Program, all of whom inspired me and encouraged me to go to France and seek adventure in the archives. My year at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies at the AlbertLudwigs-Universität Freiburg, which was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Volkswagen Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship for the Humanities in Germany, provided me with the time and environment to write much of this book. This writing was nourished by stimulating conversations with Bernd Kortmann, Carsten Dose, Britta Küst, Marco Caracciolo, Benoît Dillet, Sabine Hake, Suzanne Romaine, and Andrew Port. Since

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joining the faculty of Loyola University Chicago, I have had the great fortune to continue such conversations on a daily basis. I thank my chair, Susana Cavallo, for her support throughout this project. I thank my mentors, David Posner and Suzanne Kaufman, for their advice and encouragement. I am grateful to Thomas Regan, SJ, and Arthur Lurigio for making Loyola such a nurturing place to work. Finally, I warmly thank my colleagues, Eliana Văgălău, Reinhard Andress, Clara Burgo, and John Merchant. The Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where I benefited from the Sosland Fellowship, was the ideal place to finish this book. I am grateful to the Emerging Scholars Program at the Mandel Center for its support in the preparation of this manuscript. In particular I thank Steven Feldman for all he did to make this book a reality. I also thank the Museum’s Academic Committee and Publications Subcommittee for their decision to support the publication of this work. I am grateful to Lisa Moses Leff, Jean-Marc Dreyfus, and Samuel Spinner for their enlightening conversations and for their generosity in reading chapters of my book. I also thank Elizabeth Anthony, Aleksandra Pomiećko, and Tomasz Frydel for their expertise, Samantha Hinckley for her efficient and cheerful assistance, and the wonderful community of fellows at the museum. I thank my generous interlocutors for their feedback and expertise: Marianne Amar, Sophie Cœuré, Claire Andrieu, Guillaume Piketty, Geneviève Nakach, Michel Carassou, Olivier Salazar-Ferrer, Ramona Fotiade, François Eychart, Alyson Waters, Na’ama Rokem, Catherine E. Clark, Bruno Perreau, Heather Ruth Lee, Felipe Brandi, Rachel Druck, Marta Skwara, and Vlad Zografi. I owe a great deal of gratitude to Susannah Heschel and Susan Suleiman. I thank my friends, whom I am also lucky to call colleagues, for reading drafts of chapters: Clémentine Fauré-Bellaïche, Annabel Kim, Robyn Pront, and Maren Baudet-Lackner. I also thank the writing group extraordinaire with Christopher Davis, Diana Garvin, and Jennifer Row. I am very grateful to Susan Johnson for her attentive reading and insightful comments as she read my manuscript. I benefited from the wisdom of archivists, librarians, and staff members, including Fabienne Queyroux, Hélène Favard, Marie-Odile Germain, Kevin Repp, Paul Cougnard, and Olivier Wagner, as well as Liviu Carare, Megan Lewis, Vincent Slatt, and Elliott Wrenn at the

ACKNOWLED GMENTS

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United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. I thank Margo Irvin and Susan Karani of Stanford University Press for their help and guidance, as well as the series editors, David Biale and Sarah Abrevaya Stein. I thank Gabriel Bartlett for his help in the preparation of this manuscript. I am grateful to Michel Carassou, Nicolas Dauplé, Elisabeth Malaquais, Catherine Noone, and Jean Ristat for their permission to access the archives that made it possible to trace the stories of Jewish émigré writers under the Occupation. I could not have completed the archival research central to this project without the support of numerous grants. I am appreciative for the Whiting Fellowship in Humanities; the Bourse Chateaubriand; the Fox International Fellowship, Yale University; and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library’s Graduate Student Fellowship. I thank the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin for the Dorot Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Jewish Studies. This book was made possible in part by funds granted to the author through a Sosland Fellowship at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The statements made and views expressed, however, are solely the responsibility of the author. A portion of chapter 5 appeared in Russian Émigré Culture: Conservatism or Evolution?, edited by Christoph Flamm, Henry Keazor, and Roland Marti. It is published here with the permission of Cambridge Scholars Publishing. It is impossible to compress into a paragraph my gratitude to my family and friends. My parents, Martin and Harriet Elsky, are an unending source of love, inspiration, and support. This book is presented in their honor. Stephanie, Ari, and the newest addition, Felix, keep me laughing through it all and are always willing to share their wisdom and time. Greg is the joy that sustains me and the clarity that inspires me to try my best to think carefully, openly, and with empathy. I dedicate this book to the loving memory of my grandmother, Elaine Sloan. Her stories about her immigration to America have inspired me since childhood and have led me on this path.

l INTRODUCTION '

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If yo u w er e to stand on the rue Soufflot in Paris and gaze up the sloping street, your eyes would fall on two institutions. Straight ahead would be the Panthéon, the monument to the great men and women of the nation, a secular temple and its own lieu de mémoire of France.1 In the choir of this sleepy edifice, to the right of the monument to the National Convention, you would read on another, more somber monument a list of names under this heading: “To the writers who died for France / MCMxxxIx–MCMxLV.” Among the approximately two hundred names listed, two might stand out: B. Fondane, the pen name of the Romanian-born Jewish poet and philosopher Benjamin Wechsler, and Irène Nemirowski, the Russian-born Jewish novelist whose name is more commonly spelled Némirovsky. Honoring victims of the Shoah as people who died for France was a standard practice when this memorial was consecrated in July 1949, a practice that has often been criticized for disregarding French collaboration in the persecution of the Jews. The text has since been replaced on contemporary memorials with more direct references to deportation and Vichy collaboration. Even so, this enshrinement of Fondane and Némirovsky by the French Republic not only restores universalist ideals that were suppressed under Vichy; it also actually vindicates the aspirations of these two Jewish émigrés—to be French writers. Outside, seen from monumental steps of the Panthéon, the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève on the right spreads out in its long series of arched

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INTRODUCTION

windows. There is no memorial plaque here, but the Polish-born Jewish novelist Jean Malaquais spent the winter nights of 1935 at one of the library desks, poring over books to improve his French while staying warm at one of the few heated places that were open into the evening at no cost. He was teaching himself to become a French writer in a library that to this day is mostly used by students. French letters and republican values loom large on the place du Panthéon. But the individual lives and writings of these three Jewish émigré writers who adopted French—Némirovsky, Fondane, and Malaquais—like all of the writers in Writing Occupation, illuminate an alternative view of French literary life from the interwar period through the Occupation. They ask us to consider their place in the buildings on the place du Panthéon and the values that they represent. These writers came to France for the promise of universalism and the possibility of adopting French as a literary language in a major cultural center. But under the pressures of World War II, they would fundamentally change what it means to write in French, and furthermore what constitutes a Jewish language. They created a new, multilingual idea of French in which to reflect on their status as Jewish naturalized citizens, stateless people, and resisters. Némirovsky actually stands out as a counterpoint, as she removed Jewish voice from French in her wartime novels; thus, an analysis of her work throws into sharp relief the multiplicity of Jewish voices in the works of the other writers. This book studies Jewish writers of Eastern European origin who immigrated to France in the 1910s and 1920s, switching from their native tongues (in some cases multiple tongues) to writing in French. For the most part, they came to France in the interwar period precisely in order to establish themselves in a major center of the European literary world and to embrace the language of universalism. However, their approach would radically change under the Nazi Occupation of France that lasted from 1940 to 1944. I do not provide an encyclopedic study of this group; rather, I focus on five individuals who addressed their experiences through a reflection on language in ways that can be put into dialogue—Benjamin Fondane, Jean Malaquais, Romain Gary, Elsa Triolet, and Irène Némirovsky. By Eastern European Jews, I refer to Jewish immigrants from Romania, Poland, and the territories of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, among other countries. They were often described as a group, les juifs de l’Europe orientale, in the interwar and wartime

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periods; alternatively, they were grouped together in a discourse that negatively othered them as Eastern European Jews.2 This project began with my fascination with Némirovsky’s poignant and ambivalent portrayals of exclusion from France. The best-selling novel, Suite française, which reawakened interest in this forgotten writer, has been the subject of debate by literary critics since it was first discovered. Her daughters could not bring themselves to read the volume they believed was her diary until the 1970s, when they realized that it was actually a novel. The book was published in 2004 to great acclaim, and Némirovsky became the first author to win a posthumous Prix Renaudot. For Denise Epstein, Némirovsky’s daughter, reading the manuscript was “at the same time stimulating and desperate and intoxicating.”3 For literary critics, it was like opening a time capsule and finding a masterpiece, one so immediately close to the events of the day and yet so lucid in its representation of the upheavals of the French defeat and the Occupation. It has often been noted that there are no Jewish characters in the story and no significant mention of Jews. The omission is especially striking given that, in some of her most important works from the interwar period, Némirovsky depicted Jews and Russian immigrants, as well as Eastern European Jewish speech, accents, and languages, in the context of immigration to France or displacement within Russia. Némirovsky herself had learned French as a child, first in Kiev and then in Saint Petersburg, from her French governess in a French-speaking home where Yiddish was forbidden. Her mastery of French as a prestige language was a sign of her family’s entry into the Russian middle classes and later into the society of wealthy financiers. The rediscovery of Némirovsky set off debates about whether her writing can be considered self-hating, with one critic maintaining that the removal of Jews from her magnum opus about the war was proof of her self-hatred.4 Susan Suleiman and others, however, have rejected this view of Némirovsky as a self-hating Jew, pointing to her ambivalence about her place as a French Jewish writer, as evidenced in her interwar novels and short stories.5 The omission of Jewish voice and immigrant Jewish voices from Suite française can then be seen as a dramatic staging of her exclusion from the French nation. I began to seek out what other Jewish émigré authors were writing about under the Occupation, during the undoing of the same republican universalist values that drew them to France in the interwar period. I found many

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INTRODUCTION

texts written and, in some cases, rewritten under the Occupation that dealt precisely with the questions of Frenchness, Jewishness, and language during the war. These writers did not stop thinking about their place in France as French writers at the moment of the June 1940 defeat: the start of the Occupation did not usher in their silence. Némirovsky turned out to be the exception. While she did, in fact, depict Jewish voice and Jewish languages in her interwar writing, she banished them from her wartime texts. She moved in a direction opposite to that of the other writers in this book, from a multilingual to a monolingual French reflecting the French state’s total rejection of Jewish voice from the nation. Read by themselves outside of this context, her works would make it seem like there was no European Francophonie during the war. Simply put, European Francophonie refers to non-French European writers who wrote in French, whether or not they immigrated to France. But it is particularly useful to read Némirovsky against the other writers in this book, and to read them against her. They underscore the purposeful silences in her writing, and she highlights the resounding voices in theirs that shout out against the horrors of the war. In fact, this period has often been overlooked in studies of European Francophonie. But in this book, I argue that the Occupation is a crucial period of study. It was precisely under the Occupation that these authors addressed the choice to write in French in new ways. The desire to find their voices led me to the archives, and to multiple manuscript versions of the literary texts in many cases. When such sources were not available, I sought out different published versions of these texts as well as archived professional correspondences and diaries. Archival materials bring to life the ways in which these writers questioned and reworked their ideas, ways that are not always apparent in the final published versions of their novels and poems. Their wartime works, which they could no longer publish legally under their own names, testify to a variety of radically altered ideas of France and of the place of Jewish writers in France, especially with regard to the French language. I also saw that not all of these writers had the same point of view as Némirovsky. I came to ask the question: Why did some of the most brilliant but often forgotten Jewish émigré writers of the first half of the twentieth century choose to write in French, the language of their rejection, even as they faced a double exclusion under Vichy, both as foreigners and as Jews?

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By uncovering the voices of these writers, even of those who perished in the Shoah, I attempt to show that they themselves were analyzing their roles as French and Jewish émigré writers at this time. Coming from a specific background of what we might call an Eastern European Francophonie, they blur the binary distinction between center and periphery, between culturally powerful institutions and the margins of power, the now contested paradigm for analyzing Francophone literature. My contention is that the linguistic drama of these authors’ wartime writing has less to do with the opposition of periphery and center than with a crisis at the center itself, with culturally central writers reflecting on the political and literary implications of their multiple and contradictory identities. In this way Eastern European Jewish authors writing in French challenge the most commonly held model of Francophonie, which has begun to be confronted only in recent years. I maintain that Jewish émigré writers negotiated their positions as French writers through fraught interactions with the French language itself. This approach departs from, but still owes much to, Gisèle Sapiro’s indispensable text La Guerre des écrivains, 1940–1953 (The French Writers’ War, 1940–1953), in which she argues that writers engaged in the war through the prism of their writerly profession and their participation in major literary—and politicized—institutions.6 According to Sapiro, one category that measured the political position of writers and editors, as well as having been a means of their survival, was cultural capital. In her recent return to the topic, Sapiro states more explicitly that, as the prestige of an institution—and thus its capacity to confer cultural capital—increased, “the less likely it was to count Jews, foreigners, communists, or women among its members.”7 This would mean that literary figures who were “the most fragile—Jews, foreigners, communists—were the most threatened and thus were reduced to silence or clandestinity, if not to death.”8 Sapiro does nuance this claim by addressing the role of solidarity within these literary institutions in prompting them to help some Jewish and immigrant writers.9 Interestingly, in both La Guerre des écrivains and Sapiro’s revisiting of it, Triolet emerges as an important example, both because of her role in the Comité national des écrivains (CNE) and because she was awarded the Prix Goncourt—that is, because of her possession of symbolic capital. Nevertheless, it is precisely the supposition of silence among those lacking symbolic capital, as well as the specific position

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INTRODUCTION

of foreign-born Jewish writers, that can be rethought. In this sense I hope to fill a gap in Sapiro’s foundational account. Studies of memory in Holocaust literature have recognized the importance of postwar immigrants’ writing as well as the question of the choice of the language in which they write. As Naomi Seidman argues, “The polyglot nature of Jewish discourse and the displacements of postwar life affected the vagaries of Holocaust literature.”10 In particular, Seidman shows that the practice of translation, either by the authors themselves or by others, has constructed the discourse of the Holocaust.11 This is the case with the translations—and significant reworkings—of classic texts like The Diary of Anne Frank and Primo Levi’s memoir The Truce, as well as in the Yiddish and French versions of Elie Wiesel’s Night. When Susan Suleiman reads the memoirs of Hungarian survivors and immigrants writing in their adopted languages of French or English, she notes the ubiquity of translation in representing the Holocaust precisely because of the history of postwar migration. These memoirs are homeless because they are written in a foreign tongue, as translations “with no original,” but they are also able to reach a global audience, translating disparate experiences for readers across the world.12 In this connection Angela Kershaw’s study of postwar French Holocaust fiction by André Schwarz-Bart and the Polish-born writer Anna Langfus argues for the importance of translation across time, space, and languages, and for the importance of the narrative functions of multilingualism.13 But if we go back in time and look to Jewish émigré writers under the Occupation, we can go one step further in our understanding of literary multilingualism during the war, as these authors conceived of their position as Jewish immigrants through writing itself, often outside Sapiro’s categories of literary institutions and prior to discourses about memory of the Shoah. I contend that Jewish émigré writers under Vichy used French to express hybrid and shifting cultural, religious, and linguistic identities. They employ strategies including: multilingualism, that is, the presence of multiple languages in the text; the translation of non-French language in the text; the transcription of so-called foreign accents in French; and a version of heteroglossia, or the way in which different languages are depicted in French in the text. When the Vichy regime and the Nazi occupiers denied them their French identity through xenophobic and antisemitic laws, Jewish émigré authors from Eastern Europe began

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to reexamine and, in some cases, to reassert their role in the French nation through their literature in a redefined understanding of French. In this introduction, I provide the historical context of the interwar period and the Occupation as well as the theoretical basis of the book. Because these writers began to write in French in the interwar period and changed their positions during the war, I present a continuous but shifting narrative, rather than a story that is bracketed off by the four years of the Occupation. These authors do not represent all Eastern European Jewish writers of French expression; rather, they each illuminate different paths and responses. I look at the interwar period through the end of the Occupation, starting with the writers’ countries of origin and continuing with their lives in France. All the while, I focus on the role of language. First, I trace the motivations for Jewish writers from Eastern Europe to immigrate to France during the interwar period in order to write in French and to assume a French literary position and, in many cases, a naturalized French identity. These choices must be situated in a discussion within interwar French Jewish communities about the role of Yiddish in Parisian life or about the need for immigrants to speak French and possibly to abandon Yiddish, as well as in the context of farright French attitudes toward Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Based on these premises, I argue that Jewish immigrant writers changed their approach to French in response to the French defeat and the Nazi Occupation. The writers in this book employ literary strategies usually associated with postcolonial Francophone writers in ways that blur the boundaries of belonging within national borders and within national languages and that obscure the boundaries between Jewish languages (Yiddish and Hebrew) and other languages that have been seen as external to Jewish languages (French, for example). The introduction places these authors within a new category of European Francophonie as a form of linguistic resistance to their exclusion from French letters during the war.

Vi Got in Frankraykh: Jewish Immigrants in France, 1920s–1930s

The writers under discussion in this book are part of a generation that emigrated from Eastern European countries with strong histories of both Francophilia and Francophonie, not least because of the legacy of universalism

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INTRODUCTION

and Jewish civil rights that is celebrated in the Yiddish expression lebn vi Got in Frankraykh (to live like God in France). Although these writers had different experiences of migration from most other Eastern European immigrants—different networks, different neighborhoods—they reacted to the double experience for immigrants in France, terre d’accueil, France hostile (land of immigrants, hostile France), to use the expression of the Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration in Paris.14 There is an urgency in studying this group in particular, for they were the first victims of the Shoah in France.15 These writers lived the Occupation differently from many other Eastern European Jews, and indeed from each other, for they all had different paths in the war. Nevertheless, they too were the victims of persecution as Jewish immigrants in France, and they responded to this shared spectrum of experience in their writing. Understanding the legacy of universalism in which these writers wished to participate necessitates a jump back even further in time to the French Revolution. Republican universalism as constitutionalized by the Declaration of the Rights of Man rests on “the republican idea” that, in Mona Ozouf ’s words, “recalls the possibility of rational communication between men and the unity of humanity.”16 Based on these universal rights, France was the first country to emancipate the Jews, granting citizenship to Sephardic Jews in 1790, and then to all other Jews in 1791. As the Count Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre famously argued in support of Jewish emancipation at the Constituent Assembly: “To the Jews as a Nation, nothing; to the Jews as individuals, everything.”17 They became “citizens as individuals.”18 Indeed, as Maurice Samuels writes in The Right to Difference, debates about universalism in France have often centered on the Jews of France. French universalism, as Samuels argues, has a complex history that has not always opposed particularism to universalism but can rather be grasped in terms of a continuum between assimilationist and pluralist poles.19 It is a topic that has come under debate in contemporary France and should be examined in this context. Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson unpack the term “emancipation,” calling it “a shorthand for access by Jews to the profound shifts in ideas and conditions wrought by the Enlightenment and its liberal offspring: religious toleration, secularization, scientific thought, and the apotheosization of reason, individualism, the law of contract, and choice.”20 Birnbaum and Katznelson

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locate a “double transformation” in this process: “in standing, as Jews moved from the position of presociological and prepolitical persons to become sociological and political actors, and in the creation of new options, based on rights, for them.”21 It was these rights that drew Jewish émigré writers from Eastern Europe to France. The authors studied in Writing Occupation lived under radically different legal situations in Eastern Europe prior to their immigration to France. Emancipation did not come to Fondane’s Romania until 1919, and civil rights for Jews were entered into the 1923 Constitution in the same year of his emigration. But antisemitism only intensified in Romania in the wake of these newly acquired rights. In the Russian Empire, Jews were restricted to residing in an area called the Pale of Settlement, with specific exceptions, until the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917; only then were the legal restrictions on all ethnic and religious communities lifted. Gary and Malaquais grew up in the Pale in the years before World War I, although control of their native cities of Vilnius and Warsaw, respectively, shifted numerous times during this period in ways that changed the status of the Jewish communities there. Némirovsky’s and Triolet’s families had residence rights that allowed them to live beyond the legal boundaries of the Pale in Saint Petersburg and Moscow, but they did not have full civil rights. France thus became one of the major destinations of Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe during the interwar period. This was the largest wave of Jewish migration in French history, one that radically changed the landscape of French Jewry. By 1940, of approximately 330,000 Jews in France, 140,000 were immigrants without French citizenship and 55,000 were naturalized.22 The center of Jewish life in France shifted from Alsace to Paris, in particular to the neighborhoods of the Marais and Belleville. Between the years 1921 and 1926, the number of immigrants, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, more than doubled, and by 1926 foreigners made up around 6 percent of the population.23 In response to fears about a natality crisis after the devastating loss of life in World War I, the government reformed the naturalization laws, reducing the residency requirement in France for citizenship from ten years to three in the law of August 10, 1927. This law, which paved the way for huge numbers of naturalizations in the late 1920s and into the 1930s, would later become the target of Vichy legislation seeking to denaturalize Jewish citizens.24

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INTRODUCTION

The writers in this book all came to France in their teens or twenties between the years 1919 and 1928 to settle in Paris and become French writers. Gary is an exception, as he came to Nice first, as a teenager, before moving to Paris, but his goal had always been to join the pantheon of great French writers. This intention distinguishes these writers from Spanish Republican refugees, for example, who arrived in 1939 (including the Spanish émigré writer and Holocaust survivor Jorge Semprún, who began to publish after the war); it also distinguishes them even from German Jewish refugees, who began to arrive in 1933 (including luminaries like Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt, among many others), but who had not set out to make careers for themselves as French authors.25 The authors discussed in Writing Occupation had varied paths that did not always conform to the typical story of Jewish migration. For example, they did not live in the neighborhoods of Paris that have often been associated with Jewish immigrants, even though in France there were no neighborhoods in which Jewish residents made up the majority, as there were in England and the United States.26 Rather, they lived and spent their time in areas frequented by other writers, artists, and intellectuals, and also near universities and libraries. Némirovsky was the outlier, residing in the wealthy seventh arrondissement. Paris of the 1920s and 1930s witnessed exciting events of literary history, and these writers took part, sometimes from the sidelines. Fondane’s thrill at getting caught up in a Surrealist brawl in a Montparnasse club in 1930 is palpable in his letter to his friend, the Romanian Jewish émigré poet Claude Sernet; there he describes the Surrealist luminaries André Breton, Louis Aragon (Triolet’s future husband), and Paul Éluard, among others, entering the club in time to see the situation devolving into a free-for-all, with patrons throwing plates at each other.27 Triolet frequented these bustling Montparnasse cafés too. In the Latin Quarter, again, Malaquais was often at the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève. Another commemorative plaque to Fondane marks a nearby building, just a few minutes’ walk from the library, on the rue Rollin where he lived, as a trace of the world Jewish émigré writers made for themselves through integrating into the cultural life of Paris. In an amazing coincidence, Gary lived on the same tiny street—just around the corner from Hemingway’s and Joyce’s apartments on the rue du Cardinal Lemoine. These Jewish émigré writers’ switch to writing in French, their

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linguistic integration, had as much to do with the hopes of a literary career in France as with their legal and political reasons for immigrating.

The Occupation

The Occupation upended these writers’ expectations. It was at this moment that they also changed the way they wrote in French and about Jewishness and Frenchness. In this sense, the Occupation set the stage for a new writing of multilingualism. In The Jews of Modern France, Paula Hyman looks at the terrible war years for the 350,000 Jewish people in France, both immigrants and citizens, that “demonstrated that the long-standing faith of French Jews in the protection offered by the state was misplaced.”28 The months leading up to the French defeat are known as the drôle de guerre—literally, the strange war, or in English the Phoney War—for there were no major military operations, especially in comparison with the trench warfare of World War I. The start of the Occupation can be dated to June 22, 1940, when France signed an armistice with Germany that divided the country by a line of demarcation into two zones, the Occupied and Free (later Southern) Zones. As Philippe Pétain, the hero of Verdun, was declared the head of the French state with full governmental powers, the Third Republic collapsed. Five months later, the first Jewish Statutes were passed, stripping immigrant and native Jews alike of rights and excluding them from the professions and public life. In the remainder of this section of the introduction, I give an overview of the Occupation, organized around three topics of concern to the authors discussed in this book: the June 1940 civilian flight from Paris; the resulting displacement within France under the constant fear of internment and deportation; and the Resistance. The June 1940 civilian flight southward, called the exode (exodus), just before the German forces entered Paris, was a traumatic part of the disastrous defeat. On June 9, as the Germans approached Paris from the north, ministers deemed nonessential to national defense left Paris by order of the French prime minister Paul Reynaud.29 Most of the government fled the city. As Hanna Diamond shows, Parisians viewed the departure of their officials in the absence of an official evacuation of civilians as desertion or a clear sign of defeat.30 The French government did not leave behind any officials who “might take it upon themselves to ‘represent’ the government” or negotiate

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INTRODUCTION

with the invading forces.31 But this also meant that almost no officials or administrators were on hand to oversee the massive flight of the population, with only some members of the military and the prefect of police remaining in Paris. The city’s population dropped from almost 3 million to between 700,000 and 1 million.32 In a matter of weeks this major city was emptied. Scholars estimate that the roads were flooded with around 6 million people, or one-sixth of the population of France, and 2 million Belgians and Luxembourgers.33 Némirovsky depicted this flight from Paris in Suite française while in Burgundy, having had the means to leave Paris just a couple of weeks before the defeat. Fondane escaped after he was taken as a prisoner of war, and he found himself on the roads of France, an experience he depicted in his poem L’Exode: Super flumina Babylonis. Immigrants in France experienced the exode in a radically different way from les Français de souche—the Franco-French, those whose families had been French for generations. This was a paradoxical exodus for some FrancoFrench, since it meant a return to their country homes and to the French countryside in general. They were refugees within their own country. Unlike recent immigrants, however, they could rely on family, social circles, and other networks already established before the war. Shannon Fogg explains that the upheavals of the exodus forced people to rely even more on individual social structures and networks for survival.34 In 1940, many urban residents were only one generation removed from their rural background. These Parisians could go back to their rural origins for shelter.35 The French Jewish writer Léon Werth describes his departure from Paris in 33 Days, his firsthand account of the exode, which was smuggled out of France in 1940 by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.36 Werth left his apartment in Paris, as he had done every year, for the route to Saint-Amour in the Jura, where his wife had purchased a house from her aunt in the early 1920s.37 Describing the exhaustion, chaos, and humiliating uncertainty he feels on the road, he states: “I am prisoner of a route I didn’t choose. I have become a refugee and have no refuge.”38 But as he approaches Saint-Amour after a month of harrowing experiences, he understands the joy of sailors as they approach the shore: “We feel pity for these homeless, but quickly we are no more than sixty kilometers from home.”39 Despite being a refugee, he thinks within the framework of having a home.

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That is not to say that he experienced the war less painfully than émigré Jewish writers but rather that he had a different conception of the exodus. Émigré authors, Jewish and non-Jewish, were in a unique position in June 1940, for these writers were fleeing in the country to which they had immigrated. As people doubly displaced from home, they were particularly in tune with the notion of exile. This perhaps explains why they wrote, in wartime, about the events of June 1940 in far greater numbers than their Frenchborn colleagues. Aside from émigré wartime writing, surprisingly few literary representations of the exode were written during the war, although there do exist many journalistic accounts of the subject.40 Whether in the Occupied or the Southern Zones, the writers treated in this book were subject to antisemitic and xenophobic legislation, and were threatened with internment and deportation. As Patrick Weil demonstrates, there was no clear division between antisemitic and xenophobic laws under the Occupation; rather, they were interwoven and even competed with each other.41 From the beginning of the Occupation, the vulnerable status of Jewish refugees and recently naturalized Jewish French citizens was at the center of legal changes and government action. The law of August 10, 1927, which eased requirements for naturalization, was used as a negative symbol of the supposed degradation of France and became a vehicle for denying immigrants the right to belong to the French nation. Just as the Nazis denaturalized anyone who had gained citizenship in Germany after the defeat of 1918, the Vichy government sought to delegitimize naturalizations effected under the 1927 law, targeting Jews in particular.42 Over 15,000 French people, and 110,000 Algerian Jews, lost their citizenship, although none of the writers in this study fell victim to the policy. Even before the Occupation, with the arrival of Spanish Republican refugees in early 1939, France had, as Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton put it, “crossed a new threshold: the resort to mass internment.”43 During the Phoney War, German Jewish refugees already in France were held in French internment camps. After the defeat, foreign Jews were the first to be rounded up in Paris in the spring and summer of 1941.44 Approximately three thousand foreign-born Jews died in the French internment camps early in the Occupation; these were the first deaths of the Shoah in France.45 With

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INTRODUCTION

the collaboration of Vichy, Jewish foreign refugees in French internment camps were deported eastward in the first convoys from the Southern Zone in August 1942 to the concentration camps.46 The terrible roundups of July 16–17, 1942, targeted 27,388 Jewish immigrants, who were stateless or unnaturalized immigrants from Germany, Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union.47 This has become known as the Vel d’Hiv roundup, as many of the 12,884 who were arrested by the French police were held in the Vélodrome d’Hiver, an indoor sports center in Paris, before being deported to Auschwitz.48 Not a single one of the approximately four thousand children survived deportation. By the end of the war, only 3 percent of Jewish people deported from France to “the East” returned. Némirovsky was murdered that same summer after being interned in Pithiviers and deported to Auschwitz; Fondane died in Auschwitz just after the liberation of France. At the same time as these terrible actions were taking place, Jews were active in diverse movements of the Resistance; their experiences and political affiliations were wide-ranging, as demonstrated by the lives of two Resistance writers discussed in this book, Romain Gary and Elsa Triolet. The Resistance challenged Vichy’s rejection of immigrants by the French nation, and, since so many groups with different languages and political positions formed the different Resistance movements, they created a multilingual space of resistance. It is within this context that I study Jewish Resistance writers. The historian Julian Jackson spells out three forms of Jewish Resistance: individuals who were Jewish and in the Resistance; Jewish Resistance organizations; and Resistance organizations with Jewish objectives whose members were not always exclusively Jewish.49 Triolet and Gary would fall under the first category. They took part in two vastly different Resistance movements. Most significantly, as I argue, both movements were linguistically diverse, as were many of the Resistance networks with which immigrants were involved. Gary fought with Charles de Gaulle’s Free French movement in London. Jewish and non-Jewish émigrés made major contributions to the Resistance effort in London. To take just one example, the very “Marseillaise” itself of the French Resistance, “Le Chant des partisans,” was written, translated, and performed by immigrants. In 1942, Anna Marly composed the music and lyrics for “Le Chant des partisans” in Russian. Marly was a singer who had

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immigrated to France from Saint Petersburg in the 1920s. She left France during the exode and in 1941 arrived in London, where she volunteered in the canteen of the Free French Forces’ headquarters at Carlton Gardens. 50 The song was translated into French by Maurice Druon, the son of a Russian Jewish immigrant, and by Druon’s uncle, Joseph Kessel, a Lithuanian Jew who had immigrated to France in 1908. Gary and Kessel wrote two of the most famous novels of the Resistance, Éducation européenne (A European Education) and L’Armée des ombres (Army of Shadows), respectively. I argue that Gary’s novel references the connections to the Polish Government-inExile in London, resurrecting this memory of the French Resistance. The Communist internal Resistance in France, with which Triolet sided as a clandestine journalist, was also linguistically diverse. One of the most famous examples is the Franc-tireurs et partisans–Main d’œuvre immigrée (FTP-MOI), the wartime reincarnation of an immigrant organization that was formed in the 1920s by the trade union linked to the French Communist Party, the Confédération générale du travail unitaire (CGTU).51 The FTPMOI was divided into language groups, including a Yiddish group. Under the Occupation, the different language groups circulated clandestine journals, sometimes in their native languages, and at other times either entirely in French or in bilingual editions. The FTP-MOI is perhaps most famous for its Manouchian Group, which was the subject of the famous Nazi propaganda poster, the Affiche rouge. The group was led by Missak Manouchian, an Armenian émigré and poet. Louis Aragon wrote a poem, which Léo Ferré later made into a song, about this group, and Triolet wrote a journalistic account of the FTP-MOI toward the end of the Occupation. In depicting key aspects of the war experience—the June 1940 civilian flight from Paris, life in the Occupied and Southern Zones, the roundups and internment camps, and the Resistance in France and London—the authors discussed in this book wrote about being foreign Jews, but they did so in French and in ways that contest the boundaries between foreignness and belonging, as expressed in their new approach to language. Unpublished archival documents, including correspondence, personal diaries, immigration papers, and a host of literary manuscripts, attest to a forgotten literary history that constantly challenges the binaries of center and periphery, of native and nonnative, of insider and outsider, of Jewish and non-Jewish language.

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INTRODUCTION

Jewish Multilingualism

Jewish multilingualism is at the center of this book, for national language itself was part of the battle under the Occupation and in the Resistance. Writing and distributing multilingual clandestine tracts published by the different networks of the Resistance or listening to enemy radio programs broadcast by the BBC and Radio Moscow could mean death; and revealing a so-called foreign accent could result in deportation. As such, national languages were central to the experiences of Jewish émigré writers. But these questions did not arise in a vacuum. Even in the interwar period, French Jewish communities were debating the status of French and Yiddish. As Nick Underwood has shown, Paris was a “hub of Yiddish culture” at the time, a fact that has been neglected in studies of Yiddish centers in the interwar period.52 Language and multilingualism get to the heart of the question of what it means to become a French writer and the extent to which the writers under discussion are Jewish writers. Because they write about Jewishness, I am calling them Jewish writers; they all came from varying religious and secular backgrounds and wrote about Jewishness in different terms, from religious practice to cultural traditions to legal status.53 I argue that what they have in common in their writing is that they all react to three linguistic currents in the interwar period that impacted the connection of Jews to French as a national language: debates within the French Jewish community about Yiddish; the importance of linguistic assimilation in government rhetoric around obtaining French citizenship; and attacks in the antisemitic press on what was perceived as adulterated French spoken by Jewish immigrants. Their reactions in the interwar period were varied, and these changed under the Occupation. First, within the French Jewish community the status of national language was central to interwar-era debates about Yiddish and the need for immigrants to speak French, and possibly to abandon Yiddish. Paula Hyman has shown that the French Jewish press, especially L’Univers israélite, heard immigrants’ Yiddish as an audible sign of foreignness and backwardness that put the entire community at risk at the moment of the rise of antisemitism in the 1930s.54 Pierre Birnbaum draws out the political implications of Yiddish, dating back to a first wave of immigration that lasted from the end of the nineteenth century to the start of World War I. Jewish immigrants to Paris

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from Eastern Europe formed aid societies and political groups, including anti-Communist, Zionist, and left-wing groups that often clashed with each other on the pages of the new newspapers they formed and elsewhere. The left-wing press in particular employed Yiddish. As Birnbaum demonstrates, this left-wing use of Yiddish in some ways explains declarations about Yiddish in France in the Jewish press. Like Hyman, he points to salient quotations about the topic. Jules Meyer stated, “The walls of Paris must no longer be covered with Hebrew characters.”55 Edmond de Rothschild announced in the General Assembly of the Paris Consistory in 1913: “These new [ Jewish] arrivals do not understand French customs. . . . They remain among themselves, retain their primitive language, speak and write in jargon.”56 Yiddish was seen here as a political danger to the Jews of France. Furthermore, the target of these speeches and articles was Yiddish, rather than the many other languages Eastern European immigrants spoke, in what Benjamin Harshav has called the “exuberant multilingualism” of the Jews of Eastern Europe, for whom it was not uncommon to speak upward of five languages.57 This political use of Yiddish continued into the Occupation in, for example, the Communist Yiddish-language clandestine journal Unzer Vort and the FTPMOI’s Yiddish language group. Shifting the focus away from divisions between native Jews and recent immigrants, Nadia Malinovich shows that a diversity of experiences, with overlapping associations and debates between these groups, paved the way for new discussions about what it meant to be French and Jewish in a renaissance of French Jewish culture during the first part of the twentieth century.58 She argues that Jewish immigrants to France did not maintain separate identities as immigrants for long, and that integration, including linguistic integration, occurred quite quickly in France.59 Nevertheless, she studies examples of the children of immigrants who moved between French and Yiddish spaces in “a combination of French acculturation and Jewish distinctiveness.”60 This was one of the ways in which some French Jews showed the complementarity of universalism and particularism.61 Nick Underwood demonstrates that this search for Frenchness and Jewishness was also undertaken in the Yiddish press among Yiddish-speaking immigrants, and not only by the second generation or by immigrants who came to France at a very young age. Underwood turns to Paris as a major

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center of Yiddish culture in this period, mapping out “a new FrancoYiddishness” formed by Yiddish-speaking Jews in France. 62 Bilingual French-Yiddish moments in the Communist Yiddish-language newspaper Naye Prese testify to the ways in which Jewish immigrant communities experimented with harmonizing a Yiddish cultural identity with Frenchness.63 Underwood studies fascinating moments in the mid to late 1930s, when French and Yiddish are used together in Naye Prese, particularly in the sections aimed at children, like beauty contests and poetry contests. Most of his examples relate to bilingualism in the journal, with French articles placed side by side with Yiddish articles. But a more extreme example arises in entries for a beauty contest where the children’s French names were translated and transliterated into Yiddish; Jacques became “Zshak” and Marie became “Mari.” Underwood reads this as “French names made Yiddish” in a “symbiotic relationship” between French and Jewish cultures.64 This kind of blending of cultures as shown through language mixing took place along the lines of the politics of the Popular Front, which, as Underwood shows, endorsed displays of Jewishness and “a pluralist version of how one could be French.”65 This also points to the way in which Yiddish itself was a “language of fusion.”66 The writers in this book were not part of the Franco-Yiddish scene and they did not write in Yiddish, although discussions involving these issues inform their wartime texts. In this book I focus on writers who chose to write in French rather than in their languages of origin, none of which were Yiddish. Before the war, these writers did integrate into French literary life through the adoption of the French language. Yet I argue that under the Occupation they also drew upon Jewish multilingualism to question the boundaries between languages and between senses of belonging not only as French and Jewish but as French and Eastern European immigrant Jews. But they nevertheless continued to write about these issues, and they did so in French. Rhetoric about citizenship and naturalization was a second domain that touched on language. I argue that these writers respond to the paradoxical nature of language and citizenship: such rhetoric was used alternatively to exclude and to include, to grant rights and to persecute. The question of language had always been part of debates about citizenship in France. In fact, the same Abbé Grégoire who famously argued for granting citizenship

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to the Jews based on his assimilationist ideals also sought to eradicate the different patois of France, which he saw as linguistic barriers preventing equality and unity.67 Language came up again during the citizenship law reforms at the end of the nineteenth century—namely, in the debates about adopting a system based purely on jus sanguinis versus expanding jus soli. This expansion of jus soli affected people born in France to parents who were not citizens, especially the large Italian and Belgian populations. Before this revision, for example, 12 percent of the population of the Bouches-du-Rhône region was Italian and did not have French citizenship.68 The republican politician Alfred Naquet, who was Jewish, argued that “foreigners who are born in France, who have learned our language from their birth, who frequently speak no other, who have been educated among us, who have learned to love France . . . [become] French at heart [Français par le cœur].”69 The language question is imbricated in the politics of assimilation in citizenship law in all parts of the political spectrum, including during the interwar period and under Vichy. In 1927, the Ligue des droits de l’homme (Human Rights League), an organization created during the Dreyfus Affair, published its recommendations for the rights of immigrants in France, placing the need for language learning alongside the right of refugees to seek asylum. The League recommended that the Ministry of Public Instruction should organize French language courses for adults and obligatory French courses for children because the “French language is a powerful measure of assimilation.”70 On the other hand, and from a radically different perspective, during a rise in xenophobia in the economic crisis of the 1930s, racist and pseudoscientific experts on the assimilation of immigrants were brought in by the government to work on political reforms of immigration law.71 In his 1932 study of immigration in France based on racial classifications, a text accepted by both the Left and the Far Right, Georges Mauco refers to language as one of the major factors of assimilation. He argues, based on the socalled fact that Slavic immigrants cannot master the French language, that they will never be able to assimilate. He even waxes poetic, stating that “the language of childhood remains the language of the soul.”72 Mauco would be considered one of the major specialists on immigration under Vichy, when he wrote antisemitic texts. One month after the start of the Occupation, the Ministry of Justice sought to create a new nationality code, under which the

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INTRODUCTION

criteria for naturalization would include speaking and understanding French. It never succeeded in this project. The third current to which the writers responded was the treatment of language and accent by the xenophobic press of the Far Right as the evidence of the impossibility of including Jewish immigrants in the nation. This attitude goes back to La France juive ( Jewish France, 1886), written by the journalist Édouard Drumont, and continues throughout the Occupation. A foundational text of French antisemitism in the nineteenth century, La France juive, declares that Jews cannot really speak French because they cannot truly think like French people; Drumont even claims that one can recognize Jews from their pronunciation and guttural accents.73 For Drumont there is no difference between the Alsatian Jew and the immigrant from the Levant. In his careful study of French attitudes toward immigration during the interwar period, Ralph Schor demonstrates that the right-wing press located the harm perpetrated by immigrants on French life in the French language itself. In 1924, a journalist writing in L’Œuvre calls the language of “the barbarians welcomed by us,” including that which appears on their shop signs, “a nameless gibberish, made from rubbish of French, debris of English, and also phrases imported from who knows where”—as though their so-called garbage language reflected the objectionable nature of these people in the eyes of this journalist.74 Under the Occupation, xenophobic writing about Yiddish as a sign of Jewish inassimilability and racial difference would continue. It was during the Vichy years that the writers under consideration began to react against this discourse around Jewish language that ranged from legal to communal, to charitable, to xenophobic. For example, Malaquais reappropriated mocked Jewish accents to challenge racism and xenophobia; Fondane declared all language multilingual while transliterating Hebrew letters in French writing; and Gary started to write about Jewish characters and their languages within French. Triolet and Némirovsky, however, had different responses. Triolet also began to write about Jewish identity and its place in France and in French, but she denied the existence of a particular Jewish language. Némirovsky, too, changed her approach during the war; unlike the other authors, she did write extensively about Jewish language in the interwar period, but she completely removed Jewish voice from her wartime writing to show the exclusion of Jewish voice from French. They all responded in

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new ways during the war to the notion that the immigrant tongue, and the Yiddish language, were signs of the possibility or impossibility of admission into French life. The topic of immigrants speaking Yiddish and French falls into Max Weinreich’s classic terminology of Jewish external bilingualism (Hebrew or Yiddish and a non-Jewish national language).75 Jewish internal bilingualism (Hebrew and Yiddish) would be the alternative term. These two forms of Jewish bilingualism have been well studied.76 In this book, however, I turn to writers who address a Jewish multilingualism in which Jewish languages function within a matrix of national languages as well as within the supposedly secular language of French. In this way, French is not a separate category unable to contain Jewish voice but rather is constitutive of émigré authors’ engagement with Jewishness and French writerly identity. The writers in this study worked outside the debates about the choice of the Jewish national language between Yiddish or Hebrew, providing a broader answer to the question “What is a Jewish language?” They indicate that there is no one Jewish language and that no one language is “not Jewish,” to adapt Derrida’s formula that “1. We only ever speak one language. 2. We never speak only one language.”77 In their writings about Jewish émigré identities in the war they use multiple languages in their French texts, including transliterated Hebrew and Yiddish but also French and the languages of their countries of origin, along with descriptions of Yiddish accents in French. But they also incorporate other European languages, including Russian, Polish, and German—sometimes, as is the case with Triolet, leaving out Hebrew and Yiddish altogether in favor of a French and Russian bilingualism.78 Underwood’s example of Frenchmade-Yiddish would represent a similar dynamic, only in the opposite direction—that is, Yiddish containing French voice. This is a radically different French from the conception of the language in the failed Vichy project for new citizenship laws, in which French was used as a political tool, a monolingual language with a strong boundary dividing the outside from the inside. Indeed, it is even more radical than arguments made about the relationship between Yiddish and English during the war, when the United States was becoming the new center of Yiddish life. In this history, Anita Norich rejects the trope of the death of Yiddish and the increasing ascendance of English, showing that Yiddish and English were not kept separate, but rather that

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INTRODUCTION

there was a mix of languages, “a bilingual, multivalent, untidy array.”79 Yet she holds that English “cannot be mistaken for a Jewish language.”80 This study seeks to break down the boundary between Jewish and nonJewish language that is assumed in internal and external bilingualism. The writers discussed here work against the debates that relegated Jewish immigrants to the status of Others. They did so through the French language, incorporating other languages into it—not treating French as a non-Jewish language but as a language with which to conceive of Jewish life in France. Furthermore, their persistence at writing in French, at the same time as they were officially denied a place as French writers, defied the official discourse of the Occupation. This made writers in the Resistance like Triolet and Gary twice-resistant. Studies of European Francophonie have tended to gloss over the period of World War II as if it were an era of silence. I argue that, on the contrary, the pressures of the Occupation—and with it, rejection, exclusion, and persecution—were a catalyst for a new, multilingual French. Némirovsky’s apparent rejection of Jewish voice must be read in this context.

European Francophonie

Writing Occupation also speaks to the global turn in the field of French and Francophone Studies. I follow Christie McDonald and Susan Suleiman’s definition of the global: “The sense of a globe that is interconnected, of cultural difference that is within and beyond the nation.”81 This approach focuses on circulation and border crossing. Another way to put this would be “une littérature-monde en français” (a world literature in French), to use the words of the forty-four writers who signed the manifesto by that name published by Le Monde in 2007. This much-debated text demanded an end to the separate categories of French and Francophone literatures based on the supposition of France as the center, a “last avatar of colonialism.”82 Studying Jewish émigré writers of French expression from Eastern Europe engages with this same issue but leads to different conclusions. Rather than looking at the relationship between authors of so-called minor languages (either languages that are not French or minor languages as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari define them) and the major European literary centers, my study theorizes their linguistic strategies to show the porousness of national and linguistic boundaries for writers under the Occupation when they were responding to

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the boundaries of the collaborationist state and occupying forces, which were anything but flexible. Furthermore, I argue that we must include European Francophonie in any definition of a global French literature. The term European Francophonie has been theorized by a number of scholars in recent years. Studies on the use of French in the Europe of the Enlightenment focus on the universality and prestige of French. In a collection of essays on writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, editors Elena Gretchanaia, Alexandre Stroev, and Catherine Viollet describe the use of French by Europeans as participation in a common European heritage and in a project of universalité as it was formed by Enlightenment thinkers in ways that reveal “the cultural domination of the French language” in Europe at this time.83 In Quand l’Europe parlait français (When the World Spoke French), Marc Fumaroli studies the use of French across the European continent in the eighteenth century by the elites of the Enlightenment, for whom culture and diplomacy were inextricable. For Fumaroli, something about the style of French and the way in which it was adopted indicates not only universality but also an acceptance of its prestige. He argues that it was its “exigency of style that constituted its universal prestige.”84 French became not simply a means of communication but a universal language that people used “in order to participate in the banquet of minds of which France was long the expert hostess.”85 In Joanna Nowicki and Catherine Mayaux’s collection of essays on European Francophonie from Central and Eastern Europe in the interwar and postwar periods, the emphasis shifts from universalism to “a European specificity.”86 Nowicki and Mayaux talk about how writers from “the Other Europe”—Czesław Miłosz’s famous term—have formed an Other Francophonie. The use of French by Eastern and Central European writers in the twentieth century was characterized by “an ethical choice linked to the banner of liberty that the image of France conveys in the mind.”87 As such, French ideals were introduced in the Other Europe through the use of French and writers of the Other Europe influenced France. Nowicki and Mayaux demonstrate a porosity through language between Eastern and Western Europe. That all of the writers in this book knew French even before coming to France in the interwar period, either from their education or their literary affiliations, testifies to the influence of European Francophonie in Eastern Europe.

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INTRODUCTION

Pascale Casanova, however, returns to the idea of the prestige and universalism of French from the Renaissance to the present day in La République mondiale des lettres (The World Republic of Letters), questioning the supposedly harmonious relationships proposed by studies of European Francophonie. She points to Paris in particular as the “denationalized and universal capital of the literary world.”88 The world republic of letters is a global system that exists in its own timeframe and that has its own centers and peripheries, with Paris as the literary Greenwich meridian. Casanova argues that during the eighteenth century, the French language was universal because it was not seen as “an expression of national character”; universality in France at this time meant “the reestablishment of a unity in a world sundered by political rivalries.”89 The “Herder effect” of the nineteenth century, named after Johann Gottfried Herder, would link nation and language, and Casanova argues that literary capital is by nature national.90 Casanova investigates the continued press of literary domination—one that often reflects political domination—exercised by the center over the peripheries in the hierarchy of the world republic of letters. She states that “the notion of universality is one of the most diabolical inventions of the center.”91 For Casanova, the center dominates “small” countries—that is, “literarily deprived” countries on the peripheries—and the writers on the peripheries react either in revolt or assimilation: “The only genuine history of literature is one that describes the revolts, assaults upon authority, manifestos, inventions of new forms and languages.”92 This is a world of struggle, in which writers on the peripheries are always at a loss and are always reacting to the center. Casanova takes up the idea of minor and major literatures described by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. In studying Kafka, a Czech Jew who wrote in German, they state: “A minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language.”93 A minor literature (or, in Kafka’s words, a small literature) “deterritorializes” language and is also characterized by being political as well as having a collective value.94 Casanova firmly rejects Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of Kafka and their use of the political, in particular, as anachronistic and thus as “a form of literary ethnocentrism.”95 Nevertheless, the element of struggle exists in both texts, but in different ways. Deleuze and Guattari push to “create a becoming-minor” that

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resists, rather than follows, the dream of minor writers: “to assume a major function in language, to offer themselves as a sort of state language, an official language.”96 It is true that the writers in this book came to Paris as a literary center in the interwar period, and I read their experience in these terms. I owe a great debt to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “the polylingualism of one’s own language” and the deterritorialization of language, as well as to Casanova’s “denationalized” French, for framing the literature of migration.97 However, I argue that the wartime texts by the émigré writers studied in this book undo the idea of a center, contesting the notion that all minor writers use a collective, political voice in relation to a dominant language. Casanova’s work and other studies of European Francophonie assume a relationship between France as the center and elsewhere as a periphery or “Other.” But the wartime writing of the writers treated here is less a drama between periphery and center than it is a reflection of writers in the center on their multiple identities—while they were being persecuted in a country in crisis. Fondane’s depiction of the June 1940 civilian flight in his poem L’Exode: Super flumina Babylonis—“we were turning around things / that were turning around us”— better captures the vortex of concentric circles of identity in the war.98 I show in this book that the binaries of center and periphery, of native and nonnative, of insider and outsider, of major and minor, are inadequate terms to describe the ways in which these writers rethought their place in the French language during the Occupation years. Francophone Studies have more typically referred to writing in French in the former colonies. While I do not claim that the writers in my corpus are in a similar situation to postcolonial writers, comparative studies of the way language is used by different writers of French expression—émigré, postcolonial, refugee, native—prove to be fruitful.99 The writers in this book employ literary strategies like heteroglossia, or the mixing of registers of language, and multilingualism that have often been associated with postcolonial Francophonie. In particular, considering Jewish authors from Algeria who write about the role of the French language under the Occupation—namely, Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous—offers a vocabulary for analyzing the narrative linguistic work of the writers in this book without effacing their different situations. The writers in my corpus chose to write in French under different conditions. For

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INTRODUCTION

Derrida and Cixous, part of a younger generation writing after the war, French was enmeshed in the politics of empire.100 They both grew up speaking French (Cixous also writes about the other languages in her home, including German), part of the legacy of the Crémieux Decree of 1870, which granted French citizenship to the Jews of Algeria. But they both locate the French language as a site of troubled identities, because they grew up in French Algeria and because they lost their French citizenship under the Occupation through the abrogation of the Crémieux Decree in 1940. While this book does not focus on comparisons between Jews in the colonies and émigré Jews in the metropole, I turn to Derrida and Cixous especially in chapter 1 and the epilogue, although their work comes through at several other points, since their writings about language draw out many of the themes in this book. Scholars have shown that Jewish life in France and the colonies are not two separate spheres: the French system of empire shaped not only Jewish life in the colonies but also the “contours of European Jewish modernization.”101 Furthermore, as Daniel Schroeter has demonstrated, antisemitic policies during the war in North Africa “exposed the close connection between colonialism and radical anti-Semitism that reverberated on both shores of the Mediterranean, between the metropole and French North Africa.”102 These relationships open a path to reflection on the discourses of Jewish Francophonie and the war years. Studies of European Francophonie have tended not to emphasize the World War II era.103 Even those excellent books on the twentieth century tend not to focus on writings from the years of the Occupation itself. My own argument builds upon theirs, filling a gap in the history. Casanova devotes a single paragraph to World War II as an “extraordinary political situation,” ascribing it to a moment in which “the French literary space suddenly lost its autonomy” and French writers entered a situation similar to that of “authors in emerging worlds of letters.”104 This approach would seem to be the literary-historical equivalent of a notion that Robert O. Paxton and others have dismissed—namely, that the Occupation consisted of four abominable years bracketed off between the Third and Fourth Republics in which the real France did not exist.105 Alternatively, not treating the Occupation is an unintended simplification that marginalizes these writers as victims of the Shoah rather than studying them as authors who actively continued to reflect on their situation.

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The diverse writings and experiences of Eastern European Jewish émigré writers open up a much more varied story. I argue, first, that language was the locus in which writers negotiated their positions. Second, Jewish émigré writers produced a rich literature in which they conceived of their role as writers of French expression in the midst of one of the most terrible periods in French history. This study of Jewish émigré literature in France and in French at the breakdown of the Republic reveals that writers wrote in French about multiple languages and multiple senses of belonging—to countries, to political movements, and to Judaism—even when this sense of belonging was being violently denied. This shows not only the particular situation of Jewish émigré writers under Vichy but also their contributions to the idea of global French and Jewish multilingualism. This book is divided into chapters that correspond to literary and historical problems posed by the writers’ specific involvement in the war. The chapters are largely organized along chronological lines, as each writer deals with questions of language at different points in the war. Each chapter also opens with a linguistic biography of the author during the interwar period to establish the shift in his or her approach to writing in French during the war. The first three chapters are devoted to Benjamin Fondane, Jean Malaquais, and Romain Gary, who employ multilingualism, representation of accents, and heteroglossia to show the presence of multiple languages, including Jewish languages, within French. The last two chapters are devoted to Elsa Triolet and Irène Némirovsky, both of whom trouble the linguistic approaches of those discussed in the first three chapters either by challenging the validity of a particular Jewish voice in the French language or by removing Jewish voice from writing in French to express displacement in the war. Yet they are still very much engaged in analyzing the role of Jewish writers in the French language. One kind of document that I never found in my research is correspondence between these writers. They seem not to have known each other, and they certainly did not form a circle of writers. They were often on different ends of the political spectrum—from the Communists Malaquais (a Trotskyist) and Triolet to the supporter of de Gaulle, Gary. That strikes me as even more telling: the question of Jewishness, language, and immigration surges up in their work and testifies to the ways the pressures of the war caused a shift. I argue that they transformed their writing but that they were

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INTRODUCTION

not silenced by the defeat. They responded to persecution by generating new conceptions of French and by creating new literature. For some, French became universal in a different way: a language with no center or periphery, in which they could represent Jewish voice and multiple languages, including their maternal tongues and the language of prayer. For others, Jewish voice was either subsumed into an international struggle in which they could be accepted or into an absence to be felt in the French language once Jewish voice was removed. As a whole, these five writers alter our understanding of French Jewish identities and wartime France.

l CHAP TER 1 '

A J EW I S H P O E T I C S O F Ex I LE Benjamin Fondane’s Exodus

On May 25, 194 4, Benjamin Fondane wrote to his wife Geneviève from the Drancy transit camp on the outskirts of Paris. He signed his letter “Your Mielouchon, Vecsler Benjamin, known as Fondane.”1 It was an elaborate signature for an intimate message, but each part of the complicated name had meaning. Born in 1898 to a Jewish family in Jassy, Fondane’s legal name was Benjamin Wechsler. 2 His childhood nickname, Mielușon, means “little lamb” in Romanian. When he began to publish poetry, essays, and translations as a teenager in 1914, he chose the pseudonym B. Fundoianu, having been inspired by the name of his paternal grandparents’ estate, Fundoaia, near Herța. The numerous pen names he would use also included I. Haşir, meaning “the song” (ha-shir) in Hebrew. He first used the name Benjamin Fondane, a French version of his original pseudonym, in 1925, two years after he immigrated to Paris. This author was all that these names would indicate: the Romanian Mielușon, the Romanian Jewish immigrant Vecsler—listing his name as it would appear on official documents, with the last name first— and the French author Fondane. It is significant that he based the name on Fundoaia, which was not his birthplace but rather the land of his paternal grandparents, where he had spent summers as a child.3 This estate lay in a borderland whose boundaries changed numerous times over the course of the twentieth century. Herța, now part of Ukraine but historically situated in Moldavia, stood on the border of Bukovina—that is, on the edge of the

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Austro-Hungarian Empire—until Bukovina was incorporated into Romania in 1918.4 The very choice of his authorial name demonstrates both a nostalgia for a place that is not necessarily home and the idea that even this place is unstable. His signature encompasses multiple languages and maps multiple spaces of belonging, which he would seek to reconcile throughout his years of writing, even in the darkest days of the Occupation. Over the course of his career, Fondane shifted his approach to the French language from a search for community to a revision of the very notion of a national language. After Fondane emigrated in 1923 from Romania to Paris, he transitioned from multilingual publication in Romanian, French, German, and Yiddish to publication in French alone. He emigrated to escape the rise of antisemitism in his home country and to join the cosmopolitan French literary world. But Fondane’s linguistic background challenges the notion of a single mother tongue set aside for the adoption of French. First, as a young author in Romania he took part in an intellectual Romanian milieu whose authors were fluent in French and heavily influenced by French culture, whether classical or avant-garde. He published Romanian translations of French as well as of German literature. Second, Fondane also translated poems from Yiddish into Romanian during the rise of violent antisemitism in Romania. In this chapter, I trace Fondane’s multilingual world from his hometown of Jassy to Bucharest to Paris, arguing that the French language was for Fondane both the medium of cultural liberation and an escape from antisemitism in Romania. But over the course of the 1930s, Fondane would again effect a shift in his writing, referring to the French language as the site of his growing unease as a Jewish foreigner. French became not a language of belonging to a community but just the opposite, the language of a loss of community and of a Jewish poetics of exile during the Occupation.

Mother Tongues

For Fondane, Romania did not represent a forgotten, homogeneous past but rather an amalgam of different European and Jewish cultural influences. The years before his immigration were contradictory ones, during which he expressed attraction to and ambivalence about both Romanian and French national cultures while also balancing Yiddish-language and Zionist affiliations within his cosmopolitan European world. Through his family and his

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hometown culture, he had already immersed himself in German literature and philosophy, as well as in the Jewish tradition. In the interwar period, Jassy was undergoing a Jewish cultural and intellectual renaissance, and Fondane came from a prominent intellectual Jewish family. His maternal uncle, Elias Schwarzfeld, the author of important essays, books, and novels on the Jews of Romania, was expelled from the country because of his criticism of state antisemitism; he settled in Paris in the late nineteenth century. 5 Fondane’s grandfather, Benjamin Schwarzfeld, had established the first Jewish school in Jassy. Although Fondane did not know his grandfather, he did inherit his library, which contained books by the giants of German letters, possibly even by the famous nineteenth-century writer Theodor Fontane.6 He also discovered the joys of the Yiddish language thanks to his friendship with the poet Jacob Groper.7 Perhaps the most influential language spoken in Fondane’s milieu was French. When, in 1919, Fondane moved to Bucharest, often called “Little Paris,” to continue his studies, he joined a bilingual group that revered French culture and language. There he engaged with the local avant-garde movement, which drew its inspiration from the Parisian avant-garde. He befriended Jewish figures of the Romanian literary and artistic scene, including Sașa Pană and M. H. Maxy, as well as Ilarie Voronca and Claude Sernet, both of whom moved to Paris a few years later. In 1922, Fondane founded the Insula theater group, which was influenced by Jacques Copeau’s Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in Paris. The troupe performed a number of plays by Molière, including Le Médecin volant (The Flying Doctor), translated by Fondane himself, and works by Goethe, Shaw, Chekhov, Maeterlinck, and Anatole France, among others.8 The troupe’s name, Insula, meaning “the island” in Romanian, implies that they conceived of themselves as an island in Bucharest—as outsiders in their own country. Fondane closed the theater in 1923, shortly before emigrating, because of financial problems as well as antisemitic attacks. This was another reason to feel isolated.9 Even before Fondane’s emigration, he published on the cultural and political implications of Romanian-French bilingualism, as well as on the very kind of French influence that could be seen in his Insula theater. In 1922, he produced a collection of essays on French literature, Imagini şi cărţi din Franţa (Images and books from France). In the polemical preface he engages

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with the role of national literatures in the formation of a national culture, revealing his ambivalence toward Romanian Francophonie in the process. Calling Romanian authors parasites on French literature, he states that they are unable to assimilate French literature in order to create something new— that is, for the enrichment of Romanian letters. Romanian intellectuals depend on French literature because of their bilingualism, yet they do not write in French. As such, they do not contribute to Romanian letters and are left with the necessity of proving their worth to France. Romania has become a colony of French culture; even more radically, Fondane states that he has the feeling that he is publishing his Imagini şi cărţi din Franţa in France. Yet the book is written in Romanian, further highlighting the paradoxical bilingual situation of its author.10 Fondane is critiquing a Romanian tradition, begun in the nineteenth century, of looking to Paris as “a space of cultural identification throughout the process of Romania’s modernization,” in the words of Monica Spiridon.11 Spiridon studies this “national obsession,” according to which Paris stood for Romance language and the heritage of Romanian as a Romance language stood for “irrefutable proof of a Western European identity and allegiance.”12 As such, this was also a “national obsession with peripheral identity.”13 Fondane hones in on the practice of creating links to France through literature in particular so as to declare Romania’s place in Western Europe. According to this imaginary European map, what lies on the other side of the West is a vaguely delineated, primitive space fragmented by ethnic groups on the peripheries of “civilized Europe.”14 It is this peripheral identity, located in the dynamics of bilingualism in Romanian intellectual circles, that Fondane addresses. Although he critiques Romanian parasitism, his book is composed entirely of essays about French writers. While this approach may seem contradictory, Fondane actually proposes a different geography from the one that positions Romania as a colony. Instead, Fondane says his book shows the fruits of a voyage across the “world of books,” a world as real as the one we find on maps.15 Yet he remains pessimistic that his book will change the landscape of Romanian letters, a landscape that pains him. All he can hope to provide in his essays is a moment to confide in the reader about his thoughts on the writers he loves. Fondane’s preface on French literary

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domination fits Pascale Casanova’s characterization of the struggles and rebellions in the world republic of letters of which Paris is the capital; Fondane determines that Romanian national literature is in a state of literary destitution.16 In this kind of dominated literary space, Casanova argues, the main question for writers like Fondane “involves the nation, the language, and the people—which is to say the language of the people and the linguistic, literary, and historical definition of the nation.”17 This view of center and periphery, of nation-building through literature in one language, would change radically in Fondane’s wartime writing. But in this preface, he reveals a deep ambivalence about his allegiance to France and his Francophile colleagues in Bucharest. Instead, he seems to long for a kind of Romanian authenticity. Yet only a year after he published Imagini şi cărţi din Franţa, he moved to France, where he would write almost exclusively in French. Fondane may have come to feel alienated from Romanian literary life, not only as an intellectual working in many languages but also as a Jew in the midst of a wave of violent antisemitism. Immediately after World War I and the collapse of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires, Romania doubled in size when Transylvania, Bukovina, and Bessarabia were unified with the Romanian Old Kingdom. Romania struggled to cope with its population of ethnic minorities, which expanded from 8 percent to almost 30 percent of its total population after the war.18 The “Jewish question” became ever more important in nationalist politics. Jews were granted civil rights in the Constitution of 1923, which was in compliance with a 1919 decree born out of the Paris Peace Conference. It was a time of debate about nation-building, as well as a time of growing nationalism. The universities were massively expanded in the interwar period and became the site of ideological debate and antisemitic riots. Fondane was enrolled at the Faculty of Law of the University of Jassy from 1916 to 1919, and he was at the heart of these debates just as Greater Romania was forming. In fact, he never received his degree because of antisemitism at the university, failing the exams given by Alexandru C. Cuza, the antisemitic dean of the Faculty of Law who was known to block Jewish students from obtaining degrees.19 And things would only grow more violent after Fondane left Jassy in 1919. In 1922, rioting antisemitic students in Jassy beat Jewish students in the presence of professors and the patrol units that were on hand to maintain order. Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the

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founder of the Iron Guard, was a major figure among nationalist students at this time.20 Cuza, an ally of Codreanu, encouraged the violence. Student delegates from various universities demanded a number of reforms, including the expulsion of Jewish students who had immigrated to the annexed provinces of Romania after 1914 and a rule that would prohibit Jewish students from assuming Romanian names.21 The Jewish writer Mihail Sebastian evokes the terrible disappointment and humiliation of the physical violence that was directed at Jewish students at Romanian universities in his novel De două mii de ani (For Two Thousand Years, 1934). The narrator, a young Jewish student at the University of Bucharest, is attacked while leaving a classroom during the riots of December 10, 1922, when the above demands were made. He says to himself: If I cry, I’m lost. Clench your fists, you fool, if necessary, believe yourself a

hero, pray to God, tell yourself you’re the son of a race of martyrs, yes, yes, tell yourself that, knock your head against the wall, but if you want to be able to look at yourself in the mirror and not die of shame, don’t cry. That’s all I ask of you: don’t cry.22

Sebastian’s own journals, like his novel De două mii de ani, chronicle his evershrinking world, with his intellectual friends, including the philosopher Emil Cioran, moving over to the Iron Guard. Cioran himself would emigrate to France and switch to writing in French after World War II. He would also play a key role near the end of Fondane’s life. How could Fondane continue in such a stifling atmosphere?

“Exercice de français”

Antisemitism may have tipped the balance toward emigration. Fondane’s earliest childhood years coincided with the dramatic flight of over forty thousand Romanian Jews between the years 1899 and 1904, when many emigrants were aided by the Alliance israélite universelle, an organization based in Paris. After a financial crisis and a disastrous rise in antisemitism, most emigrants left for the United States, though some went to France, England, Egypt, and Argentina. By 1914, approximately one-third of the Jews of Romania had emigrated.23 Fondane, however, took part in the growing emigration of Jewish university students in the interwar period.24 John Hyde calls

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his emigration in 1923 “a physical closing of the gap.”25 Now he could participate in the culture that had so inspired him as a young writer in Romania. Nevertheless, after settling in France, Fondane would face the renewed question of how multilingualism and immigration affect authorial, national, and Jewish identity—now from the position of an immigrant author who had adopted the French language. Leaving home did not mean a complete rupture with the past, however. After Fondane arrived in Paris, he continued to contribute to literary journals published in Romania. In fact, his first published poem in French, “Exercice de français” (French exercise), appeared in Contimporanul in May 1925.26 The same journal published poetry and art by émigré writers Tristan Tzara and Ilarie Voronca (in Romanian), by giants of the European avant-garde like F. T. Marinetti and André Breton, and by two other recent Romanian émigré artists, Constantin Brancusi and Victor Brauner. Bucharest was also a home for French writing. The fact that his first French poem was written in Paris but published in Romania demonstrates that Fondane was still negotiating two different worlds through his poetry: one as an established writer in Bucharest and the other as an unknown poet and philosopher in Paris. The poem, “Exercice de français,” explores travel through foreign language. It recounts a voyage across Paris and an evening in Vienna, opening with the line: “Ce soir, je te traverse en étranger, Auteuil!” (Tonight, I cross you as a stranger, Auteuil!). He exults in coming as a voyager to this tony suburb of Paris, known for having been the home of writers as illustrious as Molière and Boileau and the birthplace of Proust. In the next lines, the poet describes a bar scene in Vienna: “Dans les bars l’on servait des langues étrangères / et des cok-tails [sic]” (In the bars they served foreign languages / and cocktails). Here, foreign language is as intoxicating as alcohol. His first poem in French presents travel both in light of the barriers between languages and as a pleasurable activity. It is an exercise in French and almost a joyful language classroom activity, as the title of the poem suggests. By the late 1920s, Fondane had joined Discontinuité, an émigré group situated at the edges of Montparnasse literary life. The group published a single issue of the avant-garde review Discontinuité, working from a hotel on the rue de Vaugirard in the fifteenth arrondissement, in a room rented by Arthur Adamov, the Russian-born future playwright of the Theater of the Absurd.

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Adamov had been spurned by André Breton, the doyen of the French Surrealists, after he declared his allegiance to Paul Éluard. The rejection fueled the formation of Discontinuité. In an essay about the difficulties of maintaining the Discontinuité project while still planning to publish another issue of the review, Adamov wrote: “I don’t give a damn” about those who would perhaps not be interested in seeing another issue.27 He singles out “the flies that buzz around certain Surrealists, who [. . .] despised me at the time already long ago when I wanted to join their group.”28 He sneers at those who “hate in me ‘the métèque’ [a derogatory term for a foreigner] from who knows where.’”29 The Discontinuité writers were mostly from Romania, Serbia, and Russia, and they included Fondane, Adamov, Serge-Victor Arnovitch, Monny de Boully, Victor Brauner, Grégoire Michonze, Georges Neveux, Claude Sernet, and Ilarie Voronca. These names conjure up an image of a generation of young men who wrote together, many of whom have been forgotten. In the introduction to the first issue of the journal, which they titled “L’Aube n’est pas une épée” (The dawn is not a sword), the editors declare: “One must be in order [être en règle] with oneself and eternity.”30 The expression “to be in order” has the connotation of filling out paperwork to regularize (régulariser) a foreigner’s situation in France. By contrast with this seemingly bureaucratic concern, these writers wanted to “regularize” their spirits vis-à-vis the eternal and beyond history, place, culture, and nationality. Their message recalls the statement by Voronca, coeditor of the review, to the Romanian Surrealist Sașa Pană in 1926: “Of all the Nations, I choose the imagi-Nation.”31 The eternal world of the imagination escapes the boundaries of countries and the bureaucracy of borders. Discontinuité rejected not only bourgeois society but also the French government’s regulations for foreigners. The very name of their journal indicated a rupture. Fondane’s own experience of writing within an émigré community of French speakers can be contrasted with the philosopher Emil Cioran’s late switch to French in the postwar period. Cioran moved to France a decade after Fondane, having never published in French. He wrote his last book, Breviarul învinșilor (Primer of passions), in Romanian during the Occupation in his hotel room on the rue Racine, just a short walk from Fondane’s apartment on the rue Rollin. Cioran wrote that he considered Fondane his best friend in Paris. It is a surprising statement. They met in Paris during the Occupation

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after Cioran briefly served as a cultural attaché of the Romanian embassy in Vichy, where he worked for an Axis power, the authoritarian Romanian government.32 Cioran had been, in his youth, a participant in the Romanian Young Generation movement, otherwise known as the Generation of 1927, which sympathized with the Iron Guard and epitomized the very types of antisemitic circles that Fondane had escaped in leaving Romania.33 In Breviarul învinșilor Cioran describes meandering on the streets and to the sites not far from where Fondane lived—Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, Notre-Dame, and the streets leading toward the Seine. He walks the same streets as Fondane did, yet his approach to his newfound home is much more solitary. While wandering alone Cioran feels his “non-reason for being,” yet at the same time the grey skies fit his mood: “This city understands you.”34 That is, the city understands the marginality of his existence. If you’re going to ruin your life you might as well do it in Paris, says Cioran.35 This solitary marginality is expressed in his outsider status as a Romanian writer living in France. He further contrasts the sense of fulfillment he finds in a dreary Paris, where he experiences the feeling of belonging precisely by not belonging, to the impotence he sees in “the filth of the Balkans, where the land is as vile as the people.”36 Even when Cioran switched to French after World War II, he did so in yet another expression of isolation and alienation. He made the decision while attempting to translate from French into Romanian. In 1947, when he was translating Stéphane Mallarmé into Romanian, he thought: Why am I translating into a language that “nobody knows”?37 But he would later explain that his isolation and solitude were not simply a matter of being outside the center of the literary world, but rather of being separated from the self. “In changing language, I immediately liquidated the past: I completely changed my life.”38 Writing in French means aligning himself with a language “that isn’t linked to anything, without roots, a hothouse language.”39 By speaking in his nonnative tongue, he lives on the margins: “My marginality is not accidental, but essential.”40 His switch to French reveals a new identification with his adopted home rather than an “emancipation” from Romania. Being an outsider in language parallels what Cioran calls his metaphysical statelessness, and he claims: “I no longer need a homeland; I want to belong to nothing.”41 Cioran’s pessimism and deliberate linguistic isolation contrast sharply with Fondane’s search for an intellectual circle in French while in Paris. For

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Fondane, writing in French did not reflect a lack of identity but rather entailed a search for a writerly identity and a place of belonging outside of the increasingly antisemitic world of Romanian letters. It was a search for nationality—he applied for French citizenship in the late 1930s—and the illusive sense of community, both within and outside of émigré intellectual circles through language. Although he belonged to a marginal group, Fondane had found a community and was slowly becoming more at home in France. On July 28, 1931, he married a Frenchwoman, Geneviève Tissier. Brancusi and Lev Shestov, the Russian Jewish émigré philosopher and Fondane’s mentor, served as witnesses. Fondane was building a life and a career in France.

Ulysses’s Travels

Ironically, just as he was becoming established on the French poetry scene and starting to apply for French citizenship, Fondane began to thematize multilingualism and travel as a sign of exile and displacement in a long history of Jewish persecution. In the poem Ulysse (Ulysses), published in 1933 and revised during the 1940s, Fondane shifts to representing language as a marker of exile. He began the poem in Argentina in 1929, while working on a Surrealist film project that was funded by Victoria Ocampo.42 Already in the interwar version of the poem, Fondane creates a Jewish Ulysses on a twentieth-century journey to the Americas and beyond, always in exile. He is accompanied, not by twelve ships of sailors returning from the Trojan War but rather by emigrants who are displaced without a destination after World War I and in the wake of pogroms. In section 9 of the poem, he goes from port to port, a wandering Jew who never arrives: j’ai voyagé dans le train avec vous, mon père est là— je suis enfant mais déjà matelot

je commande la mer mais je prête l’oreille aux massacres aux scènes de viol qu’on se montre en photo l’existence même m’étonnait du juif émigrant, émigrant, où vas-tu

moi-même étais-je sans racines

je m’accrochais au train mais je partais quand même était-elle si loin la terre américaine

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(I traveled on the train with you, my father is there— I am a child but already a sailor

I command the seas but lend my ear to the massacres to the rape scenes that they show in pictures the very existence surprised me of the Jew emigrant, emigrant, where do you go myself was I without roots

I clung to the train but I was leaving anyway the American land was it so far away)43

Although he is traveling with the other figures in the poem (perhaps including the “you” of the first line quoted), the speaker is somehow separate from them. He is an emigrant like the other voyagers, yet he is rootless and separate, even from them. Marking the images of sexual violence and destruction in pogroms, he is an outside witness, for it is not his world that was destroyed. The very existence, or perhaps the survival, of the Jew confounds him, yet through this statement he places himself outside the figure of the Jew. He is attached only to the train, a symbol of movement that is itself in motion to depart, in a kind of dual displacement. When the speaker arrives in South America in the original 1933 version of the poem, language is what separates him: je ne sais pas la langue que vous parlez, qu’y puis-je je ne suis pas chiromancien

mes mots mes maux sont ceux de tout le monde (I do not know the language you speak, what can I do I am no chiromancer

my prose my pain belongs to everyone)44

Fondane plays with the homophones mots (words) and maux (aches or pains), expressing that language is the source of pain. To know the other’s language is to be a palm reader: it is to understand the broken lifelines of the emigrant existence. As he began Ulysse in Buenos Aires, Fondane wrote to his friend Claude Sernet on a postcard dated September 9, 1929: “Mielușon the Emigrant. Because a Jew or because a poet.”45 Referring to himself by his Romanian

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nickname, he attributes his state of homelessness to both his Jewish background and his poetic profession. Here Fondane fits into a modernist Jewish poetics of exile; in a more succinct formula, as the poet Paul Celan quoted Marina Tsvetaeva in Die Niemandsrose (No-One’s Rose, 1963): “All poets are Yids.”46 Both poets lived in exile in Paris. For Fondane too there is something fundamentally exilic about both Judaism and poetry, a notion he expresses even while he is trying to integrate into an artistic community in France. These themes would become central in his wartime rewritings of his poems. Despite writing about displacement, Fondane had a growing network in France as he composed Ulysse. In 1938, his situation was finally “regularized” when he became a citizen with the help of Jean Ballard, the editor of the Cahiers du Sud.47 Sending around a circular letter, Ballard raised 25,000 francs in support of his naturalization. Contributors included Joë Bousquet, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, and Léon Pierre-Quint, as well as émigré artists, writers, and intellectuals—including Rachel Bespaloff, Brancusi, and Jacques Schiffrin, the Russian-born founder of the prestigious collection, the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade—who had made a place for themselves in the Parisian literary establishment.48 Yet a letter addressed to Sernet in Bucharest reveals Fondane’s state of mind in the early 1930s. Writing on November 14, 1934, on his thirty-sixth birthday, Fondane tells his dear friend of his obsessive anguish that a war is coming. He wishes he could be anywhere else than where he is, but asks: “Where, Jew? That is the problem and we cannot flee from ourselves—we must wait for the inevitable dawn, without cigarettes or rum. After all, here, there, or elsewhere, it’s always a grain of soil threatened by the Event. As long as our certainty comes to us only from a land, there will be nothing to hope for.”49 It is an ominous letter about an oncoming war, stating that there can be no hope if it is based only on having a homeland. He does not state specifically what the land is, but it could be the kind of ambiguous mix between France and Palestine, Paris and Jerusalem, that he would describe in his poem L’Exode: Super flumina Babylonis, which he began that same year. The threat of war was realized just a few years later, and Fondane was mobilized into the 216th Regiment of the French Infantry, serving in the Phoney War. He was taken prisoner by the Nazis in the Loire region on June 17, 1940, thereby sharing the fate of approximately 1.5 million other soldiers.50 After

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he escaped, he found himself on the road in France before being hospitalized in September for appendicitis at the Val-de-Grâce military hospital in Paris.

Wartime Revisions

Living in Paris for most of the Occupation, Fondane reacted to his radically altered position by revising his interwar poems. In making these revisions, he now treated French as a language of noncommunity, and Jewishness as a condition of exclusion. After his release from the hospital, Fondane refused to wear the yellow star and continued to publish under his own name. Cioran reflects on Fondane’s complete refusal to take precautions, and he concludes that Fondane’s resignation to his position as a victim, combined with a certain fascination with tragedy and “mysterious complicity with the Inevitable,” led him to this decision.51 Decades later, Cioran writes that he is still haunted by Fondane’s “face of ancient wrinkles.”52 Fondane continued to write his column “La Philosophie vivante” (The living philosophy) for the Cahiers du Sud, and published in clandestine publications like Fontaine, L’Honneur des poètes, and Pierre Seghers’s Poésie. On a postcard to Ballard, the editor of the Cahiers du Sud, in October 1940, he expressed his intention to continue publishing. Fondane turned this postcard—the censored wartime card with simple, fill-in-the-blank lines used by soldiers to communicate briefly about their welfare with their families—into a creative text. Between the printed words killed, prisoner, deceased, Fondane scribbled: “If the Cahiers have not been killed, I remain their prisoner. Philosophy not deceased.”53 Just as Fondane bent the censored, rigid words on the postcard into a literary text, he would continue to write within the censored language of French to express a poetic vision of exile. From his rue Rollin apartment, Fondane reworked the majority of his poems, reorganizing them into a single collection entitled Le Mal des fantômes, which can be translated as “The ache of phantoms” or “The homesickness of phantoms.” He radically altered Ulysse a decade after its publication, including it in Le Mal des fantômes. There exist three manuscript versions of Ulysse dated between 1941 and 1944, although the majority of the alterations to the original 1933 poem can be found already in the 1941 manuscript.54 In his unpublished afterword to Ulysse that appears at the end of the 1941 manuscript, Fondane explains his motivation to rewrite his poetry in the

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1940s.55 His current situation in France was at the heart of the decision: “This second version of Ulysse is being shaped day by day (it is not yet finished) by a man who has just barely returned from a prisoner of war camp and from the hospital, and whom the police are tracking, at every intersection, to throw him in a concentration camp.”56 His erasure of this disclosure of the ultimate fear of being sent to a concentration camp is a kind of self-censorship in a note that would never be published. In fact, in this text he wonders if the poem will ever be finished or if he will be interrupted. Fondane states that before the war, when he conceived of Ulysse in 1929, the poem was “inactuelle,” belonging neither to the present moment nor to contemporary history. As such, it was pure poetry: “At that time it was a matter of pure poetic material, not current [inactuelle], of an awareness of the real through the habitual layer of of a remote lived experience of childhood.”57 Fondane seems at first to intend to write that he was looking at poetry through the lens of childhood rather than through the present moment; yet he changes his text to say that in the interwar period he saw poetry through a kind of layer or filter of the everyday, of personal experience belonging to the distant past. However, historical time brutally intervened, and gave the images in his poem a sense of the here and now. Before the war he wrote about an existential or spiritual displacement of Jews, and during the war he was writing about the actual and specific displacement of Jews as a lived reality. This contrasts with the 1929 Discontinuité approach that explicitly looked only to the eternal spirit while rejecting the laws of the government. Now political realities have entered into his poem. But, Fondane continues, only the naive reader could think he found poetic inspiration in the devastation of the 1940s. Instead, the trauma of this war awoke older traumas that he addressed in the earlier version of the poem—namely, exile: “But it is true that a present trauma—which, by its essence, is destructive of creative affectivity—can reawaken traumas that are already old, already healed, but analogous—can spout forth poetry in another layer, even further.”58 Fondane revisited Ulysse because, he says, he could not write anything new. He was compelled by circumstance to revisit the old trauma of being an émigré author, and a Jewish one at that. Fondane marked up the 1933 edition of Ulysse, published by the Cahiers du Journal des poètes, making revisions by hand on the published pages,

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writing out entire new pages, and typing out new sheets of poems.59 This archival object gives the reader a genealogy of the shifts in his representation of poetic speakers in French. On the title page, Fondane crossed out the date of publication, changing it to 1944. In addition to updating the list of his published works, he also crossed out the name of the publisher, replacing it with his own invented press—Éditions sans fin (No End Editions)—as if to indicate that his writing would be interrupted or that he found no sense of completion.60 As a Jewish émigré writer, Fondane was now cut off from literary life in occupied Paris. An afterword he typed up for the final version of L’Exode might further explain his situation: he wrote that, although he could not publish at the moment, books search for friends rather than a public. 61 He hopes his work will find a clandestine reader. Using the same expression often found at the end of clandestine Resistance tracts, Fondane asks that the reader “take the trouble to recopy or have recopied the master manuscript.”62 Since he could no longer publish openly as he had done before the war, Fondane created his own edition of the poem. This continuation of writing in French resists the demand for silence codified by the new antisemitic laws that prohibited him from publishing.63 But there would be important shifts in this new version of Ulysse; the poet-traveler will be shown to be alienated not only from the foreign tongues of others but also from his own tongue, and precisely because he is Jewish. Perhaps the most striking change Fondane made to the poem in the 1940s comes at the beginning of the second poem of the text, “Cette nuit une lampe oubliée, allumée” (Tonight a forgotten, lighted lamp). This poem opens with a contemplation, in which the speaker writes of himself as Ulysses, of taking to the seas. In the 1933 edition, a key section reads: juif naturellement et cependant Ulysse j’avais beau écorcher l’univers

des pains se promenaient en l’air les yeux ouverts l’espace était immangeable

(a Jew, naturally, and yet Ulysses

try as I might to peel the universe

breads were scattered in the air with eyes wide open space was inedible)64

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The traveler is Ulysses, but a Jewish Ulysses. The pause between “juif naturellement” (a Jew, naturally) and “et cependant Ulysse” (and yet Ulysses) adds a surprising connection between the image of the wandering Jew and the mythical traveler. However, the revised version from the 1940s reads: Juif, naturellement, tu étais juif, Ulysse, tu avais beau presser l’orange, l’univers,

le sommeil était là, assis, les yeux ouverts, l’espace était immangeable

(A Jew, naturally, you were a Jew, Ulysses,

for all you squeezed the orange, the universe, sleep was there, seated, its eyes wide open space was inedible)65

Now Jewishness is no longer a coincidence but rather a natural part of the condition of traveling. As Monique Jutrin writes about this major change, at this moment Fondane’s “fate as a man, as a Jew and as a poet converge.”66 Fondane also removes the element of surprise from section 9 of Ulysse, quoted above, when he deletes the line “l’existence même m’étonnait du juif ” (the very existence surprised me of the Jew).67 Space here is very much linked to the notion of the planet. The new verses that follow this momentous shift from “et cependant” (and yet) to “naturellement” (naturally) immediately call to mind Éluard’s famous Surrealist poem “La Terre est bleue comme une orange” (“The Earth Is Blue Like an Orange”). In Éluard’s poem, the seemingly nonsensical first line that gives the poem its title actually reveals itself as referring to a kind of radiant blue planet full of the “solar joys” of a beloved. Éluard states a Surrealist tenet of automatic writing in the second line: “Never a mistake words do not lie.” Yet in Fondane’s text, the Jewish voyager tries to travel the world, squeezing its juices like an orange, only to find it inedible. Traveling the globe offers no sustenance or joy for the Jewish wanderer who never finds that land of which Fondane wrote to Sernet in 1934. Rather than showing itself to be a sunlit orange planet, the earth is cracking: “Elle était là encore la Terre, elle était ferme, / et pourtant j’entendais ses craquements futurs” (The Earth was still there, still solid / and yet I heard the sound of its future breaking).68 Later in

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the revised poem, Fondane associates this lack of solid ground with the notion of Jewish exile and, again, with the impossibility of finding a homeland. la sortie de l’Égypte n’était-elle qu’une figure

de cette fuite éperdue le long de l’histoire future, et Jérusalem n’était-il que symbole et que fable

de ce havre qu’on cherche et qui reste introuvable? (so did the flight from Egypt only prefigure

this desperate flight the length of future history, so was Jerusalem only the symbol and fable

of the port we search for, that cannot be found?)69

Unlike Éluard, who expresses the tenet that words do not lie, Fondane creates a speaker who seems unable to comprehend words at all. In 1941, he added the following lines to section 21, just before the moment in the poem in which the speaker arrives in the Americas: l’humiliation d’être rien,

des émigrants sans passeport, de nul peuple, d’aucun pays,

chacun parlant une autre langue,

la langue de sa petite vie obscure, [. . .]

Et j’étais parmi eux parlant ma propre langue que je ne comprenais plus, ah!

(The indignity of being nothing at all, emigrants without passports, a people or a country,

each speaking a different tongue,

the language of his own small bounded life [. . .]

And I was with them speaking my own language which I no longer understood, ah!)70

Not only do the emigrants each speak different languages that isolate them, but also in this version of the poem the speaker himself has become alienated from his own language. Language seems to be lost like the passport, the mark of belonging to a country. In the 1941 manuscript, Fondane at first wrote “la

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langue de sa petite vie personnelle” (the language of his own little private life), then crossed out “personnelle” and replaced it with “obscure.”71 This edit indicates that language is not the link to a private, interior life but is instead one that is vague, gloomy, and difficult to see or comprehend. In fact, the speaker’s own language becomes too obscure even for him to understand. Fondane would take up this notion and develop it even further in rewriting another poem in the same collection, L’Exode: Super flumina Babylonis.

By the Rivers of Babylon

One year after the publication of the first version of Ulysse in 1933, Fondane began to write L’Exode: Super flumina Babylonis, a cycle of dramatic dialogues. Unlike Ulysse, this text was not published in full before the war.72 In an afterword dated 1942 or 1943, Fondane wrote that he could not have realized he was prophesizing the moment of the June 1940 exode; his notion of exodus at that time related to a general European and especially a Jewish migration.73 Revolving around travel, displacement, and exile, it proved prophetic. After experiencing the very subject of his poem, the June 1940 exodus from Paris, Fondane rewrote his manuscript in 1942 or 1943. The Nazi Occupation fundamentally altered Fondane’s conception of his life in France, from an artistically rich and exciting emigration that had already become uneasy to a sense of alienated exile. As he rewrote the poem, he incorporated the historical exode, making explicit his sense of displacement in France in particular. This change of perspective is reflected in his turn to a form of multilingualism. Fondane began to revise the very notion of a monolingual language, drawing on a long tradition of the Jewish poetics of exile to incorporate his double exile—first from Romania, then as an inner exile in France—into a neverending cycle of Jewish displacement beginning with the destruction of the Second Temple. The June 1940 flight from Paris was one of the traumas of the defeat. Fondane himself had been swept up in the upheaval of the country. By the time the Nazis entered Paris on June 14, 1940, the city would have felt almost empty, for two-thirds of the residents had fled. Before the Parisians left, Belgians and French from the north flooded into the rest of France as well. Civilians fled in such great numbers because they feared a reprise of the German occupation during World War I and of the 1937 Luftwaffe bombings

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in Guernica that had been so heavily reported in the media. Rumors, fausses nouvelles (false news), of German barbarity and of the enemy within only increased fears. The sheer number of refugees exponentially multiplied the chaos of the road. Civilians mixed with soldiers like Fondane, making them targets of the German air force. Material goods such as food, fuel, and shelter ran out quickly. People abandoned belongings and cars along the roads. René Clément’s film Jeux interdits (Forbidden Games, 1952) famously shows the fate of a small girl whose parents are killed in a bombing while fleeing toward the south. It also features the classic imagery of the exodus that appears again and again in both literary and journalistic accounts: cars on the side of the road, abandoned once gas was no longer available; a mix of all classes from the Parisian bourgeois to farmers on horse-drawn carts sinking under the weight of large pieces of furniture; and screaming children separated from their families. Lion Feuchtwanger, the German Jewish author of Jud Süß who had sought refuge in France after Hitler’s rise to power, describes the scene in his novel Simone (1944): “The whole, endless procession of horse-drawn and motor vehicles, bicycles, donkeys, pedestrians, stood in a hopeless jumble.”74 He portrays the people as “resigned, in awkward discomfort,” while “they all squatted in the sultry heat where they had stopped, old and young, men and women, soldiers and civilians, wounded and whole, in sweating hopeless stupor.”75 Feuchtwanger repeats the word “hopeless”; the situation, like the people, was desperate. Fondane could have been one of the soldiers Feuchtwanger depicts who did not quite know what to do. From the beginning, writers referred to the events of June 1940 as the exode. By naming the debacle as such, they created a narrative of an epic migration, which, knowingly or not, they inscribed into a myth of liberation. “Exodus” typically refers to the “departure of the Israelites from Egypt,” and more generally to “the departure or going out, usually of a body of persons from a country for the purpose of settling elsewhere.”76 In Exodus and Revolution, Michael Walzer defines exodus as “a classic narrative, with a beginning, a middle, and an end: problem, struggle, resolution—Egypt, the wilderness, the promised land.”77 Or, in other words, the term implies “a march toward a goal, a moral progress, a transformation.”78 Exodus connotes leaving a house of bondage and moving toward a goal, a homeland. But the 1940

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exodus turned out to be a chaotic wandering on the roads of France that broke with the idea of forward progress indicated by the term exode, the traumatic beginning of years of deprivation to come. Georges Adrey laments in his Journal d’un replié (Diary of a withdrawn man, 1941): “When will our exodus come to an end, where are we going?”79 This wandering may have meant something particular to émigré writers like Fondane as they composed literature around the events of June 1940. In his diary of the exodus, Összeomlàs (The collapse, 1940), the Hungarian émigré journalist Zoltán Szabó illustrates this particular experience of homelessness by describing a conversation in a train overcrowded with refugees on their way to Montpellier: someone, “no doubt a French refugee,” sighs, “If only I knew when I could return home!” Szabó records the answer this refugee receives: “‘Home?’ says one of the Slavs (a Czech or a Polish person) in French, in an infinitely dejected tone.”80 Szabó assumes that the person longing for home must be French. The Slavic immigrant, on the other hand, despondently repeats the word “home,” as if to ask whether such a place actually exists. While Szabó still considers the French person a refugee, his or her experience of the flight from Paris is distinct from the immigrant’s, because the French refugee has a home to which to return. Szabó specifies that the Polish or Czech refugee is speaking in French, highlighting the concept of his double exile linguistically. Furthermore, the “Slav” questions the existence of home as he utters the word in a language that is itself foreign to him. The issues evoked in this scene are at the heart of Fondane’s literary representation of the exode. Fondane, like Szabó, was in a unique position in June 1940. He was fleeing within the country to which he had immigrated. Although the exodus had forced him into flight, after his release from the hospital Fondane remained in Paris, and, while relying on his French literary connections, he chose to write about his double exile in the French language. Writing in his adopted tongue, but about the exodus, was a way to explore his displacement while still claiming French identity. The choice to write in French also offered an opportunity, through literature, to reclaim his Jewish identity in the face of the threat of deportation and Vichy’s antisemitic laws. For him the exodus was not a story with a beginning, middle, and end, but one that was repeated throughout history and that represented a revolutionary event in

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his own life.81 He recognized in the exode a clear and painful symbol of his double displacement. Just as he reworked the text of Ulysse, Fondane also revised L’Exode during the war. Through his additions and revisions he now placed the June 1940 exodus at the center of the work, shifting from a more general exploration of Jewish diaspora in 1933 to the specific context of a defeated and occupied France. In addition to the many fascinating changes he made throughout the poem, he added a preface in 1942 and an afterword in 1942 or 1943. Perhaps most importantly, in 1943 he made the 1940 exodus the centerpiece of the work by adding the section entitled “Intermède: Colère de la vision” (“Interlude: The Fury of Vision”). He also composed a new poem, dated June 1940, “Le Chant du prisonnier” (The prisoner’s song), although he did not include it in the definitive version.82 As he had done in his notes on Ulysse, Fondane explained the centrality of the present war in L’Exode in his correspondence with Sernet. On August 19, 1942, he explained that “removed from their context (I’m talking about a poem with a chorus of voices, etc., entitled Super flumina Babylonis—or The Exodus, conceived and in part written before the apocalypse) they will have lost a good part of their significance.”83 The poem is unreadable outside the history of the apocalyptic defeat. It was also literally unreadable at the time because of censorship and Fondane’s legal status as a Jew. He implies to Sernet that he cannot even send parts of the poem on the backs of postcards, the only legally acceptable form in which letters could be sent at the time, because he fears that the content will alarm the authorities. Nevertheless, Fondane did take the risk. He published fragments in the Southern Zone, and, despite his hesitation, he sent sections of the poem to Sernet on postcards twice that same August.84 The multiple layers of writing, which are visible in the manuscripts of the poem, show a poet who constantly revisited the notion of exile. The poem L’Exode follows the interminable cycle of displacements, banishments, and exiles throughout history. Fondane represents each example with a river: the Nile ( Jewish enslavement in Egypt); the rivers of Babylon (the destruction of the Second Temple and the subsequent exile of the Jews from Jerusalem); the Mississippi River (African enslavement in America); and finally, the Seine (the June 1940 exodus from Paris, which he added after the exode had taken place). The poem takes its name and central imagery from Psalm 137, the lamentations

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of the Jewish people after the Siege of Jerusalem. A trope repeated throughout Fondane’s poem is the lamentation on the shores of Babylon: Sur les fleuves de Babylone nous nous sommes assis et pleurâmes que de fleuves déjà coulaient dans notre chair que de fleuves futurs où nous allions pleurer le visage couché sous l’eau.

(By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept so many rivers that already flowed in our flesh, so many future rivers where we would weep, our faces lying under the water.)85

Even in the Babylonian exile, the people cry over past and future rivers, a metaphor of exile. Fondane assimilates the 1940 exode into a recurring history of exile, and in so doing he compares the exile of the Jews after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem to the exodus from Paris in June 1940. He portrays Paris as a lost Zion, the destruction of a paradise for émigré authors like himself. The continuous flow of water in the rivers of the poem evokes the repetition of exile throughout history. Furthermore, it is appropriate that he chooses rivers as the unifying imagery of the poem, since water is a key image in the discourse of immigration. As Nancy Green points out, currents, waves, flux, and tide, all terms of water and fluidity, link immigration to the crossing of porous surfaces.86 Even the word “shibboleth”—from Judges 12, in which the Gileadites identify their Ephraimite enemies through their pronunciation—can mean a stream or torrent in Hebrew. The structure of the poem L’Exode is cyclical as well: it begins with a “Préface en prose,” a free verse poem; moves to a series of poems meant to resemble the Psalms, with each poem following a letter of the Hebrew alphabet, the aleph-bet; presents a dialogue between the chorus and the reciter in the form of ballads and free verse poems; continues with the centerpiece, “Intermède: Colère de la vision”; recounts another dialogue between the chorus and the reciter; returns to the aleph-bet poems; and finally concludes with an afterword in prose. Fondane takes up the central imagery of song in Psalm 137, and of poetry as an expression of the Jewish diaspora in the long tradition of Jewish exilic

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writing. Two other writers in exile in Paris conceive of diaspora as a recurring displacement in Jewish history. Heinrich Heine, the German poet living in exile in nineteenth-century France, quoted from the same psalm in his “Hebräische Melodien” (“Hebrew Melodies,” 1851) to depict his exile through Judah Halevi’s Hebrew writing in Toledo in the Golden Age of Spain.87 In fact, Fondane had written about this text by Heine and its Romanian translations in the Zionist newspaper Mântuirea (Salvation) in 1919, reading the poem in terms of the painfully conflicted identity of “the Protestant Jew Heine.”88 From the start of his career, Fondane had seen Psalm 137 as part of a poetics of Jewish life in Europe. At the same time that Fondane was revising L’Exode in Paris, Paul Celan was in a Romanian labor camp writing the poem “Chanson juive” ( Jewish song, 1942), which he later entitled “An den Wassern Babels” (“By the Waters of Babylon”). Celan begins the poem: “Wieder an dunkelnden Teichen / murmelst du, Weide, gram” (Again by darkening pools / you murmur, willow, grieving).89 Celan’s home, the German-speaking Jewish community of bustling, multilingual, intellectual Czernowitz, was being irreparably destroyed in the horrors of World War II. Before the Soviet and Nazi occupations, Czernowitz was part of Romania. As in Fondane’s case, language played a role in Celan’s and Heine’s conceptions of Jewish exile. They both wrote in the German language, which was at once their native tongue and the language of their persecutors. In 1948, when Celan moved to Paris and continued to write in German, he wrote in a letter to relatives in Israel: a poet cannot stop writing “even when he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German.”90 John Felstiner explores Celan’s continual use of German even after the Shoah as a means to hold onto a destroyed community, combining his given name and his literary pseudonym: “Coming from a homeland that hardly existed anymore, writing for a German audience that he did not live among or trust, residing in France yet unvalued there, Paul Antschel-Celan’s native tongue itself was the only nation he could claim.”91 Fondane, however, writes about a cycle of exiles within his adopted French, and not in his native Romanian tongue, nor in the language of diasporic Jews, Yiddish. He composes in French, but as a second or even third displacement of language, first from Romanian (and to some extent Yiddish) to French, and now in exile within French. He expresses the multiplication

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of exiles, the circularity and repetition of exile, in the endless flow of Babylonian waters, of the Seine, and of the Mississippi, into the present day. These are the rivers “already flowing” in the veins of the speaker.92 Fondane sees the multiplication of his exile as a swirling, unending circle. In one of the alephbet poems inspired by the Psalms he writes: Heth: Nous avons erré dans les rues et sangloté dans les vitrines,

nous tournions autour de choses qui tournaient autour de nous.

(Heth: We wandered in the streets and sobbed in the storefronts,

we were turning around things that were turning around us.)93

The double wandering recalls Tristan Tzara’s own poem about the exode, “Exil” (Exile). This famous Dadaist, and Fondane’s fellow Romanian émigré colleague from the rue de Vaugirard days, portrays the misery and solitude on the road in a similarly repetitive way: “Je suis au bord du monde racine qui s’égare” (I am at the edge of a root world losing its way).94 The double removal—at the edge of something that is wandering off—is a perfect image for the multiple displacements of the émigré author. In Fondane’s poem, however, the movement is not away but rather around in a never-ending cycle. People turn around things that are turning around. Likewise, the very form of the poem, each stanza standing for a letter in the Hebrew alphabet that repeats itself, is a cycle mimicking the repetition of Jewish exile whose memory seems to swirl around the June 1940 exode.

The Leper’s Cry

In the second section of L’Exode, Fondane seizes on the figure of the leper to portray exile in terms of the relationship between the individual and his or her community, both in the Jewish religion and in the French nation. He first wrote this section in the 1930s, making several changes later, during the war. Again, he draws on biblical imagery: just as he compares the 1940 exodus to the Babylonian exile, so too he associates the foreigner with the biblical leper

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and alludes to Leviticus 13 on the purification of the leper.95 The chorus of Fondane’s poem takes on the persona of the leper, singing in the first person (at various points in the poem the chorus speaks in the plural, in other parts in the singular). The leper, in torn clothing, exposes his head, covers his face, and cries: Voici, mes vêtements ont été décousus, la ténèbre a noyé mon visage,

ma tête est découverte, et je crie: Impur! Impur!

Impur serai-je autant qu’il te fera plaisir qu’on se moque de ton visage!

Impur! Je suis impur! J’habite seul. Ma demeure est hors du camp. (Now, my clothes unstitched,

the darkness drowned my face,

my head is uncovered, and I scream: Impure! Impure!

Impure will I be as long as it pleases you May they mock your face!

Impure! I am impure! I live alone.

My dwelling is outside the camp.)96

In the 1940s version, Fondane added the last line cited here—“My dwelling is outside the camp”—to the manuscript in ink.97 He describes the leper covering his face as being drowned by the shadows; the leper is submerged in water, in a figurative river beyond the camp of the Israelites in the desert. In other words, he is in exile from an already exiled people. If we take “camp” literally, we might think of how Fondane was living outside the camps of France where Jewish community members were imprisoned; he is alone without his people who have already been abandoned behind the barbed wires of Drancy, Rivesaltes, Gurs, and elsewhere. Fondane duplicates his alienation from his people and from France. In his essay “Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginals,” Edward Said points to the comparison that is often made between the exile and the leper.

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This untouchable person is in constant movement, not allowed to go back home but also never arriving anywhere. Said sees in this marginal status a potential for freedom.98 In Fondane’s poem, on the other hand, the leper is caught in a prison of circular exile. This section of L’Exode alludes to an earlier poem that Fondane wrote in Romanian in 1920, “Psalmul leprosului” (The leper’s psalm).99 In the 1920 poem, he quotes from Leviticus as well, but the speaker prays for death and wants his decomposing body to become a seed for germination: “grâu pentru încolţirea care vine, / când voi muri şi eu ca şi ceilalţi” (wheat for sprouting which comes / when I will die, me and the others). Rather than meditating on constant, cyclical exile, this earlier poem finds in death itself a possibility for fertility. The leper’s cry—his lament that he dwells outside the camp—which appears in L’Exode and not in “Psalmul leprosului,” also points to a tension between the individual and the collective within the experience of exile. In this cry of despair, the chorus begins to speak as the leper in the first person singular. At other points in the poem, the chorus is plural (for example, in the refrain “Sur les fleuves de Babylone nous nous sommes assis et pleurâmes”). There is something odd happening here: a group sings in the voice of one person who is excluded from the group. How can the group be the person excluded from the group? The leper’s cry seems to refer to the particular tension between individual identity and allegiance to both the Jewish community and the French nation. Monique Jutrin explains that the leper is excluded from the collective but is still in solidarity with it.100 But one can say that the leper is excluded only because he or she observes the law of the collective, which is that he or she must be excluded. Fondane is a stranger among the Jewish people, but only because he believes he has somehow abandoned their collective struggle. In the remainder of the poem, Fondane attempts to reconcile his Jewish identity with his sense of Frenchness, in an effort to surmount the barriers that stand between the two. Section 5 of the “Intermède”—the central section of the poem, which Fondane added during the war—points to the concern with reconciling multiple identities, not only within the Jewish community but within the French nation as well. In the version of this section that appears in L’Honneur des poètes (1944), under the title “Journées de juin” ( June days), the speaker addresses the difficulty of integrating immigrants and colonial subjects in the

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nation. He meets these outsiders on the roads of France, and claims for them a place in the nation: Je vous ai tous comptés [. . .]

Français de France aux yeux limpides ou du Congo, du bled–

Français des îles Caraïbes

pêcheurs d’orties et de crevettes au temps d’autrefois

S’était-on donné rendez-vous sur ces routes?

14 juillet, aviez-vous

avions-nous dansé, tous et toutes, au temps d’autrefois?

(I counted you all [. . .]

The clear-eyed French of France or of the Congo, of the bled–

French of the Caribbean islands fishers of nettles and prawns in the time of back then Did we plan to meet on these roads?

the 14th of July, did you

did we dance, one and all,

in the times of back then?)101

The colonial subjects also enjoyed the anniversary of the French Revolution, Bastille Day, whose legacy drew immigrants like Fondane to France. What Fondane does not say is that he chose the French language, while the subjects of the poem were forced into a system of French colonization. Nevertheless, the poem asserts that French colonial subjects—Caribbean, West African, and North African alike—are as much French as the Franco-French, the “Français de France.” In a reversal of the attitude that originally brought him to France, Fondane points to the country’s racism and colonial history in a poem that rejects the salvation of exodus. Fondane draws on the failure of

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the salvific story of deliverance from slavery and racism, both on the Mississippi River as the new rivers of Babylon, and on the Seine, whose capital city colonized swaths of Africa and the Americas. Fondane signed the poem “Isaac Lacquedem,” a name for the wandering Jew. His use of the pseudonym hints at something more explicit about Jewish exile, which is more apparent in the version of the poem that appears in “Intermède: Colère de la vision.” In this revision of the poem, as the manuscripts also demonstrate, Fondane included Eastern European immigrants and Jews in the French nation, making the text more explicitly about the June 1940 experience. He adds Eastern European and Jewish people to those he includes from the colonies: et des Tchèques, et des Polonais, des Slovaques et des Juifs de tous les ghettos de ce monde,

qui aimaient cette terre et ses ombres et ses fleuves, qui ont ensemencé de leur mort cette terre

et qui sont devenus français, selon la mort. (and the Czechs, and the Poles, the Slovaks

and the Jews of all the ghettos of this world,

who loved this land and its shadows and its rivers, who sowed with their death this land

and who became French, by death.)102

These immigrants, who so loved France, only become French in literally becoming part of the land “by death” (selon la mort) rather than “by law” (selon la loi )—that is, in the burial ground. Fondane compares Jewish immigrants and Eastern Europeans to colonial subjects, bringing together a system of racist and antisemitic history that is diametrically opposed to the promises of universalism. For Fondane, this exclusion of the foreigner is linked to language. Throughout the poem, the various speakers paraphrase a question from Psalm 137, in which they wonder what they can sing about in a foreign land among foreign people: Et quelle chanson chanterais-je sur une terre étrangère? Et chanterais-je ici la chanson de Sion parmi des hommes étrangers?

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(And which song shall I sing about a foreign land? And shall I sing here the song of Zion among foreign men?)103

The sentiment is ambiguous: does he mean to sing of Zion as the place he left behind in his exile? Or perhaps Zion is France, a spiritual Zion, a paradise for immigrants whom it welcomed in the 1920s. In the section on the exode, “Intermède: Colère de la vision,” it is quite clear that France is Zion, for Fondane transforms the line from Psalm 137, “If I forget you, O Jerusalem”: “Nous laissions derrière nous Paris. Ah! si jamais / je t’oublie, Jérusalem . . .” (We were leaving Paris behind us. Ah! if ever / I forget you, Jerusalem . . .).104 Either way, being a stranger or an immigrant affects song. The French word sur (“sur une terre étrangère”) is ambiguous as well; the chorus asks either how to speak in or about a foreign land. There is a sense that one cannot even sing when one is in a foreign land. The chorus sings only because the guards force it to do so. In the dialogue following the “Intermède: Colère de la vision” section, the prison guards violently command: “Chante. Juif !” (Sing. Jew!)105 The chorus responds again: “Comment voulez-vous que je chante sur une terre étrangère?” (How do you expect me to sing about a foreign land?). The chorus sings then of a man walking; a song, perhaps the chorus’s song, rises up in his muscles and marrow. The chorus asks: “est-ce une chanson mangeuse d’hommes, / une chanson cannibale?” (is it a maneating song, / a cannibal song?).106 This recalls the last line in Ulysse (original to the 1930s version), “J’ai hâte d’écouter la chanson qui tue!” (I cannot wait to listen to the song that kills!).107 Speech at the site of displacement is dangerous. It can eat a person alive. But the Jewish poet in exile continues to sing in that language. French is not only the Jewish poet’s siren song; it is also the language of the verses in which he or she sings. Fondane expresses his own sense of alienation paradoxically in the language that has become alien to him, French. In addition to being dangerous, language in these circumstances is also incoherent. This is a marked change of attitude from Fondane’s first French poem, “Exercice de français,” where the speaker is excited to master a new language. In Ulysse and L’Exode, Fondane experiments with the notion that even within the same language we never speak in the same tongue, for we are all foreigners. The revised Ulysse includes this same notion of incomprehensibility

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within the same language. The speaker finds himself with other immigrants and asks: “Parlons-nous donc la même langue” (So are we speaking the same language).108 Later, he states: “Et j’étais parmi eux parlant ma propre langue / que je ne comprenais plus, ah!” (And I was among them speaking my own language / that I no longer understood, ah!).109 Fondane gives voice to another wanderer in Ulysse in the section “Chanson de l’émigrant” (“The Emigrant’s Song”): “Nous ne parlons aucune langue, / nous ne sommes d’aucun pays” (We speak no language, / we are from no country).110 Having no country seems to explain or even cause the lack of a language. Fondane goes even further in L’Exode when the chorus sings: Car nous sommes étrangers les uns parmi les autres notre langue n’est pas pareille

quand même il n’y aurait qu’une seule langue au monde, qu’un seul mot dans le monde.

(For we are foreigners one among the others our language is not the same

even though there would be only one single language in the world, only one single word in the world.)111

Even if there were only one language, even if there were only one word, we would still not speak the same language, since we are all foreign to each other. The sections of the poem revolving around the Hebrew alphabet may best illustrate this concept. Each letter, following the kabbalistic tradition of gematria, has both a numerical value and a spiritual meaning. In the two aleph-bet sections Fondane repeats each letter in the course of the text with new poetic words. In just a single letter there are a multitude of meanings. This turn to French mixed with Hebrew is part of the arithmetic of exile. Displacement is external because it is also internal. Julia Kristeva writes of a similar notion of foreignness in Étrangers à nous-mêmes (Strangers to Ourselves), asking if the stranger might consider that “one becomes a foreigner in another country because one is already a foreigner from within.”112 Already in the 1940s, Fondane articulated this theory in his poem: Que prenne fin l’exil en la terre étrangère!

Non de ceux qui sont étrangers sur une terre étrangère,

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ni étrangers parmi les étrangers, étranger pour lui-même,

car l’homme n’est pas chez lui sur cette terre étranger où qu’il aille

(To end the exile in the foreign land!

not from those who are strangers in a strange land, nor foreigners among foreigners, a stranger to himself,

for man is not at home on this earth foreign wherever he goes)113

Here Fondane transforms the famous expression from the book of Exodus, “strangers in a strange land”: the speaker prays not for the end of foreignness but rather for an end of existential strangeness. He addresses other linguistic traumas associated with exile: forgetting your own language or being displaced in a new language and displaced from the maternal language. In section 7 of “Intermède: Colère de la vision,” at the moment of leaving ParisJerusalem, the speaker exclaims: Je me mets à genoux et je sanglote et crie en une langue que j’ai oubliée, mais dont

je me souviens aux soirs émus de Ta Colère: “Adonaï Elochenu [sic], Adonaï Echod!”

(I get on my knees and I sob and scream in a language that I forgot, but that

I remember during the disturbed nights of Your Anger: “Adonaï Elochenu [sic], Adonaï Echod!”)114

He screams in a language he has forgotten, but which he remembers in the moments of God’s anger, of exile. This language is Hebrew; its words here form the Shema prayer, the most fundamentally important prayer for Jews, a declaration of unity with God. The next section repeats the prayers in Hebrew and continues, in French, to pray for France: “Adonaï Elochenu [sic], Adonaï Echod! / Aie pitié, aie pitié de la terre de France!” (The Lord is our God, the Lord is one! / Have mercy, have mercy on the land of France!).115

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In another wartime poem from the collection Poèmes épars (Scattered poems), Fondane repeats this idea of a language that is at once remembered and forgotten, known and unknown. Men advance toward the speaker on the road at night: “ils me parlaient dans une langue / inconnue—et pourtant aussitôt oubliée” (they spoke to me in a language unknown—and yet immediately forgotten).116 How can one forget something one never knew in the first place? What is this paradoxical language: a slippage of Hebrew into French, or the in-between space of Romanian and French bilingualism? Monique Jutrin reads Fondane’s poetry, including the presence of Hebrew in the poem, as “representative of the embodiment of the ambiguous relationship between the Jewish writer and Western literature.”117 By adopting the French language, Fondane inserts himself into French poetry. The fate of the Jewish writer, then, is to write in a foreign language in forms he or she did not create.118 In their articles on Fondane, Ovid Crohmaˇlniceanu and Gisèle Vanhese focus on the divide between the Romanian and French languages, on being “torn between two literatures, Romanian and French,” as a source of exile in Fondane’s poetry.119 According to Vanhese, his bilingualism was not just an existential split but also a source of creative inspiration: “For bilingualism is always a linguistic quest for an Elsewhere; the bilingual is always in a perpetual ‘wandering.’”120 However, Fondane’s seemingly paradoxical claim can be read as a statement that no language is monolingual, that the constant cycles of exodus are reflected in the endless incomprehensibility of language. Fondane does not write only in French and Romanian but in Yiddish and Hebrew as well. His poetry is not a case of bilingualism or of the binary identities of FrenchJewish or Romanian-French. He writes in all of these languages at once, for he states that no one single language exists. Hebrew can exist in French, and there can be a space for Jewish language in the French nation. Yet he is caught in a France that cannot accept this language with fluid boundaries. He reacts by writing and rewriting his wartime poems about language as a broken-down form of communication. The speaker can no longer understand his native tongue, and even if only one word existed, everyone would speak that word in a different language so that they could not relate to one another. In this world of linguistic disunity, the poet cannot situate his own identity. Fondane’s conception of language calls to mind Derrida’s Le Monolinguisme de l’autre (Monolingualism of the Other, 1996), written over fifty years

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after Fondane’s death. For Derrida, the adoption of the French language by the Algerian Jewish community created a cycle of alienation. Derrida writes: “1. We only ever speak one language. 2. We never only speak one language.”121 Every language, including French, is multilingual: “No such thing as a language exists [. . .]. It is open to the most radical grafting, open to deformations, transformations, expropriation, to a certain a-nomie and de-regulation. So much so that the gesture [. . .] is always multiple.”122 Every statement is somehow deregulated and varies from the norm. Derrida’s paradoxical statements—“Yes, I only have one language yet it is not mine”—are similar to those Fondane inscribes throughout his wartime poetry, especially in his representation of the 1940 exodus.123 Derrida’s own style, his wordplay, and the complexity of his phrases all stem from this idea. He approaches his own history by exploding the language of alienation, the French literary language. The trope of alienation within the French language is linked, in Derrida’s words, to a trouble d’identité (disorder of identity). For Derrida, this discord is related to his experience of growing up as a Jew in Algeria.124 Derrida explains that the slipperiness of belonging to the metropole through the French language is deeply linked to the very concrete question of belonging through citizenship. The causes of this trouble were: first, the Crémieux Decree of 1870, which emancipated the Jews of Algeria as French citizens and cut them off from the languages of the local culture—Arabic and Berber, as well as Hebrew—especially in the French school system; second, under Vichy, Jews were denied French citizenship and were left in a kind of no-man’s-land between Maghrebi and French; finally, Algerian Jews were also cut off from Jewish memory. These three facts compound the alienation of Algerian Jews from the French language.125 Fondane related to the French language in an entirely different context from that of Algerian Jews, adopting it first in a Francophile country, then coming to France and acquiring French citizenship, even if the legal status of his naturalization was also threatened under the Occupation. But, like Derrida, he explodes the concept of monolingual French to convey a cycle of exile within his poetic process. For Fondane, language, in all its violence and incoherence, is at the heart of the exode and his own particular exile as a Jew, a Romanian immigrant, and a French poet. Fondane refers to L’Exode in the afterword as “un poème dramatique à plusieurs voix” (a dramatic poem with multiple voices).126 He may be referencing a Surrealist form, the simultaneous

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poem, and a lost interwar world of Eastern European émigré poets in exile. The representative poem of simultaneous poetry, “L’Amiral cherche une maison à louer” (“The Admiral Looks for a House to Rent”), was itself a poem of multiple voices in multiple languages. It was recited in 1916 by Tzara, Marcel Janco, and Richard Hülsenbeck, who simultaneously spoke in French, English, and German, respectively.127 Just as the speakers combine many voices and languages at once, in Fondane’s wartime poetry each and every person speaks in many languages at once. Community has apparently broken down in a world of no single language. Fondane was arrested in March 1944 while he was still revising L’Exode. According to some scholars, he was denounced by his concierge, who committed suicide after the war.128 Many people attempted to save Fondane once he was arrested. According to the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, the Gallimard editor Jean Paulhan, Cioran, and the Romanian émigré poet Stéphane Lupasco intervened on his behalf. His wife, Geneviève Tissier, also pleaded for his release.129 The authorities were prepared to release him but not his sister Line, who had been arrested with him.130 Line had immigrated to France one year before Fondane. Since he would not leave his sister behind, he chose deportation instead. They were both murdered in Auschwitz. Fondane was killed on October 3, 1944, less than two months after Paris was liberated.131 Fondane established the definitive versions of his poems in his last note to Geneviève from the Drancy internment camp.132 He explained which notebooks and manuscripts she should compile and in what order. Fondane had prepared for the worst-case scenario. He had already left his poetic works with his friend Claude Sernet, and his prose works with Lupasco and the Russian-born writer and musicologist Boris de Schloezer. Thus, he entrusted his legacy to émigré writers within his circle. In August 1943 Fondane sent a letter to Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, expressing to an old friend his loneliness and his doubts about his writing and rewriting over the past ten years. He ends the letter by saying that maybe in forty more years, he might have a sense of his poetry’s worth.133 With the help of Claude Sernet, Geneviève was able to compile his poems—including Ulysse and L’Exode, among others—in the collection Le Mal des fantômes. And twenty years later, the collection of poems was finally published by a French press.134 Over seventy years later, his works are being published in English translation.135

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ACC EN T S I N J E A N M A L AQ UA I S ’ S C A RRE F OU R M A R S EI LLE

The accent is commonly perceived as the presence of

a deposit—an aftertaste, a parasitic scent, pleasant or

unpleasant, evocative or mysterious—the trace or indication of an elsewhere of language, an off-stage that remains

open in the wings of speech, of a background present in

the depth of field. The accent reveals, denounces, betrays.

It is a stowaway, a phantom language, and the phantom of

a language hidden in the second language that the speaker actualizes [actualise].

—L’Accent: Une langue fantôme, Alain Fleischer

In his study of accent as it is heard in speech and depicted on the screen, L’Accent: Une langue fantôme (Accent: A phantom language), Alain Fleischer sketches out multiple paradoxes.1 First, accent is always present yet it hints at an absence. An accent is perceived and sensed, appreciated or derided. It can be seen as romantic, ugly, charming, infantile, incomprehensible. Yet an accent implies another space that the listener cannot hear. It hints at something hidden off-stage in the wings of the theater of speech. It is the blurred background in a photograph, the indistinctness hovering behind the farthest object in focus. This blurriness can contain something to

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hide; it is a clandestine past that can be betrayed by speech. It is the ghost of another language that lingers, and it is itself the language of ghosts, of people and places long gone or forever changed. In Fleischer’s text, migration and the destruction wrought by the Shoah hover over the images of ghosts: his Hungarian-born father’s accent, one that always hints at a world destroyed, is the starting point of his book.2 The accent shows the haunting of bilingualism in the utterances that the speaker “actualizes” within an adopted language. Fleischer’s choice of the verb actualiser is particularly useful, for it means “to vocalize a linguistic sign” as well as “to realize something concretely,” and in French (unlike in English), “to bring something up to date.” It is like the wartime poem that Benjamin Fondane felt he must make actuel (current). An accent always links a speaker to an absent yet lingering history, a past that is always made present. According to Fleischer’s second paradox, an accent is an individual trait that both distinguishes the speaker from, and links him or her to, a larger group. The person speaking with an accent carries his or her own past, while also verbalizing words in ways similar to all speakers of the same mother tongue in the same adopted language. When his father answers the phone with an Allô at the start of Fleischer’s text, the two syllables reveal his Hungarian accent while at the same time invoking his connection to other Franco-Hungarian émigrés. An accent makes a person stand out; it also makes him or her sound like many other speakers from a larger national, ethnic, or regional group. In Fleischer’s words, an accent is a dissemblance as well as a ressemblance.3 Fleischer is concerned with the ways in which accents were formed by humanity’s ancient history of circulation and by the often violent contact of different languages in a long history of mass migrations, warfare, and conquest. He is suspicious of the question of the origin of accent before speech and before language, a question that is linked too closely to the pseudoscience of phrenology and the racial hierarchies that legitimized colonization and genocide.4 The plurilingualism and the pluriaccented voices of Fleischer’s own family were formed by the displacements of the Spanish Civil War and World War II. Such were the circumstances, too, in Marseille under the Occupation, the subject of the Polish-born Jean Malaquais’s novel Planète sans visa (World without Visa), where refugees from across Europe gathered in one

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place in the hope of crossing to new lands. Marseille was a carrefour, a crossroads, in the form of a city. Malaquais’s novel depicts a panorama in which European refugees attempt to leave Marseille for the Americas and all corners of the world. Accents, and often specifically Jewish refugee accents in French, are ubiquitous in the novel.5 They are almost never transcribed but they are always indicated; they are always both present and absent in the actual writing of the text. In Planète sans visa, the refugee’s accent indicates another place, a country of origin and the home from which a character has fled to Marseille. Fleischer’s use of the verb betray takes on particular salience in this context, for an accent is the traitorous sign that reveals statelessness and puts Malaquais’s characters in danger of imprisonment and deportation. In the eyes of the Vichy state, accent marks refugees as outsiders. They are alone and yet also part of a massive transnational group displaced in the war within the paradox of dissemblance and ressemblance. Like Fleischer, Malaquais reacts against the notion of an accent’s “origins.” Malaquais rejects the specific discourse of the Far Right, which held that the Jew’s speech reveals predetermined racial impurity and an innate cosmopolitanism that is divorced from the land. Reappropriating the Eastern European accent mocked by the antisemitic press, Malaquais shows that, quite to the contrary, Jewish accents are the site of expressions of love as well as linguistic play. These accents transcend the pseudorationality of identity papers and the byzantine system of visas. Yet Malaquais also depicts the power of the state over the fate of refugees in his portrayal of the authorities’ perception of Jewish accents and of the French mispronunciation of the names of the émigrés. He departs from Fleischer’s view by showing that accents concern not just the phantom past but also an uncertain future.6

Interwar Slang and Wartime Accents in Southern France

Marseille in the early years of the Occupation was one of those circumstances of the ubiquity of accents that Fleischer describes. Southern France, and Marseille in particular, were the points of departure from Europe as well as a new center of intellectual life under the Occupation. The city was both a figurative and a literal crossroads in France, which Vicki Caron has called

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the “foremost nation of asylum in the world,” having taken in over 30,000 German refugees, half a million Spanish Republicans, and between 15,000 and 20,000 illegal Eastern European Jewish refugees.7 As David Rousset put it, the only way out of Europe in the early 1940s was through Marseille or Auschwitz.8 In his article “Marseille: Cap de Bonne Espérance” (Marseille: Cape of Good Hope, 1943), published in the newspaper Pour la Victoire in New York, Malaquais describes Marseille as the supreme springboard or diving board (suprême tremplin), the last open door, the last buoy on the crazed waters of the European continent, and as a carrefour.9 Malaquais focuses on departure from the city; by contrast, the German writer Hans Sahl, who lived in Marseille at the same time, called the city the “terminal [Endstation] of a mass flight.”10 For Malaquais, however, it was both the crossroads from which refugees departed in any number of directions and the quintessential intersection of wartime refugees from all over Europe. Refugee accents were a constant presence in the cafés of the Vieux-Port, something to be heard, but also the present sign of an absent home. The protagonist of Hans Sahl’s novel Die Wenigen und die Vielen (The Few and the Many, 1959) describes the cafés of La Canebière, a main street in the Vieux-Port, as “national foster homes”: “We lived in the café, slept in the café, wrote farewell letters in the café.”11 Exile writers who passed through Marseille noted the omnipresence of accents in the multilingual setting of the café. The protagonist of the 1942 novel Transit by Anna Seghers—herself a Jewish refugee from Germany, who, like Malaquais, fled from Marseille to Mexico—describes being surrounded by conversations in a café: “It was as if the counter where I was drinking stood between two pillars of the Tower of Babel.”12 Yet from time to time she could understand some words: “They kept hitting my ears in a certain rhythm as if to impress themselves on my memory: Cuba visa and Martinique, Oran and Portugal, Siam and Casablanca, transit visa and three-mile zone.”13 For Seghers, who was writing in German, the voices rise in a non-German rhythm, and she makes out accented words like Cuba and visa. The words she cannot understand point to the absent countries and languages that she cannot access. Marseille was also a crossroads of intellectual life in the literal sense. In the Vieux-Port, refugee intellectuals, as well as the formerly Parisian Surrealists and their friends, frequented cafés like Le Cintra and Au Brûleur de

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loups on the quai des Belges, just across the road from Jean Ballard’s Cahiers du Sud headquarters, resounding with a mix of languages. Walter Benjamin stayed around the corner at a hotel on the rue Beauvau.14 Heinrich Mann and his family, along with two major figures of the German Social Democratic Party, Rudolf Breitscheid and Rudolf Hilferding, all stayed at the Hôtel Normandie on the boulevard d’Athènes nearby.15 The Normandie stood across from the Hôtel Splendide, where Varian Fry first set up shop.16 In his memoirs, Fry describes meeting with Franz Werfel and Alma Mahler at Basso’s, and in a more painful tone, seeing intellectuals paralyzed by fear in the cafés: “You would get them prepared with their passports and all the visas in order, and a month later they would still be sitting in the Marseille cafés, waiting for the police to come and get them.”17 Malaquais’s depiction of the city in “Marseille: Cap de Bonne Espérance” and in his novel Planète sans visa as a crossroads at which multilingual intellectuals intersect reflects his own experience of the city before his flight from France to Mexico. But his path of migration and his adoption of French can be traced further into the past than his life in Marseille during World War II. Born in Warsaw in 1908, Malaquais immigrated to France via Palestine, Egypt, North Africa, and elsewhere in the 1920s. Abandoning his studies to work in factories and mines around the world, he rebelled against both a comfortable middle-class Jewish family life and his father, who was a teacher of Greek and Latin. Traveling to Palestine and espousing Marxism, he rejected the political views of his mother, who was devoted to the General Jewish Labor  Bund—known simply by its shortened title as the Bund— in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia.18 This Socialist organization opposed the Zionist movement and advocated for Yiddish as the Jewish national language. In 1926, Malaquais came to Paris, where he likely frequented left-wing Jewish associations. He befriended the Jewish and militantly anti-Stalinist Marxists Sarah and Marc Chirik and got his political education from them. But Malaquais soon left Paris to work as a miner elsewhere in France and in Belgium, thereafter finding incidental work in Senegal and North Africa. By the 1930s, though, he was back in Paris. Malaquais spent his evenings of the year 1935 at the Bibliothèque SaintGeneviève, one of the few heated public places that remained open late. At this point he was working as a stock clerk at the food market Les Halles. But

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he was also educating himself. Malaquais was now reading voraciously, and in fact he was doing so in the same building where some of his own archival documents are held today. One night, as he was reading the December 1935 issue of the Nouvelle Revue Française, he discovered André Gide. With characteristic chutzpa, Malaquais wrote to Gide to admonish him, first, for writing romantically about working for his bread, and second for Gide’s regretting that he never had to do so. Gide responded to the young worker with a money order, which Malaquais ripped up and mailed back. What he was looking for was not charity but a conversation with Gide, which, he wrote, would calm “the gusts of wind in my soul.”19 He also wanted a chance to ask Gide about a novel he had himself written. Gide agreed to meet with Malaquais, giving him feedback on his manuscript as well as financial support so that he could focus on his writing. Malaquais destroyed his first manuscript. But under Gide’s mentorship, he began Les Javanais (Men from Nowhere), for which he won the 1939 Prix Renaudot. In his first novel, Malaquais is already concerned with immigrants and their speech. Les Javanais depicts the lives of miners working for the Des Maures Mining Company in southern France on the eve of its shutdown, at the same time that the government is cracking down on companies that employ undocumented migrant workers. The miners who inhabit the company barracks, which are nicknamed the Island of Java for their exoticism, hail from Italy, Austria, Armenia, Bulgaria, Poland, Russia, Algeria, Canada, Brazil, Martinique, and elsewhere. There is also a Ukrainian Jewish character, Magnus the Doctor, but his Jewishness is mentioned only insofar as it is one of the many ethnicities and nationalities of the Island of Java. As the café owner Madame Michel looks at her clientele, the narrator notes that the “Javanese” have their own jargon: “These islanders of hers you could almost say had good manners; they didn’t stick their paws where it was inappropriate, they didn’t crack dirty jokes, or at least, if they ever did, it was in their own Javanese lingo, so there was no harm done.”20 The narrator indicates that this is a benign yet marginalized language that lacks enough power even to insult the young waitress Ginette. But the French-born speakers like Madame Michel are actually the ones marginalized in the novel, for Malaquais places the speech of the Javanese at the novel’s center, elevating it to a literary language that would merit the Prix Renaudot. In fact, the press compared Malaquais to

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Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose Voyage au bout de la nuit ( Journey to the End of the Night, 1932) had won the same award seven years earlier for its radical use of slang and vernacular that broke with traditional literary language.21 In depicting the speech of the Javanese, Malaquais is more concerned with showing the international language of a class of workers from around the globe than he is with any one national language. A scene at the Double Pesée, Madame Michel’s café, demonstrates this in particular. Drunken workers—“Oh, they’re soused, no doubt about it”—start singing the “Internationale,” accompanied by the Polish immigrant Jean Paderewski, who “blows on his harmonica, which looks like a set of false teeth getting the hell out of his mouth,” riling the Russians.22 André Kurek, one of the Polish singers, tries to break up a fight among the Russian, Bulgarian, Armenian, Polish, Italian, and Czech workers at the bar, and yells, “I’ll croak the first man who moves.”23 Everyone is yelling, but in the style of the Javanese lingo. Although there are a few moments of multilingualism elsewhere in the novel in which the characters sprinkle words from English, Russian, and German into the dialogue, that is not the case here. Malaquais represents a style and a register of class in the French language, rather than reproducing different national languages. In the scene involving the bar fight, the narrator does not refer to the characters’ speech based on their nationality. Instead, their multiethnic backgrounds come together in the class-based register of the Island of Java, now elevated to a literary language. Malaquais received high praise for his revolutionary new literary language from none other than Leon Trotsky, to whom he was devoted. Trotsky read the novel as the depiction of a civilization that transcends national boundaries: “Malaquais’s tramps are the product of a mature [mûre] civilization. They see the world with more experienced and less frightened eyes. They do not belong to a nation; they are cosmopolitan.”24 This mature civilization is ripe for revolution, perhaps because it is inhabited by those who move beyond state borders. The key for Trotsky is not only cosmopolitanism but also the language that comes with it: “French literature, conservative and exclusive just like French culture, assimilates new words slowly, while it itself creates new ones for the entire world; it remains rather closed to foreign influences.”25 This resistance to the incorporation of new words and foreign influences into the French language reflects a too tenacious hold on

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old habits and traditions. But Trotsky announces that Malaquais breaks from this conservatism. While Malaquais is “an authentic French writer,” his foreignness allows him to go beyond the French-born, who are too set in their ways. He shares a background of migration and is one of the “international pariahs,” like those depicted in his novel. Thus, Trotsky writes, Malaquais can “see the world through the eyes of a vagabond,” creating a new language in French that reflects the reality of class and migration.26 But further, I would argue that Malaquais shows that the coexistence of many voices in one international vernacular of the working class is a register of French, a register that can exist in French literary language. In his interwar writing, Malaquais shows that French can encompass many registers of class. In their correspondence, which preceded Trotsky’s glowing review, Trotsky actually mistook Malaquais for a Frenchman. During the summer of 1939 Malaquais wrote to him in Mexico to disabuse him of that notion: “My real name is Vladimir Malacki, which phonetically—and with a bit of good will—gives you Malaquais.”27 Malaquais continues that, since the age of sixteen, he has not “stopped ‘knocking around’ in every geographical latitude as a sailor, a miner, a worker in the factory and in the fields, dying of hunger more than my fair share,” all without ever losing hope in a fraternal humanity.28 At the height of his literary recognition, Malaquais was a stateless man, much like his characters in Les Javanais. He asked Trotsky if there was any way for him to move to Mexico, where he might find work, as his position in France had become precarious without his papers.29 Trotsky’s optimistic ending to his review—his conclusion that, although Malaquais’s passport is not in order, “literature has already granted him the rights of citizenship”—did not truly reflect Malaquais’s legal situation.30 On the eve of the French defeat, Malaquais gave an interview to Les Nouvelles littéraires that would foretell a shift in his approach to depicting the way immigrants choose the language in which they speak. Now, as he would describe in his wartime novel, language choice had as much to do with rejecting the boundaries of specific national and ethnic backgrounds as it did with class. He explained why he had adopted the French language in Les Nouvelles littéraires’ series of articles called “Les Conrad français” (The French Conrads).31 These articles each feature an Eastern European writer who writes in French, comparing that writer’s situation to Joseph Conrad’s.

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Malaquais responded to the inquiry while he was serving in the 620th Pioneer Regiment. He admits that he continually asks himself why he chose the French language. He could have written in a number of languages. After all, he spoke French, Polish, German, and Russian, and over the course of his wartime migration, this talented polyglot would also learn English and Spanish fluently.32 But he wrote in French as his primary literary language from start to finish. Why? He tells the journalist that a writer who chooses a language other than his mother tongue “obeys a drive in which free will is almost entirely absent. There is truly no choice—in the formal sense of the word—except when there is a conflict.”33 For him, writing in French is a drive, an impulse that escapes the rational; it was never a choice because he never felt conflicted about it. Borrowing the vocabulary of psychoanalysis, Malaquais portrays writing in French as both the result of a psychic force and an urgent commandment from within. He even turns to the image of a happy marriage to describe his attraction to writing in French, calling it “a love match, one of those rare marriages that are not at all unhappy.”34 The journalist echoes Malaquais, referring to his relationship with French as a love affair. Malaquais cannot say—and, furthermore, finds it uninteresting to attempt to say—why “the French language awoke in my heart sensory, sensitive, poetic possibilities.”35 Although Malaquais would not use the words of love to describe the French language in his wartime writing, this interview is enlightening because it conveys the notion that writing in French is not innate, inherited, or linked to a long-held attachment to the soil. This rejection of accent and language choice as an indication of racial origins would be all the more present in Planète sans visa. After the French defeat, Malaquais and his partner, Galina “Galy” Yurkevich, a Russian-born painter, fled to the Southern Zone. Eventually they moved to Marseille and joined its world of intellectual refugees, living on the springboard of the city. Not yet an established writer, Malaquais survived with the help of literary figures who were now based in the South of France. While visiting Gide in Cabris, Malaquais contacted Jean Ballard, who accepted his request to stay overnight in the offices of the Cahiers du Sud in Marseille.36 Literary journal offices were true havens for fleeing writers and artists, as we shall see in Elsa Triolet’s case as well. Ballard had also helped Fondane obtain citizenship just a few years earlier through a circular in the

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Cahiers du Sud. The writer Jean Giono then hosted Malaquais and Galy in Manosque, in what is now the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence department, from November 1940 to February 1941.37 Malaquais and Galy then finally moved to Saint-Barnabé, on the eastern edge of Marseille. Their new temporary lodgings had another benefit besides offering a stable shelter, which was so difficult to find in the overcrowded city: the proximity to the Quartier de la Pomme, where Varian Fry of the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC) was living in the Villa Air-Bel, nicknamed the Château Espère-Visa (Château Hope-for-Visa), which he shared with André Breton and his family as well as with the anti-Stalinist writer and revolutionary Victor Serge and his son Vlady.38 Serge and Malaquais were friends although they would have a bitter falling-out after emigrating together.39 The ERC sent Fry to France for three weeks in August 1940 with a list of the names of two hundred intellectuals, writers, academics, and artists in order to locate them and help them escape to America. Fry would stay for thirteen months. He helped around two thousand people escape from Europe, including by crossing over the Pyrenees, frequently illegally, to Spain and Portugal.40 Gide advocated for Malaquais, still a relatively unknown young writer, to be included on Fry’s list.41 Malaquais was a frequent visitor to the Sunday afternoon gatherings of artists, writers, and intellectuals at the Villa Air-Bel. They played the Surrealist game “exquisite corpse,” held art exhibitions, playacted an auction, and created the famous Jeu de Marseille (Marseille game) tarot deck. Visitors included people like Arthur Adamov, the Romanian émigrés Victor Brauner and Jacques Hérold, as well as Wilfredo Lam, Óscar Domínguez, Max Ernst, André Masson, and others. Malaquais even played two games of chess with Marcel Duchamp in January 1942.42 Malaquais was also involved in the Croque-Fruits group, a cooperative candy company founded by Sylvain Itkine. It employed intellectuals, Surrealist artists, and Trotskyists, including Malaquais’s old friend Marc Chirik.43 Mary Jayne Gold, the American heiress who worked with Fry, called the Croque-Fruits candies the “only reasonable sweets” she could remember from the harsh winter of 1940–41.44 Malaquais depicts the conflicts at the unlikely company in Planète sans visa. In fact, he got caught up in the tensions and even went on strike, ultimately being kicked out.45 André Masson describes this heady time as a

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“premonition of exile.”46 This is the world that Malaquais would depict in Planète sans visa, taking inspiration from the people and places he saw and heard, their ever present speech marked by the absent languages and the places they had fled.

Dissemblance and Ressemblance: Accents in Planète sans visa

Malaquais wrote Planète sans visa over the course of five years: from 1942, while he was waiting for a visa in Marseille, to 1947, when he was living in exile in Mexico.47 The novel presents a world of refugees in the tense atmosphere of Marseille under Vichy, prior to the Nazi invasion of November 1942, but already deep into the Occupation. Its overlapping plots feature groups of characters trying to avoid arrest and secure visas through a fictionalized ERC. In Les Javanais, Malaquais depicts the register of class within literary French; here, he shows that French can contain the speech and accents, including Jewish accents, of different nationalities and ethnicities. As the narrator puts it, the city that had been “a kind of El Dorado for these fugitives from France and elsewhere” is now “apocalyptic Marseille.”48 Malaquais depicts the places he himself frequented and the people he knew in the months prior to his flight from the city in September 1942: the ERC; the Croque-Fruits candy-producing collective (in the novel, the Sucror); Varian Fry (Aldous Smith); Peggy Guggenheim (Bessy Hargrove-Bowman), who was still in France purchasing art at the time; and Victor Serge and his son Vlady (Ivan and Youra Stepanoff ), among others. Malaquais describes the people linked to the ERC in his Journal du métèque (Diary of the métèque) as “a polyglot crowd in search of salvation.”49 He often displaces historical events from 1941 to 1942, thereby compressing historical time. In fact, 1941 was the height of emigration from Marseille, and most people who survived by emigrating had left before 1942.50 It is a global story in which the narrator constantly refers to the international origins of the speakers, their different languages, and the accents they reveal when conversing in French. Malaquais does not reproduce accents in the text; rather, he describes and indicates them in a complex fashion. Sometimes he reproduces the non-French language (German, English, Italian, Spanish); sometimes he indicates that a person is speaking in a language other than French while rendering the

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dialogue in French; at still other times he indicates when characters switch from one language to another (from French to Yiddish, for example); and sometimes he transcribes both languages in French. Malaquais’s use of accent and pronunciation in French, including in the scenes in which speakers come together and break into and out of French, is a mode of representation where what is absent is as powerful as what is present in the speech of refugees. Both the novel’s story and its publication history are global and trace the author’s own circulation during the war and in the immediate postwar period. The book appeared in Paris in 1947, while Malaquais was moving back and forth between Mexico and the United States. Malaquais tried to apply for papers to return to France in 1945, but he was able to go only in 1947. He stayed for around nine months.51 The novel was published in translation by Doubleday in New York in 1948 and in London in 1949. By then he had moved to the United States, where he became a citizen in 1952.52 Malaquais revised the novel for a new edition, which was published posthumously in 1999. While I will reference some relevant changes he made for that version, I rely mainly on the 1947 edition. In Doubleday’s highly positive yet unfortunately unprophetic internal reader’s report of 1944, the reader predicted that Malaquais would one day write a book “that will sell like the Bible.”53 While the reader warned that Malaquais’s style was quite different from the journalistic war novels so popular at the time, Doubleday published the novel nevertheless. Perhaps the story of the plight of refugees in France was not the right topic for the immediate postwar period. Critics had read Malaquais’s Journal de guerre (War Diary, 1943) as anti-French.54 Malaquais also angered the powerful figure Louis Aragon with a pamphlet entitled Le Nommé Louis Aragon ou le Patriote professionnel (“Louis Aragon, or the Professional Patriot,” 1947).55 The 1947 Prix Goncourt went to Jean-Louis Curtis for Les Forêts de la nuit (Forests of the Night), a novel about the Resistance in a small French village. Malaquais’s text, on the other hand, is about a French city full of refugees who are on the verge of migrating to all corners of the earth, in constant danger of raids by the French police, and under threat of internment in French camps. Malaquais’s novel was widely reviewed although its reception was mixed. Many critics, however, agreed on the scope of Planète—from his reader at

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Doubleday, who commented that “in a sense there is no main character except, let us say, time itself,” to the New Yorker reviewer, who declared that “Malaquais’s Marseille is, in short, a synthesis of the twentieth century.”56 The word fresque comes up multiple times in French reviews; it can mean “fresco” as well as, figuratively, a panorama depicting events of historic importance. Despite his mixed review, Maurice Nadeau calls the novel a “vast panorama [ fresque]” that captures a world even wider than that of Les Javanais.57 Jean Rousselot refers to it as “a prophetic panorama [ fresque].”58 Malaquais uses the same concept himself when writing, in French, to his first English translator, William Granger Ryan, who initially worked on the translation (the novel was finally translated by Peter Grant): “There is not on these pages either a hero or a story in the established sense of the term, but an attempt to paint a large panorama [ fresque] of our times by means of a few small, individual anecdotes, for which the only link is the destiny of a world that at once dies and is born anew from its ashes.”59 The scope of the novel is also reflected in the sheer number of characters and their international backgrounds. This forgotten novel presents a wide-lens view of Marseille in which the author uses speech—that of the refugees and of the French, German, and American characters—to show how accents reveal the individual experience of exile and displacement, and the transformation of refugees into one transnational group of people, a “stateless humanity,” as he calls it in “Marseille: Cap de Bonne Espérance,” in search of “human solidarity.” To return now to Fleischer’s paradox of dissemblance and ressemblance as a theoretical framework, Malaquais uses accents in Planète sans visa to show that everyone in Marseille—from the Jewish refugees and the Americans, to the displaced French people, to the Germans—seems to stand out, through their speech, as being from somewhere else. As the novel unfolds, a myriad of characters from all over Europe and the United States are presented, while the narrator explains the way they speak. Among the refugees, Moïse Bergmann, a Lithuanian immigrant, has a “humble and unctuous” inflection when he offers drinks to his guests, explaining that he never drank wine before immigrating to France; and the Spanish anarchist painter Emilio López rolls his r’s as if he were tapping a tambourine.60 The American Aldous Smith

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speaks in hypercorrect French. In the 1999 edition, Malaquais pushes the point further by adding that Smith sometimes reveals the traces of an accent. The French have accents as well. The French-born Mr. Hirsch, who is Jewish, is comforted by the southern French accent of the woman who guides him across the border to Spain. His appreciation of her southern accent only further serves to indicate that he had to flee his home in the Occupied Zone.61 Accents in English also appear, as we meet the Frenchwoman Francine Lepage, Smith’s secretary, who speaks English with “the most perfect Oxford accent”; this accent is called “remarkably pure.”62 But Smith points out she has never been to an Anglophone country, and so her accent has nothing to do with her background. The enemy has an accent as well. The revolutionary Ivan Stepanoff can recognize agents of the Soviet secret police, as distinct from the Gestapo and the French police, thanks to a series of characteristics, including “their Central European accent, which his ear never failed to catch.”63 Hauptmann Gregor Wolfgang, who had served in Poland with the SS but who is nevertheless horrified by his position, speaks to the older French woman in whose home he is billeted with as little of an accent as possible.64 These references to accent constantly outline histories of displacement, of places left behind and their traces that distinguish the speech of the migrant in France. In the revisions made for the edition of his book that would be published in 1999, Malaquais underscored this notion but from the viewpoint of the Jewish refugee: a Jewish woman says, as she crosses the border to Spain, “France, for a drop of an accent, pfft! They treat you like a black sheep.”65 This sentiment is echoed in the memoirs of Hans Fittko, whose wife, Lisa Fittko, helped Walter Benjamin cross the Pyrenees: “To the French we émigrés were simply Germans. We came from there, we spoke with the despised accent boche.”66 They cannot be accepted because of their accents, which are the accents of the Boches (a derogatory term for the Germans), and which render them enemies even though they are refugees from Nazi Germany. Following Fleischer’s paradox, the accent that sets a person apart in dissemblance also links him or her to a larger group, in ressemblance. This is most apparent in the opening scene of Planète sans visa, which is reminiscent of Anna Seghers’s representations of the cafés in wartime Marseille in Transit. Ivan Stepanoff sits in Madame Babayû’s café, which looks out onto the

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long lines before an unnamed consulate. Stepanoff (who is based on Victor Serge) had taken part in the Bolshevik Revolution and survived the first Moscow show trial and years in Soviet prisons. Now he is one of numerous clients petitioning Smith and the fictionalized ERC for aid. All around him in the café he hears the quiet sounds of German refugees: “The restaurant hummed [bruissait] with voices, with the sound of mastication, with staggering ideas—the Germans at Smolensk, at Tobruk, at Lhasa.”67 Their sounds from elsewhere are all poised for collective flight, the “brouhaha of conversations” all join together into one unavoidable topic.68 Furthermore, the groups are not simply tied together by a single national origin. Rather, the multiplicity of accents links the refugees to each other, forming a transnational group.69 In the shadow of the German conversations and the line at the consulate, five or six people wait for a table to free up, “all calling to each other, exchanging the news in French and Spanish, Italian and Russian, German and Polish” (tous s’interpellant, échangeant des nouvelles, français et espagnol, italien et russe, allemand et polonais).70 The adjectives employed in the original French ( français et espagnol, etc.) are ambiguous and cannot refer to the news (des nouvelles) exchanged because they are grammatically masculine. They either describe the nationalities of the people waiting or the languages in which they speak. It seems like they are all somehow conversing together in a shared, accented French. They are all dissimilar in their supposed accents but they are also similar in that they form a group through their very accents in spoken French. The dissemblance-ressemblance paradox is not without ambivalence. When Ivan Stepanoff ’s son Youra waits in the courtyard of the Évêché, the police headquarters of Marseille (located to this day near the Vieux-Port), and sees the lines of other people waiting too, he suddenly recalls when he was detained in that same courtyard after a roundup of Russians on French soil a year earlier. In the novel, the roundup took place on June 22, 1941, the date of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Youra remembers hearing the hundreds of people waiting in fear, with their papers stuffed in their pockets: “Profiles and accents of Moscow and Kharkov, of Kiev and Leningrad—how violently they had revived his homesickness!”71 Their accents take him back to his childhood, to visceral memories, and happy as well as bitter ones. In his mind’s eye he sees himself in the places where he had lived with his father,

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trudging through the harsh snows of the Solovetsky Islands, eating berries, contracting typhus in Krasnoyarsk, and going on a hunger strike at the age of fourteen in solidarity with prisoners in Orel. Listening as the mass of Russians was rounded up in 1941, he hears not individual voices but echoes that awaken other memories of sounds: “Certainly [the Russian crowd] awoke in him a longing for immense snows, immense plains, the sound of the accordion in the humming [bruissante] peace of the night, the indolent course of the Yenisei and of the Volga, but it did so despite itself, by the sole virtue of resonance.”72 Youra employs the same verb, bruisser, to describe the rivers that his father Ivan uses to characterize the conversations in the café. The word links the rustling sounds of accented conversation about migration to the powerful course of a river. Here the accent is a living force: it revives Youra’s homesickness and awakens memories of a lost place, as if the murmuring voices around him share the soundscape of home in Russia. But in this group of people Youra still feels like a stranger, since he has nothing in common with them: “Observing that crowd, listening to its talk, he is surprised to feel it so foreign, so completely incomprehensible. Were these, then, the representatives of that humanity which, he had heard, had fled the October Revolution” in cowardice?73 Youra, the son of a revolutionary, who is in the process of becoming one himself, does not feel at one with these people whose politics and worldview, he assumes, are so different from his own. The voices of the arrested may mark them as a group, but they are individuals and not a faceless mass. Malaquais addresses this same ambivalence between individual and group in “Marseille: Cap de Bonne Espérance.” He describes the long lines at the US consulate, in which theater directors from Berlin, Viennese psychoanalysts, and mathematicians from Warsaw all wait in the hopes of securing an entry visa: There they are, standing in shabby coats, waiting in line in front of the American Consulate—they whose thoughts and speculations and actions are

known by thousands upon thousands of Americans. There they are, alone, but immense in their solitude, alone, and without a country or a home, with nothing more in their hands because an immense tempest has destroyed the four walls of reason.74

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They stand in the senseless lines, alone within a mass of lonely people in one of the terrible ironies of exile.75 They are in an international group but they are still individuals with their own pasts and paths forward.

Jewish Accents

The first third of Malaquais’s almost seven-hundred-page tome recounts the increasing tension of the days leading up to a large roundup of Jews in Marseille, culminating in the arrest of the Krantz family and Sonia Krantz’s tragic suicide. The Krantz story conjures the specter of Jewish bilingualism betrayed by accent, by Jewish speech, which, according to the far-right press, signifies their racial corruption of and inassimilability to France, and for part of the Franco-Jewish community, creates fears of a rise in antisemitism. Malaquais reappropriates the Jewish accent to show its richness in emotion and play rather than its supposed inferiority or racial determinism. The reader first encounters Pawel and Sonia Krantz, Jewish refugees from Poland, on the day before their arrest. They are in conversation with GustaveHenri Hirsch and Hermann and Liese Haenschel, who fled Germany because of Hermann’s Jewish background. Hirsch, the cashier at the Sucror collective, is a French Jew who lost a son at Dunkirk; another son was taken prisoner by the Nazis. His father is interned in Drancy. He now sees himself as the last of the line of French Hirschs. The narrator specifies that this group is now speaking in French, the only language that Hirsch understands. But the conversation unexpectedly turns to Yiddish, revealing anxieties about Jewish bilingualism or what Max Weinreich designates as the “external bilingualism” of Yiddish with a non-Jewish language.76 Sonia’s hold on her sanity has slowly been slipping, as she fears the worst for her family. As the Haenschels discuss their departure on the following day to join their sons in Rio de Janeiro, and as Pawel gives them letters to send from abroad to his relatives in Havana, Mexico City, and New York, Hirsch begins to laugh hysterically. Sonia yells in Hirsch’s face, screaming that she wants to know what he knows and is not telling them. Amid this intense anger, fear, and laughter, they kiss. Pawel begins to curse, first in Polish, then in German, and then in Yiddish, with the Yiddish curses represented in French in the text: “A black year in your guts!” and “Typhus and the thirty-six plagues in the roots of your teeth!”77 These come from the depths of his childhood, which was “piously strangled in

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the Talmudic schools of Eastern Poland.”78 The Yiddish curses, bubbling up uncontrollably, reveal the depths of his anger. Here we see the “metavalue” of Yiddish, as Naomi Seidman theorizes it: the use of Yiddish as a speech act, “in its distinctive sounds rather than in its communicable content,” conveys its own meanings.79 The very use of Yiddish shows Pawel’s emotion. This scene indicates anxieties about Yiddish speech and its traces in French. Hirsch is provoked by Pawel’s outburst in Yiddish, by hearing him “mutter his revolting incantations” and “intone his psalms”: “It was because of him that France was no longer France, and life no longer fit to live. Hirsch was not an anti-Semite: how could he be, feeling so little that he was a Jew, so not at all Jewish?”80 In free indirect discourse Hirsch keeps telling himself that he hates antisemites; he cannot be one, and yet merely the sight of these Eastern European Jews fills him with rage. Other than in reference to the Dreyfus Affair, he had never heard the word juif until the “Oriental” Jews had invaded the “Occident,” turning all of Europe into a Bukovina or a kind of Ukraine, with “Jews at every step with the pogrom coming out of their eyes.”81 Hirsch cannot understand Yiddish, yet hearing its sounds does something to him. This describes yet another relationship with the Yiddish speech act. But what begins as a terrible condemnation of Eastern European Jews ends with sympathy and love, for Hirsch soon sees that he does not really believe any of the things he was thinking, that he is simply scared out of his mind. Yiddish, and his perception of its rhythm of incantation, bring out Hirsch’s own anxieties about his rejection from French life as a Jew. Hirsch gives voice to the fears expressed by parts of the French Jewish community in the interwar period: that the increased immigrant Jewish population, and the Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Eastern Europe in particular, would cause a rise in antisemitism.82 Nadia Malinovich has constructed a nuanced analysis of the blurred boundaries between “immigrant” and “native,” showing a variety of approaches on the part of diverse Jewish organizations to integrating new generations of immigrants. Nevertheless, learning the French language holds a special place in this history.83 In October 1926, in an investigative article for L’Univers israélite, the journalist Jacques Biélinky—himself an immigrant from Vitebsk and tragically a victim of Sobibor—reveals that Yiddish lay at the heart of the rise in antisemitic attacks in Belleville as compared to other Jewish neighborhoods, especially in Saint-Paul and

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Montmartre. After speaking with residents and business owners, both Jewish and non-Jewish, Biélinky concludes that it is the presence of Yiddish in public that seems most to outrage antisemites, thereby posing the greatest threat to the Jewish community. Biélinky records one local manufacturer as asking why Jews insist on bothering the French “with their Hebrew that smacks of le boche,” confusing Hebrew with Yiddish or describing Yiddish as Hebrew that sounds like German.84 Biélinky himself notes that Yiddish dominates the animated conversations in the cafés crowded with recent Jewish immigrants, and he even hears a passerby yell in violent terms that they should be speaking in French. For Biélinky the immigrants’ Yiddish, which symbolizes a mode of life “entirely transplanted from the ghettos of the east,” prevents their integration into Parisian life, and “bothers” (he uses the same word as the industrialist) the local population.85 Biélinky proposes that the Jewish community work together to help this new wave of immigrants. His solution to the problem of their separateness is “the Gallicization of foreigners” through the organization of evening conferences, concerts, and physical education that would keep the immigrants out of the cafés at night and give them an education.86 Interestingly, he proposes using the space of a new synagogue to integrate the recent arrivals into French life. Biélinky was certainly not anti-Yiddish, as he himself was active in the foundation of the Yiddish newspaper Parizer Haynt in 1926, the same year of his investigation for L’Univers israélite.87 Nonetheless, in this article he reports on the visibility of Yiddish as a threat to the Jewish community. A letter from a reader published in the following issue of L’Univers israélite expresses anguish about the antisemitism described in Biélinky’s article.88 The reader takes the position that these new immigrants must speak French, abandoning their languages, whether Yiddish, Polish, Russian, or Spanish, which sound so disagreeable to French ears. Rejection of external Jewish bilingualism would instill in them the French mentality, turning “these foreign Jews into French citizens.”89 Malaquais shows through the Hirsch-Pawel encounter the anxieties around Yiddish that are so palpable in Biélinky’s report for L’Univers israélite. The scene of the Krantz family’s arrest shows them face to face not with a French Jew but with the French police and their condemnation of Jewish language. When Sonia and Pawel, along with their two sons, are arrested in the middle of the night, Sonia refuses to leave. There is a fight, and although

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her nightgown has been torn from her, Sonia will not get dressed. Pawel pleads with her: “Sonia, my child, don’t mind I’m going to dress you. Don’t mind I’m going to put your red dress with the white collar on you.”

“Speak in French, so we can understand!” said the man with the flashlight. He tried, but he could not. Even Sonia’s name, although it was the

same in Yiddish and in French. Suddenly he did not know how to say in a

foreign tongue, “Sonia, don’t mind I’m going to dress you in your prettiest red dress.” He could not, it would have been like a sacrilege, as if with his

own hands he had opened the brown wounds of the wall opposite, with his

own hands brought in the light of heaven for Sonia to lean on, for these men to see her by.90

Pawel finds himself unable to address his wife in French, even to say her name, which sounds the same in either language. Here is a paradox that Fleischer did not take into account: when something is pronounced similarly in two different languages, how do you know in which language you are uttering the word? Saying her name in French would be a terrible exposure of his abused wife. His anguished thoughts about the very walls of their apartment opening to the sky foreshadow Sonia’s terrible leap from the window. Malaquais altered the beginning of this quoted section for the 1999 edition, changing Sonia’s name to “Sonietchké, meine Liebe” (little Sonia, my love), underscoring that Pawel is indeed not speaking in French.91 But Malaquais also signals that saying her name in French cannot express the emotion and love he feels for his wife. There is no way for him to call her the diminutive “Sonietchké” in French, to express his intimate feelings for her, his desire to protect her. In the Krantz scene, an accented name pivots around questions of intimacy. Just as Yiddish comes out in Pawel’s uncontrollable explosion of anger at Hirsch, so too does it rush forward in his outpouring of love for Sonia. These moments would seemingly show the untranslatability of the Yiddish speech act into French.92 Yet in the cases of Hirsch and Pawel, Yiddish is represented in French, indicating that a translatability does exist, as enabled through Jewish-accented French. Malaquais draws out the anxieties and emotions of Jewish language through accent in direct opposition to its portrayal by the Far Right as racial

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contamination. From the viewpoint of the Far Right, the panorama of accents in 1940s Marseille—the cafés resounding with the accents of refugee intellectuals—was the sign of the racial corruption of this French city. In his study of French reactions to immigration, Ralph Schor details the scorn for foreigners’ pronunciations of “the language of Voltaire.”93 Examples from Schor’s study of the far-right press show that immigrants’ language and speech—and even their use of French itself—were signs of their racial difference and of their negative effects on French life. Schor cites an antisemitic pamphlet by the collaborationist journalist Henri-Robert Petit, who vilifies “these hooked noses, these thick lips, this kinky hair whose owners jabber in their native Yiddish.”94 Similarly, the antisemitic collaborationist writer Lucien Rebatet describes what appeared to him to be the overwhelming number of Jewish immigrants from Eastern and Central Europe taking over Marseille in his article, “Marseille la juive” (Marseille the Jew), which appeared in Je suis partout.95 One of the defining features of the new Jewish presence is their language, which Rebatet generalizes as “yddish.” Jewish language is a violent assault on the calm evenings on the café terraces: “Cocktail hour is now Jew hour.” There he hears one Jewish person talking: “He spits out some words in Yiddish.” As for other Jewish people frequenting the cafés, “Yiddish explodes on their tongues, their claw-like hands wave around as high as their ears.”96 Malaquais’s wartime diaries indicate that even when he was in Mexico, he was consulting Je suis partout, and it is reasonable to conclude that he was familiar with the xenophobic criticism of non-French on French soil found in its pages.97 In antisemitic fascist texts of the 1930s and 1940s, Jewish voice is both the sign of racial difference and its signifier. In “Marseille la juive,” Rebatet writes that while the Polish and Czech Jews in the cafés seem to be conventional, albeit far from virile, middle-aged bourgeois men, their language gives them away: “comfortably bourgeois in their grey suits, but with the sinister mugs of featherless owls, largely past their fifties, gibbering in their vile Yiddish, which resembles German mangled by a sidi.”98 During the war, as Alice Kaplan has shown, Rebatet was involved in the “fascination with the transmission of voice” as he broadcast xenophobic and antisemitic content first in Vichy and then in Paris.99 Rebatet decried the encroachment of Yiddish in the sound tracks of French films; similarly, Robert Brasillach, editor

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of Je suis partout, said that the radio under the Popular Front had a Yiddish accent.100 Voice held racial recognizability. Kaplan also argues that for the Far Right the idea of French voice is defined in part by the parasitic Jewish voice that intrudes on the French. In “Marseille la juive,” not only does Rebatet single out Jewish difference, but he also conflates the Jew and the Arab, sidi being a derogatory term for a North African, an appropriation of the Arabic honorific. The Jew is an Arab trying to speak German. As Sandrine Sanos argues, “Colonial racism and antisemitism were imbricated rather than parallel in this far-right discourse.”101 Rebatet’s article is in fact a prime example of what Sanos describes as Je suis partout’s approach in the 1930s that “promoted a racialized Frenchness whose boundaries were mapped through the simultaneous and necessary subjection of colonized subjects (abroad in the empire), which allowed the denunciation and verbal persecution of French Jews (within the nation).”102 And these boundaries of the French nation were conceived of in terms of anxieties about masculinity and the exclusion of racial and sexual difference.103 Rebatet hears the male Jewish refugees’ Yiddish accents on the café terraces of Marseille as a threat to the boundaries of pure French and thus of a nation whose greatness must be upheld through empire. It is the sign of an unchangeable and inassimilable Jewish otherness. In Planète sans visa’s multilingual world of refugees, Malaquais reappropriates accents from the mockery of journalists like Rebatet. His approach can be distinguished from appropriation within the postcolonial context, where postcolonial subjects use the “language of the centre,” now denied its status as the privileged colonial language, and embed it with forms of cultural difference linked to their specific place.104 This form of appropriation divorces the language from its colonial power. However, in this context Malaquais reappropriates the mockery of Jewish voice and uses the same belittled speech against racial discourse about the accent. Racist and xenophobic ideas about Jewish accents were not new in the period of the Occupation. Sander Gilman argues that the stereotype of “the Jew who sounds Jewish” stands for the Jew who unmasks himself or herself as “possessing all languages or no language of his or her own” and, as such, is inherently different and corrupt.105 In a xenophobic and antisemitic book published in 1939, La Grande Invasion (The great invasion), Jacques SaintGermain entitles a chapter “Le ‘bedide gommerze’ est en train de ruiner nos

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boutiques” (“Zmall zhops” are ruining our stores), in which he claims that foreigners and Jews are taking over French businesses. The words bedide gommerze form a caricature of Jewish voice, the sign of the Jews’ destabilizing force.106 In the context of nineteenth-century France, Maurice Samuels addresses caricature in the accent of Honoré de Balzac’s character, the scheming Jewish banker Nucingen: “His phonetic substitutions—f for v, t for d, b for p—indicate a slippage of the sign, a breakdown of stable systems of value that uphold social distinctions of all sorts and that seem to have given way in Balzac’s vision of modernity.”107 His accent might be intended to provoke laughter in the reader, but it is also a sign of the Jew’s danger, “for his cosmopolitan promiscuity with money, as with language, threatens the integrity of what it means to speak, as to be, French.”108 Balzac’s Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (A Harlot High and Low, 1838–47) provides many examples of this speech. When Nucingen falls in love with the beautiful and tragic prostitute Esther after he spots her one night getting into a hired carriage in the Bois de Vincennes, he demands that his carriage catch up to hers, yelling to his footman: “Hundert francs if you cadge up wit zat goach.”109 When Nucingen admits he is in love, he sighs: “To pee in luf at my aitch, I kenow zat nossing coult pe more follish; but can I help? Zat is how!”110 He describes Esther as “eine truly Pipplingle fess! Eyess of fire, a skin off Orient.”111 Nucingen’s accent is as much a corruption of the French language as it is Balzac’s metaphor for the Jews’ corruption of France through a religion of money and inappropriate sexual desire. Just as Malaquais uses Pawel’s Yiddish accent to show intimacy and emotion rather than corruption, he turns the traditional mocking transcription of Yiddish-inflected French into a moment of play. In the 1947 edition of the novel, one of the characters tangentially involved in the Sucror collective, Raya Bergmann, contemplates the effects of her new dental bridge, worrying that: “You would have thought that out of the whole alphabet she only knew the s’s, the z’s, and the sh’s.”112 But she is relieved to have found “the good enunciation of old.”113 Her s, z, and sh sounds, normally used in caricatures of Jewish accent, are now just part of a dental procedure. For the 1999 edition, Malaquais revised this scene to draw out the importance and the humor of this mocked Jewish accent, now reproducing the accent in the text. The first time we meet Raya, she is introduced by her speech,

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which is marked by a stereotypical Yiddish accent. Malaquais uses the same sounds and methods that Balzac had used to render Nucingen’s speech. Talking with friends over a rare cup of coffee, Raya says to her daughter: “Nellychka, my treshure, I would take shome more of thish flan,” said the

whistling voice, Raya Bermann, to her daughter—just recently her dentures made her lisp. “You don’t find thish flan sucsheshful, Bergmann?”

She called him Bergmann, her husband, bound to caution, seeing that he

had Moses as a first name. . . .

But Malaquais throws us a curve ball, as only after Raya speaks do we see that her accent is the effect of a recent visit to the dentist. He continues: “She was not unhappy with her dentures; the first week, yes, you would have said she had a mouth full of ch, but the good old diction would come back to her, dentist’s promise.”114 The dentist promises her good diction will return, although the reader assumes she doesn’t have what a good French dentist would consider perfect diction. Later we learn that, unlike her Lithuanianborn husband, Moïse, Raya herself was born in Brittany.115 Through the gradual disclosure of Raya’s background, Malaquais has broken our assumptions about Jewish accent in a world where there is little room for disrupting categories.

Accents and Identity Papers

While the previous examples have dealt with refugees’ speech in the novel, Planète sans visa also highlights how the authorities pronounce or mispronounce names as a form of exerting power. We see this power of pronunciation at work when the French police approach Ivan Stepanoff. Arresting him on the very ship that would take him from France, the police call out: “Monsieur Ivan Stepanoff ?” He hears this address as “that question so distinctive, so unique in the genre with the accent that crushes each letter—a question that contains only the last name and first name with the title Monsieur in front, and of which he knew the bitter and unforgettable taste.”116 Here I take “accent” to mean both the emphasis and the pronunciation. Their French accent crushes every letter of his Russian name in an act of linguistic violence that indicates what is to come in his arrest. All that Stepanoff is to the police is his name. In Malaquais’s representations of bureaucratic procedure—the identity

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paper verifications, the collection of information during roundups and visa applications—all the authorities want to know is just a few seemingly concrete facts: “Last name—First name—nationality—Jew—non-Jew—visa—no visa.”117 But accent escapes the letters on the page: it escapes the official document. When Youra describes the lines of Russians in a roundup, their accents have nothing to do with the identity papers stuffed into their pockets. Those papers cannot reflect the multiplicity of voices he hears, the way they awaken his recollections of home. As Fleischer notes, the accent is invisible in written language (that is, when an author does not transcribe it).118 In a key scene of the novel, the Haenschel exit visa request, Malaquais demonstrates through the mispronunciation of a name that the refugee is at the mercy of the authorities.119 This mispronunciation will affect their visa application, showing that accent is linked not just to a phantom past but also to an uncertain future. Hermann and Liese Haenschel hope to join their sons in Brazil with the help of Smith (the character based on Varian Fry). They consult the accumulation of stamps and visas in their passports before one last trip to the Marseille prefecture to request their exit visas on the day before their ship sets sail. Hermann assures his wife in German, “Nun Lieschen, alles ist schon fertig” (Now little Liese, everything is already ready).120 The narrator indicates that they speak in German with each other while they converse in French with the officials. When they go to the prefecture to receive their exit visa, the official informs them they must first go to the Commissariat-General for Jewish Affairs (CGQ J) for a certificate of Aryan background in order to complete the process, all before their transit visas expire and their boat sets sail. Everything hinges on the pronunciation of a name. The commissioner asks probing questions about the Haenschels’ passports, reading each word to decipher the hidden meanings behind the names and profession listed—anything that might indicate a Jewish background. The commissioner asks how Liese pronounces her full maiden name, Liese Maria Rahel Burgermayer. Is it Ra-hel or Ra-chel, Ma-yer or Me-yer? In Malaquais’s correspondence with his American translator, William Granger Ryan, he asks Ryan to write out the names with dashes, as one would pronounce them: Ra-chel or Ra-hel.121 The accent was of particular importance, enough for him to give specific instructions about it to his translator. But the answer to the question of how to pronounce her name is never given in the

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text. Without waiting for an answer, the commissioner declares Liese nonAryan, stamping her passport, marking her fate, assigning her a new identity, and preventing her from securing the coveted exit visa. He never allows her to voice the name. The mistake is that Liese is “Aryan,” for her husband is the Jewish member of the couple. Malaquais reminded Ryan to include the expression “non-Aryan” to highlight the miscommunication. It is not just this mistake that proves the passport to be a fallible document, or, as Victor Serge describes a refugee’s passport in his novel, published posthumously as Les Années sans pardon (Unforgiving Years, 1971), “as authentic as it was fake.”122 The Algerian-born Jewish writer Hélène Cixous, who was a child in Oran under the Occupation, likewise calls her French passport a paradox and a fake, as well as something born of chance itself. Cixous states that it would be a “legal fiction” to call herself French. But at the same time she would be ungrateful if she denied her Frenchness in the face of the “intermittent hospitality” of the French (intermittent because of her loss of French citizenship after the abrogation of the Crémieux Decree under Vichy) and the “infinite hospitality” of the French language.123 But Malaquais goes even further than calling the passport a fake document. He shows that in the tension and anxiety of the process of putting one’s papers in order, official documents take on magical and symbolic meanings, negating the rationality that cloaks the passport and visa system. For the Haenschels, the visa becomes an obscure document to be deciphered: “As the variegated tapestry of visas was added, bringing their polyglot endorsement to the official paper and illuminating it with signatures and numbers like a registered stock certificate, a sensation of security gradually replaced the holder’s uncertainty.”124 We learn that Hermann was an Egyptologist who studied hieratic and demotic writing, further linking the notion of ancient language and decoding to the writing on the passports. He now reads the signs on his papers in search of an irrational sense of hope. When the couple first arrives at the prefecture to receive their exit visa, the official describes their visas as magical cards, and accent here plays a role in their deciphering. This official is an “artist in divination” who reads the fortunes of refugees in a “bureaucratic ritual”:125 All these people who passed before him at the window had taught him the

art of divination. There were some people whose destiny was barely hidden:

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you glimpsed it in the accent of their speech, in their gestures and their walk. The way an ear stuck out from the head, the line of an eyebrow, the cut of the

fingernails, the way a man knotted his necktie or spread out his identity papers, but especially the expression of the eyes—all these things were signs.126

The official is a face reader, divining destinies based not on the categories listed on the identity papers—name, date and place of birth, profession—but on the way the émigrés present themselves to him, how they lay out their papers before him, how they speak with accents. He knows that the Haenschel couple will find a way out solely from hearing them speak. When the official again sees Liese’s passport, now freshly stamped non-Aryan, he is dismayed. The pages of the visa, at first described as if they were cards by which their fates could be known, become demonic pages. The Haenschels are falling into the devil’s trap. Suddenly the window before which the Haenschels stand is crowded with demonic figures like Astaroth, Asmodeus, Belial, and Baphomet, as well as the folkloric Farfadet. The kepi in Pétain’s portrait hanging on the wall starts to spin around and around. Demonic forces take over as each letter quivers on the visa page. But the officer imitates the signature of his superior and manages to override the commissioner’s decree. The official concludes that the devil invented “cloven visas” and “signatures with tails.”127 When he announces to the Haenschels that their papers are now in order, he has “the pure accent of clean things.”128 But of course it is not “clean,” since he has just falsified a signature on documents containing incorrect information. Malaquais seems to imply there is no pure accent, that this is a cloak enveloping administrative language. In Malaquais’s text, the refugee accents that escape the written words on the pages of the passport and the imposition of identities onto refugees by the authorities reveal the passport to be an irrational and malleable, yet powerful, document that determines the fate of refugees. In the late nineteenth century, foreign residents in France were first required to have identification documents. As John Torpey explains, a system of “anthropometric identification” that Alphonse Bertillon originally developed “to track recidivist criminals was extended to the entire resident foreign population in France.”129 Clifford Rosenberg has shown that the beginnings of modern migration control can be dated not to the rise of xenophobia in the 1930s but to demobilization after World War I, “as part of the French government’s effort to

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maintain public order while relinquishing wartime controls.”130 The interwar measures included new decrees that made it mandatory for foreigners to register for identity cards and to carry them at all times.131 Official papers should be quite the opposite of magical cards to be deciphered. A place of birth, the spelling of a name, and nationality should indicate fixed and unchangeable information.132 Yet Malaquais uses accents and mispronunciation in the novel to show the misuse and irrationality of identity papers founded in racial, social, and biological determinism. Other refugee intellectuals have also alluded to the diabolical nature of the visa process. Lion Feuchtwanger entitled his 1941 memoirs Der Teufel in Frankreich (The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940). In her 1942 novel Transit, Anna Seghers refers to the “demon consuls.”133 The mispronunciation of Liese’s name also points to one other supposedly simple rubric on identity papers: nationality. Just as Malaquais shows the transformation of the passport into a magical paper that determines the refugee’s future, Hannah Arendt, in her essay “We Refugees” (1943), calls stargazing a more rational way to tell the future than one’s own passport. Describing the experience of immigrating first to France and then to the United States, Arendt traces the dizzying changes in state treatment of German refugees, their official passports being meaningless to them as stateless people: “We were expelled from Germany because we were Jews. But having hardly crossed the French borderline, we were changed into ‘boches’ all the same.”134 After the defeat, “in Paris we could not leave our homes after eight o’clock because we were Jews; but in Los Angeles we are restricted because we are ‘enemy aliens.’”135 But Arendt says that refugees like her have “found our own way of mastering an uncertain future”: We think the stars more reliable advisers than all our friends; we learn from the stars when we should have lunch with our benefactors and on what day

we have the best chances of filling out one of these countless questionnaires which accompany our present lives. Sometimes we don’t rely even on the stars but rather on the lines of our hand or the signs of our handwriting.136

Arendt’s stargazers and palm readers and Malaquais’s accent and visa decipherers all stand in response to contingent futures based on contingent identities.

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Malaquais called his own process of getting a visa to leave Europe a “cosmic anguish” in his correspondence with Justin O’Brien, his American sponsor through the ERC.137 O’Brien, a French professor at Columbia University, is now best remembered as a translator of Camus and Gide. But in 1941 he also shepherded Malaquais’s case through a bureaucratic labyrinth over the course of twenty months to help Malaquais escape from the South of France to Mexico. In a letter to Malaquais on New Year’s Day, 1941, Gide mentions that he had spoken to Fry about Malaquais’s case.138 After four affidavits of financial support, with one person dropping out at the last minute and O’Brien himself stepping in to take that person’s place, one call for help published in the Partisan Review, and many letters and telegrams, Malaquais and Galy received their visas in April 1942 and left France that October. As Malaquais wrote to O’Brien, “Like misfortune, good luck arrives all at once.”139 It almost did not happen. When he found out that he needed not one but two affidavits, the situation seemed impossible to Malaquais: “There is a good chance I will wait indefinitely for the divine and spectral visa.” 140 He worries that he will perhaps end up needing four or eight or sixteen, because—why should the authorities stop at two per person? “The geometric progression can just as well apply in this realm as in that of any of the Pythagoreans’ magical numbers. For, according to the rumors that reach me even here, at this moment I have at my disposal only a single one of these fantastic affidavits,” and from a certain Mr. Joseph D. Weiner whom Malaquais says he does not even know.141 In a way his fears were realized. Weiner dropped out and, when O’Brien learned that Galy and Malaquais were not officially married, he told Malaquais he would need not two but four affidavits of financial support.142 Even O’Brien seemed despondent, and he invoked the diabolical nature of the process: “And if it is already devilishly difficult to find two affidavits, what would it be to find four of them?”143 The magical nature of the visa now extended to the affidavit, a paper so important, yet signed by people Malaquais never knew. Luckily, O’Brien went above and beyond the call of duty, and he and William Sorkin each signed two affidavits, allowing Malaquais and Galy passage to Mexico in the hopes of then securing a visa for the United States. They would have to wait until after the war to get one.144 When Malaquais and Galy were held up in Caracas on their way to Mexico, not realizing they

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needed a transit visa for Panama, Malaquais wrote to O’Brien, saying “the devil knows” how long they would be stuck there.145 As in his novel, administrative language—visa, case, affidavit, travel permit—can be read side by side with words invoking the devil, magical numbers, and mirific papers. The title Planète sans visa might have been translated as Planet without Visa rather than World without Visa to convey Malaquais’s cosmic view of the supposedly rational process. The title of Malaquais’s novel is actually an allusion to a famous chapter from Trotsky’s My Life. In this text, Trotsky recounts his unsuccessful visa applications in Istanbul after his expulsion from the Soviet Union. Germany, Norway, France, and England all refuse to grant him the right of asylum. For Trotsky these failures are a “‘pan-European’ performance of a one-act comedy on the theme of principles of democracy.”146 This play that serves as proof of Trotsky’s “disbelief in democracy” could be titled The Planet without a Visa.147 Malaquais borrows Trotsky’s turn of phrase, although in his usage “world” is not the collection of governments and officials that refuse the legal right of passage but an international group of refugees. Malaquais shows us that the words on the visa can never capture the accents nor depict the lives of refugees. He recovers Jewish accents and shows them to be a positive attribute— the means of expressing love and intimacy in language. Far from marking inferiority or racial impurity, the Jewish accent in French in his novel reveals the emotional bonds between people and places. Accents are a powerful mode of representation precisely for their present absence, more than as a present sign of foreignness. As such, Malaquais shows the experience of displacement within the French language in the first half of the Occupation, after the defeat and the exode and before the invasion of the Southern Zone.

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E U RO P E A N L A N G UAG E A N D T H E R ES I S TA N C E Romain Gary’s Heteroglossia

On t he first day of Sep t ember 1940, the BBC broadcast an installment of a new radio series called “La Petite Académie” (The little Academy), as part of “Les Français parlent aux Français” (The French speak to the French) programming. “Les Français parlent aux Français” followed the segment, announced as “Honneur et patrie” (Honor and country), which was devoted to the voices of Charles de Gaulle’s Free French in London, and seventy-seven times to the voice of de Gaulle himself.1 In its first episode, “La Petite Académie,” parodying the Académie française, declares itself the replacement of the original institution in Paris, that seventeenth-century bastion of French language and letters, which, it claims, has been overrun by collaborators. The new institution takes over the Académie’s task of updating the official dictionary of the French language, since French itself has become corrupted by complacency or even collaboration with the enemy: All the Frenchmen living outside of metropolitan France, all those in the Empire, all those abroad, certainly share our concern. The newspapers look

the same, the radio still plays in the same language. They still speak, they still

write in French in France. But why do we have a hard time understanding? It seems to us that in the past few months words have acquired a meaning that is no longer exactly the one we recognize.2

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One of the French words the Petite Académie clarifies for its listeners is une cravate (a tie), which it defines as a “piece of light cloth, finery of men’s clothing of questionable use. Strong cord, solid and slippery, that will be of unquestionable use at the end of the war.”3 A tie is no longer simply a man’s accessory, but a material for hanging collaborators. Everyday French words have acquired new ideological weight and unexpected violence. The collaborators speak corrupted French, but the Resistance fighters in London employ their view of true French in new ways. By providing new definitions that reveal a political agenda, the Petite Académie translates French as a new language in the war. Within the same national language, there are multiple, simultaneous political languages as the dictionary becomes a site of the fight for France.4 Languages can be nested in each other in a manner that has been described as heteroglossic—that is, as characterized by the coexistence of multiple discourses within a single language in a dialogic relationship. In his landmark essay “Discourse in the Novel,” written while he was an exile in Kazakhstan during the 1930s, Mikhail Bakhtin defines the way heteroglossia enters the novel through “a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages), and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized.”5 The multiple registers of language, high and low, quotidian and ceremonial, official and unofficial, combine in artistic prose. Heteroglossia can take the form of divided intentions between the character and the author, who may parody or criticize a particular discourse, or resist official language, but it can also mean a variety of registers of language. For Bakhtin, “the living utterance” is animated by different historical moments and social contexts.6 The dialogic relationship of these contexts deprivileges and relativizes the word, undermining official language by taking supremacy away from any one of those speech types and instead creating a mix of many registers together.7 Bakhtin’s observation of the “Tower-of-Babel mixing of languages that goes on around any object” is especially appropriate for my argument about the particular way French becomes heteroglossic for the novelist Romain Gary, who would write one of the most famous depictions of the Resistance.8 If we take a leap and read Bakhtin’s language as language in the sense of the French or the German language, we arrive at the very issue at the heart

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of this book.9 Bakhtin includes, but does not develop, the multilingual aspect of heteroglossia in his theory of language, especially in his notion that there is no unitary language “within a single national language” nor “amid different national languages within the same culture, that is, the same socio-ideological conceptual horizon.”10 This idea of every single language being plural harkens back to Benjamin Fondane’s breakdown of the idea of monolingual language in his poem L’Exode: Super flumina Babylonis.11 But instead of conceiving of all language as foreign, here language is opened up to dialogue. As Michael Holquist writes, “Heteroglossia is a plurality of relations, not just a cacophony of different voices.”12 It would be impossible, I argue, to divorce multilingualism from the social and historical relations of the Resistance in London, where Gary was writing. I would like to pursue this notion of multilingual heteroglossia under the Occupation as it relates to the national languages of the Axis and Allied powers as well as to Jewish languages.13 We have already seen the antagonistic mixing of registers of language resulting from violent usurpation in the Petite Académie broadcast. Similarly, an anonymous journalist at the review of the Resistance in London, La France libre (likely its editor, Raymond Aron), reveals this linguistic expropriation among multiple national languages in a chronicle of propaganda in occupied France: “The newspapers and radio of Paris think and speak German, in French.”14 In occupied Paris, the German language is expressed in Francophone propaganda. At a time when the French language was particularly ideologically heavy, as the Petite Académie program demonstrates, the presence of non-French language in French reveals the political stakes of heteroglossia. There is a kind of violence at work within the French language under the Occupation. However, there is a way of examining languages in contact that shows they do not cancel each other out but are rather in dialogue with each other. Bakhtin began his studies at a gymnasium in the polyglot city of Vilnius, where Russian was the official language but Lithuanian and Polish speakers made up the majority of the population. Vilnius has been called a “borderland city,” and it was a center for numerous other polylingual cultures, including an important Jewish community.15 Another former inhabitant of this city was the novelist Romain Gary, who spent his childhood there. This chapter will be devoted to his use of heteroglossia in his novel of the Polish

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and French Resistance, Éducation européenne (A European Education), which he wrote in French while a member of de Gaulle’s movement in London. Gary’s novel features a Polish resistance brigade outside of Vilnius, and includes that brigade’s imagination of the French Resistance, featuring a back-and-forth between countries and languages. Gary’s mix of languages includes not only the presence of usurpant German in French but also the dialogic heteroglossia of English, Polish, and Russian, as well as Hebrew and Yiddish, sometimes transliterated and at other times expressed in French (and also in English in the novel’s English-language translation, which was published before the French edition). Translated and untranslated dialogues in French, Polish, English, German, Russian, and Yiddish, as well as Hebrew prayer, show which languages can and cannot function within the same language of a democratic Europe. Gary first published excerpts of this novel in La France libre against the backdrop of many articles that celebrate affinities between Polish and French, as well as a shared history of nineteenth-century Romantic revolutions. The authors of these articles focus on links between France and Poland as an expression of European democracy, one that could pave the way for a united Europe in the postwar period. Gary represents French as the language of democracy that could encompass a wide range of languages—and therefore national identities—in one democratic European language. He includes a range of Jewish identities in the larger context of the Resistance that fought for European democracy.

A French Education

Gary grew up in a varied and unstable linguistic environment and a fluctuating multilingual context. Born Roman Kacew in Vilnius in 1914, he sought in the French language not only dreams of literary grandeur but also a medium of universalism. French represented both a prestige language and a concrete link to universalist ideals, including those of tolerance, which he would represent during the war in his literature through a mixing of languages within French. Gary’s family lived in circumstances in which the official languages shifted with the alternation of ruling powers. In 1914, the infant Gary and his mother left Vilnius and moved eastward, escaping the terrible suffering of the city during World War I. Although their exact whereabouts during that time are unknown, it is recorded that his father was mobilized.16 Later, fleeing

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the Bolshevik Revolution, the Kacew family returned to Vilnius.17 It was a city that changed hands many times between Russia, Germany, Lithuania, and Poland before it was incorporated into Poland in 1922. As David Bellos succinctly puts it: “Yiddish Vilne, Russian Vilna, German Wilna, Lithuanian Vilnius became Polish Wilno in 1922.”18 There, Gary’s father, Arieh-Leib, worked in the fur trade and was on the board of the family’s synagogue, Tohorat Hakodesh.19 While not Orthodox, his family belonged to the Jewish community. His birth certificate, written in Hebrew by the beth din of the rabbinate of Vilnius, indicates that he was circumcised according to Jewish tradition.20 As a Jew in the Russian Empire, he faced restrictions on his rights, including those that dictated where his family could live. His home was situated outside the Jewish quarter in Vilnius, in the Pale of Settlement where Jews were permitted to reside. Gary’s first language was Russian, and that was the language he used with his mother even in France.21 But he also learned Polish in Vilnius as well as French.22 He would have heard Yiddish in the streets and he presumably learned Hebrew, at least enough to know the prayers he included in his first published novel in French. But, in his autobiographical novel, La Promesse de l’aube (Promise at Dawn), when Gary discusses the years he spent in this city whose name and languages changed so frequently, he recalls his private tutor of French and his dreams of becoming a famous French writer.23 He jokes that he knew only two people who spoke French—and who spoke about France with the same mannerisms: de Gaulle and his mother.24 Literary French seemed to transcend his erratic language landscape. Gary’s mother dreamed he would one day be a French diplomat. In La Promesse de l’aube he reminisces about her plans and the neighbors’ reactions: “It goes without saying that the words francuski posłannik—French emissary—followed me for months wherever I went, and when the pastry cook, whose name was Michka, finally caught me tiptoeing out of his shop with a splendid piece of poppy-seed cake in my hand, all and sundry were called to witness that diplomatic immunity did not cover a certain well known part of my person.”25 Dreams of wealth and status in France were like that piece of poppy-seed cake, which he could grab on tippy-toes, though it stood almost out of his reach. Throughout his childhood years of poverty, constant acquisition of new languages, and tumultuous migrations, a stabilizing love of the

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French language symbolized hope for the future. In the French text of La Promesse de l’aube he embeds the Polish words, francuski posłannik, pointing to the dissonance between his Polish present and his French future. The term is an anachronism for an emissary, further linking the idea of France to a Romantic ideal. The incorporation of Polish into French is a sign of how these two languages would take on a vital interconnection for Gary. As the Kacews’ personal life became more and more tenuous, the image of France became more concrete. The marriage dissolved, and Gary and his mother, Mina, moved to Warsaw in 1926. A couple of years later Mina obtained visas for herself and her son to take the cure in the South of France. On the pretext of these visas, Gary and his mother moved to Nice in 1928, when he was fourteen. As Nancy Huston points out, Gary gave many of his protagonists the age fourteen—including Momo in La Vie devant soi (The Life Before Us), Ludo in Les Cerfs-volants (The Kites), Luc Martin in Le Grand Vestiaire (The Company of Men), and Janek in Éducation européenne—indicating the centrality of this year for his coming-of-age stories.26 Gary left Nice in 1933 to study law in Paris, where he first began to publish in French under the name Kacew. He may have crossed paths with his neighbor Benjamin Fondane, who, remarkably, lived on the very same tiny street, the rue Rollin, just off the place de la Contrescarpe.27 He lived only a thirty-minute walk from Montparnasse but in a world apart. He did not frequent the Montparnasse cafés; he certainly did not know Hemingway, who had lived around the corner, or James Joyce, who was still living on the nearby street, the rue du Cardinal Lemoine. He used to beg his downstairs neighbor, a Russian émigré student named Sacha Kardo Sissoeff, to introduce him to Joseph Kessel.28 This famous writer—who was born in Argentina to Lithuanian Jewish parents, and spent his early childhood in Russia before moving to France—used to eat at the restaurant in whose basement Sissoeff gave ping-pong lessons. Gary and Kessel would only meet in London during the war. Despite little hope of mixing with the stars of Parisian literary life, Gary began to write. The content and language of his early stories from his Parisian school days reveal that he tried to fit into the mainstream French press. In 1935, he published two short stories in the political and literary newspaper Gringoire: “L’Orage” (The storm) and “Une petite femme” (A little

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lady).29 From the founding of the newspaper in 1928, the editors situated themselves on the Right, and in the late 1930s the journal turned to the Far Right. During the war, it was overtly fascist. “Une petite femme” appeared in the same issue as the fascist and antisemitic writer Pierre Drieu La Rochelle’s story, “Le Mannequin.” Drieu La Rochelle had already published his Socialisme fasciste (Fascist socialism) in 1934. Irène Némirovsky published in Gringoire too, but she, unlike Gary, continued to do so even after the journal became openly antisemitic in the late 1930s. Gary’s early stories in Gringoire, set in the French colonies, are his first forays into situations of mixed languages. They are decidedly not heteroglossic in the way I have been using the term. He does not critique French colonization, but instead demonstrates the confrontation of different civilizations through language, with France and French as uncriticized dominators. In “L’Orage,” the French colonizers, who are in an unspecified location in Asia, speak to the silent natives in an infantilized French. The doctor’s wife gives orders to her servant, even if she does so with a bit of shame: “You. Understand,” or, “You stay work.”30 None of the colonized characters speak at all in “L’Orage.” “Une petite femme” recounts the death of a young officer’s wife when the French are attacked by the Degar people, after a woman is accused of poisoning the chief ’s wife. The protagonist tells his interpreter to speak to the chief of the Degar people: “You say big chief, me and him good friends. You. Say me bring him presents.”31 There is no sympathy for these colonized subjects, who end up killing the young woman. Gary’s narrative implies that their linguistic inferiority is a sign of their inferior civilization, which is characteristically responsible for a series of clannish battles that cause the death of an innocent woman. Unacknowledged is the violence inflicted on them by the French, both physically and linguistically. In these short stories, Gary accepts colonial French dominance in politics and language. His own coming to French could not have been more different; rather than being an enforced language, French represented freedom and rights for Gary. Yet he does not grant these gifts to his fictional characters in his first publications. Mastering French for him meant gaining access to a new life; he was not the one being mastered. In fact, he became a French citizen on July 5, 1935, a little over a month after the publication of the second story.32 The beginnings of his literary career, therefore, coincided with his

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gaining French citizenship. Yet this unquestioned linguistic expression of colonial power in his earliest publications is at odds with the republican ideals he would celebrate in heteroglossia during the war. This narrative of Gary’s upbringing and literary beginnings sounds like a humble émigré story from the 1920s, fascinating in its own way but lacking in the romance Gary cast around his life, especially in La Promesse de l’aube. Gary also implied that his father was Ivan Mosjoukine, the Russian silent film star. When not adhering to this story, Gary gave different versions of his father’s name in interviews and on administrative papers.33 He changed the date of his own birth depending on the situation. He claimed to be Polish, Russian, and Tartar.34 He maintained that his mother had him baptized, and he fabricated the story of his father’s death. Gary wrote that his father died of fear outside a gas chamber; however, since the Jews of Lithuania were mercilessly killed in mass shootings, this could not have happened.35 At other times he claimed his father was not Jewish. He is especially known for his famous hoax, the creation of the fictional author Emil Ajar, in what Christopher Miller has called an “intercultural, interethnic, and interclass imposture,” which made him the only writer to ever win two Prix Goncourt.36 This hoax was not just a matter of Gary’s hiding his identity (although the story is a wild one, with twists and turns and a cousin playing the role of Ajar, who then starts to take control of the false Ajar identity); Miller argues that it was “an ethical engagement with the question of immigration.”37 Gary’s biographers have tried to decipher the meaning of these myths and tricks. Two patterns emerge in this picture of Gary’s sense of himself in relation to his identification with Jewishness. On the one hand, Myriam Anissimov writes that his defining identity was his Judaism, not a pushand-pull between Polish and Russian identities: “Of course he was Russian, but not any more so than he was Polish. He was Jewish and spent his childhood two steps from the synagogue where his father would go to pray.”38 On the other hand, Nancy Huston, herself a Canadian Anglophone writer who adopted French, captures the slipperiness of his identities in Tombeau de Romain Gary (Romain Gary’s tomb), explaining that Gary purposely made it impossible to know his true identity.39 He was Jewish, but he was baptized a Catholic; he was Russian, Polish, and French. He was impossible to pin down: “From one end to the other of this existence you [Gary] lied

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inveterately, brazenly, superbly.”40 But it was around his experience of the Resistance that Roman Kacew would create the myths of Romain Gary. We can resolve the contradiction between Anissimov’s and Huston’s views on Gary by looking at his use of heteroglossic language in his novel of the Resistance as a key to his approach to Jewish identities within a spectrum of European identities and languages.

A European Education

The spectrum of languages is articulated in Éducation européenne, which Gary wrote while participating in the Resistance. Gary’s modest entry into the French military did not foreshadow his rise to the status of a successful pilot who would write one of the most famous literary works of the Resistance. In November 1938, Gary was called up for military service and he joined the air force in Salon-de-Provence. He was one of only two people who failed to be named officers, and he graduated at the lowest rank, a sergeant. Gary wrote to his former girlfriend, Christel Söderlund, hiding behind the fabricated excuse that he was being punished by one of his superiors, a jealous husband whose wife he had seduced.41 In fact, a friend had told him that the army hierarchy judged him to have been too recently naturalized, and his Jewishness was taken into account.42 Despite being told he was not French enough—which was a blow to his faith in French universalism, according to which there are no different kinds of citizens—Gary maintained his desire to fight heroically for France. At the end of his letter to Söderlund he writes that the one thing he most wishes for is to die in a just war, subscribing to the tradition of Polish Romantic imaginations of French republican heroism. Gary served, but did not die, in such a war alongside the French in the Battle of France. He could have followed the example of his paternal uncle, who had lived with him and his mother in Nice since 1933. Borukh Kacew also fought for a free Europe, but he did so by joining the Polish Army as soon as the war broke out.43 Gary, however, persisted in fighting as a French national, staying with the French Army even after its defeat. Gary’s faith in republicanism started in his earliest years in Poland and grew during the war, along with his veneration of de Gaulle. Refusing to stop fighting at the announcement of the armistice in June 1940, he left with three other sergeants for North Africa.44 He reached de Gaulle in London with

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the help of Polish soldiers who transported him to Gibraltar and finally to England on a ship that was evacuating the Polish Air Force.45 Gary’s Polish background was no longer the source of humiliation that it was in Salon-deProvence; instead, it helped him make it to England in order to continue to fight for France. Once there, he had a remarkable career in the Forces aériennes de la France libre (FAFL). From 1940 to 1942 he was based in Central Africa, Sudan, Egypt, and Syria before being stationed in England. In honor of his heroic fighting during the war, he was named a Compagnon de la Libération. Gary’s involvement can be framed by what historian Janine Ponty calls the “triangular relationship” between the French, the Polish, and the British.46 These three countries—the first two of which were, so to speak, exiled in the third—were linked in this way for the first time in their histories. This is one of the prisms through which to look at the complexities of the Polish position among the Allies. Ponty studies the dynamics of these countries as one system in which approaches to the war shifted in response to one another’s positions. This triangular relationship proved to be a novelty. Paris, not London, had been the famed destination for Polish political exiles of the Great Emigration during the nineteenth-century. The luminary of the Romantics in political exile in France, as well as the national poet of Poland and one of Romain Gary’s literary heroes, was Adam Mickiewicz. Following the Partitions of Poland in the eighteenth century by Austria, Prussia, and Russia, the French became key players in Polish history. During the Napoleonic Wars, the French drove the Russians out of Poland, though after Napoleon’s defeat, Russia took over most of Poland again. Later, after the November Uprising (1830–31), a failed insurrection against the Russian tsar, many participants in the rebellion fled to France. Mickiewicz came to Paris in 1832 at the start of the Great Emigration.47 Paris once again became the destination for Poles in exile after the Nazi invasion of 1939, and in the wake of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Nazis and the Soviets that resulted in the Fourth Partition of Poland. The elite of the Polish Army, led by Władysław Sikorski, established the Polish Government-in-Exile in Paris and then in Angers. When France fell just over a year later, the Polish saw their home in exile crumble. An officer of the Polish Army and a major figure in the Resistance, Thadée Paczkowski, stated: “When Paris fell, it was as if Warsaw was taken a second time.”48

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Following the Fall of France, the Polish Government-in-Exile escaped to London in June 1940. Gary’s own experience of joining de Gaulle mimicked the triangular relationship, as he reached London by traveling with Polish officers on their way there. When he was stationed in Hartford Bridge, he would have encountered Polish air units frequently.49 Articles in La France libre by Polish émigré writers focused on literary and linguistic connections between France and Poland in particular, and they were written against the background of political goals regarding the Allies and apprehensions about Soviet expansion. In his memoirs, editor Raymond Aron recalls the friendly relationship between the journal and Polish writers in exile, and how he published many articles by them that were often at the instigation of their authorities and with the knowledge of the Polish Government-in-Exile. Aron recalls their hope for the formation of a bloc of countries between Germany and the Soviet Union, but he dismisses it as a utopian project formed in a fictional world.50 But their political goals, coupled with their writings about culture, make for powerful texts in which Franco-Polish connections stand for a larger vision of European democracy. As of 1943, Britain and the United States had not protected Poland from Soviet expansion, and the Polish Government-in-Exile “had been comprehensively outmanoeuvred by the Big Three.”51 Nevertheless, on the pages of La France libre, the Franco-Polish alliance continued to be supported in articles that spelled out a connection between the two cultures through a shared literary history as well as an affinity between the French and Polish languages in a common European context. One of the most important consequences of this literary interaction was that those who published in the journal, including Gary, no longer used French as a dominant language but as a language within a system of European languages, one that represented the dialogue of these languages in the context of a multilingual resistance in London. In this atmosphere, the Resistance in London was a Bakhtinian Tower of Babel.

Exile, Romanticism, and Heteroglossia in La France libre

To understand the political arguments Gary makes through heteroglossia in Éducation européenne, one must first understand the politics of the Polish and French languages that were ubiquitous in the magazine that first published excerpts of Gary’s novel. There is a surprisingly large number of articles by

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Polish and French authors in exile dedicated to uniting Polish and French Resistance movements by recuperating the bonds of the countries’ republican revolutions in the Romantic age. These articles draw a parallel between nineteenth-century Paris—where French republican intellectuals lauded Poland’s November Uprising (1830–31) and provided a haven for Polish revolutionaries in exile—and wartime London, where France and Poland would unite again through a common political culture. Exile and nostalgia play an important role in these articles, but they do so with a political aim. I argue that the writers in exile in London describe, in articles written in French, the way Polish and French Romantic literatures are in a European dialogue with each other within the French language. In so doing, they not only maintain Poland’s place in the triangular relationship but they also argue for a federal postwar democratic Europe. Polish-French connections come to stand for a larger ideal of European unity among many countries. Articles in La France libre highlight Gary’s celebration of the histories of Romantic revolutions shared by Poland and France and the reason for celebrating them during the current war. In fact, after Éducation européenne was published, a reporter on the radio show Paris vous parle (Paris speaks to you) found in Gary’s novel support for a federal Europe.52 André Labarthe, who had been a civil servant before the war and was a member of de Gaulle’s entourage, founded the monthly journal La France libre in November 1940. Although the journal had been started with de Gaulle’s support, its editors quickly gained the reputation of being at odds with him, albeit never being in open opposition to his movement.53 At the height of its success toward the end of the war, La France libre enjoyed the largest circulation of any monthly journal published in England with seventy-six thousand subscribers.54 In his memoirs, Raymond Aron describes two major figures of the journal as “colorful and marginal to the point of weirdness.”55 One was Stanisław Szymończyk, who went by Staro, from Cieszyn (annexed to Poland in 1938), who had fought in the Austro-Hungarian Army during World War I before serving in the Polish Army. Jean Oberlé of Radio Londres on the BBC called him “an extraordinary person and a Polish giant.”56 Staro wrote his regular contributions in German and Aron translated them into French.57 Aron recalls another central figure of the journal, Martha JansenLecoutre, a Jewish immigrant from Warsaw to France.58 According to Aron,

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she influenced the choice of articles to be included as well as the editing process, and she was responsible for public relations. Aron also describes a third person, Moura Budberg, the elusive Estonian aristocrat and spy. The salon she held in London, as well as her contacts, made her a central figure at the journal.59 Along with Aron, she was instrumental in publishing Gary.60 These members of La France libre were Gary’s first readers and supporters. This international group found themselves émigrés among French men and women who had fled France for England. The issues of La France libre that deal with some twelve thousand French people’s sense of exile in Britain have been well documented.61 The historian H. R. Kedward locates a sense of exile, nostalgia, and a desire to return home in various articles, photographs of small French towns, and advertisements for products in La France libre. For example, the caption of an ad for Abdulla Cigarettes reads: “There will always be a France, and Abdulla will always be there.”62 Albert Cohen’s article, “Angleterre” (England), which appeared in the same issue as the Abdulla cigarette ad, deals with the pain of departing from France for England. Collections of works by members of the Free French—such as Jean-Pierre Giraudoux-Montaigne’s D’Exil: Quatre discours prononcés à la radio de Londres (From exile: Four speeches delivered on the London radio) and J. G. Weightman’s edited volume of short stories (including one by Kessel) entitled French Writing on British Soil—also point to French expressions of loyalty to their country from abroad. But Kedward does not mention that Albert Cohen was a naturalized Swiss citizen, born in Corfu, who had immigrated to France. He was not a Frenchman longing for home but an émigré writer who was at least twice displaced and who was reflecting on his second exile. In fact, a large number of articles by émigré writers, many of whom were from Poland, can be found in La France libre. Their articles on the links between France and Poland highlight the ways in which Gary portrays the affinities between these two countries in his novel. The Franco-Polish administrator of La France libre, Jansen-Lecoutre, may have played a role in selecting so many articles by Polish writers, including Jean Malaquais, Adam Ciołkosz, Władysław Folkierski, Zbigniew Grabowski, Maria Kuncewiczowa, Jan Lechoń (pseudonym of Leszek Serafinowicz, and spelled Jean Lechon in the journal, where most of these names were Gallicized), Stanisław Mikołajczyk, Z. Nowakowski,

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and Ksawery Pruszyński. Władysław Sikorski, the prime minister of the Polish Government-in-Exile, also contributed to the journal on numerous occasions. Non-Polish émigré authors included the Romanian prince Matila Costiesco Ghyka, the Czech writer František Langer, the Serbian Dr. M. Sekulic, British writers including Graham Greene and H. G. Wells, the Norwegians Nordahl Grieg and Per Thorstad, and many others. Joseph Kessel, now a good friend of Gary’s, published parts of his famous novel of the Resistance, L’Armée des ombres (Army of Shadows), in La France libre as well.63 Many of the Polish émigré writers for the journal were intellectuals and novelists who had come to Paris in 1939 to form their Governmentin-Exile. Unlike Gary, they had not come to France as youths planning to settle there and become French writers. Nevertheless, during the war they wrote not only about a sense of exile but also about the profound links between France and Poland through literature. Their articles use literature and language to promote a vision of a federal Europe in the postwar period that would be able to save Poland from the clutches of the Soviet Union. Like Gary himself, who related to France through the great works of Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas during his childhood, Polish émigrés in London wrote about their own feelings toward France in terms of literature and language.64 One such article was penned by Zygmunt Nowakowski, a novelist and the editor of the Polish counterpart of La France libre, Wiadomości Polskie (Polish news), which was started in Paris in 1939. Nowakowski lived in exile in Paris before he went to London. He begins his article on the Polish Resistance and its fight for freedom, “Conspiration d’un peuple” (Plot of a people, December 15, 1941): We others, the Polish, we find ourselves on the same side as the part of France that fights, but in spirit we still see the one and indivisible France. We

speak often of France. We miss her. We think of Paris, “the marvelous city,” which, in the Polish translation of The Misanthrope, rhymes with “woman.” It also rhymes with all that is beautiful, radiant, human. The word Paris is still

for us a sort of vox media. This word holds a thousand values that we could never count. This word also rhymes with “humanity.”65

The Polish fight for the same principles as France does, principles contained in words and their literary associations. He conceives of the word “Paris” as

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a vox media, meaning a word that can have a spectrum of meanings and registers assigned to it, and that can signify different ideas for different people. But here Nowakowski uses the term vox media to mean that one language can mediate the other or be a medium for the other. What might appear linguistically accidental or coincidental—a rhyme, for example—is assigned deep significance. The rhyme in a Polish translation of a classical French text somehow best expresses a profound human link between the countries in wartime.66 The rhyme in The Misanthrope is likely metaphorical, although the term cudowna stolica (marvelous capital) does rhyme with the word pięknolica (woman with a beautiful face).67 Words in the two languages take on the quality of rhyming and harmonizing with each other. Through sympathetic languages, then, the nations are allied. One of the most pronounced tropes of the Polish émigré writers is a revival of French and Polish Romanticism, and they link it to the current situation of Polish and French writing in exile in London. In Labarthe’s article, “L’Héroïsme polonais dans la littérature française” (Polish heroism in French literature, February 16, 1942), he explains the historic loyalty that French writers like Victor Hugo have felt toward Poland. Their loyalty is explained by an old distrust of Germany: “France searched for a counterweight in the east against the menace of the Germanic empire [. . .]. The cultural affinities justified and reinforced the considerations of balance or the links of alliance.”68 French Romantic poets celebrated the November Uprising’s demand for liberty, and, in turn, Polish Romantic intellectuals and writers thrived in exile in France. Some of these writers also took action through their poetry, in which they protested the partitioning of Poland and the partial Russian occupation. This Romantic poetry itself was not, Labarthe says, “a simple diversion, a form of distraction and escape.”69 Instead, Labarthe describes it as “all at once dream and action.”70 He calls it a dream because it “transfigured” that “absent country,” becoming a form of nostalgia for a lost home.71 It was action as well, for the Polish authors were writing against Russian domination, under which the Polish people were not allowed to speak, learn, sing, or pray in their own language. Here the connection between French and Polish is the defense or promotion of the Polish language in French poetry. Labarthe’s most moving example of French and Polish union through literature is taken from the historian Jules Michelet’s class of May 11, 1843, at

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the Collège de France. This class was the third lecture of Michelet’s course on the Jesuits, featuring an anti-Jesuit stance that became polemical. As Michelet taught, he was flanked by Adam Mickiewicz and the historian Edgar Quinet. Although Labarthe does not mention it, this session was marked by interruptions from the students who opposed Michelet’s anti-Jesuit lectures. Colleagues, French and foreign, defended him by sitting with him. That is how Michelet came to be seated between Mickiewicz and Quinet. Labarthe quotes Michelet, who called that May 11 one of the most beautiful days of his life. In the notes accompanying his lectures (not reproduced in La France libre), Michelet remarks that Quinet also supported Michelet by speaking out in his own class to reestablish “the professor’s right to liberty.”72 These three giants of the nineteenth century—Michelet, Quinet, and Mickiewicz—came together at one of the most prestigious institutions in France in the spirit of the freedom of learning and teaching. This cross-national collaboration for liberty in a French institution was expressed as an interlingual connection. Labarthe quotes Michelet as going even further when describing Mickiewicz’s teaching on Slavic cultures at the Collège de France that year: “This class, Eastern [oriental] by its language and its characters, was intimately linked to ours, with the inspiration of two men of the West [l’Occident]; it was the call to heroism [. . .]. The external diversity only made the interior unanimity stand out more.”73 Although Michelet maintains the East-West binary, there is a profound link between the two; France is a revelation for Mickiewicz in the darkness of northern Lithuania. Michelet calls the class “Eastern” in language, although it was given in French and Mickiewicz would doubtless have been fluent in French, since it was a primary language in his milieu in Poland. For Michelet, the Eastern European topic seems to meld into the French language, yet it retains its own register. The students in Michelet’s May 11, 1843, class were international too; they included Italians, Hungarians, and Germans among their ranks. Standing among those nationalities, writes Michelet, “I felt one soul in my chest: that of Europe.”74 Precisely because of the national divisions and languages there is a Europe. Russian is clearly left out. Labarthe characterizes the spirit of the audience in attendance: Not only moral and heroic, it was also European.”75 Labarthe immediately follows the description of this class with a rupture, a short sentence that reads: “1842–1942.” He then adds, “A

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century passed,” with all illusions lost among the masses of refugees who are no longer in Paris but in London. Nonetheless, their will has not been lost and they must continue to fight together. A “communion in pain” has consecrated Franco-Polish friendship once again.76 The choice of the word communion seems to be particularly appropriate, for it can refer not only to an almost sanctified friendship but also to a connection made through conversation and communication. The novelist Maria Kuncewiczowa further develops the theme of Polish and French echoing within each other in her article, “Une ‘matinée perdue’” (A “lost matinee,” October 20, 1943).77 Kuncewiczowa describes an emotional matinee organized by the Comédie-Française in November 1939 that was devoted to Polish culture. The Parisian theater staged a number of performances, preceded by the Polish national anthem. These included a reading of Ernest Renan’s text about Mickiewicz’s funeral in Paris in 1855; a recital of Romantic poetry followed by Chopin’s “Raindrop Prelude”; a performance, in part, of Stanisław Wyspiański’s depiction of the November Uprising in his Romantic play Noc listopadowa, or La Nuit de novembre (November Night, 1904), which perhaps references Les Nuits (Nights, 1835–1837) of Romantic poet Alfred de Musset.78 Finally, there was a dramatic reading of Journal d’un aviateur polonais (Diary of a Polish aviator), which recounts the invasion of Poland that September. In addition to drawing on the parallel between the political exiles of the Romantic period and the recent fall of Poland, Kuncewiczowa also links the two countries through language. She describes Mickiewicz’s French translator, Paul Cazin, who read the Renan text: “With his Latin subtlety, he has known for a long time, as a matter of fact, how to penetrate all the secrets of the Polish language [. . .]. He served as an intermediary between the immaterial Poland and this crowd of very much alive Parisians.”79 French as a Romance language can penetrate the secrets of the Slavic Polish. Like Labarthe, Kuncewiczowa maintains the separation between East and West but at the same time shows that they penetrate each other through language. She similarly describes Chopin’s music, which translates the Polish natural landscape, imbued with the revolutions of the Romantic period, into the French landscape: “It is in the forests and fields of Mazovia that the son of Mademoiselle Krzyźanowska and Nicolas Chopin had heard these cries with his French ear, and, in his Polish heart, had

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transformed them into music. Then, for over one hundred years, the anguish of a Polish November had penetrated the woods of Fontainebleau, the pastures of Anjou, and the gardens of the Côte d’Azur.”80 Chopin translates the cries of Mazovia, the site of nineteenth-century rebellions against Russia, into music impregnated with Romantic revolution. This same music of revolution carries the anguished cries of the Polish fighters through the forest of Fontainebleau, just as Cazin penetrates the language of Mickiewicz. The two languages can access each other because of a shared history. In his article “La Littérature de l’émigration polonaise” (Literature of the Polish emigration, April 17, 1942), the political writer Zbigniew Grabowski focuses on the sympathies between the French and Polish languages.81 He writes that it is no coincidence that Polish political exiles went to Paris in 1831—and again in 1939, before going to England—and that “the most spirited development of our literature is linked to the memory of emigration.”82 Grabowski alludes to these same literary and linguistic links in his political essay (not published in La France libre) Creative Peace: Integration of Europe a Necessity, in which he argues for a bloc of states in Central Europe and Eastern Europe while expressing strong apprehensions about the Soviet Union. For Grabowski, “a system of European federations is essential for the stability of peace.”83 Writing in London in 1943, Grabowski declares: I consider myself a European, and I am proud of a citizenship for which another Nansen will one day perhaps find some legal status. . . . I frankly admit

that it would have been impossible for me to taste freedom in my own coun-

try, if I knew that France was no longer an abode of culture, that Denmark, Holland, Sweden, Switzerland and Norway, those splendid laboratories of

democracy, were in bondage and that those peoples of the Balkans were unable to regain their independence.84

The culture of France, which in these articles in La France libre is spoken of in terms of its language and literature, is as central to a peaceful Europe as democracy itself. Culture and politics go hand in hand, displaying a particular vision of different nations with their own languages and political traditions. The discussions of contemporary Polish émigré writing in La France libre are essential to understanding Gary’s use of language in his novel of the Resistance. In another article in La France libre, the poet and literary

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critic turned diplomat Jan Lechoń surveys Polish émigré authors writing in French and in English. In “La Littérature polonaise et notre temps” (Polish literature and our times, July 15, 1942), Lechoń explains that Polish literature is representative of its national ideology. Writers are thus central to Polish national politics. He analyzes the legacy of Polish Romantic writers for the contemporary moment. Mickiewicz, notably, is cast as poet, a grand orator of the Collège de France, and a symbol of political liberty. Lechoń draws a direct line from the Romantic writers to Joseph Conrad and his depiction of honor and loyalty to one’s dreams. In assessing Conrad’s writing, Lechoń points to the multiple registers of European languages that can be held in one language. Even though Conrad writes in English, his characters “still behave in Polish.”85 They are English characters speaking in English about English affairs, according to Lechoń, and yet they behave “in Polish,” depicting the sentimental qualities that explain why Romantic heroes fight for Poland. While Lechoń emphasizes how Polish breaks through the English, one can also see that the relation between English and Polish goes in the other direction: English can contain Polish—if not the language itself, then Polish behavior and its revolutionary spirit. The divide between languages is broken down here too, with the fusion of languages reflecting a united ideal of democracy in Europe. Gary’s heteroglossic interlacing of languages within French in Éducation européenne responds to, and is of a piece with, the numerous articles that link Poland, France, and England through literature and language. The triangular relationship in La France libre fueled his approach to language. He also embeds the triangular relationship in the text through linguistic and typographic innovations. While Gary never took an official stance, the various ways he employs heteroglossia in the novel point to the power dynamics in European resistance movements and the postwar alliance of democracies. The story that his manuscript traveled to his Parisian editors in the diplomatic pouch only underscores its political relevance. As David Bellos points out, Gary’s representations of de Gaulle in essays and in fiction “come close to the clichés of Polish valour—a romantic and unrealisable sense of honour in the service of national grandeur.”86 Bellos argues that Gary’s “allegiance to de Gaulle was personal, moral and historical.”87 De Gaulle’s fight seems to reflect the “romantic appeal” of the French and Polish Romantic

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texts he read.88 Gary takes up the Romantic theme that was so celebrated in La France libre, but he does so in ways that were not always in line with de Gaulle’s political position.

Heteroglossia in the Novel

Éducation européenne tells the story of a Polish resistance brigade encamped in a forest outside Vilnius during the Battle of Stalingrad. Gary first composed the novel in French at night between missions in 1943, while he was stationed in Hartford Bridge. He published excerpts in La France libre in 1944, toward the end of and soon after the Occupation.89 Éducation européenne was actually published in 1944 in an English translation by Viola Gerard Garvin for the Cresset Press before it came out in French. In 1945, with Raymond Aron’s support, the French publishing house Calmann-Lévy printed the novel in French based on the manuscript that had been sent from London to Paris in the diplomatic pouch.90 The 1956 Gallimard edition is the definitive one, although Gary rewrote the novel again in English in 1960 under the title Nothing Important Ever Dies and Table 1

Editions of Éducation européenne discussed in this chapter T it l e

P ubl ic at ion Dat e

P ubl i sher

“Le Continent englouti” (The continent engulfed, excerpt corresponding to “Les Bourgeois de Paris” section of the novel)

July 1944

La France libre 8, no. 45: 204–9

Forest of Anger, translated by Viola Gerard Garvin

1944

Cresset Press

Éducation européenne

1945

Calmann-Lévy

Éducation européenne

1956

Gallimard

Nothing Important Ever Dies, written in English by Romain Gary

1960

Cresset Press

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then retranslated it into French in 1961. I will focus on the 1944 and 1945 editions, although I will reference the others as well when there are significant differences.91 David Bellos characterizes the revisions made between 1944 and 1945 as a de-Polonization and a Europeanization of the novel. Gary changed many of the initial references to Poland to allusions to Europe.92 For example, the liberation of Vilnius becomes the liberation of Europe. In addition, in one of the novel’s allegories for the war, “Simple conte des collines” (“Plain Tale from the Hills”), the “hills of Poland” in the 1944 Cresset Press edition are changed to the “five hills of Europe” in the French version.93 Most notably, Gary replaced the Polish national anthem, “Mazurek Dąbrowskiego,” in the English edition with “La Marseillaise” in the French editions. Bellos argues that Gary made these changes so that the text would be comprehensible for its audience in each country, deleting some references to Poland in order to focus on the French victory and on French identity for French readers. Ralph Schoolcraft follows the additions of references and allusions to de Gaulle made to the 1956 Gallimard edition—namely, the character Nadejda, the elusive, inspirational Resistance leader who encourages listeners over the radio waves but who turns out to be a fiction. Schoolcraft skillfully argues that the symbol of de Gaulle was “grafted onto the novel retrospectively for its republication in 1956.”94 While it is true that Gary deleted many references to Poland from the original 1944 version, he does not efface Poland. It is not an either-or matter. On the contrary, however much Gary reduces the references to Poland, the French versions of the novel are still about the Polish Resistance and not the French Resistance. Gary also keeps many Polish words in the text. For example, a single page includes the words pan (Mr.), szynk (bar), and czub (spit curl, strand of hair).95 Moreover, the Polish setting does not contradict Gary’s European perspective. Gary’s use of multiple languages within the novel and his typographical representation of each of them reveal a political subtext about the coexistence of multiple languages in Europe. I argue that he writes a mix of languages in which no single language dominates another. Nevertheless, there are also moments that diverge from this coalescence of languages to show the violence of war in linguistic form. The particular use of language reflects the political condition of the French-Polish-British

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triangle. The interlingualism of French, Polish, and English in the novel demonstrates the profound link between all three languages and, through language, shows the Resistance to be a transnational phenomenon that celebrates European democracy on the whole. As opposed to his interwar writings, in which he seems to accept the dominance of French in the colonies, in these wartime writings Gary began to compose a heteroglossic and diverse European story in French. The majority of Gary’s heteroglossic moments are to be found in the fictional writings of one of his characters. At the beginning of Éducation européenne, a leader of the Polish Resistance leaves his son Janek to hide in the forest. Janek joins a Resistance brigade and befriends Adam Dobranski, a young writer.96 At three moments in the novel, Dobranski reads to the group his short stories, which are reproduced in the text. His collected short stories, like Gary’s book, are called Éducation européenne. Gary frames the main narrative text around internal narratives of writing the Resistance. The proliferation of writings and the variety of languages within the same novel show registers of different languages like Polish and English within the French. The first story within the novel, “Plain Tale from the Hills,” describes echoes in the mountains that are allegories for European countries; the second, “The Bourgeois of Paris,” depicts a Resistance network in a Parisian apartment building; and finally, “The Good Snow” and “The Outskirts of Stalingrad” each describe hallucinatory scenes of German patrols in Stalingrad. In “Plain Tale from the Hills” multiple languages are shown to echo in one another or to resist an echo, demonstrating which languages can and cannot exist within French as a linguistic representation of democracy. In the 1945 Calmann-Lévy edition, “the five hills of Europe”—which stand for Germany, France, England, Poland, and the voice of the European people— speak with each other in the “language of the hills.”97 A few trees chime in, too, but the “language of the trees” is the same as that of the hills. “Milles voix” (A thousand voices), or Germany, start shouting that Russia, England, and all of their enemies will fall, and they proclaim themselves the voice of Europe. The poor character of the echo laments that it is forced to repeat Heil Hitler all day long: “This is not a life for a European echo.”98 In the 1944 English edition, even if the hills are those of Poland, a German person is still

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present. One of the younger hills leaves the conversation to begin his lessons of “les langues vivantes” (modern languages), that is, English and Polish in the 1944 edition, and English and French in the 1945 edition. In this lesson, in both the 1944 and 1945 editions, the younger hill practices aloud, in English, Winston Churchill’s famous speech that he delivered in the House of Commons on June 4, 1940.99 The echo then breaks into the Polish national anthem in the English edition, and into “La Marseillaise” in the French edition.100 The character called “European echo” reverberates the British speech into these national anthems, not as if it were in a different language but as an echo of the same language and words. In the 1945 CalmannLévy French edition we read: “We shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills . . .” “In the hills!” blew the hills piously. “We shall never surrender.”

There was a brief silence. Then the echo let out a sob—only a European echo learned to sob this way—and it sang the great song: Allons enfants de la patrie

Le jour de gloire est arrivé. Contre nous de la tyrannie

L’étendard sanglant est levé . . .101

The Polish national anthem appears instead of the French national anthem in the 1944 edition. But in both versions of this story within a story, Polish and English are reproduced in the original. English (written in the text in English, not in translation into French) is echoed in French. Polish and French exist within English here, and vice versa. The echo is not simply a repetition but rather a transformation of an English speech into the Polish or French national anthems. The languages of Europe are entwined, forming one European language and thus a common bond—a system of multiple national languages together in one language. But this language excludes Germany; German is the only language that is written out in French rather than in its original. It cannot echo within these European languages, revealing the limits of European heteroglossia as a democratic, dialogic language. In “The Bourgeois of Paris,” Gary again shows which language cannot be represented in French as the frame of European languages: it cannot include

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the register of the fascist language of the occupiers. This story about a building in Nazi-occupied Paris first appeared in La France libre as “Le Continent englouti” (The continent engulfed).102 The building’s inhabitants appear to accept and admire the Nazi official, Mr. Karl, who now occupies one of the apartments. They seem indifferent to the plight of a Jewish tenant, Mr. Levy, whom the Nazis have just evicted. But the narrator slowly reveals that behind the calm exterior of the building the inhabitants have formed a clandestine press operation in which almost everyone is involved. The same man who greets Mr. Karl every day with comments about “our noble and generous ally across the Rhine” hides the press that prints the clandestine newspaper Libération, along with a basketful of printed issues.103 Why does Gary set Dobranski’s story in Paris and not in Poland? In what language is the reader supposed to think Dobranski writes? Just as Gary was writing about resistance in Vilnius, where he himself was not fighting, the fictional writer Dobranski creates a realistic, albeit idealistic, image of Parisian resistance without ever having visited Paris and without any concrete information about the French Resistance. The novel collapses the distance between Poland and France by eliminating the difference between their national languages. Gary wrote his novel in French, although the reader is meant to imagine the Polish brigade speaking in Polish. Dobranski’s stories are in turn meant to be written in Polish but for an audience (namely, the fictional brigade) who would imagine the dialogues in Paris taking place in French. There is a confusing system here in which no author is actually writing in the language that his characters are meant to be speaking. French and Polish function as one seamless language; there is no clear distinction between source and target languages. The text is not bilingual but heteroglossic, in that Polish is expressed in French. In this story, Gary goes beyond echoes, showing multiple languages that exist within the same language. The fictional author, writing with Gary’s pen, builds a bridge between France and Poland through language just as the authors of La France libre do. The Allies represent the true Europe, and French implicitly contains and represents the other countries in the European Resistance. Gary expresses a link between France and Poland in particular through his adopted French language, which encompasses his Polish identity rather than rejecting it.

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In the French versions of this short story, German is again excluded from the registers of French, for the conversations in German are written out in German, outside the dialogic relationship between Polish and French that Gary creates. In all the French editions, we are not allowed to imagine German as nested within the French. When Mr. Karl speaks with other German officials who come to search the building, their dialogue takes place in German, and it is printed in italics. The Nazi soldiers, not knowing that Mr. Karl is their superior, knock on his door, and he answers: “‘Que diable me voulezvous?’ hurle-t-il en allemand. ‘Das ist aber unerhört, unerhört! Glauben Sie aber, dass ich einen englischen Spion unter meinem Bett verstecke?’” (“What the devil do you want?” he shouts in German. “This is outrageous, outrageous! Do you really think I am hiding an English spy under my bed?”).104 In the 1945 Calmann-Lévy edition, the German sentences are translated into French in footnotes. In the original version in La France libre, the German is italicized but not translated. The last line of the story—Mr. Karl’s musings that “in fifty years, the sons will forget that the fathers spoke French”—points to the impossible liaison between French and German.105 By setting the German apart linguistically and typographically, Gary rejects heteroglossia here. German is not part of the language system in which he and his character write. A language of conquest, German represents precisely the discourse that threatens to usurp the language of democratic Europe. Garvin’s translation stands in contrast to this reading of the story. The English translation does not reproduce the German at all and so the linguistic exclusion of Germany is not apparent. Gary wrote about Poland and Europe in the novel precisely at the moment Poland was struggling to maintain its relevance to British decisions about the Eastern Front. He fights for this same goal in his novel. Bellos writes that in London Gary’s multiple identities all worked in unison for the first time because the Allies could embrace all of them: “All of a sudden he had no need to put his allegiance to France before his Russian roots, his Polish education or his Jewish background, because his multiple identities brought together almost the entire alliance against the Axis powers.”106 But it was not just that all of his identities were accepted; it is even more striking that he translated the context of the Resistance in London to a dialogic view of language in Éducation européenne. Instead of writing languages as a source of miscommunication and dominance—as he did in his interwar short

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stories in which infantilized language is imposed on the colonized—Gary depicts a common European identity by demonstrating different European languages that echo within each other.

Jewish Languages in the Novel

Gary evokes two more languages in Éducation européenne: Yiddish, which is spoken by characters in the novel, and Hebrew as a language of prayer, as opposed to Modern Hebrew. Hebrew in the novel is the language of worship spoken with a Polish Jewish accent as part of the everyday life of Yiddishand Polish-speaking Jews. These two languages fall outside the cultural and linguistic system so prominent in the excerpts from the novel that appeared in La France libre. Their presence in Gary’s novel only highlights their absence from the political discussions in the journal. Through his use of Yiddish and Hebrew, Gary both depicts this absence and corrects it. On the one hand, he portrays Jewish characters who are sidelined and incapable of joining the fight; on the other hand, he also creates Jewish characters who are active in the Resistance as Jews. He likewise depicts moments in which Jewish languages are included in the European language of democracy and moments in which they seem to exist outside European language. In so doing, Gary demonstrates a heterogenous Jewish experience of the war, one that does not reduce all Jewish characters to one point of view, all the while including Jewish people in his portrayal of European Resistance. In all editions of the novel Gary depicts an active Jewish member of the Polish Resistance, the Chassidic butcher Yankel Cukier from Święciany (Gary’s mother’s hometown, now Švenčionys), who fights in the Polish brigade. This section of the book is not part of the excerpt that appeared in La France libre. Along with other Jews hiding in the forest, on Fridays he risks taking his prayer book and tallis (prayer shawl) to the makeshift synagogue in the old gunpowder magazine on the outskirts of Vilnius. Gary states that the Polish brigade regards his behavior “with respect” and “with goodwill.”107 He inscribes these gestures of kindliness first when Yankel is introduced at the beginning of the text and once again in the scene where he goes to the synagogue. Yankel’s character is in fact defined by these outings. In the scene at the synagogue, the pious men in attendance alternate between singing a line of prayer in Hebrew and yelling at each other about who is outside keeping

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guard, switching between languages. Gary represents Kabbalat Shabbat and Maariv, the Friday evening services, in his own transliteration of the Hebrew. The services seem to be based on his childhood memories rather than on an accurate transcription of the prayers. He includes, among other parts of the service, Lekhu Neran’nah (Psalm 95) and the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4), with some sections out of order: “Lchou nraouno ladonaïnorïo itsour echeïnou! ” sobbed Sioma. “Chma izraël adonaï . . . Who, who stayed outside to keep watch?”

“Cymès,” says a believer quickly, his eyes fixed on the Book, beating his chest. “Cymès stayed . . . Chma izraël adonaïeloheïnou adonaïecho!”

“Boruch, chein, kweit, malchuze, loeilem, boet, . . .” chanted piously the voice of Cymès. “I’m here, rebbe. I want to pray like everyone else!”

“Arboïm chono okout bdoïr vooïmar! ” chanted the cantor, while rocking back and forth. “So who, who stayed outside to keep watch?”

“Arboïm chono okout bdoïr vooïmar! ” lamented Cymès too, without incriminating himself. [. . .] “Baruch chein kweit malchuse loeilem boet!” the cantor quickly chanted. “When we’re all massacred by a patrol, I’ll be laughing!” “Adonaïechot!”108

The group continues to argue for the remainder of the prayer, recited in what is perhaps the manner of Hebrew pronunciation that Gary remembers from his childhood in Vilnius. The different editions of the novel each present the coexistence of Hebrew with French or English in this scene at the makeshift synagogue in different ways. These typographical mannerisms, whether or not they were dictated by the editor, the translator, or by Gary himself, have an effect on whether or not we read Hebrew as embraced within the European language. In the 1945 Calmann-Lévy French edition quoted above, the Hebrew is italicized and there is no translation in a footnote of the sort that we sometimes find for other languages in this edition. In the 1944 Cresset Press edition, the

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Hebrew is not italicized, and it flows into the English.109 One might read the English translation as using Hebrew as one of the European languages, much like in the “Plain Tale from the Hills.” But in the French version, the Hebrew is italicized and othered from the French. Hebrew now seems to hover on the borders of European language. It also hovers in Gary’s memory or area of knowledge, for it is not an accurate prayer but instead the echoes of Kabbalat Shabbat. It is Yiddish that seems to enter French in this scene. Anny Dayan Rosenman reads the scene of prayer as a back-and-forth in which the characters speak in Yiddish and pray in Hebrew.110 There is no written indication in the novel that the characters are meant to be speaking Yiddish, but hers is a plausible conclusion to draw. The constant shifting between sacred and profane languages, the registers of prayer and of quarrel, heighten the comedy of the scene. But these switches also indicate that the Yiddish language can be assimilated into the French, just as the Polish language of the other resisters can be. If the Jewish characters are speaking in Yiddish, then Yankel’s speech to the Polish brigade and to his Jewish peers in the novel flows seamlessly between Polish and Yiddish as these are represented in the French, or in the English in the translated edition. For Dayan Rosenman, Gary’s use of Yiddish here and elsewhere in his early novels “shapes and traverses the French language,” functioning as a language of memory that marks a lost world and culture.111 However, Gary’s use of Yiddish can be read in quite a different way. It is very much a living language present through heteroglossia in the French and incorporated into the European Resistance. In a 1970 interview, Gary said that he himself and his texts have a sensibility that is “one hundred percent Jewish,” in that he is linked to the Jewish people not by blood but rather by his deep ties to Yiddish culture, as well as “a typically Jewish humor” and “the Slavic-Yiddish humor of Babel, Gogol, and Sholem Aleichem, and the sensibilities that I indisputably inherited from my mother.”112 But a secular scene of Jewish dialogue would uphold Dayan Rosenman’s understanding of Yiddish as part of a dying world; Gary shows it literally in the throes of death. In contrast to Yankel, the wunderkind and musical genius Moniek Stern cannot be integrated into the Resistance. When we first encounter him, Moniek is mocked, beaten, called the derogatory term youpin, and made to sing vulgar songs by black marketeers. The protagonist

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Janek meets the child on a dangerous mission to Vilnius and brings him back to the forest. When Moniek plays the violin, “his face [is] no longer ugly, his clumsy body no longer ridiculous.”113 But he does not survive the winter; the narrator explains that his “race” was too removed from nature, from the land, and the brutal cold of the Polish forest kills him.114 Gary includes here racial stereotypes about Jews, especially their divorce from the land. Now Jewish characters stand just outside the Resistance. As Moniek dies, “He hallucinated and babbled incoherently in Yiddish strange words that only Yankel managed to understand.”115 Yankel Cukier is the only person who understands these words that he must translate for the other resisters—Moniek is calling for his parents. At his demise he speaks a Yiddish that is incomprehensible to the Polish fighters and is not even represented in the novel. Here a delirious Yiddish language only further isolates the dying child. This misunderstood character could also be a reference to the famous ending of Joseph Conrad’s “Amy Foster,” in which a Polish immigrant called Yanko Goorall dies asking for water. Since no one can understand his Polish he dies alone. Yanko’s Polish speech is represented in English in Conrad’s story, unlike Moniek’s Yiddish. If this is such a reference, then Moniek’s death alludes to and perhaps incorporates him into a famous moment in Polish émigré literature.116 In the Dobranski story within a story already discussed, which appeared in La France libre, “The Bourgeois of Paris,” the sole Jewish inhabitant of the Parisian building is Mr. Levy, but he is not part of the resistance activities taking place. Everyone except for Mr. Karl and Mr. Levy knows about the clandestine press operation, and so he does not realize that his neighbors stand by his side. As Mr. Levy prepares to leave, he tries to say goodbye to his neighbors, but they ignore him because they are working to remove the hidden copies of Libération from the building before the Nazi officers find them. We learn that Mr. Levy’s plans for departure are actually his plans for a desolate suicide. Thinking he has been entirely abandoned by those he trusted, Mr. Levy dies in terrible solitude. When the concierge finally goes to speak to Mr. Levy, she finds his body and, on his table, his identity card, which was likely stamped juif—as if it were an explanation for his departure. Mr. Levy is at the heart of a terrible misunderstanding, doubly alone both among his neighbors and in the racist world order of the Nazis.

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In her deeply researched study of the press and propaganda of the highly differing movements of the French Resistance, both in France and abroad, Renée Poznanski reads Gary’s character Mr. Levy as an allegory for the French Resistance’s attitude toward Jews. The landlady empathizes with Mr. Levy, but he is not at the center of her concerns. He is thus quite alone, even in a building full of resisters.117 Poznanski demonstrates that in the Resistance there remained a “strange silence” or “discretion” regarding the plight of European Jews for reasons as varied as the movements of the Resistance themselves—from the strategy to distribute propaganda that would most likely sway French public opinion (which, they thought, would not be emphasizing Jewish persecution), to the tactic that the focus must be on victory and saving France, which would result in the end of persecution, to concerns about a “Jewish Problem” or anti-Jewish sentiment in France.118 The Polish Government-in-Exile also had to navigate antisemitic sentiments at home, the concerns of Jewish organizations, and its position with the Allies in its declarations about anti-Jewish persecution.119 Even the Jewish Resistance press in France avoided writing about Jewish persecution and the experience of Jews as Jews. In none of de Gaulle’s speeches did he ever address French Jews. Poznanski demonstrates that in French propaganda from London “considerations of political utility” always took precedence.120 Referring to La France libre in particular, Poznanski characterizes the discretion and restraint of the editor Raymond Aron, who was himself Jewish, in his articles on Vichy.121 While editorials on life under Vichy evoke laws affecting the Jews, the laws are never the main topic. For example, in the column “Dans Paris occupé” (In occupied Paris, January 15, 1942), references to the firing of Jewish workers do appear, but they are buried in the middle of a paragraph in the middle of the article.122 This was standard practice for reports on life in occupied France in general. In fact, the only news item that openly describes the murder of the Jews appears in an article from 1943 by a Polish contributor: Stanisław Mikołajczyk, the prime minister of the Polish Government-in-Exile after Sikorski’s death.123 Yet this information is also buried deep in the article. The only articles in La France libre in which Jewish persecution is the main topic are as follows: Albert Cohen’s “Chant de Mort” (Death song), in which he evokes Jewish persecution in the war while writing about his mother’s death; Jean Oberlé’s obituary of

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Max Jacob, which begins “Max Jacob died in the concentration camp of Drancy. They had placed him there because he was Jewish”; and Gary’s text, “Les Bourgeois de Paris.”124 However, the fact that Gary’s story is one of just a few articles that engage with Jewish persecution is significant. Although Gary’s story and Mr. Levy’s suicide can be read as metaphors for the “discretion” and subsequent marginalization of Jewish persecution, they also seem to correct a silence in the journal, for Gary, after all, is one of the few who brought Jewishness into the pages of La France libre. The character Yankel resists as a Jew and Moniek dies as a Jew. It is understood that they are both alone because their families have been killed, even if their murders are not depicted in the novel. Likewise, there are moments when Yiddish and Hebrew seem to function within French heteroglossia, but there are other moments when they are separate, isolating the language of Jewish characters. Gary seems to be showing the sidelining of the Jews while also arguing for their presence in the Resistance and in the culture of European democracy.

The Discretions of Romanticism

To write about Jewishness at La France libre in the context of these FrancoPolish connections is to write about a nonappearance, but perhaps not about a total absence. Just as La France libre gives us the political context to understand Gary’s use of languages in the novel, Gary’s text reveals something hidden in La France libre. He draws out an important aspect of Polish Romanticism that did embrace the Jews. His novel is not only a metaphor for Jewish marginalization that represents the approach of the editors of La France libre. Rather, Gary also invokes the philosemitic aspects of the Franco-Polish connections through a history of Romanticism and revolution so often present in the pages of La France libre. Most notably, his novel alludes to Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz, czyli Ostatni zajazd na Litwie (Pan Tadeusz, or the Last Foray into Lithuania, 1834), a foundational epic poem of the Great Emigration, in which a patriotic Jewish innkeeper is an important character who has become a symbolic figure in literary history. Furthermore, this positive link between Jewishness and Romantic revolution goes in direct opposition to the Far Right in France, which decried Romanticism and revolution as Jewish and Protestant foreign imports.

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The references to Mickiewicz that so often appear in La France libre’s articles on Franco-Polish Romanticism and that celebrate communion between French and Polish cultures and languages would evoke some aspects of the memory of Mickiewicz’s positive writings about the Jews—namely, the parallels he drew between the Jewish diaspora and Polish exile. Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz takes place in 1811 and 1812 during the Russian Partition, at a time when Lithuania was divided between the Russian, Austrian, and Prussian Empires. Mickiewicz recounts the love story of Zosia and Tadeusz Soplica, the children of two opposing noble families. This tale, filled with nostalgic descriptions of everyday life in Poland at the beginning of the nineteenth century, is framed by a revolt against the Russian garrison. Gary explicitly evokes this memory in his novel. In Gary’s story of resistance, now against the Nazis, he gives many of his characters the same names as those in Mickiewicz’s classic epic. Gary’s Zosia, the kind but sickly young woman in the Polish brigade and the only important female character, has the same name as the modest young woman whose wedding ends Mickiewicz’s text. The writer of the stories within the story of Éducation européenne, Adam Dobranski, has Mickiewicz’s first name. But most notable is Gary’s character Yankel Cukier, who shares the first name with Mickiewicz’s Jewish innkeeper.125 Since Mickiewicz was one of Gary’s literary heroes, this hardly seems coincidental. Harold Segel has argued that Mickiewicz’s beloved, honest, and deeply patriotic Yankel (or Jankiel in the original Polish) “demonstrate[s] the compatibility of Jewishness and Polish patriotism.”126 One of the final scenes of the epic poem is Yankel’s moving performance of the “Polonaise of May the Third” at Zosia’s wedding, which takes place just before Napoleon’s Russian campaign. After performing his rendition, Yankel is described as “the honest Jew / He loved our country like a patriot true.”127 He tells the illustrious general Jan Henryk Dąbrowski, who fought against the Russians for Polish independence in the 1790s and distinguished himself in Napoleon’s armies: “‘Our Lithuania has waited long for you,’ / He said, ‘As Jews for their Messiah do.’”128 The Polish have waited for this hero to unite the country in its struggle for independence just as the Jews wait for their homeland. Magdalena Opalski points out the influence of Mickiewicz’s Yankel thirty years after the original publication, which can be seen in an “entire gallery

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of heroic Jews, insurgents and sympathizers of the [1863] uprising” in a philosemitic strain of Polish literature.129 Gary’s Yankel Cukier of the Polish brigade follows in the tradition of the earlier and more famous Yankel the innkeeper. He risks everything, not only in fighting with the Polish Resistance but also in finding a minyan, the required ten-man quorum, to pray in Hebrew, demonstrating the coexistence of the Jewish religion and Polish patriotism. The fact, then, that Gary represents Hebrew in the novel and perhaps Yiddish within French means that Yankel’s Jewishness does not exclude him from the Polish Resistance. And implicitly, Jews are not excluded from Gary’s idea of European Resistance. In her study of Mickiewicz’s Collège de France courses on Les Slaves, Karen Underhill writes that Mickiewicz viewed the Jews as “the most spiritual of all nations.”130 He thus “places the Jewish nation at the top of the spiritual hierarchy; and suggests that in rising to their calling, the Slavic and French nations should emulate, and join, the Jewish people in its (productive) devotion.”131 In Księgi narodu i pielgrzymstwa polskiego (The Books and the Pilgrimage of the Polish Nation, 1832), Mickiewicz makes a spiritual link between the Jews and the Polish in exile: “The Pole passes under the denomination of a pilgrim; because he made a vow of wandering to the Holy Land—to his free fatherland; and he has made this vow, to wander until he shall have redeemed his land.”132 But Mickiewicz goes even further when he traces the history of republican liberties back to the Jews of the Jewish scripture as “the Jews, or the men of the Old Testament, who worship the sovereignty of the people, Equality and Freedom.”133 The Jews destroy the idolaters—here, false sages, including Machiavelli and powerful European monarchs—“after the law of Moses, and of Joshua, and of Robespierre, and of Saint Justus.”134 Just as the birth of messianic republicanism finds its origins in Europe, so too does Christ in the Jewish people, who are the precursors to rather than the enemies of early Christians: “And as amidst the nation of Jews, Christ was born, and his covenant proclaimed, so in the cities of the European liberals, your covenant will have its rise—the new covenant of self-devotion and of love.”135 The authors of articles in La France libre never explicitly mention Mickiewicz’s spiritual linkage of Polish exile and republican revolutionary ideals to Jewish scripture. Yet there is a kind of parallel between Mickiewicz’s nostalgia for a lost Poland that harkens back to a tradition of messianic liberation that found

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its realization in republican revolution, on the one hand, and the Polish writers in exile in London, on the other hand, who look back to Franco-Polish Romanticism through language. The celebration of Romantic revolution through a cultural and linguistic dialogue between France and Poland by the contributors to La France libre and Gary’s own embrace of the Romantic spirit also pit these writers squarely against the thinkers of L’Action française. Charles Maurras, the protofascist founder of L’Action française, made a similar link between Romantic revolution and the Jews, but he did so in a vastly different way. In his 1922 preface to Romantisme et révolution, Maurras holds that Romanticism and revolution are two stems growing from the same root.136 He opposes the triad ReformationRevolution-Romanticism to Catholicism-Counterrevolution-Classicism.137 The origins of Romantic revolution, a political and aesthetic movement, are on the one hand Eastern and Jewish and on the other, Germanic and Protestant: “The fathers of the Revolution are in Geneva, in Wittenberg, formerly in Jerusalem; they stem from the Jewish spirit and from the varieties of independent Christianism that raged in the Eastern deserts or in the Germanic forest, that is, in the various roundabouts of barbarism.”138 As David Carroll puts it, “The sources of the Revolution and romanticism were of course all ‘foreign’ and included Rousseau, Luther, German thought in general, and all manifestations of the ‘Jewish spirit.’”139 In his antirepublican and antirevolutionary stance, Maurras calls Romantic literature weak and effeminate, a movement that gave too much of a role to the individual and his or her freedom.140 Maurras’s disgust with Romantic revolution could not be further from Gary’s and La France libre’s celebration of its ideals. Gary’s novel and his references to Mickiewicz, the Romantic tradition, and the place of Jews in the Resistance draw out possible allusions to Jews in La France libre. These texts of the Resistance in London provide a clear rebuttal of the Far Right’s rejection of republican revolution and Romanticism as a Jewish import and thus as foreign. Through heteroglossic European language, this “Jewish” ideal is European par excellence. Nevertheless, it remains an allusion rather than an open declaration, like the dying words in Yiddish on the lips of Moniek that are never actually represented in the novel. One article in La France libre in particular demonstrates the juxtaposition of Polish Romanticism to allusions to support for the Jews quite clearly,

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but it does so without mentioning the word Jewish: Maria Kuncewiczowa’s “Paris, mon Paris” (Paris, my Paris).141 Kuncewiczowa was also the author of the article “Une ‘matinée perdue,’” in which she describes the Polish and French languages echoing within each other. In her article “Paris, mon Paris,” she waxes nostalgic for the Paris of the interwar period, with its lively cafés and artists’ ateliers in Montparnasse, now all emptied of its crowds. Again, she makes links between France and Poland by evoking the revolutions of the nineteenth century as well as Napoleon’s support of Poland. But now, London seems to have taken the place of Paris as a haven for refugees and exiled people. Kuncewiczowa describes the environment at a meeting of the Polish PEN Club in London in August 1940, peppering this recollection in French of a Polish-English meeting with expressions in English. Just as Gary does, Kuncewiczowa also illustrates the Franco-Polish-English triangle. London will start to change, she writes, and it will perhaps become more like Paris when it was a destination for immigrants. But the word Kuncewiczowa uses for immigrants is métèque: Make no mistake. I do not detest this little Parisian word at all. The human race that it designates is very dear to me. It is from this crowd of anonymous foreigners that had emerged the great poet Mickiewicz [. . .]. It is from this crowd of métèques that had emerged the angelic Chopin, the communard Jarosław Dąbrowski, and the humble student Marie Skłodowska (Curie).142

The word métèque is a derogatory term that refers to foreigners in France, and was popularized by Charles Maurras. A xenophobic designation of foreigners, it is also associated with other supposedly anti-French residents including Jews, Protestants, and Freemasons.143 But Kuncewiczowa rehabilitates the term here. Jean Malaquais also reclaimed it in his wartime Journal du métèque, 1939–1942 (Diary of the métèque). Kuncewiczowa’s interwar writing makes it clear she was sympathetic to the Jewish plight and would not have thought of Chopin as similar to the typical foreigner in interwar France. She wrote positive representations of Jewish people both in her novel Cudzoziemka (The Stranger, 1936) and in Miasto Heroda: Notatki Palestyńskie (The city of Herod: Palestinian notes), which details her trip to Palestine in 1939 when she was invited by the Hebrew PEN Club.144 While she indicates in the article that the métèques are fleeing the Gestapo, she does not mention deportations or

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the word Jewish, but she seems to be alluding to a community of foreigners that includes the Jews. This kind of allusion always remains just that, the hint of an unwritten inclusion of the Jews in the Resistance and in the link between Poland and France. Gary’s novel goes against allusion. He depicts a Jew, Yankel Cukier, fighting as a Jew in the Resistance all the while recalling the heroic stance of a Romantic revolutionary. At the same time, through Mr. Levy and Moniek the dying wunderkind, he shows the outcomes of Jewish persecution and marginalization. This interpretation neither holds that Gary was too slippery to maintain a single identity, as Nancy Huston writes, nor proposes that his identification was exclusively Jewish, as Anissimov implies. Rather, by looking at how he writes European language and examines the complexities of representing Jewish language within a European dialogue, we find a space in between these two claims. In this space Gary shows that Jewishness either is or should be part of the discussion of what European democracy is, and that Jewishness can be embraced in the French language. Gary’s belief in French universalism remained unshaken throughout his literary career. In a 1970 interview, he was asked how it came to be that a Jewish man—and Gary interrupted to add that he is a foreigner as well—became a diplomat at the Quai d’Orsay. Gary retorted: “To ask such a question is, pardon me for saying so, not to understand France at all.”145 This statement is all the more striking given that Gary received a post because many purged members of the diplomatic corps, a corps that had traditionally been inhospitable to Jews, needed to be replaced in the postwar period.146 Elsa Triolet, who wrote as a member of the Communist Resistance, would have a different opinion on what it means to be a Jewish immigrant in France.

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B U R I ED L A N G UAG E Elsa Triolet’s Bilingualism

In a letter to Elsa Triolet in 1943, Albert Camus responded to her latest novella with some of his highest praise: “It is the best way to philosophize: to offer images that have meaning.”1 This was a high accolade from the writer who wrote in his personal notebooks: “We only think in images. If you want to be a philosopher, write novels.”2 Triolet, who was living in hiding in the Drôme region and was active in the Communist Resistance, had sent Camus a manuscript of her novella written in response to The Myth of Sisyphus, “Qui est cet étranger qui n’est pas d’ici?, ou Le Mythe de la Baronne Mélanie” (Who is this stranger who is not from here?, or The myth of the Baroness Melanie). In “Qui est cet étranger qui n’est pas d’ici?,” Triolet imagines a female Sisyphus going down the mountain while living the war in reverse time. The text points to the strange gap between historical time and personal time, between the Occupation and private struggles as time moves forward. Images of internal conflict in the face of larger historical movements would be a central topic for her writing about interwar migration and French Jewish identity during World War II and in the Communist Resistance. In this chapter, I trace three of Triolet’s powerful images: her comparison in the interwar period of writing in French to wearing a plaster corset; the portrait of Esther that her first Jewish protagonist carries from place to place in his exile from Paris under the Occupation in her wartime novel of the Resistance, Le premier accroc coûte

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deux cents francs (A Fine of Two Hundred Francs, 1945; henceforth Le premier accroc); and the buried notebooks of a woman in the Resistance, also portrayed in Le premier accroc. This was an important novel both for her career and for the history of the recognition of women writers in France. Triolet won the Prix Goncourt for Le premier accroc during the first award season after the Occupation. In fact, she was the first woman to receive this prestigious award, and it was granted by only the second Académie Goncourt that included a woman (Colette).3 During the 1930s and 1940s, Triolet employed the images of these objects—a corset, a painting, buried notebooks—to talk about bilingualism, the political force of the act of writing, and Jewish identification in the Resistance. Despite a long literary career in which she reflected on her FrenchRussian bilingualism, Triolet did not incorporate bilingualism into her texts. She did not employ literary strategies like multilingualism, accent, and heteroglossia in her writing to inscribe Jewish voice into French and to challenge the idea of monolingual French. This sets her apart from the authors studied in the three previous chapters, Fondane, Malaquais, and Gary. Triolet instead saw the limits of a particular Jewish voice in French. It was perhaps this limit, as well as a kind of rigidity in language, that discouraged fluid language play. Although Triolet does not refer to Yiddish or Hebrew in her work, reflecting instead on French-Russian bilingualism, she is still thinking within French about Jewish identity and against particularism. By particularism in this context, I mean an attachment to a particular group (here, Jews). Particularism has a shifting relation with universalism in France but it is not the opposite of universalism.4 As Pierre Birnbaum has put it, particularism is one part of the negotiation and balancing “between civic and civil, between public space and private space, between Republican citizenship and attachment to specific values, between public happiness and private happiness” that make up a highly varied Jewish political history in France.5 Triolet shows in her novel that Jews must abandon particularism to fight in an international Communist struggle against fascism. In such a worldview these individuals are not rejected from but rather included in the Resistance in France. And she declared her own place by writing her Resistance novel in French.

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The Plaster Corset: Triolet’s Switch to French

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In her private and fictional writings Triolet described her switch to French, as well as the linguistic shifts of émigré women characters in her novels, in terms of rigidity and even imprisonment in her adopted language. Her experience of migration was marked both by the gender politics of citizenship and by her linguistic background. In 1918, when Ella Yur’evna Kagan married the French military officer André Triolet and emigrated from Moscow at the age of twenty-one, she left behind a multilingual intellectual Jewish home, but not a practicing religious one. Following in the tradition of her parents, both of whom were from Latvia, she was fluent in German, as was traditionally the case for the Latvian Jewish bourgeoisie. Triolet also learned to speak French fluently from her French teacher Mademoiselle Dache, as was typical for her milieu.6 Growing up outside the Pale of Settlement, she spent her adolescence with friends in the Russian Futurist avant-garde, especially Roman Jakobson and Vladimir Mayakovsky, as well as others, including Viktor Shklovsky, whom she met in the home of her sister Lili and her brother-in-law Osip Brik. The Futurists she befriended were early supporters of the Bolshevik Revolution.7 When Triolet reflected later, in the 1960s, on her migration, the question of her native Russian language was wrapped up in nostalgia for Moscow. She would write that in leaving Russia, “I cast myself for life in an ocean of nostalgia.”8 During her difficult first years in France, she learned that “language-sickness [le mal de langue], like homesickness [le mal du pays], is unbearable.”9 Triolet was motivated neither by antisemitism nor by the Bolshevik Revolution to leave for France but by her doubts about her status in the family, unrequited love, and her poverty in the wake of her father’s death. She left via one of the few avenues open to young women, marriage. Despite her close relationship with her older sister, Triolet was convinced that her family favored Lili, who was thought of as the more beautiful sibling. To make matters worse, in 1915 Lili became Mayakovsky’s lover and muse, immortalized in his poetry throughout the 1920s, even though Triolet had met and brought him into their circle first.10 Despite financial difficulties after her father’s death in 1915, she earned a degree in architecture at the Moscow Institute of Architecture, a striking accomplishment for a Jewish woman at the time.11 The

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year she finished her degree, she also married André, whom she met while he was on a military mission to Russia and with whom she would soon leave the country. Triolet would write that despite her entering into a marriage, she never expected to emigrate. Perhaps she didn’t think it would last: “I was certain to return very quickly, just to take a trip. I didn’t know yet that destiny is politics, and if I realized the greatness of the October Revolution, I never considered that the doors to the country would be locked on both sides.”12 She may have turned to marriage as a way to leave her family, but she depended on it for legal status in France. She obtained French citizenship automatically through marriage, and she relied on André for support.13 This was a radically different situation from the one that prevailed in the Soviet Union, where by 1918 women had the freedom to divorce and to choose their nationality when marrying a foreigner. Women in the Soviet Union over the age of twenty were enfranchised in 1917, three decades earlier than in France.14 Only after the reforms to French nationality resulting from the law of 1927 did Frenchwomen cease to depend on their husbands for citizenship; before this law was passed a Frenchwoman would lose her French nationality if she married a man with citizenship from a different country.15 Joan Wallach Scott outlines the contradictions in France between universal rights and the exclusion of women from voting and obtaining citizenship independently of marriage, which the government based on sexual difference. Republican universalism was not simply a contradictory ideal that denied women like Triolet rights; the rights of the individual that universalism enshrined were based on constructions of the individual as masculine.16 After a sojourn in Tahiti, and trips to New York and San Francisco, the Triolets separated in 1920. According to her biographer Lilly Marcou, André Triolet suggested they not divorce as a way of providing his wife protection, since an unmarried Russian woman in Paris would seem suspicious to police.17 Separated from André, Elsa Triolet now found herself in the precarious position of a single, female Russian-born Communist alone in Paris. To use Catherine Raissiguier’s term, she was in some ways an “impossible subject”: as a female immigrant she was vulnerable to “discursive practices that turn certain immigrants into unthinkable members of the national body, as well as material and legal practices that locate them in spaces of impossibility.”18 Triolet had received citizenship through marriage, yet she could not remain

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in the possible space of marriage in France. After the separation, she moved a few times to find new literary and artistic circles. She lived in London while working for an architecture firm in 1921. The following year she moved to Berlin to join its bustling Russian émigré community.19 In 1924, Triolet moved back to Paris, where she joined the world of the Montparnasse cafés. She did not fit into the Russia Abroad circles—namely, the White Russian émigrés of an older generation who were anti-Communist and conservative, both politically and artistically.20 Instead, with the help of Mayakovsky, she gained entry into Montparnasse circles, which were enriched by émigré writers and artists. Mayakovsky visited Triolet in Paris almost every year between 1924 and 1929, the year before his suicide. During his trips, he introduced her to the cultural stars of the Montparnasse scene (including Louis Aragon, her future husband). He stayed at the same hotel where she lived, the Hotel Istria, on the rue Campagne-Première and only a ten-minute walk from the boulevard du Montparnasse.21 Triolet had found her lodgings with the help of Fernand Léger, and she had neighbors like Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Francis Picabia, and Kiki de Montparnasse.22 She met other émigrés like Picasso and Tristan Tzara at the home of the painters Robert and Sonia Delaunay, who held a modern-day salon.23 Sonia Delaunay, herself a Russian émigré, famously created Surrealist-inspired fabrics for fashion designers. Like her, Triolet crafted fantastical jewelry for haute couture houses, including Poiret and Schiaparelli, to make ends meet.24 Triolet joined artists’ and writers’ circles frequented by more marginal émigré authors like Benjamin Fondane. But she was not without doubts about her life in Paris, and Mayakovsky helped Triolet get a visa to return to Moscow for eight months from 1925 to 1926.25 Her diaries from the time show that Triolet did not quite feel at home in the Montparnasse network. An entry dated September 29, 1928, indicates that she likely still saw herself as an outsider four years after she moved to Paris— owing, at least in part, to her Jewish background. In this entry, she describes a series of slights that she experienced during an outing at Le Dôme. When comparing herself to Tat’yana Yakovleva (the future Tatiana du Plessix, and Mayakovsky’s other muse), who had stopped by the café, Triolet feels short and chubby. She concludes that the painter Fausto Pirandello, with whom she had been talking, would never date someone like her. She imagines he only likes “superior” women, while she and her friends are “just some Montparnasse

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kikes.”26 This is an odd comment, given how many Jewish intellectuals were part of the Montparnasse scene.27 In the same moment, Triolet remembers an invitation to Giorgio de Chirico’s home, which she did not dare accept because of the unpleasant tone in which it was extended and her inability to shake the feeling that no one liked her. In this entry, Triolet is at the center of the literary and artistic world while still feeling marginalized, seemingly because of her Judaism. She ends the entry: “What attraction does the West [l’Occident] still offer me? I will soon be absolutely ready to return to Russia.”28 Associating marginalization with Jewish identity was not new to her. Triolet was nineteen years old when the Russian Jews were emancipated in 1917. Although not religious, Triolet’s family did not sever their ties with Jewish culture, and they were important figures in the Jewish intelligentsia of Moscow. Her father, a lawyer who specialized in writers’ and artists’ contracts, represented Jewish clients in cases of discrimination regarding residential rights. As a Jewish man, he could not plead his cases in court and his nonJewish associates had to do so for him.29 Triolet herself had to overcome the Jewish quota in the university system. In her diaries, but at this point not in her literary texts, Triolet from time to time expressed ambivalence about being Jewish. Marie-Thérèse Eychart understands Triolet’s references to Judaism in her diaries as revealing “an obsessive fear of marginality,” one that was always threatening to show her inferiority in Russian society and her precarity even in the intellectual circles in which she ran.30 Triolet actually wrote very little about her Jewish background. She kept a diary on and off from 1912 to 1939, but it was during the year 1913 in particular that she discussed Jewishness in ways that revealed her profound discomfort. The statements Triolet makes in the diary entries from that year are entwined with her sense of rejection and of being misunderstood in romantic affairs. In February she attends a party where she realizes she is the only Jewish person in attendance.31 At the ages of sixteen and seventeen, she rejects two suitors, criticizing them for looking too Jewish. But her comments about Judaism, which may raise the specter of Jewish selfhatred, are almost always coupled with her own anxieties about not being taken seriously as a young woman. In February she expresses frustration with her suitor Ratner, because he “treated me like a little girl, or more precisely, paid no attention to me,” implying he never really saw her for who she was

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as a person.32 In the next sentence she writes that it was not love at first sight because she could never be proud of being with someone so typically Jewish: “I feel that without his sharply marked Jewish look, I would have loved him. I need to be proud of the one I love, to be happy that he judged me worthy of his choice.”33 It is almost as if she turns around and refuses to see him for who he is. In November she writes, “A. V. took me for a little girl.” 34 She again links this complaint to his Jewishness: “Like R. [Ratner], he has a very pronounced Jewish look and I dislike it.”35 But between these two entries, Triolet is particularly moved by the Beilis trial, when a Jewish lawyer from Kiev—practicing her father’s profession—was accused of the ritual murder of a Christian child. While waiting to hear the verdict of the court in October, she is in a panic. After learning of his acquittal, she exclaims: “For the moment, I have joy in my heart. . . . The injustice would have been terrible, indescribable, and how madly I pity Beilis! God be praised.”36 She devotes the same entry to her unrequited feelings for a friend, the sense that no one is in love with her, and her fear that she herself has never loved anyone. Her entries about Jewishness seem always to come along with her reflections on social and romantic rejection, as well as on marginalization. Nevertheless, the topics in her burst of entries in 1913 about her underlying sense of rejection in Russia, as well as her ambivalence, to say the least, about her male Jewish peers, were not at the forefront of her diaries. Their reappearance in 1928, with her comment about the “Montparnasse kikes,” then, is all the more striking. Only in 1938 does she begin to refer again to antisemitism, writing that fascists appeal to the basest instincts: how much easier it is blame everything on your local Jew [youpin du coin] than on capitalism.37 During the days leading up to the Munich Agreement in September 1938, when she fears the rise of fascism, the threat of antisemitism is on her mind.38 These September entries also date to her switch from writing in Russian to writing in French in her diaries, as will be discussed later. And in her first novel in French, Bonsoir, Thérèse (Goodnight, Thérèse, 1938), published that same year, she refers to her protagonist Anne-Marie-Thérèse Favart’s disgust at her lover’s antisemitism and anti-Communism; in a moment of solidarity with his imagined enemies, she slaps him. But it was not until World War II that Triolet would begin to write at greater length about Jewish identity and antisemitism in her novels.

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Her unease in France translated into her first fictional writings in Russian, in which she expressed a painful bilingualism. She composed her first three novels in Russian while in Paris and published them in Moscow: Na Taiti (In Tahiti, 1925), Zemlyanichka (Wild strawberry, 1926), and Zashchitnyy tsvet (Camouflage, 1928), also entitled Camouflage in the French translation. In her notes for her last Russian novel, Camouflage, as well as in the work itself, Triolet questions what an immigrant’s relationship to Russia and to the Russian language could be after years of living in France. Her growing distance from Russia as her home and Russian as a literary language is reflected in the narrative of the story. Camouflage recounts the disintegrating and unlikely friendship formed in a Montparnasse café between a Russian émigré named Varvara and a wealthy Frenchwoman. Over the course of the novel, Varvara becomes haggard, resigned to poverty, and distant from her friend. She is no longer capable of adapting to life in Paris. At the same time, she also grapples with the loss of her connection to Russia and, specifically, to the Russian language: “All that Varvara had left was the Russian language, and even that she had to cripple, because her way of thinking often did not fit into [ukladyvalsya] Russian turns of speech. . . . As for her nationality, she had lost it in the hotels in which she grew up.”39 Losing her Russian identity in her various displacements throughout Europe, Varvara can no longer think in the logic of Russian. She must maim her native tongue because the rhythm of her new surroundings has drowned out her old life. The salient verb connected to her newfound inability to use the Russian language is “to fit” (ukladyvat’sya), as in to try to fit into a form or shape. Language’s soft contours, its flexible means of expression, are replaced with the image of rigidity. Léon Robel’s translation of the novel into French—which Elsa Triolet quotes in her opening essay to the Œuvres romanesques croisées d’Elsa Triolet et Aragon (Interlinked works of fiction by Elsa Triolet and Aragon), a fortytwo-volume collection of Triolet’s and Aragon’s works, each with its own preface—renders ukladyvalsya as the verb se plier (to bend).40 Varvara begins to lose her mental and physical health as her ties to her Russian origins weaken. The feeling of belonging to a country, to a home, is entwined with speaking the Russian language. Triolet’s last Russian novel explores a character’s loss of Russian identity and growing sense of marginality in French life. The content of the novel reflects her own linguistic choices, as well as her

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growing sense that she could neither be French and Russian nor be French and write in Russian at the same time. Triolet met Louis Aragon in the Montparnasse café La Coupole the same year she published her last Russian novel, beginning a lifelong relationship of mutual literary and political inspiration.41 She drew her Russian writing career to a close as she began her partnership with this famous French poet, becoming more settled in French private and political life. Aragon had just joined the French Communist Party in 1927.42 While Triolet herself did not join officially, as a fellow traveler (compagnon de route) she became part of the circle of the foremost Communist intellectuals in France.43 It was through her and Lili Brik that Aragon made Russian contacts. Triolet now found herself in a position to become an insider. But when Triolet wrote in her personal diary about her switch to French in the wake of her novel Camouflage, she used another verb that echoes Varvara’s description of the loss of an ability to conform to a space of language: se plier. Something went wrong when she tried to write this third novel in Russian. The third [novel] was a catastrophe it was a novel that took place in Paris, I had a lot of difficulties with And I understood that there was something It

didn’t work One didn’t nee– the language no longer wanted to bend to what

I was grabbed [happée] by France. I I needed to write in French or no longer write.44

She wrote this journal entry in French, crossing out lines as she went along. The incomplete sentences of this journal entry echo what she had Varvara say in the novel: The Russian language refused to bend to her thoughts and to what she wanted to write. Triolet uses a violent image of being grabbed (happé ) by France’s mouth or beak, the way an animal seizes its prey in its jaw. The verb evokes the image of a tight jaw, a rigid mouth. Here, language is inflexible; it cannot bend to the bilingualism of the émigré author. Triolet’s notes themselves are composed in a halting rhythm, with sentences that do not shift to take new forms but rather break off, only to be crossed out in ink. Instead of a rich source of inspiration, bilingualism is precisely the location of a conflict between Triolet’s Russian émigré and French identities in this period. Her Paris chapter ushered in a period of dissonance that she

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experienced as a multilingual person. Living in these two languages was not the sign of a cosmopolitan life, but of a life ripped in two. It would be ten years before she would write another novel. However, Triolet’s transition to writing in French was not as sudden as the excerpt quoted above implies. The many notebooks containing her ideas and drafts over the course of her entire career are filled with painstaking records of her struggle with two languages. Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour and Marianne Delranc-Gaudric have both studied Triolet’s switch to French, demonstrating that French slowly crept into the Russian notebooks in which Triolet composed her first three Russian novels.45 Delranc-Gaudric also locates, in Triolet’s notebooks from the 1920s containing the notes for and drafts of Camouflage, examples of “slipping into French” or of French words in Cyrillic script that exist in both languages but are French in origin: quartier (kart’ye), genre (zhanr), camouflage (kamuflyazh), concierge (kons’yerzhka).46 There are twenty-five examples in notebook 39 alone.47 Delranc-Gaudric understands Triolet’s use of French words in Russian as her way of expressing, in language itself, being caught between wanting to express a French reality and being obliged to write in Russian.48 The slippages that Delranc-Gaudric studies therefore imply some kind of flexibility in Triolet’s bilingualism, in which French starts to appear in the Russian. While addressing the ways in which “Triolet’s French was still stiff,” Klosty Beaujour reads these moments as intimate illustrations of code-switching that reveal the process of a bilingual author beginning to write in her second language.49 In reality Triolet’s French was very fluent. I would argue that Triolet does not necessarily go back and forth, either stiffly or by slipping into a single language; rather, she is seized by French expression. Triolet herself would later write in her collection of thoughts and images, La Mise en mots (Putting into words, 1969): “It sounds like a disease: I suffer from bilingualism. Or more: I am bilingamous. A crime before the law.”50 Bilingualism is an illness, or worse, a form of linguistic polygamy. In 1938, though, Triolet published her first French novel and began to write her personal diaries in French. In her first diary entry in French, she expresses how hard it is to commit herself to writing, lamenting the loss of her country and her language: “The deep ache is in what I have lost, my country and my language, and that now I am here knowing nothing organically. Except

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myself. So it is endlessly about myself.”51 Her switch to French in private and public writing coincides with an attempt to come to terms with her own self, stripped bare of the trappings of nationality. The writing self is not naturally determined by where the writer was born or which language she spoke when she was growing up. Rather, Triolet tries to recreate herself as a writer by grappling with a new language. In her first French novel Triolet again locates rigidity in women’s émigré writing in French. Bonsoir, Thérèse recounts the story of an Eastern European immigrant in Paris who looks for a woman called Thérèse, a name she hears on the radio; in so doing she tells the stories of other Parisian women. Triolet describes her unhappy experience of writing this novel in her opening essay to the novel in Œuvres romanesques croisées: “I suffered from it physically, as if they had put me in a plaster corset. I was restricted on all sides, there was nothing around me but confines, I lacked the verbal material, and that which I possessed was rigid and  as  practical to handle as a tangled-up string of barbed wire.”52 As she does in Camouflage, Triolet again evokes the notion of rigidity when talking about her switch to a new language. The barbed wire of unwieldy words seems to make up the boning of the plaster corset. The image of the corset is a gendered one; she does not evoke a straitjacket or handcuffs. Rather, it is a sartorial constriction of the woman’s body, enclosed in boning like a barbed wire prison, an article of clothing that had only been shed from Frenchwomen’s fashion at the end of World War I. The corset as an image for the experience of bilingualism was taken up decades later by another Francophone Jewish woman writer, Hélène Cixous. In her essay “Les Noms d’Oran” (“The Names of Oran”), Cixous unpacks how her last name has always “medusa-dumbfounded” the French, because of its x, or its cix.53 She is struck that “there exists a name that the tongue in which I play with writing recognizes instantaneously to be unpronounceable, indomitable, inaudible, escaping the ear, the voice, and the orthographic corset.”54 However, this name is most recognizable in Algeria: “In Algerian it is as at home and as familiar as can be, as unsavage, as crumbly as can be and not spicy at all. As Kouskous I am spread semolina in a large dish rolled, rubbed, kneaded by the solid palms of mémé-couscous [. . .]. No one in Algeria can do without my name I am the daily bread.”55 In France, the Cix– in Cixous is what pops out of a constricting corset, but in Algeria it is

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the beloved and free-flowing grain that fills the stomach. The sound cix also hints at k, the same sound from her childhood lived in Arabic and German, with its aural links not only to words like couscous but also to the k’s in her Jewish grandmother’s German. The multilingual sound is a profound link to the nom-mots flowing through the Oran streets in her mind. Time and time again, Cixous undresses the orthography of French from its corset through her wordplay and neologisms. In “Les Noms d’Oran,” she explains the neologism soulbra (meaning “I don’t know” in the Cixous home), which morphed from the German ich weiß nicht (I don’t know), which became Schweiß (sweat) and then sous le bras (under the arm).56 This kind of play stems from a childhood lived in a multiplicity of languages: French, German, Hebrew, and Arabic. As Laurie Corbin explains, Cixous uses wordplay and neologisms in French to show the French language’s “foundational importance to Cixous’s identity yet at the same time its separateness from her conception of her self which allows her to shape it and herself in it at the same time.”57 This distance from French “allows Cixous to always be inside and outside of the language simultaneously.”58 There was a negative side to this rich background, for Cixous writes that she was always a foreigner within French, othered from its language. Her French nationality was arbitrary on all sides: as a French Jew in Algeria her citizenship was revoked under Vichy; on her maternal side, she was French through her German grandmother’s French visa acquired thanks to her and her husband’s having lived in Alsace. 59 For her, the French language became both a site of displacement and, in Corbin’s words, “the ‘home’ that helps to alleviate the lack of home.”60 This doubleness plays out in language outside the corset. For Triolet, the corset imagery functions quite differently. Interestingly, it is Triolet, not the author of The Laugh of the Medusa, who talks about the corset as an embodied bilingualism that refuses flexibility. Triolet wears the corset rather than thinking of it as an external orthographic rule. Perhaps this notion of rigidity is one of the reasons she does not resort to wordplay between French and Russian, choosing instead to focus on the imagery of concrete objects to convey the difficulty of switching to French. Besides her terms mal de langue and biligame, quoted earlier, Triolet does not use neologisms as a central feature of her writing style. She writes that a language does not live on flexibly in speakers when they emigrate from their native country:

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“One would think that no one can take a language away from you, that you carry it with you wherever you go, that it lives in you, unforgettable, incurable, divine.”61 On the contrary, deprived of its people and country, language “rusts, atrophies, and dies.”62 Triolet’s use of French in her first novel was a barbed wire language, corseted in and rusted over.63 Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour has also used the idea of rigidity in reading Triolet’s mature works with a political emphasis. There is “a carefully cultivated rigidity” in Triolet’s writing that served “the interest of ideological and linguistic purity.”64 Because of her “utilitarian, not to say socialist-realist, view of language,” Triolet did not delight in her bilingualism or engage in bilingual wordplay.65 But the notion of rigidity, so well represented by the corset, also relates to her experience of immigration. Even if she was completely fluent in French, she located her struggle to integrate at the level of writing. This rigidity cut both ways. When Triolet began to publish in French, she expressed her unwillingness to be translated into Russian. She wrote (in Russian) to her sister Lili, who was still in Russia, on July 12, 1938: “Imagine that, in circumstances independent of your will, you wrote something in a foreign language and that someone translated it into Russian?! How would you react to that? In any case, for me, it is unbearable. If it is unavoidable to translate, I will do it myself.”66 In this letter Triolet responds to her mother’s suggestion that she (the mother) translate Elsa’s work into Russian—a mother translator into a mother tongue. At the end of 1938, Triolet repeats in another letter to Lili that it is absurd to translate Bonsoir, Thérèse into Russian, not least because she wrote part of it in Russian to begin with and it had been rejected by a publisher in the Soviet Union.67 Her refusal to be translated is all the more remarkable given her own burgeoning career as a translator in both directions. She translated some of Mayakovsky’s poems into French. In the mid-1930s she published Russian translations of a play by Gide intended for performance in the USSR, as well as Aragon’s novels Les Cloches de Bâle (The Bells of Basel ) and Les Beaux Quartiers (Residential Quarter).68 But her 1934 translation of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit ( Journey to the End of the Night) is perhaps the most significant for French literary history. The translation was heavily edited by the Soviet Ministry of Culture, for which Céline blamed Triolet and Aragon. After its success in the Soviet Union, Céline traveled there to collect and spend his royalties, which were in

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rubles. Following his travels to Moscow and Leningrad in 1936, he published Mea culpa, a vehement attack on the Soviet Union.69 Céline’s virulently antisemitic pamphlet, Bagatelles pour un massacre (Trifles for a Massacre, 1937), also contains descriptions of his time in the USSR. The Communist and Jewish Triolet was involved indirectly in Céline’s far-right invective. Through translation, Triolet negotiated her Russian and French writing careers. But she could not extend this movement to her own novels. Throughout Triolet’s life, translation and her resistance to it played an important role in her relationship to Russian and to her family in Russia. One of Lili Brik’s first questions to Triolet in November 1945—the first time the sisters had been in contact since the beginning of the war, when they barely knew whether the other one was alive—was to find out what her sister had written and what she could translate.70 But before this postwar epistolary reunion, when war with Germany broke out, Triolet’s relationship to the French language shifted yet again.

Writing the Multilingual Resistance

Under the Occupation, Triolet’s displacement from Paris to the Southern Zone brought her into the center of a multilingual Communist intellectual Resistance, where she also found a means to survive the war among other French writers. She began to reflect on writing in French not as incompatible with her multilingual background but as a newfound language of resistance and political expression. At the same time, her Russian background was now a source of inspiration to join the fight for France within the context of the Internationalist cause rather than presenting a hindrance to her belonging in France. Although she began to write about French Jewish identity during this period, in her novels she rejects Jewish particularism in the Resistance. Just as the Nazi Occupation and the Vichy state threatened Triolet’s life and denied her French identity, just as she risked deportation and persecution as a Jew, a Communist, and a naturalized citizen, she came into her own as a French novelist and as a political writer in the French clandestine press. Triolet’s exodus took her to various towns in southern France; these peregrinations were also literary and political trips, during which she exchanged ideas and created newspapers with some of the most important literary figures in France.71 She left Paris in the June 1940 exode and traveled in the

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South of France, eventually finding Aragon in Javerlhac near Nontron, where he had been demobilized.72 By then she and André had divorced, and she had married Aragon, keeping her French citizenship. Unable or unwilling to return to Paris, Triolet and Aragon spent the beginning of the war in Carcassonne, Avignon, Nice, and elsewhere in the region. She crossed paths with other émigré authors and with French-born writers who were helping them. Triolet and Aragon stayed in Carcassonne with Joë Bousquet, whose home she described as “our only refuge.”73 For a few months in the fall of 1941 they lived in the home of the publisher Pierre Seghers and his wife in Villeneuve near Avignon.74 At that time they likely cowrote the famous “Manifeste des intellectuels de zone non-occupée” (Manifesto of the intellectuals of the Unoccupied Zone) for L’Université libre. One towering figure of the Resistance, Georges Politzer, a Jewish émigré from Hungary, cofounded the clandestine journal L’Université libre with Jacques Decour and Jacques Solomon. Triolet met Politzer through Georges Dudach, the Resistance leader and the husband of Charlotte Delbo, who would later be known for her memoirs of her experience as a prisoner in Auschwitz. Dudach had established a connection between Aragon and the clandestine French Communist Party in Nice, having asked him to contribute to another publication, La Pensée libre. Triolet and Aragon had moved to Nice by October 1941. Through Aragon’s connection with Dudach, Triolet became deeply involved in La Pensée libre. In June 1941 Triolet illegally crossed the line of demarcation into the Occupied Zone with Aragon and Dudach to attend meetings about organizing clandestine Resistance publications. They were arrested and were held for around three weeks in a prison in Tours before they could continue their journey. In Paris, they finally met Politzer and Danielle Casanova, whom they helped to write the famous second issue of La Pensée libre. They stayed in the atelier of Jacques Lipchitz, the Lithuanianborn sculptor.75 Triolet was also involved in the creation of the Resistance paper Les Lettres françaises with Jacques Decour and Jean Paulhan. At that time, Paulhan was helping to protect a member of Fondane’s circle, the Romanian émigré poet Ilarie Voronca’s wife, Colomba, who lived in his apartment building.76 Triolet faced great danger; Dudach and Politzer were both executed by the Nazis on Mont-Valérien, on the outskirts of Paris, about a year later in May 1942.

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When the Italian and German Armies invaded the Southern Zone in November 1942, Triolet and Aragon decided to leave Nice and begin their life in hiding. Relocating to Lyon on New Year’s Eve of 1943, they lived in René Tavernier’s office of the literary journal Confluences. Confluences published authors who were critical of Vichy but it was nevertheless an authorized publication. At the office, Triolet met Albert Camus and Pascal Pia, who gave Triolet and Aragon their first false papers.77 There Aragon founded the Comité national des écrivains (CNE) for the Southern Zone, and he and Triolet coordinated the two zones under the CNE, an organization that Gisèle Sapiro calls “the principal authority of the literary resistance.”78 Triolet describes Lyon as “packed with all sorts of people who came from elsewhere, a city suddenly appointed the capital of the Resistance, living an intense and perilous life, cut through by the gusts of roundups, fattening up on the black market, suffering from its prisons.”79 Although she was working with many Jewish émigré Communists, Triolet did not engage in the Resistance within Jewish Communist networks. She did not join the Union des femmes juives or the Solidarité movements formed in Paris in September 1940 by the Jewish Communists, which published the clandestine Yiddish-language newspaper Unzer Vort. Nor did Triolet engage in the Yiddish-speaking section of the Communist Francstireurs et partisans–Main-d’œuvre immigrée (FTP-MOI) when it was created in the spring of 1942.80 The MOI had been formed before the war, in the 1920s, by the trade union linked to the French Communist Party, the Confédération générale du travail unitaire (CGTU).81 This branch was divided into twelve language groups; some Jewish members were part of the Yiddish section while others chose to participate in sections belonging to the languages of their countries of origin. Although not a part of this network, Triolet did report on the FTP-MOI in the clandestine press. When discussing what role Jewish identity may have played in the Yiddish Communist press under the Occupation, Annette Wieviorka has argued that it served the purpose of reaching non-French speaking people, and that it was in no way intended to affirm a Jewish identity or the existence of a Jewish people or nation. Furthermore, the Jewish Communist was theoretically not supposed to worry about Jewish issues more than any other militant was.82 Nevertheless, as Poznanski points out, the Jewish Communist press was almost the only

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forum that contained substantive reflection on Jewish persecution.83 Annie Kriegel, who had herself been a member of the FTP-MOI, focuses on the heterogeneous experience of Jews active in the Communist Resistance, including the different situations of French-born Jews and Jewish immigrant workers whose social structures had collapsed under the Occupation. She insists on the fact that Jewish Communists were actors in the movement. Their experiences varied from the total fusion of Jewish millenarianism into Soviet millenarianism, so that not a trace of Judaism remained, to a stronger attachment to Jewishness that worked within the logic of a Jewish people.84 To join the Communists, argues Kriegel, meant to break a vicious cycle: it was better to die voluntarily for a cause than for inclusion through an “accident of birth” into Judaism according to the Nazi racial definition.85 Kriegel writes of her own experience, quite clearly explaining why she was in the Jeunesse communiste–MOI even if she was not an immigrant but rather from a family with deep Alsatian roots: “If I stayed in the JC-MOI, it was because we were Jewish militants, Jewish combatants. If I weren’t Jewish, what reasons would I have [. . .] to enter into active resistance under the age of sixteen?”86 She differentiates herself from others who insisted they fought as French people and not as Jews. Triolet would take up a philosophy of Soviet millenarianism in her novel.87 The multilingualism of the MOI and the Communist clandestine press worked within the ideological goals of the Communist Party. The November 1943 issue of La Vie du Parti explains, in a supplement on the role of the MOI, the historic role of the language groups: to aid the party in organizing foreign workers through developing propaganda in their language, and to foster a coming together of foreigners with their French sisters and brothers in a common struggle.88 In the propaganda, the stated goal of the language groups was to use different languages not to isolate but to unite. The 1943 publication stresses that now a common fight links the French with immigrants; they sacrifice their lives alongside one another. Resistance networks produced a plethora of clandestine publications in different languages, including Yiddish, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Czech, and Armenian.89 Bilingualism in particular—including Jewish external bilingualism in its traditional sense—takes on political meaning. For example, bilingualism was often used to demonstrate an allegiance to France: the use of

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both languages showed that the immigrants were not only fighting for their country of origin or for their immigrant and religious groups but also for France. Unzer Vort published at least two bilingual issues in French and Yiddish.90 There were other bilingual publications in the Communist Resistance as well. For example, Italia libera, the newspaper of an antifascist network of Italian immigrants in France, declared in Italian and in French, “Long live the fraternal friendship of the Italian immigration and the French people! Long live Italy and France resurrected in liberty!”91 A bilingual tract rallying the struggle for liberation signed by the Milicje Patriotyczne (Patriotic Militias) of the Polskie Siły Zborojne we Franeji (Polish Armed Forces in France) declares in bold letters: “The Polish of Paris are at the side of the French in their struggle!”92 The Polish side of the tract is addressed to Polish people and the French side to their French “brothers,” as if these two languages are two sides of the same coin. Triolet’s own multilingualism was particularly useful in her journalistic work. No longer stuck in a painful French-Russian bilingualism, she was now in a multilingual zone in which her Russian, French, and German were important to her dangerous activities reporting for clandestine newspapers. In the July 1944 issue of Les Lettres françaises, Triolet recounts how she spoke with Soviet soldiers in France who had been held as prisoners of war in Germany before escaping. She then writes that she will try to translate their stories: For the needs of the cause, I will drop the difficulties of the conversation

through an interpreter, a conversation mixed with snippets of labored German and of French; I want to reserve in it only the melody of speaking Russian, of speaking of these three countries, the epic tone of the storytellers, this flavor of living folklore, of popular poetry.93

Triolet uses her Russian to humanize these soldiers moving through France, to tell their stories in French translation, and to inspire the public to help them. At one point, Triolet even encountered the FTP-MOI in the early spring of 1944. The poet and Resistance fighter Jean Marcenac showed Triolet around the local maquis, rural guerilla bands in the Resistance, of the Lot region.94 Georges Sadoul organized their meeting in order to help Triolet do

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research for her novel about the Resistance, Le premier accroc, with Triolet disguised as Marcenac’s cousin Madeleine. This meeting also resulted in her article, “Aux armes, citoyens!” (To arms, citizens!, May 1944), published in the clandestine Les Lettres françaises, in which she describes the work and sacrifices of the young men in the Resistance.95 Marcenac brought her to Nîmes and then to Agen, where by some miracle, he says, they were not arrested when the leader of the MOI was caught. This may be a short reference to this group, but it nonetheless shows the exposure Triolet had to immigrants in the Communist Resistance. Ironically, Triolet’s success as a mainstream French writer was actually growing at this time. Her unique position is out of tune with our usual assumptions about Resistance writers. The collaborationist publisher Robert Denoël printed her novels Mille regrets (A thousand regrets, 1942) and Le Cheval blanc (The White Horse, 1943), which she wrote between 1941 and 1942. Denoël’s three biggest moneymakers of the early 1940s were Triolet and two violently antisemitic collaborationist writers, Lucien Rebatet and LouisFerdinand Céline.96 By the time Denoël published Le Cheval blanc in 1943, Triolet was not thinking of sales but fearing for her life. On March 21, 1943, SS-Obersturmführer Heinz Röthke of the Gestapo in France ordered, with some faulty information, the immediate arrest of “the Jewish Elsa Kagan, called Triolet, mistress of a so-called Aragon, Jewish as well.”97 She had already entered into clandestinity the previous year, after the occupation of the Southern Zone. In the summer of 1943, she and Aragon went into hiding in Saint-Donat, the seat of the Forces françaises de l’intérieure in the Drôme-nord region, where she cofounded and helped run the clandestine newspaper La Drôme en armes.98 That Triolet was one of Denoël’s best-selling authors when she had to run for her life highlights not so much a moral gray area as the strange fate of a successful Jewish émigré writer in occupied France. Likewise, Denoël continued to sell Jean Malaquais’s Les Javanais under the Occupation. Denoël had helped Triolet during the war by advancing her money for her work. But this same person was also put on trial for collusion with the enemy, although Triolet gave him her support during the trial. Denoël was found innocent, but he was assassinated under mysterious circumstances just before he could testify at his publishing house’s trial for collaboration.99 Le premier accroc was published by Denoël the year before he

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went on trial, while one of the stories in that collection, “Les Amants d’Avignon,” had been published by the clandestine Éditions de Minuit in 1943.100 Triolet’s insider-outsider status—as a woman who was both in hiding and at the center of the intellectual Resistance—and her new use for multilingualism would be apparent in Le premier accroc, which she penned during the last two years of the Occupation.

The Woman in the Painting

Le premier accroc, whose title refers to the code announcing the Normandy landings, is comprised of four connected short stories. Each relates to a character’s entry into the Resistance; the work includes the stories of Louise Delfort, a journalist who was raised in Russia, and the painter Alexis Slavsky, the grandchild of Polish and Russian Jewish immigrants. The title of the collection, Le premier accroc coûte deux cents francs, is also the name of one of the short stories—the only one written after the liberation of France. Although the book’s title is translated as A Fine of Two Hundred Francs, it actually means “the first snag costs two hundred francs.” A premier accroc refers to a small tear in clothing, the snag that must be sewn up before the rest of the clothing unravels. As Triolet explains the image on the very last page of her book, the snag is the coming apart of the Occupation; the Resistance is pulling apart the very fabric of the Occupation so that it unravels at the seams. This intimate, domestic language of the snag in the clothing that makes it all come apart seems like the opposite of the plaster corset. And indeed, in Triolet’s wartime writing, language and bilingualism are freedom rather than a trap. In Triolet’s preface to her novel in Œuvres romanesques croisées, “Préface à la clandestinité” (Preface to clandestinity), she explains a shift in her motivations for writing in French under the Occupation. The 1930s were a terrible time for Triolet’s writing because of her displacement (dépaysement) in France and in French. But she poses the question of what she would have written if there hadn’t been a war; the war, and her work for the Resistance, seem to have shocked her into writing a new reflection on language and on Jews in France—in French. Her Resistance writing was “the free and difficult expression of a single worry: to liberate oneself from an intolerable state of affairs.”101 No longer imagined as a plaster corset, French is the language

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of self-liberation and self-expression, and, through her Resistance writing, of literal liberation from Nazi Occupation. Triolet states: “Writing was my freedom, my defiance, my luxury.”102 Just when the political situation was at its worst, writing in French became not a prison house of language but rather a means of self-understanding and action, of resistance itself. Furthermore, just as she was in the most danger as a Jewish person, it was in French and under the Occupation that she began to write about Jewish identity. Her first fictional Jewish protagonist is Alexis Slavsky of the second story in Le premier accroc, entitled “La Vie privée ou Alexis Slavsky, artiste-peintre” (translated by Helena Lewis as “The Private Life of Alexis Slavsky, Painter”). This short story also marks the first time that Triolet addresses the complexities of French Jewish identity in her fictional writing. The painter Alexis Slavsky, the grandchild of a Jewish Russian émigré and his wife Henriette, flee Paris for Avignon, then Lyon, and finally Saint-Donat. Triolet and Aragon took the same trajectory themselves during the war. The very first words of the story explain that Alexis leaves Paris because he has a Polish last name and because of his Jewish background, the weight of which Triolet represents through the painting of his grandmother Esther that he brings with him from place to place. This is an anchoring object throughout much of the story. Triolet does not make Alexis an immigrant, nor does she grant him the burden of bilingualism. Instead, she reflects on the second generation of an immigrant family. The painting of Esther, and Alexis’s attachment to it, depict a French Jewish identity that is stuck in a republican mode that has been destroyed under the Occupation. As in her other texts, Triolet provides us with a meaningful image—here, a woman in a painting who is as fixed and unmoving as the image of the plaster corset. In the opening of the short story, the narrator traces Alexis’s family history of migration through the painting. It exists thanks to the fortunes of his émigré grandparents: “Alexis Slavsky, painter, was second-generation French, the product of the blue blood of a petty Polish nobleman and the red blood of a beautiful Russian Jewess [ juive]. These two had come to Paris about a century ago to squander their combined fortunes, derived from land and finance.”103 This is a description out of the nineteenth century of a Jewish family, from the notion of a dilapidated fortune

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accumulated through finance, to the degeneration of a family, to the image of the belle juive. Maurice Samuels identifies this literary cliché: “The belle juive, or ‘beautiful Jewess,’ along with her usurious male counterpart would provide Romantic novelists—and historians, artists, and composers—with a way of registering a fundamental ambivalence toward Jews just as they were beginning to enter the social and economic mainstream in the early decades of the nineteenth century.”104 Esther, “this beautiful grandmother, with her elaborate coiffure, her eyes like gold louis, her slender body, so lovely in its voluminous gown of green velvet, it was she who was now at the origin of Alexis’s misfortunes.”105 Yet Alexis makes sure that this source of misfortune comes with him to Lyon during his exile from Paris. He is the male counterpoint to the cliché, the holder and beholder, although Triolet saves him from the stereotypes of the usurer. He refuses to profit from the painting, rejecting at his own risk a German black marketeer’s request to buy it even when he comments to Alexis’s wife, “Esther? That’s a Jewish name. How does your husband’s grandmother happen to have a Jewish name?”106 In the manuscript of her novel, Triolet reworked the image of the grandmother and Alexis’s origins, laboring over and changing important details. Most notably, she hesitated about how distant the family’s history of immigration should be. The manuscript draft, for example, reads: “Alexis Slavsky, third- second-generation French.”107 She also toyed with the idea of making both his grandmothers Jewish, or “pas très catholiques” (a play on words that means “not very Catholic” but also “a bit fishy,” in an ironic nod to their Jewishness).108 In the end, she decided to describe his family as more recent immigrants on his father’s side, now with a Russian Jew and a Polish nobleman on one side only. Perhaps having a Jewish grandmother, rather than a greatgrandmother, would make Alexis’s identity crisis more immediate. Although he has only one Jewish grandparent, and is thus not legally considered Jewish under Vichy law, Triolet makes much of his Jewish background. Early in the novel, Alexis considers himself among the defeated in a war waged against himself. When staying with non-Jewish friends in the Dordogne, he considers that they can easily follow the times and side with the winners. But Alexis laments that he is named Slavsky and that his grandmother is named Esther—that is, he has a foreign and Jewish background and therefore cannot change his fate.109

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The object that stands for Alexis’s Jewish and Russian background is the portrait of his grandmother Esther. Ironically, the symbol of his foreignness is also what gives Alexis “the feeling [l’impression] of being at home” when he receives the painting sent to Lyon from Paris.110 In her manuscript notes, Triolet writes that it merely gives him the “illusion” of being at home (l’illusion d’un chez soi). But in the final version, Alexis clings to his place in France through the painting. Triolet softens the terms for Alexis’s struggle to maintain a French Jewish identity; it is not completely false (l’illusion), but it is nevertheless not based in objective reality and can change (l’impression).111 Here, in the manuscript, the narrator points out that Esther places her hands on a book, possibly a livre de messe; in the published version she holds a Bible or a livre de messe, which Helena Lewis renders in English as “the Bible or a prayer book.”112 Could she have converted? Is this the impression of being at home, at home in France? However, there is no indication in the manuscripts or in the published version that she converted from Judaism. Alexis always addresses his Jewish past in terms of Esther. He rejects the idea of returning to Paris because he refuses to ask for permission from the authorities: “I have no intention of going into long explanations about my name, and about Esther! I was always taught that it’s impolite to ask people about their religion. I am a well-bred man and I find that in grossly bad taste, a coarse indiscretion!”113 He is in the odd position of not being defined as a Jew under Vichy law yet of being alienated because of his Jewish background. In impassioned, or disconcerted, run-on sentences, he asserts his private life (hence the title of the story) in the tradition of French universalism. As Diane Holmes points out, Alexis does not accept that there can no longer be any distinction between “personal destiny and political events.”114 Another way to say this, with another emphasis, might be that his religion can no longer remain in the private realm under the Occupation, for it is the very target of the discriminatory laws. He even mentions that if he had fake papers, he would seek permission to go to the Occupied Zone just to cheat the authorities. But precisely because his papers are authentic and he still has civil rights (under Vichy law he is not considered Jewish), he is too disgusted to face them. This strange situation was also a particular choice made by Triolet. As noted, in an early manuscript of the novel, both grandmothers were Jewish, and Alexis would be considered Jewish if he married someone in his same situation.

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Right after Alexis refuses to sell the painting of Esther, the French police show up at his apartment and tear it apart. The commissioner who is with them even complains about Slavs. The narrator calls this situation “a sinister disorder, a pogrom.”115 This reference to a pogrom was added later to the novel and does not appear in the manuscript versions. In all versions, though, the impression of home that the painting gives him turns out to be an illusion after all. Triolet changes the manuscript to make Alexis’s disappointment all the more poignant. We see that Alexis is painfully wrong when he exclaims that his Judaism is a matter of discretion. He learns that “private life” and “the illusion of security behind one’s walls” are “a vestige of the past.”116 Triolet also played with the details of the Slavsky home and the setting for Esther’s portrait in her notes and in the two manuscript versions of the story. In the published novel, before Alexis and Henriette manage to find a furnished apartment, they stay at a hotel near the place du Pont. In the manuscript, at first the location near the place du Pont is their only apartment, although this seems to change as Triolet progresses in the manuscript notebook. Triolet compares the square near this Slavsky home to the deck of a ship carrying immigrants: “The square really resembled a It was truly a deck, the deck of a boat where there swarmed a crowd of emigrants who awaited, idly, the problematic arrival somewhere anywhere. . . . Streets, courtyards arrive from everywhere open onto an interminable arm of a starfish on the square.”117 The streets and connecting courtyards are like a rush of people coming in. Triolet crosses out the verb resembles, inserting the adverb truly in its place, so that the square does not merely resemble the deck of ship, but it is such a vessel in reality. In the manuscript version, their apartment is the site of an immigrant passage, an in-between space, where waiting people neither arrive nor depart. Arriving is “problematic.”118 But in the final, published version Triolet toned this down, writing instead: “The square itself, in the shape of the bridge of a ship, carried a crowd of idle passengers waiting for the motionless boat to arrive somewhere.”119 We still get the sense of a thwarted journey but without the reference to migration. In the manuscript, this location by the place du Pont is where Esther gives them a sense of home; in the final version, they only receive the painting from Paris in their next Lyon apartment.

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The walls where Esther’s portrait hangs in the published version of the novel are in Alexis and Henriette’s furnished Lyon apartment. Their new home faces a street named, significantly, the rue de la Juiverie ( Jewry Street). In the final publication, Triolet describes the rue de la Juiverie as a narrow street leading nowhere, repeating the word narrow multiple times.120 It is also accessed through a dizzying architectural description that is disorientating to the reader. One must follow steep staircases and traboules, the passageways between building courtyards for which Lyon is famous and which also enabled people in the Resistance to move unobtrusively from one street to another. “The entrance to the narrow passageway, or traboule, as they say in Lyon, leading to the courtyard, lay between the door of the funicular station and that of a small bistro called Chez Thérèse.”121 We even see a nod here to her novel about immigration in interwar Paris, Bonsoir, Thérèse. After living on a square that marks a migration with no departure or arrival, they now live on the narrow rue de la Juiverie, which is accessed through a complex series of steep and narrow staircases and which leads nowhere. Triolet, who was a trained architect, seems to be using architecture and urban design to convey the difficulty of migration and the impossibility of continuing the same French Jewish identity from before the Occupation. Alexis and Henriette leave Lyon for Saint-Donat. Toward the end of Alexis’s story, the image of Esther is replaced when he sees his own reflection in a window. After he hears a knock at the door one stormy night in Saint-Donat, he tries to look through the window pane: “The black night beyond made a mirror of [the window], and he could only see his own reflection, blurred and broken, streaming with water.”122 Presented with his own reflection, and not a vision of Esther, Alexis decides to help the man on the other side of the window. This is a turning point, when Alexis stops referring to himself as one of the defeated, stops thinking about his Jewish background, and first engages in an act of Resistance. On the other side of the door—out in the open and not behind closed doors—stands Jean, a young Frenchman escaping from the Service du travail obligatoire (Compulsory Labor Service, STO), the program through which hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen were deported to Germany. Its extreme unpopularity boosted recruitment into the Resistance and weakened the public’s support of Vichy. People became much more willing to go against Vichy

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laws to help escapees of the STO.123 Alexis is one of them. That night, Jean teaches Alexis about the maquis, and they both sleep the “sleep of the just.”124 Alexis does not enter the Resistance out of Jewish solidarity; the man he saves is not tracked because he is Jewish. Alexis begins to act only when he stops looking to Esther. Triolet seems to be making a larger comment on Jewish identity here, writing against Jewish particularism. While Alexis is living in Saint-Donat, he meets an old acquaintance, the journalist Louise Delfort, from his Montparnasse days. Louise is now in the Communist Resistance and is also living in hiding. In another short story in the collection, “Cahiers enterrés sous un pêcher” (“Notebooks Buried under a Peach Tree”), we read Louise’s private reactions to Alexis. She decries Alexis’s attitude about being a victim because he is a Jewish man. When Louise rages against Alexis’s lack of a political consciousness in her diaries, she accuses him of using his Jewish grandmother and his foreign name as an excuse to focus on what is, to her mind, his own not particularly unfortunate position. She declares that she “deserve[s] credit for not having slapped him sometimes when he starts complaining of all his troubles, brought upon him by his foreign last name and his having a grandmother named Esther. But what have they really done to him? Nothing whatever.”125 She continues that no one he loves has been killed or deported, that he has not been thrown in prison or tortured the way her comrades have been: “He doesn’t know what it is to love a people, the people.”126 Louise’s dismissal of a particularly Jewish victimization is difficult to read today, knowing that Triolet suffered as a Jewish émigré, and not only as a Communist activist. Triolet would repeat this same idea in her postwar novel Le Rendezvous des étrangers (Foreigners’ rendez-vous, 1956), about foreigners living in Paris amid the disillusion of the postwar period. One character, Olga Heller, resembles Louise in many ways. She is an unmarried but well-off Russian woman living in Paris and a former member of the Communist Resistance. In each novel, Olga and Louise are friends with Elizabeth, a character who also appears in Le Cheval blanc. For mysterious reasons, Olga says she chose to use a Jewish last name in place of her true one, even though she is not Jewish. Olga—the new Louise—repeats Louise’s tropes in her criticism of Alexis, and again refuses to accept Jewish victimization over a decade after

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the original Louise did. Olga rebukes a young Jewish Frenchman, who discusses the many persecutions in Jewish history and his own encounters with antisemitism in France as the basis of his motivation for moving to Israel. Using the same tone that Louise takes with Alexis, Olga exclaims: “The yellow star, yes, I know, I saw it. . . . But that is fascism, you see, fascism—you know what that is, sir! All Jews should know it, better than anyone—and yet no! There are some, like you, who make of it a purely Jewish misfortune. Think of all your compatriots who gave their lives against fascism, the yellow star among others, here, in France . . . your compatriots, French, Jewish or not.”127 Olga insists that he already has a country, France. Who is trying to take it away, she asks? Her question is oddly tone-deaf, as only a decade before, Frenchness was literally taken away from Jews and indeed from this very character whom she criticizes. But Olga argues that antisemitism will go the way of many of society’s ills in a new order. In Le premier accroc, Louise, instead of dismissing Alexis, gives him two Resistance tracts that change his life. They have nothing to do with Jewish deportation and contain no mention of Jews. The tracts report on the degradations of Auschwitz and a female resister who was decapitated in the prison of Fresnes.128 In articles that call on the Red Cross for aid, the word Jewish is not mentioned once. Instead, the deportees are described as French, as patriots, and as deported French workers sent to Germany. This is very much in line with the way Renée Poznanski describes the silence about Jewish persecution in the clandestine press across many different movements in the Resistance, a silence in which Triolet participates. Louise and Jean open Alexis’s eyes to what is unfolding in France, encouraging him to move beyond his own situation as a Jewish person. After Alexis begins to take action, the portrait of Esther, the imagery so important to the first half of the story, suddenly disappears from the rest of the text. Alexis’s story ends soon after his entry into the Resistance, with him painting a new canvas, maybe his best work, a scene of a hotel café with a German soldier and a prostitute. It is a painting about his contemporary surroundings, not an image that looks to the past, no matter how comforting it is. The figures on the canvas are surrounded by the golden disks of peach trees. The peach trees of Saint-Donat are in bloom as Alexis joins the Resistance. In “Préface à la clandestinité,” Triolet does not refer to Alexis’s

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Jewishness but to his overabsorption in his vocation as a painter. She also imagines an alternative ending where he would have been captured and tortured but would have heroically refrained from divulging information, all the while regretting his painterly craft in a way that shows the importance of his art.129 In Le premier accroc itself, however, painting is not discussed in terms of a craft in general but in terms of the physical painting of Esther. In a different ending in which Alexis never entered the Resistance, Triolet almost went the exact opposite way with her character: in her manuscript version, Alexis was originally supposed to die of peritonitis before going to Saint-Donat.130 Rather than depicting either of these two alternative deaths of Alexis, Triolet frames the short story with two paintings, the portrait of Esther and Alexis’s new painting that engages with contemporary life in France. Alexis must abandon what the painting of Esther represents. He does not hide it in shame, in the language of Triolet’s 1928 diary entry; rather, he replaces an old model with a new form of action. Alexis does not resist as a Jew and the child of Russian Jewish and Polish immigrants; he instead joins the Resistance only when he moves beyond identifying as a Jewish victim of the war and begins to see himself as part of an international struggle. We find in Triolet the approach explained by Annie Kriegel—that is, a fusion with the Communist ideal to the point that Jewishness disappears. Triolet’s characters reject a specifically Jewish persecution in the war, even in the 1950s when the horrifying scope of the murder of the Jews was known. Jews are part of the story, but they are not central to it. Triolet appears to have written, revised, and added references to Jews. This is of course the case with Alexis’s Jewish background, but we see this at work elsewhere in the collection of stories. In the story about the Normandy landings, “Le premier accroc coûte deux cents francs,” the doctor in the village where a wounded parachutist has landed provides fake papers “for the young, for the Jews, for the hunted.”131 Triolet added this line to the story, and it is not in the original manuscript.132 Likewise, in the same short story, the villagers imagine that a French resister who shows up might be a curate, a Jew, a freemason, or a career officer.133 This is also a comment that Triolet added that does not appear in the original manuscript. Jews are among the hunted, but Triolet’s story does not revolve around the Jewish experience of the war; she seemed to be working out just exactly how Jews did fit into that experience as she was writing her book.

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Under the peach trees of Saint-Donat—the same ones that Alexis paints— are buried the diaries of Louise Delfort. These diaries comprise the story “Cahiers enterrés sous un pêcher.” Just as in Gary’s novel Éducation européenne, here too we find a text within a text as well as a reflection on language and writing. Through Louise, a French journalist in the Resistance who grew up in Russia, we find a new meditation on the now positive force of bilingualism and writing through the image of uncovering buried notebooks. Louise’s lover dug up her diaries after her deportation. Reading Louise’s buried notebooks is a process of exhuming a woman’s political voice that has grown out of her bilingual Russian youth. We never hear or see her lover, whose discovery is only announced at the end of the story, and it is as if the notebooks resurrect themselves. Triolet wrote the story while she, like her character, was living in hiding in Saint-Donat. She hid the very notebooks containing Louise’s story—her manuscripts of the fictional work written in notebooks— under a tree near her home, just as her character does. The fictional notebooks that she mentions in the book are also real notebooks, now conserved at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The reader uncovering Louise’s notebooks, like the researcher digging up Triolet’s archival materials, participates in an entwined story of writing, for Triolet mixes her own clandestinely published Resistance articles with Louise’s words. None of these tracts, however, refers to Jewish persecution, and Louise is not a Jewish character. The notion of exhuming buried writing is particularly apt here, for women’s participation in the Resistance and their writing in the clandestine press have often been forgotten. Even at the turn of this century, historian Claire Andrieu noted the lack of histories and sociological studies of women in the Resistance in the French context, studying why women—as opposed to their male peers—had so often gone unrecognized by the French government.134 Triolet received the Médaille de la Résistance in 1947, although she was not among the six women (as opposed to the 1,036 men) who were decorated by the Ordre de la Libération.135 In her groundbreaking work, Paula Schwartz argues for an expanded definition of the Resistance, maintaining that women have been underrepresented in histories of the Resistance as well as in official recognition because of the nature of their work. That work

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included domestic activities like housing, feeding, and hiding combatants, as well as carrying messages, using resources from secretarial work, among many other tasks. Not categorized as a form of combat, this work is not usually associated with the Resistance even though it was essential and also highly dangerous.136 Schwartz also demonstrates that new tasks like working in the clandestine press and collecting intelligence, which Triolet did, were not necessarily predefined by gender roles.137 Valerie Deacon has shown the necessity of continuing to study women involved in combat, women who were driven by many different political standpoints that predated the war, from the Communist Left to the Far Right.138 Triolet’s work belongs to this heterogeneous Resistance, one in which women’s political work has remained understudied. Her clandestine journalism and her fictional Le premier accroc go against typical narratives of women in the Resistance. Even when she won the Prix Goncourt for Le premier accroc in 1945, she was already being marginalized and maligned. Susan Cavani points out the dismissive media coverage, quoting from one newspaper headline that read: “Aragon’s wife wins Prix Goncourt.”139 Triolet wrote to her friend and Aragon’s translator, Hannah Josephson, in Connecticut that year about her new book and her need to defend herself against “relentless enemies”: “I will tell you without modesty or bitterness that on the one hand it is a big public success here” and on the other, it is received by “highbrows” and specialists with “an implied denigration (hardly expressed until now but that day will come!)”140 Louise, like almost all of Triolet’s female characters in her wartime writing, is transformed from a marginal figure in the interwar period into an accepted member of the Resistance in the Communist network. The wartime diaries that make up her story showcase her bilingualism as a source of internal richness, one that is at the center of her desire to be a writer of the Communist Resistance. Louise shares the fate of Triolet’s other, similar protagonists who include marginalized unmarried mothers, unemployed women with precarious housing situations, women working among men, and immigrants. Scholars have noted this theme, although I argue that it is precisely because of the characters’ outsider identities and not in spite of them that they become political fighters.141 In Louise’s case, being an outsider is grounded in both her Russian background and her writerly profession.

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In “Préface à la clandestinité,” Triolet maintains that the biography of the character depends upon the biography of the author.142 A basic lesson in the study of literature is that the author is not her character; however, Triolet pushes against this idea again and again in her preface and in the story by making her writing Louise’s. But what is even more interesting is that Triolet makes Louise into a mirror image of herself: “I gave Louise a past that was not authentically mine, but I did want it to be Russian.”143 Louise’s situation is Triolet’s in reverse; she is a Frenchwoman, not Jewish, who grows up in Russia, where she learns Russian. Through her character, Triolet examines Russian identity from the inside out. Like her previous characters, Louise experiences her Russianness and Frenchness through language. She recalls her childhood in linguistic terms, musing that the Russian landscape of her youth speaks “the true language of the heart.”144 But 1917 arrives, the family returns to Paris, Louise marries, tragically loses a child, divorces, and goes on to become a journalist and travel the world. Louise experiences travel through language, and, much like Fondane wrote about the joy of language and travel in the poem “Exercice de français,” she recalls: “I loved the cadence of an unknown language, the strange food, all the surprises of a strange town [. . .]. I loved traveling as others love the gaming table.”145 Yet she also expresses the return to her native country through an attachment to language, rather than in terms of an impossible reconciliation between native and adopted tongues: “I loved to return to Paris, to come home, too. What bliss to discover the little casket of home, where everything is so welladapted to your body, made to your measure: the language, the temperature, the countryside, the street, the bedroom, the bed, every sound!”146 This is a far cry from Varvara, the protagonist of Triolet’s last Russian novel, Camouflage, who cannot integrate her Russian past into her French present. Language is not the plaster corset burrowing into your bones but rather a plush bed that contours your own forms and shapes. Triolet’s Resistance character is the opposite: Louise is a Frenchwoman who learned Russian, and who can combine the two identities. Louise’s path in the Resistance is revealed through her diaries, which she composes because she is pushed by the impulse to write about her past between Russia and France. In a reversal of Proustian involuntary memory, she feels the urge to write, for only in writing does she fully experience the

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memory of her Russian past. Memories of her childhood flash before her, but only writing catches the smallest detail that reveals the most: When I write, “I wore a brown uniform and a brown pinafore to school . . . ,” I feel the woolen dress on my skin, Nounou’s hands buttoning my high collar, the crossed shoulder bands of the pinafore [. . .]. I see and feel a thousand

things. It’s a professional distortion to wish to set down a memory in writing, to fix poor fragments of it, instead of being content to dream luxurious dreams. What a strange need to write, “I wore a brown uniform . . .”147

Louise’s “strange need” to note down a seemingly minor detail about her schoolgirl uniform is not simply daydreaming. This comment on writing is also political in that it opens the door to her deeply pro-Communist memories of Soviet Russia. Louise portrays travel to the Soviet Union in idealized terms. Recalling her 1936 visit to Leningrad, she describes the palatial Hotel Astoria, inhabited by workers, as well as an overnight train to Moscow with its beautifully upholstered, solidly built compartments that are covered in floral-printed velour, lit by electricity, and not restricted to an upper class.148 Tired of people being surprised by her Communist engagement, Louise exclaims: “It’s true, I work with the Communists against the Boches! I’ve almost come to believe that among intellectuals there are organic anti-Communists, just as there are pathological anti-Semites!”149 These idealized images of Soviet Russia are all the more surprising, given that Triolet was aware of the murderous 1937 Moscow trials, in which her brother-in-law, Lili’s second husband, the general Vitaliy Primakov, was condemned and executed. But Triolet defends her party at a time when she not only had to uphold her own French identity but also that of her party. She entered into active Resistance in February 1941, long before the termination of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact on June 22, 1941, and thus before the organization of an official Communist Resistance in France. After the end of the Nazi-Soviet alliance, Triolet was at the center of the Communist intellectual Resistance when, as cofounder of the CNE Jean Lescure explains, the Communists had difficulty convincing many French intellectuals to join their ranks: They “had trouble getting people to swallow their Frenchness, as we would say now, their nationalism and their patriotism.”150 Communists, Lescure says, remained foreign. But in Louise’s diaries, the link to Russia

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and to the Soviet Union does not preclude her Frenchness. Rather, these notebooks uncover the female political voice committed to the Communist Resistance because of, and inspired by, a childhood in Russia and visits to the Soviet Union. Through Louise’s act of writing, specifically about her Russian past, Triolet shows us that a woman writing the self is meaningful as well as political. But ironically, Triolet does so through Louise’s own doubts about her writing. Louise expresses the fear that her diaries are a waste of time on multiple occasions: “I haven’t much time to mark up [noircir] my exercise books, I have too many useful things to write nowadays.”151 Her dismissal of her own act of private writing as noircir implies writing too much, filling up, or even wasting, page after page (noircir du papier), or making a situation seem darker than it is (noircir la situation). Louise considers her clandestine journalism useful and legitimate, but she refers to her personal diaries as “a kind of vice, my journey into memories of the past.”152 A few pages later, Louise decides to stop writing in her diary for a time: “But really now, I must get down to work. I have important things to write.”153 This is not the last time she refers to her private writing as unimportant. Triolet added in ink on the manuscript version the same phrase that had already appeared twice, insisting on saying for a third time that she had “to write useful things.”154 And yet, despite her constant dismissiveness, her entire story is her private writing; her personal diaries themselves present her political activities to the reader. “Préface à la clandestinité” could provide a clue: Triolet explains that under the Occupation writing became her obsession, and that the content of her writing was dictated by this obsession to “liberate myself from an intolerable state of affairs.”155 Later in the preface, Triolet refers directly to the moment in which Louise feels the need to write about her school uniform, stating that this line has become a major literary concern of hers. It shows an anxiety about writing and time, about how time is condensed in the novel, how the bounds over the passage of time in the novel give her “the vertigo of a void.”156 Louise feels a sense of urgency to note down her thoughts just as Triolet urgently wrote her book during the war. The themes of aging and time are also at the heart of her novella, “Qui est cet étranger qui n’est pas d’ici?” In another section Louise implies that her writing exists for a male gaze rather than for her own personal benefit: “Yes, this time I would like

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to write to please a man, to use writing as a means of seduction.” 157 But Louise’s seduction is a political one: her writing does seduce her neighbor Alexis Slavsky, who reads one of her journals, but not in a romantic sense. Rather, it seduces him into joining the Resistance. The scene in which he saves the young man running from being deported with the STO actually occurs right after he finishes reading Louise’s diary. Furthermore, in this statement Louise turns around the textual relations Triolet had experienced: Mayakovsky’s veneration of her sister as his muse and what Marie-Thérèse Eychart has called the Yeux d’Elsa syndrome—that is, Aragon’s mythologizing of Triolet, especially in the famous 1942 collection of poems Les Yeux d’Elsa (Elsa’s eyes), which prevented the literary scene from appreciating her as a writer and an individual beyond being Aragon’s muse.158 Here instead a woman writes about her experience of migration, journalism, and Resistance to change the life of a male artist. Louise is not just a character who shares Triolet’s past; through her name, she also takes on the feminine form of Aragon’s first name, Louis. The process of reading Louise’s fictional notebooks involves not only digging up layers of soil but also excavating strata of writing as Triolet weaves her own political writing into Louise’s. Entire sections of the story appear word for word in an actual article Triolet published as a report in Les Lettres françaises, the Resistance newspaper she was a key member in founding. She was also the only female contributor aside from Édith Thomas. Even more than taking a stand for Communism, Triolet is also making the point that women writing the self in the war is political in and of itself. Triolet refers to Louise in the essay “Préface à la clandestinité” as if this character were a real person: “When I left to do a report in the maquis, I brought along with me Louise Delfort.”159 A section of Louise’s own fieldwork in the maquis of the Lot region in Le premier accroc is taken word for word from the article that Triolet published in the May 1944 issue of Les Lettres françaises, “Aux armes, citoyens!,” mentioned earlier as one of the results of her visit to the maquis with Marcenac. By weaving private and published Resistance writing in Le premier accroc, Triolet makes the case not only for women’s political voices but also for the role language plays in their writing. As her character Louise reflects on her Russian upbringing, we see that the exposure to bilingualism

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and switching back and forth with ease between languages reveal the very political force of language. Through writing and language, as both an engaged Communist journalist and a woman writing a diary, Louise resists. o In Triolet’s prefaces from the Œuvres romanesques croisées collection, she reflects on writing in the context of her political stances as anchored in historical moments. In “Préface à la contrebande” (Preface to contraband activities) and “Préface à la clandestinité” we see a clear shift from displacement in French in the 1930s to writing in French as a form of liberation under the Occupation. But in “Préface au mal de pays” (Preface to homesickness), introducing her novel Le Rendez-vous des étrangers, Triolet returns to her bilingual pain now in postwar France. She calls bilingualism an anomaly that makes an immigrant “doubly foreign.”160 Language, she states, is “the major reason why a foreigner remains a foreigner and cries for his homeland.”161 Ironically, during the war, when Triolet’s life was in danger as a foreigner and a Jew, multilingualism was a source of personal freedom and action. After the war, once she was safe and even lauded by the Goncourt, Triolet returned to her prewar sense of being an outsider signified through bilingualism. She declares herself a Russian who writes in French.162 Being in another country away from the sensibilities of home, she writes, is like trying to plug yourself into the wrong socket: “The machine called man no longer functions; plugged into a voltage that is not his own, 110 instead of 220, or the reverse, he doesn’t work, and sometimes he even burns out his motor.163 Burning out the wiring of a motor seems to bring us back to the barbed wire of language, to the boning of a corset. As opposed to writing in French as a source of freedom, as opposed to burying notebooks under blossoming trees, here again language is an unforgiving mode. Triolet does not write about a particular Jewish voice in French, as Fondane, Malaquais, and Gary do. She rebukes this idea in Le Rendez-vous des étrangers through her character Olga Heller. Heller cries to the young French Jew who has survived the war: “You are French, sir, as I, for example, will never be. . . . No matter how I have loved France, I will never be French, I was born elsewhere.”164 Heller states that he is French in part because French is

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his native tongue and he has no foreign accent. He is integrated into French life, and his French has nothing particularly Jewish about it. Olga instead questions how a foreigner can find a way in the French language. Triolet describes the way she did it: “Gnashing my teeth, tearing out my hair . . . persuading myself that living in France, sharing the quotidian and the exceptional parts of its destiny, and having the reality of which I am part as the material for my writing, I had to write in French for the French.”165

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D I S P L AC I N G S T ER E O T Y P ES Irène Némirovsky in the Occupied Zone

Ir ène Némirovsky pr e sent s a counterpoint to the other authors in this book, as she entirely removed Jewish voice and language from her wartime writing. She allows us to revisit many topics explored by the writers in this study, but from a contrasting perspective: accent and bilingualism; the exode and representations of displacement in France; and the othering of Eastern European Jews in the press. Némirovsky’s writing career was tragically cut short by her murder in Auschwitz in 1942. Her work had been forgotten for many years until the publication of her posthumously discovered novel, Suite française, which she wrote while living in Burgundy during the first half of the Occupation. Suite française, a rare depiction of the June 1940 exode from Paris and a nuanced portrayal of the beginning of the Occupation, became a bestseller in France and the United States in the early 2000s. But in this depiction of the Occupation, something is missing: Jews. In a scathing review in the New Republic Ruth Franklin called Némirovsky’s depiction of Jews in her interwar novels antisemitic and her erasure of Jews from Suite française further proof of her Jewish self-hatred.1 Other critics, however, have pointed to Némirovsky’s ambivalence about her place as a French Jewish writer. Jonathan Weiss refers to this choice as her continued effort “to create for herself a purely French identity.”2 Alice Kaplan has argued that Némirovsky’s text is an “unsparing critique of the part of France she had once emulated.”3 In The Némirovsky Question, Susan Suleiman maintains that “there is a Jew in

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this novel”—namely, the narrator, who sees all that the French are doing at the start of the Occupation.4 I would argue that the underlying question to pose about Suite française should not necessarily be, Why are there no Jews in her story? (not writing about Jewish people is not in itself self-hating) but rather, Why did she abandon her career-long interest in stereotypes and the role of language for her characters who were often Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe? I take up Suleiman’s call that “negative stereotypes must be examined not in isolation but in terms of their function in the work as a whole” in order to give Némirovsky’s texts “the careful reading they deserve.”5 In this chapter I look at Némirovsky’s response to her portrayal by the press as the “Oriental” Russian Jewish Other—a stereotype that displaces her from her adopted home of France—in her representations of Jewish bilingualism as a source both of inspiration for her characters and of repulsion based on antisemitic stereotypes. I trace a marked shift in the wartime period, when Némirovsky distanced herself from these stereotypes and the rhetoric of the right-wing periodicals in which she published. Instead, Némirovsky explored the notion of displacement itself, but without any use of Jewish language or characters, in three short stories that revolve around the town of Montjeu (sometimes spelled Monjeu in her works)—a Suite Montjeu—whose name was inspired by a farm close to where she lived in Burgundy under the Occupation during the last years of her life.

Jewish Bilingualism and the Interwar Period

Throughout her literary career, Némirovsky tried to find “the way in,” to use Leo Spitzer’s expression, by obtaining degrees from a French university, joining a profession, and perfecting her command of the national language to the point of becoming a successful writer who was published and admired in even the most traditional settings.6 But in key interwar publications, Némirovsky depicts Russian Jewish backgrounds and Jewish bilingualism in particular; her portrayals of Russian-Hebrew and French-Yiddish bilingualism show an ambivalence about seeing these languages as both a deep link to a communal past and a source of artistic genius, as well as a preclusion to acceptance and assimilation. She also writes about Russian-French bilingualism among upwardly mobile Russian Jews as another linguistic dynamic of Jewish life.

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Némirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903 and grew up in the elegant Pechersk district, where Jews in only certain positions were allowed to live.7 In 1914, with her father’s fortunes increasing, the family moved to Saint Petersburg with the documentation required of Jews to live in the capital. She spoke French at home and had a French governess, both signs of her class. The language of the house was not Russian—or Yiddish, which her mother forbade. In 1917, she and her family fled the Bolshevik Revolution, traveling first to Moscow and then to Finland and Sweden. They settled in Paris in 1919 along with thousands of anti-Bolshevik refugees fleeing the new Communist government. Most of these immigrants were not Jewish, although families like Némirovsky’s—the rare Jewish families that had risen through the ranks of society in the Russian Empire—took part in this exile.8 A year after she arrived in Paris, Némirovsky enrolled at the Sorbonne to study Russian literature, testifying to her quick integration into French life. Némirovsky’s correspondence with her friend Madeleine Avot offers a glimpse of her grappling with her Russian background as an adolescent immigrant. Némirovsky openly discusses with Avot the gulf between her Russian and French social circles, but in none of her dozens of letters does she mention her Jewish milieu. Instead, she refers to a connection to her Russian past. In an undated letter, she states that she has to get serious about her studies at the Sorbonne, after having gone out every night of the week. Describing a party with her Russian friends in Paris, she reports: “On Saturday night I had a lot of fun. It was the Russian January 1. There was a dance at the Russian Circle. I found all my little flirts.”9 At the start of the party, she felt “completely disoriented [dépaysée], almost like a foreigner in their midst.” The adjective Némirovsky employs—dépaysée—indicates not only uncertainty but also displacement from one’s comfort zone, or literally from one’s country. Nevertheless, she warmed up to the party over the course of the evening, dancing all night long. It took time for her to get used to being around Russians in France, she writes. In a letter written to Avot on May 15, 1922, Némirovsky describes another gathering with Russian friends, this time with several gigolos or kept men (a kind of character she would depict later in numerous novels).10 She jokes that she wishes Madeleine had been there just so she could shock her. And when she entertains Russians, Némirovsky continues, she does not dare invite René, Madeleine’s brother,

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through whom Némirovsky had befriended Madeleine, for fear of corrupting him. She seems to find a perverse joy in the company of her Russian friends, who were to be kept separate from her French ones. From a young age she found it difficult to reconcile these two spheres. She remained within her family’s milieu. In 1926, she married Michel Epstein, a Jewish banker who had immigrated from Moscow to Paris, both at the mayor’s office and in a religious ceremony at a synagogue. While she mentions nothing about the social world of Jewish adolescents in her letters to Avot in the 1920s, in her published texts she would deal with Jewishness and foreignness in great detail. She rose in the literary scene in 1929 after the appearance of her novel David Golder with the reputable publishing house Grasset, and she joined the Société des gens de lettres, a writers’ association founded by none other than Balzac, among others. From her first text written for publication, L’Enfant génial (The Child Prodigy, 1927), to the last novel she published before the Occupation, Les Chiens et les loups (The Dogs and the Wolves, 1940), Némirovsky depicts Jewish bilingualism. Jewish bilingualism and multilingualism are central to her characters’ constructions of their Jewish selves in a secular and foreign environment. Their languages are Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew in L’Enfant génial ; French and Yiddish in David Golder and Les Chiens et les loups; and French and Russian, with the Yiddish language looming as a specter, in her autobiographical novel Le Vin de solitude (The Wine of Solitude, 1935). Even her portrayal of Russian-French bilingualism deals with the question of Jewish voice. As I argue, this is a different Jewish bilingualism from the well-studied concepts of Jewish internal and external bilingualism. In these books, Jewish bilingualism is a productive and dynamic source of artistic creation for her characters who are writers and painters. However problematic her representations of Jewish communities, when Némirovsky turns to young Jewish artists, she writes about the artistic productivity of Jewish bilingualism. Yet the characters—artists and others alike—must abandon Jewish bilingualism, and when they cannot do so successfully, they cannot truly belong outside their Jewish communities. The role of Jewish language and literary creativity is already visible in Némirovsky’s raw first story, L’Enfant génial. This novella seems to be her first work written for publication, as she claimed in a 1930 interview in Les

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Nouvelles littéraires to have written it in 1923, years before it was published in Les Œuvres libres.11 Ismaël Baruch, the protagonist, is endowed with a literary genius born of the sorrows of the Jewish ghetto and the port city of Odessa on the Black Sea. He calls to mind Moniek Stern, the wunderkind from Romain Gary’s Éducation européenne. Ismaël’s origins are described almost entirely without nostalgia: Némirovsky compares the high mortality rate of children in the ghetto to swarming vermin that pollute the city quarter, and she likens Ismaël’s brothers to rats in the harbor. The ghetto is a diseaseridden place where one child dies and is quickly replaced by the birth of another. Money is the driving motive for most of Némirovsky’s Jewish characters who reside in the ghetto. Nevertheless, the Rabbi’s house is described in a positive light as a place of warmth during winter days where Ismaël first shows his gift for words. At the Rabbi’s he “quickly learned to read, write, chant the prayers [psalmodier des prières], and recite by heart verses of the Bible.”12 He “loved to remain there for hours, snuggled in the heat of the stove while around him twenty little voices repeated, without wearying, a holy verse, monotonous and plaintive.”13 Words become associated with religious Hebrew learning in this cozy scene. It is this Hebraic learning that Ismaël channels when he discovers his literary and musical gifts. Abandoning the Rabbi’s school at the age of thirteen, he starts spending his time in the port. To cheer up his friend, the sailor Sidorka, he sings a poem he has composed: “He began to sing, to chant [psalmodier] rather, in a voice slow and pure that vibrated strangely in the silence of the night.”14 The narrator states that his poems are like the Jewish prayers he learned at the Rabbi’s, an idea underscored by the repetition of the verb psalmodier. His refrains are described as treasures that God has deposited in his soul. Later, the songs he sings in the cabaret are foreign to the Slavs; they are “an unconscious echo of sad Jewish songs.”15 The origins of his talent are deeply linked to Judaism, and they go even beyond his lessons at the Rabbi’s, connecting to a sort of communal past. His literary skill draws on the melancholic poetry of the Jews that goes back centuries, one that is unconsciously called forth in his creative act. The plot shifts with the appearance of a member of the nobility, a poet named Romain Nord, whose own failures foreshadow Ismaël’s demise. He whisks Ismaël away to make him an entertainer for his lover, the princess.

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Nord comes in search of Ismaël at the port, asking, “The little Jew, is he here? The little poet?”16 He promises Ismaël all the money he wants if he will sing the most beautiful songs for him and his lover. At first, Ismaël is seduced by the princess’s luxurious lifestyle, which represents the opposite of his childhood surroundings. Seeing flowers in December for the first time, Ismaël marvels at the roses that fill the vases and lie strewn across the tablecloths. He eats delicacies, the likes of which he has never before tasted, and he almost tries champagne before he is stopped because of his young age. When he sings in this setting, the narrator compares him to the “adolescents in the Bible animated by God’s breath.”17 The princess is amazed by his talents, but she cannot accept him as he is: “He cannot stay like this . . . look at him . . . he’s miserable, ignorant, starving . . . a little Jew from the port. . . . And yet there is genius in him. . . . Don’t you see?”18 She wants to take him in, to turn him into a renowned poet. Ismaël agrees, yet he is revolted by the princess, who wants to “violate his unconstrained life.”19 Ismaël has begun to assimilate into a world of decadence and brutality. Némirovsky penned her first novella, written in her adopted language of French, about a budding Russian poet who must come to terms with literary creation in a language different from the one spoken at home. Just as she was becoming a French writer, she composed her first text for publication about a Jewish teenager struggling to create poetry while living in a secular Russian world. At first, her subject assimilates easily: “He exercised the curious and precious faculty of assimilation of his age and race,” and he is attracted to all that is noble and beautiful in the princess’s world.20 Assimilating to the national culture for Ismaël means leaving behind the Hebrew and Yiddish of the ghetto and taking up Russian. He somehow seems to know “which words learned in the Jewish quarter he must not repeat.”21 He rides on horseback in the mornings before his daily lessons in Russian grammar, which have replaced his Hebrew education at the Rabbi’s. But leaving behind Jewish language is the root of his downfall, both physically and mentally. In the second half of L’Enfant génial, the princess and Nord fail to notice that the boy is growing skinnier and paler every day. Instead of describing Ismaël’s awe before the roses, Némirovsky compares the relationship between Nord and the princess to an evil flower: Ismaël “seemed to breathe their vociferous love like a poisonous flower.”22 He falls

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gravely ill with a fever but survives; his parents are allowed to visit, and they cry out in Yiddish as they stand by his sickbed. But after he recovers while staying in the countryside, he fails in his efforts to compose a new song. The narrator explains that when he was in the Jewish ghetto, Ismaël experienced so much anguish and yet developed a tortured ability to find beauty. But now, in this simple and happy life in the countryside, he feels “the bliss of satiated beasts, of plants in the heat of the summer.”23 In his comfortable life with the princess, he is cut off from his connection to the deeper emotions of the Jewish ghetto, the source of his poetic material. Deprived of Jewish inspiration, he seeks to copy the literature of Pushkin and Lermontov, to listen to the melodies of Wagner. But this is also a disaster, and still he cannot write as before; he is a stranger in both cultures. Ismaël seems to want to return home, at least linguistically, when he befriends a local Jewish man and has an innocent idyll with his daughter Rachel, speaking with them in Yiddish. Eventually, however, his patrons reject him, and the princess replaces him with two dogs, a monkey, and a “rascal” from Italy who plays the mandolin. His relationship with his patrons was never real, for it seems Ismaël was just their pet. He returns home but his family mocks him in a mix of German and Yiddish, muttering wunderkind at him sarcastically. In the face of failure and cruelty, Ismaël commits suicide. The princess sends flowers to be placed at his grave, but his parents toss them away; in accordance with Jewish law, they leave stones on his desolate grave in the Jewish cemetery. At home nowhere and alienated in both the worlds of Russian letters and Jewish learning, Ismaël’s impossible assimilation is his demise. The impossibility of assimilation, now to France, is the theme of David Golder, the novel that put Némirovsky on the literary map. It also contains what is possibly the most climactic scene of shame about Yiddish in Némirovsky’s œuvre. Némirovsky published the novel in 1929, and it was made into a feature film directed by Julien Duvivier and starring Harry Baur in 1931. The novel, advertised by Grasset as a new Père Goriot, Balzac’s realist masterpiece, received much attention in the press.24 The protagonist, David Golder, is a Russian Jewish banker in France who is financially and emotionally wrung dry by his wife and daughter, two women who have assimilated to a rich social circle and whom Némirovsky depicts in terms that are just as stereotypically misogynistic as antisemitic. Duvivier’s film also trades in

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Jewish stereotypes as well as misogynistic ones.25 Suleiman points out that we are “meant to feel both repulsion and sympathy” for David Golder, as we are for many of Némirovsky’s Jewish characters.26 As he lies ill in bed in his house in the South of France, his greedy, heavily bejeweled wife tries to take yet more money from him. In the culmination of a fight that arises between them, Golder shouts Gloria’s childhood name in Yiddish: “‘And what about you? Do you remember Kishinev, and that little shop of your moneylender father’s in the Jewish quarter? You weren’t called Gloria then, were you? Well? Havke! Havke!’ He hurled the Yiddish name at her like an insult, shaking his fist.”27 Her Yiddish name is compared to an insult, as if Golder knows her greatest source of shame and the worst possible thing to say to her. But Golder’s lapse into Yiddish in and of itself is shameful for Gloria. As in Jean Malaquais’s scene of Pawel’s outburst in Yiddish, we see that the use of Yiddish itself, and not just the sense of the words said in Yiddish, signifies. As Naomi Seidman writes, these characters are “doing something with words,” in particular with Yiddish words.28 This use of Yiddish also foreshadows the end of the book. Returning from a trip for a banking scheme in Russia, Golder meets a young Jewish man on the boat. He recognizes his “lilting accent,” and sees himself in the younger traveler: a Jewish emigrant looking for a fresh start in France.29 As the other passengers on the boat sing Jewish prayers, old Golder dies on the way back to France, as if to symbolize that he has no future as a Frenchman. Duvivier’s cinematic version of the novel, his first sound film, prominently features Jewish prayer at the end. Golder’s last words in the novel are in Russian, but then “suddenly the forgotten language of his childhood unexpectedly spilled from his lips and he started speaking Yiddish.”30 He dies speaking Yiddish on the boat to France, never fully arriving, as if to show that his Jewish faith and Russian background preclude acceptance in France. In her 1935 novel, Le Vin de solitude, Némirovsky again shows the pecking order of Jewish languages, and she revisits the theme of the budding writer, although one with a happy ending. The protagonist, Hélène Karol, shares much of Némirovsky’s biography: She was born in Kiev, then moved to Saint Petersburg with her family before fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution for Finland and then moving to Paris in 1919. Hélène loves her father, Boris, a successful businessman who rose up from an impoverished Jewish

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background, but she detests her egotistical mother, Bella, who hails from the wealthy Safronov family. She is particularly perceptive and, although we never see her become a writer, we are led to believe she will become one. This novel establishes a hierarchy of languages for the upward mobility of the Karol family: Yiddish, Russian, and French. The explicit bilingualism in this novel is French-Russian. However, as Susan Suleiman has demonstrated, in notes that did not make it into the final version Némirovsky included a line about Boris speaking Yiddish, Hélène not understanding him, and Bella and her parents laughing at him and responding in Russian.31 Boris’s Yiddish-Russian bilingualism and Bella’s disdain for it can be assumed from the way Némirovsky describes their mismatch during a fight. Bella cries that when she married Boris everyone wondered how she could link herself to “that little Jew who came out of nowhere, who wandered around Lord knows where, whose family you don’t even know!”32 Bella herself slides backward and away from French when she speaks to her lover Max in Russian during a fight they have toward the end of their liaison. She reveals her background, one that she is always seeking to transcend. These linguistic questions are all wrapped up in the social mobility of Russian Jews and the fear that one can never escape the past. French is the sign of Hélène’s belonging to a particular class among Jews in Kiev and then in Saint Petersburg. She is a generation removed from Ismaël’s Yiddish and Hebrew on her father’s side and even further removed on her mother’s. Prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, Hélène and her family visit France every year, bringing with them her beloved French nanny Mademoiselle Rose. Hélène calls France her “own haven of light” during an unhappy childhood, and she hates returning to Russia, where she does not quite feel at home precisely because she speaks French better than she speaks Russian.33 She is uneasy in Russia yet does not quite belong in France either. She wonders what it would be like to have a typically French name like Jeanne Fournier or Loulou Massard instead of the Russian Jewish name Hélène Karol. Here, she might remind us of a version of Triolet’s character Varvara. But unlike Varvara, Hélène decides that her travels and memories, her life experiences—that is, as a Russian Jewish girl who speaks French better than Russian—make her life particularly interesting. They bring her a special joy that other children do not have.

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Hélène can translate her experience as a Jewish girl into French, for French is precisely the language of her Jewish milieu. While still living in Saint Petersburg, Hélène writes for the first time in French. Like Ismaël’s writing, Hélène’s comes out of a linguistic situation. However, Hélène’s writing does not originate in the warmth of Hebraic learning but rather in a realization she has while studying her German conversation manual. She is learning the lesson on “a happy family,” complete with a modest father, a housewife, their perfect children, and pets.34 But Hélène finds this lesson to be a lie, a false and naïve image of family. She starts writing a damning portrait of her own family, wielding her pen like a loaded weapon. Just as Eugène Ionesco famously parodied an English language manual in his play La Cantatrice chauve (The Bald Soprano, 1950) years later, Hélène takes the trope of a language lesson and shows how the artificial situation that it depicts can lead to deeper reflection, including about how language expresses a reality. She begins to write in French about a father whose thoughts concern an attractive woman he saw on the street, and a mother who has just seen her lover; neither of them understands their children and their children do not love them. Families, she writes, are full of “greed, lies and mutual misunderstanding.”35 Encountering the fake image in a textbook leads her to write a deeply painful and previously unexpressed truth about her own family (her mother’s affair). When her mother demands to see what she has written and her father reads it, Hélène’s writing truly does turn out to be a harmful weapon. But she seems to be entirely at home in French writing, enough to convey through it that her family is not a home. The novel ends with her liberation from her family after her father’s death. While Ismaël’s story terminates in the crumbling Jewish graveyard in his ghetto, Hélène’s ends with the auspicious sign of skies clearing over the Arc de Triomphe after a storm, as the reader imagines that she will now set off and become a writer. Her story ends where Ismaël’s assimilation and demise begin. Perhaps Hélène will find a future as a French writer, but only after leaving her family behind—by breaking free from her mother’s social climbing as represented through language, and from her father’s language, Yiddish, which she never knew. She seems freer from the anxieties about Jewish language than her parents are. Les Chiens et les loups, published in April 1940 just before the defeat, was her last novel that appeared in print during Némirovsky’s lifetime. Writing it in

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1939, she returned to the theme of the Yiddish language as a source of shame and at the same time as a wellspring of inspiration and artistic vision. It first appeared as a series in the right-wing and by then antisemitic journal Candide, and the publishing house Albin Michel issued it as a monograph in April 1940. It tells the story of two branches of the Sinner family, one rich and one poor. Both sides emigrate from Kiev to Paris, where the stories of their children, the wealthy Harry Sinner and the poor artist Ada Sinner, collide. Prior to their emigration, as children in Kiev, Ada and her cousin Ben had sought shelter during a pogrom in Harry Sinner’s home, away from the ghetto. After years apart, and after immigrating to Paris and becoming a painter, Ada is reunited with her longtime unrequited love, Harry. But in the meantime, Ada has married Ben and Harry has married a non-Jewish Frenchwoman. Similarly to Ismaël in L’Enfant génial, Ada has a creative talent that finds its sources in the Jewish ghetto. Harry, unlike the non-Jews in his social milieu, is so moved by Ada’s paintings—paintings he comes across by chance and does not realize are hers—precisely because they bring him back to a Russian Jewish past. He becomes obsessed with them, for they remind him of “a distant reality, one destroyed very long ago.”36 Her paintings recall something buried in his memory—not only Russia but also all the people and places he knew there, especially his grandmother who stroked his hair “while tenderly murmuring words in a foreign language.”37 That language is Yiddish, which only his grandmother spoke, a fact that the rest of his side of the family finds “scandalous.”38 Even though Harry never knew Yiddish, Ada’s paintings awaken in him a reality more profound than his Parisian present. When Harry finally reconnects with Ada, she explains to him that the past is so much more important than their current lives. Harry asks if she means in Russia; Ada answers that it is something further in the past, as if it were a Jewish heritage stretching centuries into the past that unites them. Nevertheless, we are still reminded of the shame of the Yiddish language, which Harry’s family rejects and suppresses. Back in Kiev, when Ada hides during the pogrom, she comes across Sinner senior, the grandfather on the wealthy Sinner side. He is described as grotesque, “his long, dry fingers with their curved, yellow nails, hard as horn, his sharp, drawling Yiddish accent.”39 His Yiddish accent is as repulsive as his overgrown nails. It is because Sinner speaks Yiddish that he resembles a secondhand goods dealer in the ghetto.

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Yet this is also what makes him familiar to the children and reassures them. The implication is that Yiddish is repulsive to others—both to his children who make up the wealthy side of the family and to those outside the family. Harry’s mother, now living in Paris, speaks with an accent that people find holds a certain “Slavic charm”; her accent is “baptized” by French so that she no longer rolls her r’s as harshly.40 But when she is extremely afraid or upset, she cannot find the right words in French: “She suddenly made mistakes when she spoke—she who had learned French from a Parisian since she was three years old.”41 She even breaks into Russian briefly while worrying about her son’s marriage. And when she makes these linguistic slips, her sisters-in-law nastily tell her a joke about a rich banker who runs to his wife who is in labor only when she screams to him in Yiddish and not in French, since only then does he know that the baby is really coming.42 For the wealthier side of the family, Yiddish is hidden beneath Russian, and is the innermost language that reveals itself only when inhibition, decorum, or self-control break down. Harry’s mother and her sisters-in-law even thank God that they do not know Yiddish, so that they cannot lapse into it: “They knew no Yiddish, thank God. They hadn’t been brought up in the ghetto. Nevertheless, it was undeniable that when upset, it was hard to remember all the rules of French grammar and syntax; they were so difficult.”43 There is a sense that if one has any Yiddish background at all, it will come out in the most passionate or desperate moments. This sentiment resembles Malaquais’s representation of Yiddish accent in Planète sans visa. But where Malaquais writes about accent and Yiddish erupting in the most emotional of scenes in order to show their richness and the depth of feeling in an adopted language, Némirovsky’s characters fear this possibility. Just like in the fight between David and Gloria Golder, and just like Bella Karol slipping into Russian, Jewish bilingualism comes up in the climax of an argument between Ben, Ada’s husband, and Harry, her lover. What pushes Ben to the breaking point is Harry’s pronunciation of Ada’s name in the French manner: “When he heard the way Harry said ‘Ada,’ he flew into a rage. It was the French pronunciation, with the accent on the last letter, which Ben found affected and almost insulting.”44 Ben curses him in Yiddish and Russian, languages that Harry can barely understand. For Harry “there was something repugnant and grotesque in the way he swore, gesticulating

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wildly in an outburst of hatred.”45 The reader has already encountered Ben’s “quick, passionate accent” earlier in the text.46 When Harry is disgusted by Ben’s language, he yells that they are not in a ghetto. But Ben retorts with the painfully prophetic and vitriolic comment that Harry has the same “hooked nose” and “frizzy hair” as he does, and that he too will one day be rejected for being Jewish.47 Their languages and accents portray their difference, perhaps only imagined, from each other. There is a fear of speaking Yiddish here, just as there is in L’Enfant génial, David Golder, and Le Vin de solitude. But Ben’s anger in Les Chiens et les loups is the reverse of Gloria’s in David Golder; he is not angry at the use of Yiddish but at the use of French to say a Yiddish name, as if to erase its Jewishness. The French accent is the insult. This anger about French views of Jews and the essentialized Slavic soul would be important in Némirovsky’s dealings with the press and its use of stereotypes to describe her as a writer.

“A Spicy Jewess”: The Language of Stereotypes

In Némirovsky’s critical reception in the 1930s and 1940s, the question of the effect of her Russian Jewish background on her use of the French language came up time and again. Journalists described her as an author in terms that essentialize her as an Eastern European woman or as a Russian Jew. In his positive review of Némirovsky’s Le Pion sur l’échiquier (The Pawn on the Chessboard, 1934), the fascist writer Robert Brasillach uses a succinct description of her background that effectively denies her status as a French writer, calling her “this young Russian [who] writes in French.”48 In his review of David Golder, Brasillach refers to her as a Russian and Jewish [israélite] émigré who has chosen to write in French.49 In comparing her to another novelist, he regrets that “it is the foreigner indeed who best knows the secrets of our race.” The press seems fascinated by her person, and journalists ponder the divide between East and West, sometimes directly referring to her Jewish background and at other times merely alluding to it. Some articles feature physical stereotypes of the belle juive. For example, she was described as a “spicy Jewess [israélite]” in an interview with D’Artagnan in 1930; Frédéric Lefèvre of Les Nouvelles littéraires waxes poetic about the darkest black hair imaginable, which is strangely soft on this svelte, “beautiful variety of Jewess [israélite].”50 These remarks resemble ideas about the passionate and exoticized

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Eastern Jewish woman in Romantic literature.51 While israélite was a term often associated with assimilated French Jews that emphasized their Frenchness, as opposed to recent immigrants from Eastern Europe, the journalists use it in the context of discussing her immigration.52 But in these interviews from the 1930s, rather than using israélite to imply a successful assimilation into the universalist model of French identity, journalists seem to use it to indicate her class or distinguished profession. At the beginning of an interview in Les Nouvelles littéraires in 1938, the interviewer Jeanine Delpech writes that Némirovsky looks exotic, and invokes her Russian background: “Irène Némirovsky appears all the more Russian, all the more profoundly mysterious than if you could find the slightest trace of exoticism in her costume or in the decor of her life.”53 Somehow the absence of traces of Russia in the superficial aspects of her life underscores her Russian exoticism. In addition to imagining her as Eastern, a journalist for L’Univers israélite, Nina Gourfinkel, describes seeing a sketch of Némirovsky soon after the success of David Golder in which she had been drawn with heavy, “sensual lips” and “sooty hair.”54 She is surprised to see nothing of the “the negroid [négroïde] in the newspaper” when she meets her.55 Her Jewishness is depicted as blackness, with the journalist clearly commenting on the question posed about Jewishness and race: Are Jews white?56 Némirovsky also confronted stereotypes about her Russian background that dealt with the very material of her work: language. French journalists and literary critics perceived Némirovsky as a Russian Jewish author who chose the French language rather than as a French author. They attributed her literary achievement to a successful combination of a French style with an innate, if geographically undetermined, “Slavic” nature. Angela Kershaw has studied her reception by the press, demonstrating that Némirovsky was acceptable “within the terms of the Occident/Orient binary: those for whom her Slav identity raised the possibility of Oriental decadence could view her texts as proof of the subjugation of Slav disorder by French classical forms.”57 According to more than one interviewer, her Russian and even her Russian Jewish identities make up her literary talent. In his 1930 article in Les Nouvelles littéraires, Frédéric Lefèvre notes that she combines “a perfect and rare harmony of the Slavic intellectual, well-known among the frequenters of the Sorbonne, with the socialite.”58 In another article in the same newspaper in

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1938, Jeanine Delpech praises Némirovsky’s work for combining a Slavic understanding of the world with the clarity of French writing: “A very Slavic disposition and perception of the world and its beings, a clarity and sense of composition that is quite French: this marriage of inclination allows this Russian to give us literary works that fascinate us without unsettling us too much.”59 The key to Némirovsky’s success, according to Delpech, is that she is Russian but not too Russian. Delpech attributes the success of her most recent novel to a “productive duality,” a French-Russian dichotomy where “the atrocious side, poisoned by almost all the characters with their access to violence and their passivity before catastrophe, remain very Russian.” Yet at the same time, there is an order to her work, in which she shows a deep knowledge of French life. Delpech’s article demonstrates that this is the other side of the coin of discussions about writers who adopted French in the interwar period. She also characterizes the place of Eastern European writers who have adopted French in a way that links them, to use Pascale Casanova’s expression, to the center of the world republic of letters: Today more than ever before, writers from all countries consider France to be the refuge of the freedom of thought, and Paris as the most radiant spiritual home. And many are those who express directly in our language their

thoughts, their profoundly national sensibility. Among them, and among French novelists, Irène Nemirowski has very quickly been able to conquer an important place.

Here we find a characterization of Eastern European Francophonie as a body of writers drawn to Paris not as a national center but as one that represents freedom. However, the rest of Delpech’s article indicates that the writers have their own national characteristics that they express through French. Likewise, Némirovsky has found her place among French novelists but she remains a Russian writer. Kershaw demonstrates that Némirovsky’s representation as “an exotic literary curiosity” in the press took place in the context of discussions about the Orient and Occident, and against the background of the rhetoric of the political right in the 1920s according to which “France and French culture incarnated Western values which were universal and which derived

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from the French classical tradition, and which should be defended against the encroachment of the Orient in the form of bolshevism, Jews, mysticism, capitalism, socialism, and so on.”60 The Orient here represents a generalization about an imagined, almost barbaric space occupying undefined swaths of Eastern Europe. We can trace this line of thought about a vague space of Eastern Europe further into the past, as Larry Wolff does in Inventing Eastern Europe. Wolff argues that as Enlightenment thinkers fashioned Western Europe as a space of “civilization” in the eighteenth century, Enlightenment travel writers “discovered” Eastern Europe as its “complement within the same continent, in the shadowed lands of backwardness, even barbarism.”61 This idea of Eastern Europe continued into the Cold War, as Wolff shows, and was certainly expressed in Némirovsky’s context. In the interwar press coverage, the mysticism of Némirovsky’s “Slavic” style displaced her from being a French writer to, as Brasillach put it, an outsider looking in on the French. This underlies Delpech’s portrait of Némirovsky as somehow living at once in Paris and in Russia, as the title of her article indicates: “At Home with Némirovsky, or Russia on the boulevard des Invalides.”62 Stereotypes about Némirovsky’s language fit into Sander Gilman’s analysis of how the imposition of Jewish otherness functions through a myth of Jewish bilingualism. Jews are imagined as having “their own hidden language” (Hebrew and later Yiddish) in addition to the language of the country where they live, which they can never fully possess.63 In early modern to modern Western Europe, this imagined language of the Other was “hidden, dark, magical, dangerous, private.”64 Writing about the German context, Gilman states that during the Enlightenment, Yiddish symbolized the language of Jews of the East in a culture that saw “the East as the source of the corruption of the Jews.”65 By the nineteenth century, the stereotype developed that the Jewish Other exposed himself or herself through accent, pronunciation, and intonation.66 This supposedly corrupt linguistic difference was integrated in the late nineteenth century into pseudoscientific discourse on the Jewish race, making “the special language of the Other a sign of the innate, biological difference inherent in the very concept of race.”67 The nationalist historian Heinrich von Treitschke wrote in 1879: “There will always be Jews who are nothing more than German-speaking Orientals.”68 The scenes in Némirovsky’s novels of Yiddish or Russian invading the French language in

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moments of heightened emotion draw on the fear of some of her characters that Jewish bilingualism would make them nothing but French-speaking “Orientals.” Ben Sinner pushes back against this fear by insisting on the Yiddish pronunciation of Ada’s name in Les Chiens et les loups. For Gilman, language is also the key to understanding Jewish self-hatred, defined as Jews accepting negative stereotypes and myths about Jews as true descriptions of themselves in reality. Language in particular is the site of tension for marginalized Jews, who “are forced to function within the same discourse as that which labels them as different.”69 Gilman presents a model of the self-hating Jewish writer, who is marked by an anxiety that his or her use of the national language is somehow inescapably Jewish, and who accepts the myths of corrupt and corrupting Jewish language. One response for this writer would be to reject Jewish language completely, and to mock it according to stereotypes.70 Critics of Némirovsky, both in her lifetime and today, have accused her of Jewish self-hatred. It is true that some aspects of her works seem to integrate the very stereotypes that would other her and prevent her from ever being seen as a French writer. Many of Némirovsky’s stories contain stereotypically antisemitic themes and characters, such as money-hungry Jews and even some with hooked noses and large lips (as in the sketch of Némirovsky mentioned above). David Golder centers around Russian Jewish immigrants in France fueled by a desire for money, and the Jewish family of the protagonist of L’Enfant génial is driven by the same inclination. In Les Chiens et les loups Harry Sinner’s mother loves to wear too much jewelry, purchased with the encouragement of her brothers, as they have “a secret, Oriental delight in owning valuable possessions that you could feel in your hands, press to your breast.”71 But Némirovsky does not seem to mock Jewish language. Rather, she shows a nuanced view of how her characters express anxiety about assimilation through Jewish language. Némirovsky defended herself against accusations of self-hatred in a 1930 interview in L’Univers israélite with Nina Gourfinkel, the same journalist who describes the caricature of Némirovsky.72 She says that she thought her characters inspire sympathy as well (even if she also says that of course Jews love money). When Gourfinkel pushes her, saying that her book provides further material for antisemites, Némirovsky responds three times: “But that was how I saw them.”73 Although this statement has been interpreted to

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mean that this is how she saw Jews in reality and that this is what inspired her, it could also be read as her explaining that this is how she saw her characters, for she goes on to say that these are fictional people from her imagination; and she maintains her freedom to write whatever she imagines. Gourfinkel’s review certainly does not evoke ideas of inclusion either, for despite Némirovsky stating that she is not antisemitic and that she is Jewish, Gourfinkel concludes: “Antisemitic, certainly Irène Némirovsky is not. As little as she is Jewish.”74 Gourfinkel continues that just as you cannot judge the French based on the neighborhoods of Paris converted for the tastes of “foreigners,” you cannot judge a people based on immoral individuals whose true patrie is a fashionable beach “where all of the trash of all nations mix.”75 Because this sentence is juxtaposed with her statement that Némirovsky is hardly Jewish, it is hard to tell if Gourfinkel is merely talking about Némirovsky’s characters or if she is including Némirovsky in her condemnation, for this is her milieu as well. In fact, Gourfinkel herself was born in Odessa and emigrated to Paris in the interwar period, which may explain her antipathy to Némirovsky’s representations of Russian Jewish émigrés. But in refusing to accept her as a Jew, even after she defends herself as one, Gourfinkel points to yet another rejection in Némirovsky’s career. In 1935, the journalist Janine Auscher of L’Univers israélite asks even more directly that Némirovsky respond to accusations of antisemitism. There is a kind of camaraderie between Auscher and her subject; Auscher says she strongly condemns the allegations of antisemitism, calling Némirovsky’s critics “our adversaries.”76 She describes Némirovsky as having an impish face that cannot quite take on the contrite countenance that her critics demand. But Némirovsky explicitly argues in this article that she is describing a specific milieu, her milieu, and not all Jewish people, and maintains that she also shows positive attributes. She also argues that a Jewish writer is allowed to depict Jewish people negatively, just as a French bourgeois can be critical of the French bourgeoisie. She concedes that if Hitler had been in power when she wrote David Golder she would have softened it, but she says that as a writer it would have been wrong to do so.77 Once again Némirovsky affirms her Jewishness, saying she never hides her background and always affirms that she is a juive. She does not use the term israélite, which the journalist uses for French-born Jews as opposed to recent Jewish immigrants ( juifs). At

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any rate, unlike in the case of Gourfinkel, her Jewishness is not called into question. The journalist finishes on a familial note, saying that Némirovsky’s devotion to her husband and daughter at least shows that a love of the family is “a Jewish feeling par excellence.”78 Rather than pure condemnations, Némirovsky’s novels feature Jewish characters rejected by French society, and they seem to point to an ambivalence between Jewish and French identities and a fear of never being accepted as French. In Les Chiens et les loups, Monsieur Delarcher, Harry’s non-Jewish father-in-law, has difficulty accepting that his daughter will marry an Eastern European Jewish man: “He wasn’t actually xenophobic, no . . . yet everything that came from the East aroused insurmountable mistrust within him. Slavonic, Levantine, Jewish—he didn’t know which of these terms disgusted him the most.”79 When French people show up unannounced to visit Ada’s studio and look at her paintings, they think that her work is beautiful, but “so sincere, ingenuous, barbaric!”80 She has a supposedly Orientalized talent that is exotic and uncivilized. The guests are described as looking at Ada as if they were watching a rare and wild animal at the zoo. Ada herself seems to reject this; when they ask how she is able to make this art at such a young age, she retorts that she works a lot. If Némirovsky includes antisemitic stereotypes in her novel, she also writes about how Jews are marginalized in France because of these same stereotypes. In the same year she began Les Chiens et les loups, one of her most indepth studies of Jewish immigrants in France, Némirovsky and her family converted to Catholicism.81 In the decade leading up to her conversion she was also on a doomed path to citizenship, with failed attempts in 1930, 1935, and 1938. It is unknown what motivated Némirovsky to convert, but it is clear she was thinking about her personal position in France at the time. Her daughter Denise Epstein could never figure out “the baptism problem.”82 Given the lack of any writing by her mother on the subject, Epstein oscillates between thinking the conversion was to save the family and wondering whether or not it was a “true conversion.”83 In her “dreamed memoirs” of her mother, Le Mirador, Némirovsky’s other daughter, Élisabeth Gille, imagines Némirovsky thinking about her baptism in the context of French antisemitism and xenophobia just before the Nazi invasion of Prague. Gille represents her mother as being unable to recall if she converted “out of conviction or

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opportunism” and has her state: “If I felt a cowardly desire to sever these final ties to a people whose alien sense of identity I had never understood, it was because I wanted to close the remaining gap between myself and the nationality of my choice, and to protect my children.”84 Myriam Anissimov understands the conversion in terms of the fear of antisemitism and war.85 Scholars argue that we cannot discount the search for “personal spirituality.”86 Susan Suleiman adds to the discussion the context of a number of famous conversions in French letters during the first half of the twentieth century, including those of the Jewish intellectuals Raïssa Maritain and Henri Bergson but also of Jacques Maritain, Charles Péguy, Jean Cocteau, and François Mauriac, among others.87 I would echo Suleiman’s question about whether the conversion might have also been related to an “affirmation of national identity.”88 What is known is that Némirovsky never used this conversion in her letters to try to argue for her place in France, or as a means of continuing to publish after the ban on Jewish writers. Perhaps she knew it constituted an invalid argument. I would not venture to read Némirovsky’s mind, but her conversion adds another dimension to the complexity of her Jewish identity in France as well as her desire to integrate. Némirovsky does, however, openly respond to both her frequent rejection as a French writer in the press and to her success in the French literary establishment throughout the 1930s. A study of Jewish bilingualism in her interwar novels, a topic she removes from her wartime writing, reveals that she uses the question of language both with and against the stereotypes about Eastern European Jews. Rather than arguing about whether or not she was an antisemite or a self-hating Jew, it is far more interesting to see how stereotypes about the Eastern European Jewish Other play out in the issue of language choice between adopted French or Russian on the one hand, and Yiddish on the other. But this would all change during the war, for Némirovsky did not have a static relationship to French.

Némirovsky’s Exodus

Némirovsky made an about-face under the Occupation. In a rare moment, she publicly responded to her characterization by reviewers and publishers from the 1930s, openly expressing her views on her experience as a Frenchwoman and as a Russian. She first broached the topic just before the Fall of

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France in a profile published in the “Conrad français” series in Les Nouvelles littéraires. In this series, the journalist Georges Higgins (who was himself English) interviewed “Slavic” writers of the French language, comparing their experiences to that of Joseph Conrad. This is the same series that featured Jean Malaquais and other émigré writers like Henri Troyat. Each interview focuses on the differences in the language and character of French and the writer’s language of origin, all the while valorizing what Slavic writers have brought to French letters. Némirovsky’s section begins with the explanation that she had left Paris to take care of her daughter’s health. The journalist, either knowing the truth or not, erases the fact that she left because of an impending war. Némirovsky’s response to the “Conrad français” project openly resists for the first time in the press the false categories of “French” and “Russian” writing. She states, “Your inquiry troubles me a little. It is up to the reader and not the writer to distinguish these things.”89 Her skepticism continues: “Then, what do you mean exactly by ‘French’ and ‘Slavic?’ Yes, I know well; French means measure, mastery of the self, harmony. But Slavic? Is it disorder? Is it fatalism? Or mysticism? Or pessimism? You see, it is for me to interview you.” Now Némirovsky reveals her own motivations: I say a little, because I desire, I hope, I believe myself to be a French writer more than a Russian one. I spoke French before I spoke Russian. I spent half

of my childhood in this country, and all of my youth and my life as a woman thus far. I never wrote in Russian except for some school papers. I think, and I even dream, in French.

All this is so melded with what remains in me of my race and my country

that, even with the best will in the world, it is impossible for me to distinguish where one ends and the other begins.

She rejects the language of difference. Here Némirovsky insists that she is more French than Russian because of her linguistic history and the fact that the majority of her life was spent in France. Her insistence here reveals both the aggravation caused by assumptions about each category of language and a sense of rejection in her exclamation that she thinks and even dreams in French. She wants to be seen as a French writer rather than as a Russian immigrant—or we might add, although it is not said explicitly in the article, as a Russian Jewish immigrant—who just happened to choose to live in France

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and to write in French. But toward the end of her statement, she contradicts herself, explaining that she does somehow retain her Russian identity. In fact, her journal reveals that she sketched some ideas for novels in French, and occasionally even in English, as well as fairly often in Russian. Its cover holds inscriptions that suggest she had it in her possession from adolescence to the end of her life, and it is inscribed with names of places and dates such as “Finland, 1918,” “Paris, January 1938,” “Issy-l’Évêque, January 1940.”90 As is apparent in the mix of languages in which she wrote in her journal, for Némirovsky there was no barrier between her Russian and French identities, although as an author she strove to be perceived as French. The reader is left to wonder where Jewishness fits into this, as it does not come up in the interview. When Némirovsky talks about her race, she is referring to her Slavic stock rather than to a biological, racial category, although it is hard not to hear an echo of rhetoric about the Jewish race here as well. This ambivalence about Frenchness and Russianness is spelled out in her writing through her depictions of Jews: while she wished to be a purely French author (or what she imagined a French author to be), Némirovsky devoted many of her important and, it might be argued, her most interesting works to depicting Russian Jews up until the 1940s. Her subject matter was not “French.” This frustration would be exacerbated after the defeat and just a few months after the appearance of the “Conrad français” series. In her notes for the novel Suite française, whose first part recounts the June 1940 flight from Paris, she writes: “My God! What is this country doing to me? Since it rejects me, let’s consider it coldly, let’s watch it lose its honor and its life.”91 She would almost immediately do so in her novel about the national exodus, after her own flight from Paris to the commune Issy-l’Évêque in Burgundy. In Suite française she describes not only the exode but also her own personal tragedy—while leaving out the themes that may have mattered to her most. Her depiction of the exodus is a harsh condemnation of the French bourgeoisie and the intellectual community, illustrating through her characters their total lack of honor, strength, and loyalty to the country. In 1941, she began her epic depiction of the exodus and its aftermath, Suite française. She was writing from the Occupied Zone, just north of the line of demarcation. By the autumn of 1939 she had sent her daughters away from Paris to Issy-l’Évêque, where she joined them in May 1940. In her notes

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for the novel she indicates that every detail should reflect the reality of her time. Citing War and Peace as a source of inspiration, she writes that she wants her novel to seem like one small episode in history and that, like all other historic epochs, hers is just one episode.92 She notes a list of materials or bodies of knowledge she would require in order to write the story: a detailed map of France or a Michelin Guide; a complete collection of French and foreign newspapers published between June 1 and July 1, 1940; a treatise on porcelain, presumably for the character Langelet; the knowledge of birds in June, including their names and songs; and finally, a mystical book by the Abbé Bréchard.93 In the same notebook Némirovsky also worries that she cannot really capture the events in which she herself is caught—and not only because it would have been impossible for her to get a full collection of such newspapers given the state of affairs. Writing about the political opinions of the character Jean-Marie Michaud in “Captivity” (the last section of Suite française that she would never write) would require that: “1) I know what the future holds; 2) that I should have a balanced political viewpoint myself, other than one which consists of gnashing one’s teeth and champing at the bit or digging holes in the earth to escape.”94 All she could focus on was a gnawing anxiety about how to escape the prison that Issy-l’Évêque was slowly becoming. While in Issy-l’Évêque, Némirovsky almost certainly witnessed the masses of refugees heading southward in the exodus. Removed from the literary world, far from her chic Parisian address in the seventh arrondissement, she was intimately acquainted with the hardships the refugees faced. She knew not only the uncertainty about the future but also the concrete material hardship and isolation in the present. She wrote to Robert Esménard, the publisher of Albin Michel, saying, “Life here is really sad,” but that her writing saves her, although even that is painful “when one is not sure of the next day.”95 In her preparations for Suite française and its depiction of French dishonor, she links her own experience to the fictional narrative she crafts: “It must be by dint of oppositions: one word for misery, ten for selfishness, cowardice, association, crime. [. . .] But it is true that this air, I breathe it. It is easy to imagine this: the obsession with food.”96 Legally barred from her profession and from the possibility of naturalization, she found fuel for her brilliant depiction of the defeat as it unfolded. At

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the forefront of her novel are less the crowds of people on the roads than the villagers who do not welcome their fellow countrymen turned refugees, the term Némirovsky, like her contemporary writers, used for displaced French people. The narrator explains that no one helps because there are so many refugees that they become faceless: “There was nothing human left in this miserable mob; they were like a herd of frightened animals; a singular uniformity spread over them. Their crumpled clothes, crazed faces, hoarse voices, everything about them made them look peculiarly alike, so you couldn’t tell them apart.”97 As opposed to Malaquais, who individualizes Jewish refugees through their speech, Némirovsky depicts how the French see the mass of refugees. Her juxtaposition of the opposing terms singular and uniform, peculiar and alike, points to this tension. Némirovsky’s depiction of the flight from Paris in Suite française is a panorama of French dishonor. The first half of the novel follows five Parisian families and individuals on their journeys from Paris at the start of the Occupation. The wealthy Péricand family is more concerned with their material goods than the fate of the nation or even that of their family. Somewhere between the Loire and Nîmes they realize that they have forgotten their grandfather during their travels southward. Madame Péricand thinks she is being a charitable Catholic as she hands out the family’s food supplies to others on the road. But as soon as she realizes there are food shortages, she stops. After a bombing, Madame Péricand does not think of the casualties. Instead, she dreams: “She would be in Nîmes the next morning. Nîmes . . . her mother’s dear old house, her bedroom, a bath,” all in a home with luxurious linens.98 Némirovsky mocks the luxury of returning to the family country home; she herself resided in a requisitioned hotel before renting a house. Madame Péricand assumes that she will get a spot on the train in order to return to her summer home: “Like royalty, Madame Péricand, in her position of mother of a large family, quite naturally came first everywhere she went . . . and she was not the kind of woman who let anyone forget what was rightfully hers.”99 The next couple Némirovsky depicts is no better. The banker Corbin gives a free spot in his car to his mistress, even though he had already promised a ride to his employees, Mr. and Mrs. Michaud. Abandoned, the Michaud couple has no choice but to leave Paris on foot. Since it takes them too long to reach the bank’s new location in Tours,

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they are promptly fired. The Michauds, a humble couple who do no harm to those around them, are the only truly sympathetic characters in the exode section of the novel. Finally, Némirovsky turns to two single men from the intellectual class. A famous French writer, Gabriel Corte, checks himself into a fancy hotel with his mistress. He gives the manager the impression that he has given up and that he has not eaten (which is not true). The manager tells him he “mustn’t give in. You owe it to mankind.”100 As he is ordering breakfast to his room, Corte thinks to himself that “he didn’t dispute his obligation to mankind, but at the moment he couldn’t be expected to have more courage than the most humble citizen.”101 The reader can almost see the narrator rolling her eyes. Corte is indeed despondent at the defeat, but in large part because he worries his work will be obsolete. Finally, the porcelain collector Charles Langelet steals oil from a young couple whose car he promises to watch. He cares more about his porcelain collection than about human loss in the war. The only semiheroic character in the entire novel is the young and well-intentioned Hubert Péricand, who tries to continue the fight but never really manages to do so. In his study of Suite française, Nathan Bracher writes that Némirovsky’s depiction is revelatory of “some of the scars inscribed onto those figurative prison bars by an author otherwise unable to lash out against her oppressors.”102 We might read Némirovsky’s condemnation of the characters as some of these lashings. For all that Némirovsky strives for historical accuracy, what is entirely missing from Suite française is any depiction of the plight of Jewish people and of immigrants in France during the war. The same is true of another depiction of a family’s flight from Paris and Normandy in Les Biens de ce monde (All Our Worldly Goods, 1947), which she wrote at the start of the Occupation, and which was published posthumously. This is particularly striking given that the subject of much of Némirovsky’s previous work was precisely the status of Jewish immigrants in France. She joins Fondane as one of the few writers to depict the June 1940 exodus as it unfolded. But she has a totally different approach from Fondane. While Fondane locates his notion of double displacement as a Jewish émigré author in June 1940 within the French language, Némirovsky erases foreignness, foreign language, and Judaism in Suite française, distancing herself from her previous, seemingly essentializing novels about Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Whereas

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Fondane depicts the exode as a particularly Jewish displacement in a cycle of exile, Némirovsky excludes Jews from the story. Her desire to write the exodus in a realist way resembles a very different book about the defeat: the historian Marc Bloch’s Strange Defeat. Like Némirovsky, Bloch tries to make his account as close to reality as possible. He structures his analysis of the defeat as a court case in which he is a reliable witness like Némirovsky, who casts herself as a witness to the cruel country that has rejected her. But Bloch, on the other hand, reaffirms his place as a Frenchman in “Presentation of the Witness,” the moving opening of his book.103 He argues that he can testify as a Frenchman, vouching that the fault of the defeat lies not in the hands of individuals but at the highest levels of bureaucracy. He affirms his Jewish background: “By birth I am a Jew, though not by religion.”104 But his Jewishness does not void his allegiance to France: France, from which many would like to expel me to-day (and may, for all I know, succeed in doing so), will remain, whatever happens, the one country

with which my deepest emotions are inextricably bound up. I was born in France. I have drunk of the waters of her culture. I have made her past my

own. I breathe freely only in her climate, and I have done my best, with others, to defend her interests.105

Even though he was an established academic with generations of roots in France, Bloch suddenly had to defend his sense of Frenchness. Perhaps his new outsider status did not prevent him from writing about the defeat and the resulting civilian flight but rather spurred him to do so. In fact, he explicitly frames his topic with a discussion of his place as a Jewish man in France. For Bloch, the defeat is a French tragedy and one that the Jews take part in as French people. But for Némirovsky, the disaster is one in which Jews are excluded from France. The word “Jewish” appears only once in Suite française—in an offhand comment made by Langelet, who surprises himself by thinking about leaving France. Why should he, for “he himself was neither Jewish nor a Mason, thank God,” he thinks, “with a scornful smile.”106 When the collaborationist Viscountess de Montmort worries about all the great problems of her time— “the future of the white race, or Franco-German relations, or the threat posed by the Freemasons and Communism”—she conspicuously does not mention

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Jews.107 Némirovsky’s harshest critics have read her refusal to talk about Jews in the war as yet another moment of self-hatred in a long career of antisemitism. Since the publication of Suite française in 2004, scholars and critics both in and outside France, like Myriam Anissimov, Ruth Franklin, Olivier Philipponnat, Susan Suleiman, Alice Kaplan, and Francine Prose, among others, have engaged in an impassioned debate regarding Némirovsky’s relationship with Judaism—and about whether, as a writer, she can be described as Jewish, self-hating, or antisemitic. But if realism and a drive to represent France as she saw it during the exode inspired her, then her deletion of Jews from the story is particularly puzzling. And why, right at the moment when she wrote in her diaries that she was so rejected as a Jew and wanted to show France for what it really was, did she delete from the novel the basis for her own exclusion? In her insightful study of stereotypes, self-hatred, and the assumptions and emotions behind the critical responses to Némirovsky’s work, Susan Suleiman tackles this question. Suleiman writes that if Némirovsky desired to show the ordinary French person’s reaction to History with a capital H, she was also showing that Jews could no longer be included in the category of ordinary French people: “By the time she started working on Suite Française Némirovsky had arrived at the hopeless conclusion that Jews would never feel or be fully accepted by the French.”108 Jews were excluded from the nation—that is, from the French experience of the Occupation. But there is more here at a narrative level than a reflection on Jewish exclusion. Gone are stereotypes about immigrants and the relationship between French, Russian, Hebrew, and Yiddish that had so marked Némirovsky’s interwar literature. Despite the richness of the narrative in Suite française, I argue that there is a conspicuous homogenization of voice. The question of who speaks was important in a more literal sense, for Némirovsky was trying to publish during the war to support her family financially. As she was composing Suite française, Némirovsky struggled to be seen as a French writer and not as a Russian Jewish author. Rather than a question of publicity and public recognition, or even a question about her literary approach, her status became a legal question. The theme of rejection by one’s own literary patrons, thematized in Némirovsky’s first novella, L’Enfant génial, was eerily present in her own life. The year 1940 marked a disastrous

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transformation in her relationship with her publishers as the result of a new statute. Already in August 1940, Némirovsky wrote to the secretary of Robert Esménard, the director of Albin Michel, asking for clarification about a brief announcement she had found in a regional newspaper: “In accordance with a recent decision, no foreigner will be able to collaborate on a new review.”109 She asks, “Do you believe that this concerns a foreigner who, like me, has lived in France since 1920?”110 She would get an answer in the form of the Jewish Statute published on October 3, 1940, which forbade Jews from running and working on journals and periodicals, with the exception of publications that were strictly scientific in nature.111 This statute resulted in a tense correspondence between Némirovsky and Jean Fayard about publishing in Candide, an antisemitic, right-wing journal issued by the Fayard publishing house, where Némirovsky had published before. Némirovsky had received the first half of her payment for a novel she was commissioned to write, and having completed it, she requested the balance.112 She was met with cold responses explaining that she could keep the advance but that they could not pay her the rest since they could not publish her work.113 A draft of another letter from 1942, asking for help from Horace de Carbuccia, the editor of the antisemitic newspaper Gringoire, where Némirovsky had also published, reveals her material anguish during this period.114 As she composed her letter, she became more and more desperate, and then crossed out what she had written. For example, she began a sentence: “I am completely alone and [désem—].” She stopped midword in writing désemparée, which means “lost at sea.” Later, she started to write about “this tragic circumstance for me,” also stopping midword only to cross out what she was writing. The situation was indeed a strange one. Némirovsky, a Jewish author who had published in right-wing, antisemitic journals, was writing to one of the founders of such a journal to discuss her situation as a Jewish writer who could no longer publish under the Occupation. Her desperation was the consequence of the financial panic that came with finding out that she was not, in fact, the French author she had strived to be. And this desperation may also have been at the root of why she continued to try to publish in antisemitic journals even under the Occupation. On September 13, 1940, Némirovsky wrote to none other than Marshal Philippe Pétain to claim the legitimacy of her French identity.115 During

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the war, both she and her husband sent disturbing and desperate letters to French and Nazi officials. In her letter to Pétain she makes no effort to hide, listing her addresses in Paris and Issy-l’Évêque. The inclusion of her Parisian address perhaps also indicates that she had not lost hope of returning to Paris. In the letter, Némirovsky broaches the topic of government measures against stateless people, and she explains that she and her husband are of Russian origin and that they had come to France fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution. The word “Jewish” does not appear in her letter. She maintains that France should recognize and distinguish between two kinds of immigrants: the undesirable ones and the “honorable foreigners” who have done their best to merit France’s hospitality.116 Némirovsky places herself among the “good” immigrants, and the proof that she deserves a place in France is her literature: “It goes without saying that I have never been involved in politics, and that my work is purely literary. In any case, I have done my best to make France known and loved around the world, in the foreign press and on the radio.”117 She stresses that she wrote in France and in French, arguing that she is French because she has not left France since her immigration and because her children are French. Némirovsky seeks to maintain her place not only in France but also in French letters; she requests “that we may be allowed to live freely in France and that I may be able to continue to exercise my profession of novelist.”118 In fact, she did continue to publish in the early 1940s—under the pseudonyms Pierre Nérey and Charles Blancat, and even simply as “a young woman,” for Présent and Gringoire. The right-wing editor Horace de Carbuccia broke the regulations of the statute by publishing her work.

Suite Montjeu

Could Némirovsky’s argument in her professional correspondence that she was a purely French author explain why she eliminated Jewish voice from her wartime writing rather than writing a culminating wartime novel about the experience of Russian Jewish exiles during the war? In the approximately sixteen short stories she wrote under the Occupation, Némirovsky mentions immigrants only twice and never mentions Jews. In “Les Cartes” (The cards, 1940) she describes a Russian émigré hotel manager in the fashion of her interwar writing, comparing him to a white rat.119 In “L’Ogresse” (The ogress,

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1941) she depicts a child and his ailing father, who, while vacationing in an empty casino, encounter a stage mother who has lost one of her beloved children. That mother, using a derogatory term, speaks of all the “awful immigrants [métèques]” in the American film industry.120 It seems more likely that almost entirely eliminating this kind of language as well as more ambivalent language about Jewish identity was a way of avoiding the topic, a way out of the rhetoric that was now directed at her. Némirovsky distanced herself from the antisemitic rhetoric of right-wing journals in which she published, perhaps realizing the danger of the ideology in which she had taken part. Furthermore, a series of short stories she wrote in addition to Suite française indicates that she was interested in themes of displacement and alienation. Although they do not for the most part depict the war and the exodus, and although they never depict Jews, the eight short stories she published under a pseudonym in Candide, Gringoire, and Présent, and the four short stories published posthumously indicate that she was dealing with the larger issue of movement and feeling foreign or out of place. The stories all revolve around people from the city who find themselves in the countryside, and vice versa. Some of these stories evoke loss, displacement, and the remembrance of World War I during the outbreak of the current war, and two stories take up the exode explicitly. In “La Peur” (Fear, autumn 1940), a man accidentally kills his best friend and former brother-in-arms in World War I, thinking he is the approaching German enemy; after realizing his mistake, he commits suicide.121 The protagonist of “Monsieur Rose” (1940) is a wealthy Parisian set in his ways who is almost singularly concerned with saving his property and fortune for fear of the possibility of war in the 1930s. When war does break out and he leaves Paris for Normandy in June 1940, he realizes he is “out of place in the world,” someone whose habits are from another time.122 He redeems himself by refusing to abandon a young man, a kind stranger who has helped him during the exode—described as a nightmare and a mass migration—when he comes upon friends who offer him a spot in their car. In “L’Inconnu” (“The Unknown Soldier,” 1941), which takes place in May 1940, two brothers who are soldiers are caught up in the flight of Belgian, Dutch, and Luxembourgian refugees; one tells the other that he discovered a German soldier he killed in a raid a few months earlier was actually their half brother, the child of their father who had disappeared after World War I but

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who had apparently not died. One brother is named François, while his half brother is named Franz.123 The theme of marriage comes up in the context of the disparate experiences of the two world wars in an unpublished story that predates the defeat, “En raison des circonstances” (Due to circumstances, ca. 1939), and is further developed in the novel Les Feux de l’automne (The Fires of Autumn).124 In these displacements, as in Suite française, there are no Jews.125 Némirovsky’s other wartime short stories are studies in the experience of being in places where one is not at home, and they often feature women alone in the provinces. In “Les Cartes,” a dance troupe tours the French countryside, and tragedy strikes as the prima becomes jealous of her lover. In “L’Honnête Homme” (The honest man, 1941), a drama about inheritance, Mr. Mitaine moves to a small village after fighting in World War I; he is considered a foreigner even after living there for twenty years.126 In “La Confidente” (“The Confidante,” 1941), a Parisian musician visits the place where his wife died in a car accident while he was on tour in Mexico and she was staying at the home of a friend—a “spinster” who lives in the countryside—to understand the circumstances of her death.127 In “L’Inconnue” (The stranger, ca. 1941), a divorced woman from the provinces begins a long correspondence with a dashing writer who travels the world but misses his home in Paris; she tricks him into marrying her in their old age.128 In “La Voleuse” (The thief, ca. 1941), the granddaughter of wealthy peasants stages a theft from her grandmother after learning that she was the illegitimate daughter of a servant in the house who had been sent away herself after being falsely accused of theft. The servant dies in Paris, and her illegitimate daughter is also sent away after taking her revenge.129 In “Les Vierges” (The virgins, 1942), a woman recently abandoned by her husband returns to France with her daughter after years of living in Morocco. Told from the daughter’s point of view, the story depicts her and her mother staying with her single aunts in the countryside.130 Both the returning sister and the single older sisters cannot understand the vastly different life choices they have made—that is, to marry or not. “L’Ami et la femme” (The friend and the wife, ca. 1942) tells the story of two crewmen who survive a plane crash over Russia on a flight from France to China.131 One crewman, Rémy, dies as he calls for his beloved wife, but his friend Sert survives and lives in Shanghai for two years. Sert gets tired of living abroad, yet, like the protagonist of “Les Vierges,” he is disappointed when he

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returns to France. He learns that Rémy’s widow is a greedy woman who simply profited from his insurance and, in a moment of anger, he murders her. Another unsuccessful marriage is studied in “Un beau marriage” (A beautiful marriage, 1943). In this story about Parisians talking at a hotel in FontRomeu on the Spanish border, a couple recounts how they met during the husband’s failed previous marriage in New Jersey to an American.132 At the end of “La Grande Allée” (ca. 1942), which takes place in a village in a part of the French countryside that the characters believe to be full of witches, a fight between two farms comes to an end. The men throw their rifles into a moat to show they are laying down their arms. But in the dark of night the peasants wonder: “If an evil being came, taking advantage of the night to remove a gun . . .”133 The unfinished sentence implies the possibility of a looming nefarious presence from the outside. This sense of alienation is always beneath the surface in these short stories. A name recurs in a number of other short stories that Némirovsky wrote during the war—namely, the hamlet of Montjeu. The Suite Montjeu, as I call it, includes “Destinées” (Destinies, 1940), “Les Revenants” (The revenants, 1941), and “L’Incendie” (The fire, 1942), all published in Gringoire under the pseudonyms Pierre Nérey and Pierre Neyret.134 Although each of the three stories has been published separately, together they form a trio of images about displacement on this estate. Montjeu refers to a real place. It was a farm near Issy-l’Évêque, the hamlet where Némirovsky had been living since 1940, her daughters having come there a year earlier. In fact, Némirovsky had been vacationing in Issy-l’Évêque, the hometown of her nanny who was close with the family, enjoying her walks near Montjeu, since 1938.135 Montjeu was also the name of a seventeenth-century château approximately twenty-five miles from Issy-l’Évêque. Ironically, the inhabitants of Montjeu helped to hide a Jewish family tracked by the Nazis in 1944. Roger Demon, a commander of the Foreign Legion, arranged for the family’s shelter and was named Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in 1998.136 Némirovsky would not have known about the mission. But it is moving to imagine this location, a place so important for three texts about marginalization, as a haven. The name of the estate in her three stories also spells out mon jeu (my game) or even mon je (my “I”). In fact, her friend André Sabatier, the literary director of Grasset, submitted her short stories to the journal Présent under the

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pseudonyms Jacques Labarre and Pierre Monjeu after visiting her in Issy.137 The place seems to have held a particular interest for her, enough to center three texts around it during her years in Burgundy. “Les Revenants” is told from the point of view of Hélène Dufour, a woman reflecting on her life in Paris decades after moving from her idyllic childhood home of Monjeu (here spelled without a -t-) to Paris following her marriage. Monjeu had been a beautiful, wealthy country estate before World War I. After the sale of the family home, which had been significantly diminished even in her childhood, Hélène stores the old furniture in an empty room in her small Parisian apartment. She later finds that her children play in this room, which has taken on the magical spirit of Monjeu. Her sons mysteriously know the local folk songs that she has never taught them, and they befriend the ghost of her childhood playmate and later lover who died during World War I. They are able to recall details about her home even from before her time, from the heyday of her parents’ youth. Like Ada in Les Chiens et les loups, Hélène has an origin story and a link to something lost deep in the past, even beyond her own lifetime. Némirovsky’s story is an understated expression of one woman’s pain at the loss of her home and at of the loss of a world destroyed by World War I. But instead of talking about Jewishness and World War II directly, Némirovsky writes through the prism of World War I. In “L’Incendie” we find movement in the opposite direction, from Paris to Montjeu. The Parisian Julie Georges and her husband have been buying up land in Montjeu as an investment. Julie stands out in the countryside for her Parisian clothing, but she is nevertheless adept at the skills of managing a countryside estate, from churning butter to surveying her properties. She briefly develops an interest in a tenant, a Parisian painter living on part of her newly acquired land. There is a sudden fire that destroys his home and takes his life. At his funeral she sees that he has two sons who have dwarfism and whom he has kept secret. The story ends by saying that it seems to Julie Georges and her husband that this spectacle holds some profound meaning that they cannot understand. These Parisians living in Montjeu, one of whom is hiding two sons, feel some ineffable sense of discomfort and disconnection. The reader is left to puzzle over what these hidden heirs of the painter could possibly represent. Does some unseen dualism become

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apparent through displacement in the countryside? Némirovsky was living with her two daughters—outcast in the countryside at this time for different reasons than the painters’ sons—and arrangements had to be made for their care. She herself published the story under a pseudonym to hide her identity, another hidden duo in the countryside: Némirovsky/Nérey. “Destinées” is the only story of the Suite Montjeu that is directly related to World War II. In some ways it is the most interesting because of the changes that Némirovsky made to the story between the first version and the published version, as can be seen in her manuscripts.138 These changes demonstrate the slow and partial erasure of Russia from her writing. In the text, three women tell each other stories to pass the time during a bombing alert on May 10, 1940. In the manuscript version, which was entitled “Les Inhumains” (Inhuman people), the three protagonists are Russian émigré women. Two of these women live in the Basque region but are visiting the third woman in Paris. The story is told from the Parisian woman’s perspective. One of the stories within the story takes place in Montjeu, and each story addresses the moment in a person’s life when he or she becomes inhuman—that is to say, when he or she no longer acts with fellow feeling toward other people and begins to feel hatred for them instead. This hatred can be directed at the entire world or at any group of people; once it is lodged in the heart, however, the hater finds supposedly logical reasons for feeling this hatred. And that is when the crowd follows.139 In the original manuscript version of the story, the women recollect a Russian bombing in Helsinki as they are living through the 1940 bombing. After the plane that dropped the bombs had been downed in Finland, they saw that the pilot was a woman. The three women now wonder at what point hatred forms to the extent that an ordinary woman could develop the terrible ability to shoot down a column of refugees. Rather than attributing the cause to patriotism or self-defense, the women determine that it is wounded selfpride. As such, each individual has a tremendous amount of responsibility toward everyone else, and each gesture can make an impact on the world. Later in the story, the narrator says that no one is innocent when everyone’s gestures count.140 The Parisian narrator recounts another story to provide an example. She remembers the exact moment when she could tell that one woman would turn against another. Her story takes place in Russia in 1916.

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A masseuse is told by one of her wealthy clients that although she has a wonderful figure, without money she can never make herself look beautiful to men. The narrator locates this as the moment of the birth of that woman’s hatred, a hatred so terrible that it would lead the masseuse to denounce her client to the Bolsheviks and watch her execution. The published version of the story is quite different and follows the handwritten changes made by Némirovsky on the typescript of “Les Inhumains” that are preserved in her archives. The story was renamed “Destinées” and the reference to “les inhumains” was deleted, as was the discussion of hatred and herd mentality. In the opening pages, the discussion turns to larger-scale questions than the individual choices people make. Némirovsky crossed out the story of the woman bomber, replacing it with a question about affiliations on a national scale: “The closeness between peoples, the infatuation that one feels for a country, sometimes an unknown country—what are the origins of these?”141 The question no longer addresses how an individual begins to commit acts of violence or how everyone is to some extent guilty. A sentence stating that everyone has a responsibility to be human is retained in the final version, but Némirovsky removes the idea that everyone’s acts (gestes) have a multitude of consequences.142 In the original version, the question of individual humanity and responsibility is dealt with through a story about the Bolshevik Revolution. But in the second version of the story, the worldview or the destinies of countries (rather than the inhumanity of people, as the name change suggests) imply much less human volition. Rather, people seem cast into their roles through history. Furthermore, Némirovsky changed the story of the masseuse from 1916 to 1936, placing it not during the Russian Revolution but the Spanish Civil War. The person telling the story is no longer the narrator herself but her friend, who is now cast as a Spanish refugee. This first-person Russian émigré voice is deleted from the story. Here we can see Némirovsky’s process of removing the Russian émigré perspective little by little. In the manuscript version of “Les Inhumains,” on the morning after the bomb alert, the third friend tells her story, which takes place in Montjeu. This friend was also a refugee from Russia who came to Paris. As a child she was sent to the countryside to be raised in Montjeu by a former servant since her mother had to work in Paris and could not care for her. Here, Némirovsky repeats the theme of displacement from Paris to the provinces. In Montjeu,

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the woman saw the ill treatment of a servant, a young boy mocked for his unattractiveness. A Parisian woman visiting with her young daughter yells at him for approaching her daughter, who is so clean and soft-skinned that he is drawn to touch her arm. The Russian émigré girl (now the adult telling the story) tries to be kind to him after she witnesses the moment when he first peers into a mirror and sees how others view him, realizing he is ugly. She later finds out that the boy became a priest and a missionary to a leper colony before joining the French Army. The story that focuses on this unhappy boy who grows up to be an honorable man living on the margins is also about a young Russian immigrant girl seeing Montjeu from the outside. Yet the narrator describes her Russian friend using the stereotypes we find in her interviews: “What dominates in her is what the French call Slavic mysticism.”143 The narrator goes on to say that what is called mysticism is simply “undisciplined piety, something a little disorderly and wild.”144 At this point in the manuscript, Némirovsky stopped making changes, aside from a single very significant edit that she almost made but did not keep in the end. In addition to changing this friend into a Spanish refugee, she altered the expression “Slavic mysticism” to “the mysticism of her race.”145 But then Némirovsky crossed this out again and kept the original version of Russianness and Slavic mysticism.146 Although she qualifies the expression with the phrase, “what the French call,” the narrator still talks about the wild quality of the Slavs. But if the story concerns the assumptions people make about entire groups of people and countries, this can be read as a reflection of that kind of generalization that is criticized in the same short story. The narrator as character, rather than as an omniscient narrator, talks about mysticism; as such, one might read this as the character falling into the same trap as the interviewers whom Némirovsky criticized. But it is ambiguous, revealing that Némirovsky was still grappling with the question of stereotypes even as she was in the process of slowly deleting them from her stories. o Némirovsky never had the chance to return to Paris from Issy-l’Évêque, reversing her own displacement from Paris to the countryside. She was arrested by gendarmes and transferred to the Pithiviers internment camp. Her

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husband, Michel Epstein, wrote on July 27, 1942, to the German ambassador to France, Otto Abetz, in an attempt to argue a way out of deportation for Némirovsky: “Even though my wife was of the Jewish race, she spoke of Jews [in her books] without any tenderness.”147 He mentions that she had published for journals like Gringoire, whose editor Horace de Carbuccia (to whom Némirovsky wrote her anxious letter in 1942) “certainly has never been favorable to Jews or Communists.” Némirovsky died in Auschwitz in 1942 at the age of thirty-nine. Epstein’s last-ditch effort to save his wife is all the more painful when read against the deletions she was making in her literature during the war as she wrote the Montjeu stories. She was slowly removing all traces of Jewish voice in French; it no longer had a place in the writing that she was struggling to publish during the war to support her family. Némirovsky’s fate possibly represents the most terrible outcome of Jewish émigré writing under the Occupation. She was expelled from France and deported to a tragic death, and in her work she herself stifled all Jewish voice to show Jewish exclusion from the nation, perhaps in order to distance herself from her interwar writing. Her own voice disappeared in 1942, leaving no possibility for postwar reflection. Two years before her death, in the same multilingual notebook that is inscribed with all of the different names of places where she lived, she imagines her daughters reading her diaries after her death: “If you ever read this, my daughters, how you will find me silly! How I find myself silly at this happy age! But one must respect his past. So, I do not tear anything up.”148 She decides she will not destroy her private writing, but rather will leave it to them to read about her past. It is thanks to Denise Epstein and Élisabeth Gille, who read her manuscript of Suite française long after the war, and to the support of the writer Myriam Anissimov, that her books were given a new life at the start of the twentyfirst century. Romain Gary was actually the person who initially suggested that Anissimov read Némirovsky, and he had offered her a copy of David Golder as a gift.149 Perhaps this timeline is why her novel has been described as testimony; Denise Epstein even called it a logbook, as if the novel were recounting Némirovsky’s past to her daughters.150 Through this renewed interest in Némirovsky, her interwar writing has also been republished and now translated into English, giving readers access not only to a rare contemporary description of the exode but also to her interwar work, in which Jewish voice

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presents an ambivalent picture of Eastern European Jewish immigration to France, and in particular of the immigration of writers and artists. Its absence from her wartime work is now all the more striking. Reading this absence, rather than condemning it to self-hatred, would work toward Denise Epstein’s motivation to publish Suite française: “I hope that this book will do justice to what she was before anything else: a writer.”151

l EPILOGUE '

M EM O RY, L A N G UAG E , A N D   J EW I S H   F R A N CO P H O N I E

I belong to that particular generation of Jews who have the duty to speak Yiddish, my mother tongue, in a tongue at once familiar and “foreign”—French.

—Myriam Anissimov, “A Yiddish Writer

Who Writes in French”

In study ing the fiv e authors in Writing Occupation, I have sought to demonstrate that French can be read as a Jewish language. Each of these writers can be read in terms of a European Francophonie, as writers from Eastern Europe who adopted French as their literary language. Furthermore, they also engaged in a Jewish Francophonie as they reflected on what it meant to include or exclude Jewish voice in French. Under the Occupation in particular, Benjamin Fondane, Romain Gary, and Jean Malaquais wrote in a French that incorporated Jewish voice, or even rejected the notion of French as a closed, monolingual language. This new idea of French was resistant to the discourse of Vichy, which excluded these writers from the nation as foreigners (or as all too recently naturalized citizens) and as Jews. Taking a different approach, two of these writers removed Jewishness from French in their wartime writing: Elsa Triolet did so in rejection of Jewish particularism, and Irène Némirovsky did so as a reflection of the violent exclusion of

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Jews from the nation. But in each case there is a deep engagement with the role of Jewish identity in the French language. The question of Jewishness within French and, in particular, in relation to the memory of the Shoah and histories of migration continues to this day even among those who did not experience the war. In 1995, the French novelist and literary critic Myriam Anissimov wrote an autobiographical essay in which she describes her approach to writing in French. It went into print just a few years before she helped to publish Irène Némirovsky’s Suite française. Speaking as a child of survivors of the Shoah, and as a child survivor herself, Anissimov captures a sense of home and displacement within the French language in the wake of the persecution of the Yiddish-speaking world in Eastern Europe. Anissimov was born in a Swiss refugee camp in 1943 to Polish parents who spoke Yiddish and who had immigrated to Lyon before the defeat; they returned to the same city after the war.1 In explaining her position as a French writer, Anissimov states that her French is a “hybrid language,” one that uses the rich sensory qualities of Yiddish but expressed within the French language.2 In her writing, she infuses into the French language the Yiddish speech that she heard in her father’s tailor workshop during her childhood. In her novels she uses “the sparks, the phrases, the words of the Yiddish language,” but in French.3 The French language itself is associated with the rigid rules of her school days and with the teacher who made red marks on her papers to correct her syntax, which was colored by her Yiddish upbringing. In her novels, writes Anissimov, Yiddish “fuses” itself into the French.4 Both the Yiddish and French languages denote a distance or loss in Anissimov’s story. French is a language that is at once familiar and foreign. On the one hand, for Anissimov, French is the “vehicle” that helps convey “a feeling born in another world.”5 On the other hand, Yiddish as expressed in French contains a lost world. In Anissimov’s personal history, French is a language in the present tense, while Yiddish is in the past or always on the verge of being in the past, for it is always on the verge of disappearing. It is the language of a personal past, a language that makes her smell the food she ate as a child and that makes her hear once more her father’s bustling workshop. It is also the language of a collective past, of the last words she imagines were uttered by those murdered in the Shoah. It is the language

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of demolished shtetls, the one in which her father tells her “Farges nisht!” (Never forget!).6 Anissimov publishes in French while grieving the idea that the Yiddish books she inherited from her father, as well as those that the Jewish community inherited and that are conserved at the Centre Medem in Paris, will one day cease to be read. When the last speakers of Yiddish pass on, laments Anissimov, this language will fall silent. It is also, I would add, as if a certain kind of French will disappear, for by Anissimov’s logic, no one can be a Yiddish writer in French once Yiddish is forgotten. Anissimov thus tries to hold on to a particularly Jewish Francophonie in which Jewish voice is expressed through French. The narrative Anissimov constructs of writing in Yiddish is a painful one of loss; hearing small phrases in Yiddish evokes in her fragmented memory “a dark abyss full of ashes.”7 Her Yiddish itself is forever marked by the horrors of the Shoah. Nevertheless, there is something positive to be glimpsed in this story. Although French is a language that is both familiar and foreign to her, it is precisely the language that can encompass Yiddish. By calling herself a “Yiddish writer who writes in French,” Anissimov reveals that the limits between the two languages are fluid.8 This notion works against her idea of an abyss through which an entire world has fallen—into oblivion, with an ever-growing sense of loss. Instead, French takes on a lively, multifaceted quality that can accept Yiddish. If the victims of the Shoah were made inhuman, in that they were placed outside the boundaries of laws that protect citizens, the French language itself does not contain these boundaries. This brings to mind Hannah Arendt’s famous declaration, “It wasn’t the German language that went crazy,” explaining how “the German language is the essential thing that has remained and that I have always preserved” after the Second World War.9 Anissimov hails from the generation of the children of the writers in Writing Occupation. Written more than half a century after the war, Anissimov’s account demonstrates the lasting impact of Jewish multilingualism on writerly identity, and illustrates how Yiddish can be spoken in French, how translingualism functions, and how French can be a Jewish language. She has also published important studies of two of the writers in this book, Irène Némirovsky and Romain Gary. Their stories, written a generation earlier than Anissimov’s, provide multiple alternatives to the idea of writing in

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French as a sense of being at home and being displaced both in the interwar period and during World War II. Under the pressures of war, they wrote a Francophonie that shifts the paradigm of dominant and dominated cultures to one of immigration and transnational circulation and expands the idea of what a Jewish language is. Anissimov’s essay shows the afterlives of these questions and texts and their continuing mark on French Jewish writers. Hélène Cixous and Cécile Wajsbrot’s Une autobiographie allemande (A German autobiography, 2016) further develops the questions of the memory and postmemory of the war and how they affect the relationship to language, and to the French language in particular, in the context of Jewishness.10 This text is comprised of the correspondence between Cixous and Wajsbrot in 2013–2014. Cixous was born in Algeria to an Algerian Jewish father and a German Jewish mother, and she remembers her childhood in Oran under the Occupation. Wajsbrot belongs to a younger generation, having been born in Paris after the war. Her grandparents emigrated from Poland and came to France in the 1930s; her grandfather was murdered in Auschwitz. She herself lives between Paris and Berlin.11 As someone born after the war, but who is still deeply affected by her family’s experience, Wajsbrot embodies what Marianne Hirsch has called postmemory, or the way in which the generation that did not live the war relates to its traumas by experiencing their own kind of memory based on “experiences [that] were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right.”12 As such, this generation’s “connection to the past is thus actually mediated not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation.”13 Une autobiographie allemande fuses two autobiographies, those of Cixous and Wajsbrot, which span two generations as well as two continents. In their letters, these two authors are in dialogue about a particularly Jewish relationship to language based on the history of the Shoah in France, Algeria, Germany, and Austria. It is significant that they conduct this conversation in French, for doing so reflects the ways in which the authors discuss their different languages and Jewish identities through the prism of the French language. Even when discussing their instruction in German and Yiddish, they remain within the context of their Francophone upbringings. Early on in the text Cixous describes the “inaugural conjunctions” of living in an Algeria populated by German Jewish refugees, including her

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grandmother, who fled Germany for Oran in 1938, as if in some ways a Germany lived in Algeria.14 Just like clauses connected by a conjunction, Germany and Algeria—and German and French—are always linked. When Cixous writes Allemagne (Germany), it becomes a word indistinguishable from moi (me); she compares this to Derrida’s studies of the stories of Abraham that touch on his être-juif (being-Jewish).15 Although she does not say that Allemagne is the sign of her being-Jewish, this reference is revealing. But for Cixous identity is never about one country: “As soon as I say ‘Germany’ [Al lemagne], Algeria [Algérie] rises up in its shadows.”16 This play on words only works in French, in which both Algeria (Algérie) and Germany (Allemagne) begin with the syllable Al–. But Cixous goes further, stating that she writes this wordplay in French in particular, for it is the language that her grandmother and mother used to hide themselves away from Germany, “‘passing’ their original truth under the blanket of French.”17 They passed, hiding their Jewishness under the cover of the French language. For example, her grandmother would say chez nous in French to refer to Germany, but she would never use the expression bei uns. During the war she could refer to her home in Germany by using the French language, but never the German. As Cixous writes, her grandmother was speaking German in French, and she demanded that the rest of the family speak it too.18 German in French is a kind of Jewish Francophonie, a multilingual French of the war. I would argue that this Franco-German, a language of the Jewish refugees from Nazism in Oran, is just as Jewish as the Yiddish Cixous never learned. This is not to say that French is the peaceful language of home for Cixous, who recalls the exclusion of the war years: from the repeal of the Crémieux Decree in 1940 that stripped Algerian Jews of French citizenship to the passage of the Jewish Statutes late in that same year, and the feeling that the reinstatement of the Crémieux Decree in 1943 only happened because the French were obligated to do so by de Gaulle and by the Americans.19 After reflecting on the wartime experience and on how her father went from serving as a doctor in the French Army in 1939 to being stripped of his medical license in 1940, she writes that she feels in some ways she has never been in France, having always only ever been at its gates (aux portes). She later refers to feeling less than French owing to the failed entry (entrée-manquée)

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of her childhood under the Occupation, which weighs so heavily on her autobiography.20 Instead, she has been in French, in its literature.21 But Cixous writes that a literature is not national, and that she has always resisted any call to nationalism. She urges: “One must reach the region where one language speaks from one language to another [d’une langue à l’autre], where it remakes a multicolored, multilingual language.”22 That is, one must reach the region where one language speaks multiple languages. Her expression, d’une langue à l’autre, recalls the phrase, d’une rive à l’autre (from shore to shore), further linking her idea to a language-region. Language is like a province without a nation, one in which many languages coexist. Instead of being a site of nationalism, French becomes a site of multilingualism and of many different places and spaces. When Wajsbrot asks Cixous directly if French is her “language of the heart,” Cixous responds by talking about a multilingual French: “For me (me, I, for example, one can only say in French)—there is only one language and it speaks sometimes English, or sometimes sings German; it is the sonorous river into which so many tributaries flow.”23 She can only talk about herself in French, and the words “me, I” are only possible for her in French. But her multilingual French can speak and sing in other languages. The war looms large in her multilingualism; German is closely tied to her grandmother’s flight from persecution, and English to the country to which other members of her family fled from Nazism.24 Yet there is a joy, erotic and physical, in these languages of her “plurilingual heart,” in the allemand-de-la-maison (home-German) that was full of language play between German, French, and Arabic.25 She had to translate this home-German into standard German when she started to study it formally in high school, during a period of her life she refers to as meschugge (crazy, in Yiddish).26 Notably, in Une autobiographie allemande, Cixous does not refer to an important episode in her essay titled “Les Noms d’Oran” (“The Names of Oran”): just before her father’s death, he hired two tutors for her, one for Hebrew and one for Arabic; he also enrolled her in a French school.27 Then he passed away without explaining the linguistic legacy he wished to leave her. This absence of Hebrew in the text, as well as the absence she acknowledges in the book of not speaking Yiddish, further underscores that her writing about French and German addresses her multilingual French as a Jewish language.

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When the question of the mother tongue comes up toward the middle of Une autobiographie allemande, Wajsbrot addresses her own linguistic past and the way the memory of immigration and the war has imprinted itself onto the French language. Wajsbrot writes that her mother tongue is French but that of her parents was Yiddish. However, she has always had the sense of French as a learned language and Yiddish as her affective language. Strikingly, she writes, she does not know Yiddish aside from some songs sung to her in childhood, songs she has since forgotten but that nevertheless somehow stay with her.28 She calls Yiddish a mother tongue that she does not know. Her Yiddish recalls what Jeffrey Shandler theorizes as “postvernacular Yiddish,” which includes people who have “an affective or ideological relationship with Yiddish without having command of the language.”29 Postvernacular Yiddish privileges “the symbolic value” of the language over “its instrumental value” to communicate information, and opens up rich cultural practices with enthusiastic speakers.30 Wajsbrot’s Yiddish is also a perfect example of what Samuel Spinner has called “reading Jewish,” where “the inability to read Yiddish becomes the ability to read Jewish.”31 Spinner argues that increasing illiteracy in Yiddish, which Anissimov regrets so painfully, is not only a “story of loss”; the other side of the story is that not knowing a language can also produce a different cultural force and can be “a positive assertion of an identity.”32 Spinner’s thesis shows how within any language there can be a Jewish language to be read. Wajsbrot remembers that her mother never spoke Yiddish again after the Occupation, when it was a forbidden language. Like Cixous, Wajsbrot learned German in school. But she did so in order to try to feel closer to Yiddish; this ended up being a painful paradox, because in German she recognized Yiddish sounds but also the menacing ones associated with her family’s persecution. Wajsbrot has a totally different relationship to German and Yiddish in France from Cixous’s to German and French in Algeria. Unlike Cixous, who experienced the war, Wajsbrot has a postmemory. She locates in her life a space of absence and silence, the refusal in France to remember collaboration when she was growing up, a national narrative that contradicted her family’s memory of being arrested by French and not German police. She calls this “the absence of speech” that she tries to bridge in her writing.33 Notably, this writing is in French. In one letter to Cixous,

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Wajsbrot traces a fascinating history of the commemorative plaques at the Gare de l’Est, the train station from which Jews were deported to concentration camps, the same train station she frequents when she goes to Berlin. 34 The earlier plaques are evasive to say the least: the first one honors deported fighters of the Resistance; the second recognizes the work of the railways in bringing back hundreds of thousands of French prisoners of war and political deportees; the third, which dates to 1992, finally refers to the tens of thousands of Jews who were deported to extermination camps from the station. But Wajsbrot notes that this plaque was dedicated not by the French government but by the Fils et filles de déportés juifs de France (Sons and Daughters of Jewish Deportees from France). Finally, the fourth plaque is for the Service du travail obligatoire (Compulsory Labor Service, STO), which forced hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen to work in Nazi Germany. Wajsbrot writes about the Gare de l’Est as a place of memory that forgets, a kind of lieu de non-mémoire (realm of nonmemory), as opposed to the Panthéon with which this book began and which is a central lieu de mémoire of France. Wajsbrot represents the silence of the train station as a failure of the universalism enshrined in the Panthéon. She wonders, “But deep down, don’t they [the commemorative plaques] pose, in their way, the question of language, or more precisely, of the relationship between language and memory, the need for plurilingualism that you allude to in your last letter, the need for literature and a language to create, in literature, that allows one to approach the world differently?”35 Despite their different relationships to German and to Yiddish, Wajsbrot and Cixous both see the transformative power of plurilingual language in French, of the multiplicity of ways of being in France and in French, through Francophone writing and literature. Like a train station, a site of physical border crossing, many languages can inhabit the same space at once. Anissimov, Cixous, and Wajsbrot rethink Francophonie through the prism of a Jewish Francophonie. Like the writers in Writing Occupation, they shift the paradigm of dominant and dominated cultures to one of immigration and transnational circulation. The memory, and the transmission of the memory, of emigration and the Occupation seem to define this approach to the French language. Their works show the lasting traces of the same questions asked by Benjamin Fondane, Jean Malaquais, Romain Gary, Elsa Triolet, and Irène Némirovsky during the war itself. Focusing on the experience

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of immigration, I have laid out in this book a set of varying personal histories of displacement and exile to examine how Eastern European Jewish writers in France broke down barriers between insider and outsider through language. In turn, Eastern European Francophonie complicates the question of what a Jewish language is, demonstrating that Jewish writers in the war explored Jewishness from within the French language. In the twenty-first century the traces of their work remain as a palimpsest in the autobiographies discussed in this epilogue. The possibility of literature in French to blur the boundaries between insider and outsider, native and nonnative, between Jewish and non-Jewish languages, and indeed between one language and another, is their long-lasting legacy.

N O T ES

Introduction

Author Note: All translations in this book are my own unless otherwise indicated. 1. Mona Ozouf, “The Pantheon: The École Normale of the Dead,” in Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, vol. 3, Symbols, ed. Pierre Nora and Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 3:325–46. Ozouf complicates this narrative, stating that the Panthéon has been “a focal point of internal division” and that the memory it enshrines “is not the national memory but one of several political memories available to the French” (345). 2. There is a long history of the idea of Eastern Europe, which often lacks a precise geographical position. See Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994) for the Western invention of “Eastern Europe as its complementary other half in the eighteenth century, the age of Enlightenment,” a barbaric, backward land to be juxtaposed to its own civilized character (4). For a study of Ostjuden as a “non-European, semi-oriental people” in the German context, see Paul Mendes-Flohr, Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 77–132. 3. Denise Epstein, interview by Vera Frankl, August 17, 2005, Toulouse, France, French transcript, p. 25, Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 4. See Ruth Franklin, “Scandale Française,” New Republic, January 30, 2008. 5. See chapter 5 for further discussion of these debates. 6. Gisèle Sapiro, La Guerre des écrivians , 1940–1953 (Paris: Fayard, 1999). See Margaret Atack, Literature and the French Resistance: Cultural Politics and Narrative Forms,

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1940–1950 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989). In this important work, which takes a literary perspective, Atack looks through the prism of wartime unity and postwar ambiguities in the Resistance novel, although she does not distinguish the experience of Jewish émigré writers from those of Franco-French writers. Other foundational texts on the history and sociology of writers under the Occupation include Anne Simonin, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1942–1955: Le Devoir d’insoumission (Paris: IMEC, 1994); and Jeannine Verdès-Leroux, Refus et violences: Politique et littérature à l’extrême droite des années trente aux retombées de la Libération (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). In The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), Alice Kaplan shows the centrality of writing itself in confronting the war. She contends that “language is at stake in the Brasillach trial, the capacity of language to do real evil” (xv). Examples of two recent studies of writers in the war are: Alan Riding, And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied France (New York: Knopf, 2010); and Frederic Spotts, The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 7. Gisèle Sapiro, “Forces of Solidarity and Logics of Exclusion: The Role of Literary Institutions in Times of Crisis,” in Being Contemporary: French Literature, Culture, and Politics Today, ed. Lia Brozgal and Sara Kippur (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016), 151. 8. Ibid., 150. 9. Ibid., 151. 10. Naomi Seidman, Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 201. 11. In addition to those mentioned here, there are numerous other studies of translation and the war. See, for example, Anita Norich, Writing in Tongues: Translating Yiddish in the Twentieth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013), 42–65; and Sara Kippur, Writing It Twice: Self-Translation and the Making of a World Literature in French (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015). 12. Susan Rubin Suleiman, “Monuments in a Foreign Tongue: On Reading Holocaust Memoirs by Emigrants,” in Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 401. 13. See Angela Kershaw, Translating War: Literature and Memory in France and Britain from the 1940s to the 1960s (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). In the first part of her book, Kershaw studies the translation of the experiences of the war—for Joseph Kessel, from London back to France, and for Elsa Triolet, from the experience of the Resistance to the postwar period and from postwar France to the United States and United Kingdom, when her book was translated into English. In so doing, Kershaw follows Hilary Footitt’s articulation of war zones as “fundamentally translational spaces.” For Footitt, war zones are “transnational contact zones which are, by definition, multivocal spaces in which identities are translated and communication attempted.” See Hilary

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Footitt, “War and Culture Studies in 2016: Putting ‘Translation’ into the Transnational?” Journal of War and Culture Studies 9, no. 3 (2016): 215. 14. “Terre d’accueil, France hostile,” n.d., Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration, accessed December 27, 2018, https://www.histoire-immigration.fr/ musee-numerique/reperes/terre-d-accueil-france-hostile. 15. Seventy-five percent of Jews in France survived the war; 90 percent of French Jews survived, compared to 60 percent of foreign Jews. See Jacques Semelin, La Survie des juifs en France 1940–1944 (Paris: CNRS, 2018), 21. 16. Quoted in Jeremy Jennings, “Universalism,” in The French Republic: History, Values, Debates, ed. Edward G. Berenson, Vincent Duclert, and Christophe Prochasson (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 147. 17. Quoted in Maurice Samuels, Inventing the Israelite: Jewish Fiction in NineteenthCentury France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 8. See also Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) for a discussion of the Abbé Grégoire’s position supporting Jewish regeneration through political rights, whereby Jews would gain “formal inclusion in the nation” but also “needed to change physically, morally, and politically to become fully French” (95). 18. Samuels, Inventing the Israelite, 53–54. 19. Maurice Samuels, The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 5. See also Nadia Malinovich, French and Jewish: Culture and the Politics of Identity in Early Twentieth-Century France (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008), 4–5; and Lisa Moses Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity: The Rise of Jewish Internationalism in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). Leff argues that French Jewish internationalism “used the language of solidarity—filled as it was with decidedly republican ideals—to solidify their own positions within France” (6). 20. Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson, “Emancipation and the Liberal Offer,” in Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States, and Citizenship, ed. Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 4. 21. Ibid. 22. Jean-Jacques Becker and Annette Wieviorka, eds., Les Juifs de  France: De la Révolution française à nos jours (Paris: Liana Levi, 1998), 108. 23. Patrick Weil, Qu’est-ce qu’un Français?: Histoire de la nationalité française depuis la Révolution, rev. ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 110–11. 24. Ibid., 116. On average, 22,500 immigrants received French citizenship in 1928 and 1929, and around 17,000 people were naturalized each year into the 1930s. 25. For an in-depth study of Jewish refugees after the rise of Nazism in Germany, see Vicki Caron, Uneasy Asylum: France and the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933–1942 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); and Michael R. Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press,

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1985). For a study of German refugees in France, see Gilbert Badia, Jean-Baptiste Joly, Jean-Philippe Mathieu, Jacques Omnès, Jean-Michel Palmier, and Hélène Roussel, eds., Les Bannis de Hitler: Accueil et luttes des exilés allemands en France (1933–1939) (Paris: Études et Documentation Internationales; Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1984); and for the history of Spanish refugees in France, see Scott Soo, The Routes to Exile: France and the Spanish Civil War Refugees, 1939–2009 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). 26. Malinovich, French and Jewish, 113. 27. Benjamin Fondane to Claude Sernet, February 1930, FDA Enr C 2 (1), Fonds Benjamin Fondane, Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris. 28. Paula E. Hyman, The Jews of Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 161. 29. Hanna Diamond, Fleeing Hitler: France 1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 47. I rely on Diamond’s book for much of the information in this paragraph. See also Jean Vidalenc, L’Exode de mai–juin 1940 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1957). 30. Diamond, Fleeing Hitler, 48. 31. Ibid., 49. 32. Richard Vinen, The Unfree French: Life Under the Occupation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 30. 33. Ibid. See also Jean-Pierre Azéma, 1940, l’année noire: De la débandade au trauma (Paris: Fayard, 2010), 127. 34. See Shannon L. Fogg, The Politics of Everyday Life in Vichy France: Foreigners, Undesirables, and Strangers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 35. Diamond, Fleeing Hitler, 23. 36. Léon Werth, 33 Days, trans. Austin Denis Johnston (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2015), 6. 37. Gilles Heuré, L’Insoumis: Léon Werth, 1878–1955 (Paris: Vivianne Hamy, 2006), 249. 38. Werth, 33 Days, 20. 39. Ibid., 115. 40. One might add certain moving sections of Colette’s recollections, Journal à rebours (Paris: Fayard, 1941). Extensive bibliographies on the exodus include only three fictional accounts written in French during the war: Jacques Decrest’s Les Jeunes Filles perdues (1943); Irène Némirovsky’s Suite française; and Maurice Rostand’s La Tragédie de la route (1942). See the bibliographies of such texts in Éric Alary, L’Exode: Un drame oublié (Paris: Perrin, 2010), 445–48; and Diamond, Fleeing Hitler, xiv–xv and 241–45. Ilya Ehrenbourg first published Padenie Parizha (The Fall of Paris, 1942) in the Soviet Union in 1940; it appeared in French in 1945. 41. Weil, Qu’est-ce qu’un Français?, 145. 42. Ibid., 144.

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43. Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 64–65. See also Denis Peschanski, La France des camps: L’Internement, 1938–1946 (Paris: Gallimard, 2002). 44. Susan Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 81. See also Renée Poznanski, Les Juifs en France pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, rev. ed. (Paris: Hachette, 1997). 45. Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews, 67. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., 104–5. 48. Ibid., 107. 49. Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 367. 50. Anna Marly, Anna Marly, troubadour de la Résistance: Mémoires (Paris: Tallandier, 2000), 14, 87. 51. Stéphane Courtois, Denis Peschanski, and Adam Rayski, Le Sang de l’étranger: Les Immigrés de la MOI dans la Résistance (Paris: Fayard, 1994), 16, 29. See also Annette Wieviorka, Ils étaient juifs, résistants, communistes, rev. ed. (Paris: Perrin, 2018). 52. Nick Underwood, “Our Most Beautiful Children: Communist Contests and Poetry for Immigrant Jewish Youth in Popular Front France,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society 23, no. 1 (Fall 2017): 66. 53. Dan Miron’s prologue to From Continuity to Contiguity: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010) provides a useful warning against defining Jewish writers as a continuous category. Maxime Decout discusses the reluctance to study the Jewishness of a literary text in the French context in Écrire la judéité: Enquête sur un malaise dans la littérature française (Seyssel, France: Champ Vallon, 2015). 54. Paula E. Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy: The Remaking of French Jewry, 1906– 1939 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 115–52. 55. Quoted in Birnbaum, “Between Social and Political Assimilation: Remarks on the History of Jews in France,” in Birnbaum and Katznelson, Paths of Emancipation, 112; and Hyman, Dreyfus to Vichy, 118. 56. Ibid. See also Nancy L. Green, “The Contradictions of Acculturation: Immigrant Oratories and Yiddish Union Sections,” in The Jews in Modern France, ed. Frances Malino and Bernard Wasserstein (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press; University Press of New England, 1985), 56. 57. Benjamin Harshav, The Polyphony of Jewish Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 24. 58. Malinovich, French and Jewish, 3. 59. Ibid., 112–13. 60. Ibid., 114. Malinovich explains her focus on those who wrote in French (5). 61. Ibid., 4–5.

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62. Underwood, “Our Most Beautiful Children,” 66. 63. Ibid., 89. 64. Ibid., 75. 65. Ibid., 67. 66. See the discussion of Max Weinreich’s term in Benjamin Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 27–40. 67. See David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation  in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 175–77; and Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976), 71–72. 68. Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 105. 69. Quoted in Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood, 107. 70. Janine Ponty, ed., L’Immigration dans les textes: France, 1789–2002 (Paris: Belin, 2003), 149. Originally published in Les Cahiers des droits de l’homme ( January 10, 1927): 3. 71. For a discussion of these racial studies of immigration in the 1930s, see Weil, Qu’est-ce qu’un Français?, 120–30; Gérard Noiriel, Le Creuset français: Histoire de l’immigration (XIXe–XXe siècle), rev. ed. (Paris: Seuil, 2016), 116–24; and William H. Schneider, Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 230–55. 72. Georges Mauco, Les Étrangers en France: Leur rôle dans l’activité économique (Paris: Armand Colin, 1932), 518. See Patrick Weil, “Georges Mauco, expert en immigration: Ethnoracisme pratique et antisémitisme fielleux,” in L’Antisémitisme de plume 1940–1944: Études et documents, ed. Pierre-André Taguieff (Paris: Berg, 1999), 267–76. 73. Édouard Drumont, La France juive: Essai d’histoire contemporaine, 84th ed. (Paris: C. Marpon and E. Flammarion, n.d.), 1:30–31. 74. Ralph Schor, L’Opinion française et les étrangers en France: 1919–1939 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1985), 352. 75. See Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, trans. Shlomo Noble (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). Harshav calls these practices internal and external multilingualism. Polyphony of Jewish Culture, 35–40. 76. For studies of internal and external bilingualism, see, for example, Naomi Brenner, Lingering Bilingualism: Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures in Contact (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2016); Allison Schachter, Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literature in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Yael Chaver, What Must Be Forgotten: The Survival of Yiddish in Zionist Palestine (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004); and Shachar M. Pinsker, Literary Passports: The Making of Modernist Hebrew Fiction in Europe (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011). See also Lital Levy and Allison Schachter, “Jewish Literature / World Literature: Between the Local and the Transnational,” PMLA 130, no. 1 ( January 2015):

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92–109. Levy and Schachter call for a new Jewish literary history that looks to transnational circulation and “trajectories of cultural transmission” between Jewish and nonJewish languages (105). 77. Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 7. 78. My point is along the lines of the work of Leslie Morris on post-Holocaust German and American literary and artistic exchanges that “expand the parameters that have defined what constitutes Jewish text” and move beyond “the very ‘center/margin’ paradigm” through the vicissitudes of German and English translation and “the Jewish.” Leslie Morris, The Translated Jew: German Jewish Culture outside the Margins (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018), 6, 7. 79. Anita Norich, Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish American Culture during the Holocaust (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 12. 80. Ibid., 13. Perhaps closer to my conception would be Zohar Weiman-Kelman’s study of Irena Klepfisz’s bilingual English-Yiddish poetry in New York in the 1980s. Weiman-Kelman theorizes “acts of queer translation,” a mode that “undoes the border (and potential conflict) between present and past” and rethinks the workings of bilingualism in ways that move between English and Yiddish. Zohar Weiman-Kelman, Queer Expectations: A Genealogy of Jewish Women’s Poetry (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018), 107. On the idea of English as a Jewish language in the contemporary United States, see Cynthia Ozick, “America: Toward Yavneh,” in What Is Jewish Literature?, ed. H. Wirth-Nesher (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1994), 20–35; and Dara Horn, “The Future of Yiddish—in English: Field Notes from the New Ashkenaz,” Jewish Quarterly 96, no. 4 (Fall 2006): 471–80. Horn rejects the idea of English as a Jewish language, like Ozick did after publishing her article, but talks about Judeo-English as a code (477–79). 81. Christie McDonald and Susan Rubin Suleiman, “Introduction: The National and the Global,” in French Global: A New Approach to Literary History, ed. Christie McDonald and Susan Rubin Suleiman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), x. 82. “Pour une ‘littérature-monde’ en français,” Le Monde, March 15, 2007. On the “multilingualization of the Francosphere,” see also Charles Forsdick, “Global France, Global French: Beyond the Monolingual,” Contemporary French Civilization 42, no. 1 (2017): 21. 83. Elena Gretchanaia, Alexandre Stroev, Catherine Viollet, “Introduction: Un nouveau domaine de recherche: La Francophonie européenne,” in La Francophonie européenne aux XVIIIe–XIXe siècles: Perspectives littéraires, historiques et culturelles, ed. Elena Gretchanaia, Alexandre Stroev, and Catherine Viollet (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2012), 14, 16. 84. Marc Fumaroli, When the World Spoke French, trans. Richard Howard (New York: New York Review of Books, 2011), xxvii. The original French title refers to Europe and not the world.

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85. Ibid., xxxi. See also Vladislav Rjéoutski, Gesine Argent, and Derek Offord, eds., European Francophonie: The Social, Political and Cultural History of an International Prestige Language (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2004). The introduction to the latter volume focuses on the historical sociolinguistic use of French by European elites from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, pointing to the French language’s cultural capital as “its connection to social power and its resultant prestige” (17). 86. Joanna Nowicki and Catherine Mayaux, foreword to L’Autre Francophonie, ed. Joanna Nowicki and Catherine Mayaux (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2012), 10. 87. Ibid. 88. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 34. 89. Ibid., 72. 90. Ibid., 75–79, 34. 91. Ibid., 154. 92. Ibid., 175. 93. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 16. 94. Ibid., 17. 95. Casanova, World Republic of Letters, 204. 96. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 27. 97. Ibid., 26–27. 98. Benjamin Fondane, Le Mal des fantômes, rev. ed. (Paris: Non Lieu; Verdier, 2006), 155. 99. David Chioni Moore and Alison Rice have more directly taken up postcolonial studies. See David Chioni Moore, “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique,” in “Globalizing Literary Studies,” ed. Giles Gunn, special issue, PMLA 116, no. 1 ( January 2001): 111–28; and Alison Rice, “Francophone Postcolonialism from Eastern Europe,” International Journal of Francophone Studies 10, no. 3 (2007): 313–28. Regarding colonial discourse, see Susannah Heschel, “Revolt of the Colonized: Abraham Geiger’s Wissenschaft des Judentums as a Challenge to Christian Hegemony in the Academy,” New German Critique 77 (Spring–Summer 1999):  61–85. For rich comparisons between Yiddish literature and Anglophone and Francophone African literatures, see Marc Caplan, How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011). 100. One particularly strong connection to be made between the French language and Jewish life in Algeria can be found in the ideological mission of the schools of the Alliance israélite universelle to teach French across the Middle East and North Africa. See Aron Rodrigue, “La Mission éducative (1860–1939),” in Histoire de l’Alliance israélite universelle: De 1860 à nos jours, ed. André Kaspi (Paris: Armand Colin, 2010), 227–61. In

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his novel Pillar of Salt, Albert Memmi describes the experience of learning French at an Alliance school, as well as his linguistic troubles related to French and Judeo-Arabic in Tunisia during the war. 101. Ethan B. Katz, Lisa Moses Leff, and Maud S. Mandel, “Introduction: Engaging Colonial History and Jewish History,” in Colonialism and the Jews, ed. Ethan B. Katz, Lisa Moses Leff, and Maud S. Mandel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 2. 102. Daniel J. Schroeter, “Between Metropole and French North Africa: Vichy’s Anti-Semitic Legislation and Colonialism’s Racial Hierarchies,” in The Holocaust and North Africa, ed. Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevaya Stein (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018), 25. 103. Some excellent studies that have been significantly helpful to my own work evoke the war but do not deal extensively with writing during the war itself. See Murielle Lucie Clément, ed., Écrivains franco-russes (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008); and Anne Quinney, ed., Paris–Bucharest, Bucharest–Paris: Francophone Writers from Romania (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012). 104. Casanova, World Republic of Letters, 194–95. 105. Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (New York: Knopf, 1972).

Chapter 1

1. Michel Carassou, “Benjamin Fondane: Letters from Drancy,” trans. Cheryl Z. Weisberg, Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 6, no. 1 (Spring–Summer 1994): 105. The original French letters were published as “Lettres de Drancy,” Bulletin de la Société d’études Benjamin Fondane 2 (Fall 1994): 2–9. 2. Also spelled as Wechsler or Wexler. In his deportation papers, he is referred to as Vecsler. Carassou, “Letters from Drancy,” 111. 3. Monique Jutrin, Benjamin Fondane ou Le Périple d’Ulysse (Paris: Nizet, 1989), 25. Jutrin, who provides a complete list of Fondane’s pseudonyms, argues that the pen name “Benjamin Fondane” combines his maternal grandfather’s name (Benjamin) with his paternal grandfather’s identity. 4. Andrei Corbea-Hoisie, “Gertsa,” trans. Anca Mircea, in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, accessed November 14, 2019, https://yivoencyclopedia.org/ article.aspx/Gertsa. 5. Isidore Singer, “Schwarzfeld,” in Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. 11 (1906), accessed November 10, 2019, http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/13344-schwarzfeld. 6. Jutrin, Benjamin Fondane, 20–21. 7. Léon Volovici, “La Collaboration de Fondane à la presse juive roumaine,” in Entre Jérusalem et Athènes: Benjamin Fondane à la recherche du judaïsme, ed. Monique Jutrin (Paris: Lethielleux; Les Plans-sur-Bex: Parole et Silence, 2009), 12.

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8. Olivier Salazar-Ferrer, Benjamin Fondane (Paris: Oxus, 2004), 25–29; Éric Freedman, “Introduction: Le Théâtre dans la vie et l’œuvre de Benjamin Fondane,” in Théâtre complet, by Benjamin Fondane, ed. Éric Freedman (Paris: Non Lieu, 2012), 12–13. 9. Freedman, “Introduction: Le Théâtre,” 13. 10. Benjamin Fondane, Imagini şi cărţi din Franţa (Bucharest: Socec, 1921), 8–12, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Benjamin Fondane, Images et livres de France, trans. Odile Serre (Paris: Paris-Méditerranée, 2002), 22–25. 11. Monica Spiridon, “Bucharest-on-the-Seine: The Anatomy of a National Obsession,” in Paris–Bucharest, Bucharest–Paris: Francophone Writers from Romania, ed. Anne Quinney (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), 23. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 34. See also Monica Spiridon, “The Fate of a Stereotype: Little Paris,” in “Cities,” ed. Patricia Yaeger, special issue, PMLA 122, no. 1 ( January 2007): 273. 14. See Adrian Cioroianu, “The Impossible Escape: Romanians and the Balkans,” in Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation, ed. Dušan I. Bjelić and Obrad Savić (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 212. 15. Fondane, Imagini şi cărţi din Franţa, 13. 16. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 181. 17. Ibid., 191. 18. Irina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building and Ethnic Struggle, 1918–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 9. 19. Ovid Crohmaˇlniceanu, “Benjamin Fondane and Romania,” Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 6, no. 1 (Spring–Summer 1994): 64. 20. Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania, 261–65. 21. Ibid., 270. Livezeanu goes into greater detail about the complex history of the university riots and their stakes in her book. See also Cristina A. Bejan, Intellectuals and Fascism in Interwar Romania: The Criterion Association (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Regarding the antisemitic tropes faced by Fondane and his Jewish colleagues, see Andrei Oișteanu, Inventing the Jew: Antisemitic Stereotypes in Romanian and Other Central–East European Cultures, trans. Mirela Adăscăliței (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press for the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2009). 22. Mihail Sebastian, For Two Thousand Years, trans. Philip Ó Ceallaigh (New York: Other Press, 2017), 6–7. 23. Carol Iancu, Jews in Romania 1866–1919: From Exclusion to Emancipation, trans. Carvel de Bussy (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs; distributed by Columbia University Press, 1996), 168–72. On the Alliance’s work to secure rights for Romanian Jews, see Lisa Moses Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity: The Rise of Jewish Internationalism in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 183–98.

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24. See Victor Karady, “Pérégrinations contraintes et migrations stratégiques: Les Cadres socio-historiques de la fuite des cerveaux de l’Autre Europe (1890–1940),” in Étudiants de l’exil: Migrations internationales et universités refuges XVIe–XXe s., ed. Patrick Ferté and Caroline Barrera (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2009), 119–32. 25. John Kenneth Hyde, Benjamin Fondane: A Presentation of His Life and Works (Geneva: Droz, 1971), 13. 26. Benjamin Fondane, “Exercice de français,” Contimporanul (May 28–29, 1925): 4. The first poem Fondane published in France was “Le Regard de l’absent,” Discontinuité 1 ( June 1928): 8; Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 27. Ern Adamov, Fernand Lumbroso, and Claude Sernet, Mises au Point (Paris: Discontinuité, 1929), 12; Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. This quotation appears in a section written by Adamov (still going by his first name, Ern), dated November 1929. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Discontinuité 1 ( June 1928): 2. 31. Ilarie Voronca, ed. Jean-Pierre Begot, Revue Plein Chant 77 (Bassac: Plein Chant, 2004), 13. 32. Emil Cioran, “Benjamin Fondane: 6, rue Rollin,” in Exercices d’admiration: Essais et portraits (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 153. 33. For Cioran’s political allegiances, see Marta Petreu, An Infamous Past: E. M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania, trans. Bogdan Aldea (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005); and Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine, Cioran, Eliade, Ionesco: L’Oubli du fascisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002). 34. Emil Cioran, Bréviaire des vaincus, trans. Alain Paruit (Paris, Gallimard: 1993), 39. 35. Emil Cioran, Entretiens (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 209. 36. Cioran, Bréviaire des vaincus, 41. 37. Cioran, Entretiens, 28. 38. Ibid., 29. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., 34. 42. Voronca wrote his own Ulise in Romanian in 1928, which was translated into French by Roger Vailland as Ulysse dans la cité (Paris: Éditions du Sagittaire, 1933). The double Ulysses of 1933 caused a rift in the friendship. See Christophe Dauphin, Ilarie Voronca: Le Poète integral (Cordes-sur-Ciel: Rafael de Surtis; Paris: Editinter, 2011), 92–93. 43. Benjmain Fondane, Ulysse (Brussels: Cahiers du Journal des poètes, 1933), 31.

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44. Ibid., 20. 45. Benjamin Fondane to Ernest Spirt-Sernet, September 9, 1929, Lt Ms 8948, Fonds général, Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris. Claude Sernet was Ernest Spirt’s pseudonym. 46. For a discussion of this epigraph at the beginning of “Und mit dem Buch aus Tarussa,” see Katja Garloff, Words from Abroad: Trauma and Displacement in Postwar German Jewish Writers (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 152–61. 47. Jean-Yves Conrad, “Le Dossier de naturalisation de Benjamin Fondane,” Cahiers Benjamin Fondane 8 (2005): 93. 48. See the file of Ballard’s correspondance with Fondane, JB Ms 510, Fonds Jean Ballard, Fonds patrimoniaux, Bibliothèque municipale à vocation régionale de l’Alcazar, Marseille. See also Alain Paire, Chronique des Cahiers du Sud: 1914–1966 (Paris: IMEC, 1993), 223. 49. Private collection, Catherine Noone. He uses the same expression in the revised Ulysse. See Benjamin Fondane, Le Mal des fantômes, rev. ed. (Paris: Non Lieu; Verdier, 2006), 42. 50. Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 126. 51. Cioran, “Benjamin Fondane,” 155. 52. Ibid., 153. 53. Benjamin Fondane to Jean Ballard, October 26, 1940, JB Ms 510, Fonds Jean Ballard. 54. Benjamin Fondane, Ulysse, FDA Ms 11–13, Fonds Benjamin Fondane, Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet. For a discussion of Fondane’s three Ulysses poems written at the age of sixteen in 1914, see Ion Pop, “L’Ulysse de B. Fundoianu-Fondane,” Lendemains 146–47 (2012): 148–59. 55. Fondane, Ulysse, FDA Ms 11, folder 2, p. 94, Fonds Benjamin Fondane. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid. 58. Acquisto argues that the prologue, in its plea not to read the poem purely in terms of the war, “hovers between the particular and universal, the historical and metaphysical.” Joseph Acquisto, The Fall Out of Redemption: Writing and Thinking Beyond Salvation in Baudelaire, Cioran, Fondane, Agamben, and Nancy (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 91. 59. Fondane, Ulysse, FDA Ms 12, p. 1, Fonds Benjamin Fondane. 60. Ibid., pp. 1–3. 61. Benjamin Fondane, L’Exode: Super flumina Babylonis, “Manuscrit original corrigé,” FDA Ms 7 (1), Fonds Benjamin Fondane. This afterword is included in the Non Lieu-Verdier edition published in 2006. 62. Fondane, L’Exode: Super flumina Babylonis, “Manuscrit original corrigé,” FDA Ms 7 (1), Fonds Benjamin Fondane.

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63. Olivier Salazar-Ferrer reads L’Exode in particular as the great poem of Jewish poetic resistance under the Occupation. Salazar-Ferrer, Benjamin Fondane, 184. 64. Fondane, Ulysse (1933), 15. 65. Fondane, Ulysse, FDA Ms 11, folder 1, p. 7 and folder 2, pp. 9–10, Fonds Benjamin Fondane; Fondane, Le Mal des fantômes, 20; Benjamin Fondane, Ulysses: Bilingual Edition, trans. and ed. Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2017), 11. 66. Monique Jutrin, “Self-Portrait in Fondane’s Poetry,” trans. Gilla Eisenberg, Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 6, no. 1 (Spring–Summer 1994): 72. 67. Fondane, Ulysse, FDA Ms 11, folder 2, pp. 42–45; Ulysse, FDA Ms 12, pp. 24–28; Ulysse, FDA Ms 11, folder 2, pp. 26–30, Fonds Benjamin Fondane. 68. Fondane, Le Mal des fantômes, 19; Fondane, Ulysses (2017), 11. 69. Fondane, Ulysse, FDA Ms 11, folder 2, p. 23, Fonds Benjamin Fondane; Fondane, Le Mal des fantômes, 33; Fondane, Ulysses (2017), 47. 70. Fondane, Ulysse, FDA Ms 11, folder 2, p. 65, Fonds Benjamin Fondane; Fondane, Le Mal des fantômes, 52; Fondane, Ulysses (2017), 93. 71. Fondane, Ulysse, FDA Ms 11, folder 2, p. 65v, Fonds Benjamin Fondane. 72. An excerpt was published in Lirica 7 ( June 15, 1935): 7–9. It corresponds to the last aleph-bet stanzas in Fondane, Le Mal des fantômes, 203–7. 73. Fondane, L’Exode, FDA Ms 7 (1), p. 67, Fonds Benjamin Fondane; Fondane, Le Mal des fantômes, 207–8. Fondane’s afterword from the original manuscript, dated 1942 or 1943, states that he started this poem in 1934, between writing Ulysse and Titanic. 74. Lion Feuchtwanger, Simone, trans. G. A. Hermann (New York: Viking Press, 1944), 4. 75. Ibid., 4–5. 76. OED Online, s.v. “exodus (n.),” accessed January 14, 2014, http://www.oed.com/ view/Entry/66307. 77. Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 10–11. Walzer studies the exodus in “political terms as a liberation and a revolution” (7). Eddie Glaude Jr. similarly describes the exodus as “a progression, the transformation of a people as they journey forward to a promised land” (5), in Exodus!: Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Glaude studies the story of the exodus as “a crucial source for the construction of a national identity for African Americans” (5). Despite these different contexts, Walzer’s and Glaude’s framing of the story is useful for thinking about how Fondane changes the structure of the story of exodus. 78. Walzer, Exodus and Revolution, 12. 79. Georges Adrey, Journal d’un replié: 11 juin–26 juin 1940 (Paris: René Debresse, 1941), 57. 80. Zoltán Szabó, L’Effondrement: Journal de Paris à Nice, 10 mai 1940–23 août 1940, trans. Agnès Járfás (Paris: Exils, 2002), 195.

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81. Ibid., 133. 82. Benjamin Fondane, “Copies de Poèmes épars,” FDA MS 14, Fonds Benjmain Fondane. “Le Chant du prisonnier” appears as a separate poem in Fondane, Le Mal des fantômes, 260. 83. Benjmain Fondane to Ernest Spirt [pseud. Claude Sernet], August 19, 1942, FDA Enr C 2, Fonds Benjamin Fondane. 84. Benjamin Fondane to Claude Sernet, Cartes Inter-Zones, August 2 and 23, 1941, FDA Enr C 2 (3), Fonds Benjamin Fondane. Fondane published fragments of L’Exode in journals in the Southern Zone, in clandestine journals, and in journals outside of the metropole: Fondane, “Le Mal des fantômes,” Cahiers du Sud 21, no. 268 (October–December 1944): 121–31; “Poèmes,” Fontaine 7 ( January–February 1940): 142–43; and “Poèmes: Le Mal des Fantômes,” Les Volontaires 2, no. 2 ( January 1939): 42–44. 85. Fondane, Le Mal des fantômes, 163; Benjamin Fondane, Exodus: The Face of Poetic Resistance under the Holocaust, trans. Pierre L’Abbé (Toronto: Joseph Norman, 2008), loc. 323 of 1268, Kindle (translation modified). 86. Nancy L. Green, Repenser les migrations (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002), 1–2. 87. See Roger F. Cook, “Hebrew Melodies,” in By the Rivers of Babylon: Heinrich Heine’s Late Songs and Reflections (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 307–39. 88. Benjamin Fondane, “Les Mélodies hébraïques de Heinrich Heine,” trans. Marlena Braester, in Jutrin, Entre Jérusalem et Athènes, 64. Originally published in Mântuirea 144 ( July 11, 1919). 89. Paul Celan, Die Gedichte, ed. Barbara Wiedemann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003), 400. I am using John Felstiner’s translation. See John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 18; and Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 149. 90. Felstiner, Paul Celan, 57. 91. Ibid., 94. 92. Fondane, Le Mal des fantômes, 163. 93. Ibid., 155. 94. Tristan Tzara, Œuvres complètes: 1934–1946, ed. Henri Béhar (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), 3:384. 95. Leviticus 13:45–47. 96. Fondane, Le Mal des fantômes, 170; Fondane, Exodus (2008), loc. 461 of 1268, Kindle (translation modified). 97. Fondane, L’Exode, FDA Ms 7 (1), p. 24v, Fonds Benjamin Fondane. 98. Edward W. Said, “Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginals,” Grand Street 47 (Autumn 1993): 113, 123.

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99. Benjamin Fondane, Poèmes d’autrefois, trans. Odile Serre (Cognac: Le temps qu’il fait, 2010), 14–18; B. Fundoianu, “Psalmul leprosului,” Lumea evree 2, no. 9 (May 1, 1920): 1–3. 100. Jutrin, Benjamin Fondane, 134–35. 101. Benjamin Fondane [pseud. Isaac Lacquedem], “Journées de juin,” in L’Honneur des poètes: Europe (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1944), 2:24–26. 102. Fondane, L’Exode, FDA Ms 7 (1), p. 35, Fonds Benjamin Fondane; Fondane, Le Mal des fantômes, 178. See Michel Carassou’s study of the changes made to the poem, as well as Fondane’s use of the figure of the wandering Jew in “Journées de juin,” Titanic: Bulletin International de l’Association Benjamin Fondane 6–7 (2019): 55–66. 103. Fondane, Le Mal des fantômes, 169. 104. Ibid., 179. 105. Ibid., 190. 106. Ibid., 166. 107. Ibid., 73. 108. Ibid., 43. This does not appear in the 1933 edition. 109. Ibid., 52. This does not appear in the 1933 edition. 110. Ibid., 36. This does not appear in the 1933 edition. 111. Ibid., 169. 112. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 14. Kristeva proposes that “the foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of our identity” (1). This notion of the stranger within us all would change a system of hatred and rejection: “By recognizing him within ourselves, we are spared detesting him in himself ” (1). 113. Fondane, Le Mal des fantômes, 170. 114. Ibid., 180. There is an error in the Hebrew: it should read “Adonai eloheinu, Adonai echad.” Fondane, L’Exode, FDA Ms 7 (1), p. 36, Fonds Benjamin Fondane. 115. Fondane, Le Mal des fantômes, 180. 116. Ibid., 255. 117. Jutrin, “Self-Portrait in Fondane’s Poetry,” 69. 118. Jutrin, Benjamin Fondane, 115. 119. Crohmaˇlniceanu, “Benjamin Fondane and Romania,” 65–66. 120. Gisèle Vanhese, “De l’étranger à l’hôte: L’Émigrant dans la poésie française de Benjamin Fondane,” in Rencontres autour de Benjamin Fondane, poète et philosophe: Actes du colloque de Royaumont 24, 25 et 26 avril 1998, ed. Monique Jutrin (Paris: Parole et silence, 2002), 130–31. Vanhese also discusses Kristeva. 121. Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other: or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 7 (Derrida’s emphasis). 122. Ibid., 65. For a study on language and the Occupation in Derrida’s and Cixous’s writing, as well as the “implicit and explicit connections they make between

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antisemitism and colonial violence,” see Ronnie Scharfman, “Narratives of Internal Exile: Cixous, Derrida and the Vichy Years in Algeria,” in Postcolonial Theory and Francophone Literary Studies, ed. H. Adlai Murdoch and Anne Donadey (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), 87–101. 123. Derrida, Monolingualism, 2 (Derrida’s emphasis). 124. Ibid., 14. 125. Ibid., 55. 126. Fondane, Le Mal des fantômes, 207 (Fondane’s emphasis). 127. Tristan Tzara, Œuvres complètes: 1912-1924, ed. Henri Béhar (Paris: Flammarion, 1975), 1:492–93. 128. Hyde, Benjamin Fondane, 18. 129. Tissier survived Fondane. After the war she worked for the Œuvre de secours aux enfants (OSE), and later became a nun. See Geneviève Fondane to Claude Sernet ( July 5, 1944–May 13, 1950), FDA C 1, Fonds Benjamin Fondane; and Salazar-Ferrer, Benjamin Fondane, 225. 130. Salazar-Ferrer, Benjamin Fondane, 249. 131. Ibid., 254. 132. He included his literary will in a letter dated May 29, 1944; Fondane, “Lettres de Drancy,” 8–9. See also “Liste des œuvres de Benjamin Fondane rédigée par Geneviève Fondane pour Claude Sernet,” FDA Enr C 21, Fonds Benjamin Fondane. 133. Benjamin Fondane to Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, August 1943, GEN MSS, file 452, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 134. La Fenêtre Ardente, 1965. Michel Carassou has also done extensive editing of Fondane’s writings through the publishing house Non Lieu. 135. Ulysses, trans. and ed. Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2017); Cinepoems and Others, ed. Leonard Schwartz, trans. Mitchell Abidor, Marianne Bailey, E. M. Cioran, Marilyn Hacker, Henry King, Andrew Rubens, Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody, and Leonard Schwartz (New York: New York Review Books, 2015); Existential Monday: Philosophical Essays, ed. and trans. Bruce Baugh (New York: New York Review Books, 2016); Exodus: The Face of Poetic Resistance under the Holocaust, trans. Pierre L’Abbé (Toronto: Joseph Norman, 2008).

Chapter 2

1. Alain Fleischer, L’Accent: Une langue fantôme (Paris: Seuil, 2005). The quotation used for the epigraph to this chapter comes from pages 77–78. 2. Ibid., 13. 3. Ibid., 12. 4. Ibid., 113–16. 5. Julien Roumette calls it a polyphonic narrative. “Malaquais et Anna Seghers: Deux Esthétiques pour deux visions politiques de Marseille sous Vichy 1940–1942,” in

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Jean Malaquais entre deux mondes, ed. Geneviève Nakach and Julien Roumette (Paris: Lettres Modernes Minard, 2017), 93. 6. Hannah Arendt uses the expression “an uncertain future” in her account “We Refugees,” in Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile, ed. Marc Robinson (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994), 111. 7. Vicki Caron, introduction to Uneasy Asylum: France and the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933–1942 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 2. 8. Alain Paire, “Entre Villa Air-Bel et rue des Treize Escaliers: Sylvain Itkine et les CroqueFruits,” in Le Jeu de Marseille: Autour d’André Breton et des Surréalistes à Marseille en 1940–1941, ed. Danièle Giraudy (Marseille: Alors Hors Du Temps; Musées de Marseille, 2003), 50. 9. Jean Malaquais, “Marseille: Cap de Bonne Espérance,” Pour la Victoire: Journal français d’Amérique, March 6, 1943. 10. Hans Sahl, Memoiren eines Moralisten, vol. 2, Das Exil im Exil (Hamburg: Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 1994), 261. Jean-Michel Guiraud also calls Marseille a sanctuary city and a waiting room for exile in La Vie intellectuelle et artistique à Marseille à l’époque de Vichy et sous l’Occupation, 1940–1944 (Marseille: Centre régional de documentation pédagogique, 1987), 89, 91. 11. Hans Sahl, The Few and the Many, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962), 305. 12. Anna Seghers, Transit, trans. Margot Bettauer Dembo (New York: New York Review Books, 2013), 35. 13. Ibid., 36. 14. Alain Paire, “Franz Hessel/Walter Benjamin: Camp des Milles, Marseille et Sanary, derniers jours en France,” Galerie Alain-Paire, April 14, 2014, http://www.galeriealain-paire.com. 15. Varian Fry, Surrender on Demand (New York: Random House, 1945), 3, 58. 16. Evelyn Juers, House of Exile: The Lives and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 280. 17. Fry, Surrender on Demand, 6, 16. 18. Regarding Malaquais’s family background and his early years in France and elsewhere, I refer to Geneviève Nakach, Malaquais rebelle (Paris: Cherche Midi, 2011). 19. André Gide and Jean Malaquais, Correspondance: 1935–1950 (Paris: Phébus, 2000), 31. 20. Jean Malaquais, Les Javanais (Paris: Denoël, 1939), 30; translated as Men from Nowhere (New York: L. B. Fischer, 1943), 26 (translation modified). Translator not named. 21. See Nakach, Malaquais rebelle, 119–22, on the press coverage of Les Javanais. 22. Malaquais, Les Javanais, 37; Men from Nowhere, 33–34 (translation modified). 23. Malaquais, Les Javanais, 39; Men from Nowhere, 36 (translation modified).

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24. Léon Trotsky, “Un nouveau grand écrivain: Jean Malaquais,” in Littérature et révolution, trans. Pierre Franck, Claude Ligny, and Jean-Jacques Marie (Paris: Les Éditions de la Passion, 2000), 197. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 198. 27. Jean Malaquais to Leon Trotsky, July 19, 1939, Leon Trotsky Exile Papers, MS Russ 13.1 (2897–2898), Houghton Library, Harvard University. 28. Ibid. 29. Jean Malaquais to Leon Trotsky, August 3, 1939, Leon Trotsky Exile Papers. 30. Trotsky, “Un nouveau grand écrivain,” 198. 31. George Higgins, “Les Conrad français,” Les Nouvelles littéraires, April 6, 1940. 32. Curriculum vitae, application to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, 1949–1950, container 8.10, Jean Malaquais Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 33. Higgins, “Les Conrad français.” 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Jean Malaquais to Jean Ballard, November  6, 1940, JB Ms  830, Fonds Ballard, Fonds patrimoniaux, Bibliothèque municipale à vocation régionale de l’Alcazar, Marseille; Jean Malaquais, Journal de guerre, suivi de Journal du métèque 1939–1942 (Paris: Phébus, 1997), 244. 37. Jean Malaquais, typescript, Journal du métèque, p. 34, container 1.10, Jean Malaquais Papers; French typescript extracts published in Nota Bene (Spring 1988), container 2.2, Jean Malaquais Papers; Nakach, Malaquais rebelle, 152–53. 38. See the history of the Air-Bel household in Rosemary Sullivan, Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille (New York: HarperCollins, 2006). 39. At the low point of their relationship, Serge wrote in a letter in French to Malaquais, one that he never sent: “You are Jewish but you hide it, you are ashamed of it, it’s pathetic (I mean to say: it is a great and significant weakness). You are Polish and you don’t want to be: there is something in that of a renunciation of the self, a deep ache.” Victor Serge to Jean Malaquais, October 15, 1944, GEN MSS 238, box 1, folder 51, Victor Serge Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. But Malaquais did write to Serge the day after their big fight, saying he knew Serge had called him “an embittered little Jew and an agent of the Gestapo.” Jean Malaquais to Victor Serge, October 14, 1944, Victor Serge Papers. 40. Fry, Surrender on Demand, xii. 41. André Gide to Varian Fry, July 28, 1941, Varian Fry Papers, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 42. Alain Paire, Peinture et sculpture à Marseille au XXe siècle (1906–1999) (Marseille: Jeanne Laffitte, 1999), 75.

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43. Paire, “Silvain Itkine et les CroqueFruits,” 61–62. 44. Mary Jayne Gold, Crossroads Marseilles, 1940: A Memoir (New York: Doubleday, 1980), 309. 45. Paire, “Silvain Itkine et les CroqueFruits,” 62–63. 46. André Masson, Mythologie d’André Masson, ed. Jean-Paul Clébert (Geneva: Pierre Cailler, 1971), 64. 47. Malaquais edited the novel for its 1999 republication by Phébus. Unless otherwise noted, I quote from the original 1947 edition, published by Le Pré aux clercs. I will discuss important changes he made for the 1999 edition to scenes that involve accents. Unless otherwise noted, I use Peter Grant’s translation, World without Visa (New York: Doubleday, 1946). 48. Planète sans visa, 19, 16. 49. Malaquais, Journal de guerre, suivi de Journal du métèque 1939–1942, 245. For a discussion of Malaquais’s use of military jargon and regional French dialects in his diaries, see Catherine Rannoux, Les Fictions du journal littéraire: Paul Léautaud, Jean Malaquais, Renaud Camus (Geneva: Droz, 2004), 101–18. 50. Donna F. Ryan, The Holocaust & the Jews of Marseille: The Enforcement of AntiSemitic Policies in Vichy France (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 115–16. See Eric T. Jennings, Escape from Vichy: The Refugee Exodus to the French Caribbean (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018) for the history of the Martinique refugee corridor. 51. Malaquais and Gide, Correspondance, 189, 198, 202. 52. Nakach, Malaquais rebelle, 296. 53. William Granger Ryan to Jean Malaquais, November 28, 1944, container 5.10, Jean Malaquais Papers. Ryan sent Malaquais the Doubleday reader’s report on this date. 54. See Malaquais’s letter of February 15, 1944, to William Granger Ryan, complaining that John Chamberlain calls him anti-French in his review of the diaries in the New York Times; container 5.10, Jean Malaquais Papers. There were positive critiques, including Clement Greenberg’s “War and the Intellectual,” in the Partisan Review 11, no. 2 (Spring 1944): 207–10. But many American reviewers also pointed out that Malaquais was of Polish origin, not French, and thus not capable of understanding the French. Kay Boyle, “The French Retreat,” New York Times Book Review, February 13, 1944, 12; C. G. Paulding, review of War Diary, by Jean Malaquais, Commonwealth, February 25, 1944. 55. Jean Malaquais, Le Nommé Louis Aragon ou le Patriote professionnel: L’Intelligence servile (Paris: Lefeuvre, 1947). 56. William Granger Ryan to Jean Malaquais, November 28, 1944, container 5.10, Jean Malaquais Papers; J. M. Lalley, “Books: The Id Made Flesh,” New Yorker, June 5, 1948, 107. 57. Maurice Nadeau, “Les Livres: ‘Planète sans visa,’” Combat, October 31, 1947. 58. Jean Rousselot, review of Planète sans visa, by Jean Malaquais, n.d., n.p., container 11, Jean Malaquais Papers.

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59. Jean Malaquais to William Granger Ryan, December 18, 1944, container 5.10, Jean Malaquais Papers. 60. Planète sans visa, 214; 347, 351. 61. Ibid., 327. 62. World without Visa, 275; Planète sans visa, 374. 63. World without Visa, 266; Planète sans visa, 362. 64. Planète sans visa, 300. 65. Planète sans visa (1999), 239. 66. Quoted in Ryan, Holocaust & the Jews of Marseille, 83. 67. World without Visa, 3 (translation modified); Planète sans visa, 12. 68. World without Visa, 3; Planète sans visa, 12. 69. For a different reading of language, incommunicability, and the search for a new language in the novel within the “great cacophony of the century,” see Pierre Masson, “Planète sans visa ou voix sans issue,” in Jean Malaquais entre deux mondes, 31–39. 70. World without Visa, 3; Planète sans visa, 12. 71. World without Visa, 337 (translation modified); Planète sans visa, 465. 72. Planète sans visa, 466. This passage does not appear in the translation. 73. World without Visa, 337; Planète sans visa, 466. 74. Malaquais, “Marseille: Cap de Bonne Espérance.” 75. Marcos Eymar draws on the paradox of loneliness of the refugee in his paper, “Massive Loneliness: Community and Individual in the Literary Representation of Spanish Republican Refugees in France” (lecture, Colloquium on Refugees in Europe: A Long History of Representation, Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, Freiburg, Germany, May 13, 2016). 76. Naomi Brenner, Lingering Bilingualism: Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures in Contact (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2016), 5. 77. World without Visa, 103; Planète sans visa, 143. 78. Planète sans visa, 142. The English translation does not include these details. 79. Naomi Seidman, Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 4. Seidman analyzes Yiddish as a speech act in the opening of her book in the context of her father translating (or unfaithfully translating) between Yiddish and French, between stateless refugees and French policemen, in the Gare de l’Est in postwar Paris. See Jeffrey Shandler’s discussion of speaking in Yiddish in contemporary America as performative in nature. Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language & Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 126–32. 80. World without Visa, 103 (translation modified); Planète sans visa, 143. 81. World without Visa, 104; Planète sans visa, 144. 82. Paula E. Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy: The Remaking of French Jewry, 1906–1939 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 115–52; Ralph Schor, L’Opinion française et les étrangers, 1919–1939 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1985), 196.

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83. Nadia Malinovich, French and Jewish: Culture and the Politics of Identity in Early Twentieth-Century France (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008), 109. Likewise, for a discussion of Franco-Yiddish culture and bilingualism, see Nick Underwood, “Our Most Beautiful Children: Communist Contests and Poetry for Immigrant Jewish Youth in Popular Front France,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society 23, no. 1 (Fall 2017): 64–100. 84. Jacques Biélinky, “Les Émigrants juifs à Belleville,” L’Univers israélite, October 15, 1926, 168. 85. Ibid., 169. 86. Ibid. 87. Renée Poznanski, ed., foreword to Journal, 1940–1942: Un journaliste juif à Paris sous l’Occupation, by Jacques Biélinky (Paris: Cerf, 1992), 13. 88. “À propos des ‘Émigrants juifs en France,’” L’Univers israélite, October 22, 1926, 217 (signed by “A reader”). 89. Ibid. 90. World without Visa, 175; Planète sans visa, 238. 91. Planète sans visa (1999), 178. 92. Seidman, Faithful Renderings, 4, 12. 93. Schor, L’Opinion française et les étrangers, 122. 94. Ibid., 184. The pamphlet is entitled L’Invasion juive (n.d.). 95. Lucien Rebatet, “Marseille la juive,” Je suis partout, August 30, 1941. 96. The above quotations are all taken from Rebatet, “Marseille la juive.” 97. Jean Malaquais, Journals, 1941–1995, pp. 3–4, container 9.1, Jean Malaquais Papers. 98. Rebatet, “Marseille la juive.” 99. Alice Yaeger Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 133. 100. Ibid., 134. 101. Sandrine Sanos, The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism, and Gender in 1930s France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 8. 102. Ibid., 194–95. 103. This is one of Sanos’s central arguments in Aesthetics of Hate. 104. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2002), 37–38. 105. Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991), 12. 106. Jacques Saint-Germain, La Grande Invasion (Paris: Flammarion, 1939), 79. 107. Maurice Samuels, “Jews and the Construction of French Identity from Balzac to Proust,” in French Global: A New Approach to Literary History, ed. Christie McDonald and Susan Rubin Suleiman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 407. 108. Ibid.

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109. Honoré de Balzac, A Harlot High and Low, trans. Rayner Heppenstall (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 82. 110. Ibid., 86. 111. Ibid. 112. World without Visa, 155; Planète sans visa, 212. 113. World without Visa, 155; Planète sans visa, 212. 114. Planète sans visa (1999), 158. 115. Ibid., 167. 116. Planète sans visa, 361. 117. World without Visa, 199; Planète sans visa, 270. 118. Fleischer, L’Accent, 30. 119. This section of the novel was first published as a short story: “Le Diable et le visa,” L’Arche 12 (December 1945–January 1946): 32–57; “The Demon and the Visa,” trans. Peter Grant, Town and Country 100, no. 4288 (September 1946): 153–54, 262–68. 120. World without Visa, 98; Planète sans visa, 136. The German is not translated in either edition. 121. Jean Malaquais to William Granger Ryan, August 13, 1945, container 5.10, Jean Malaquais Papers. This same approach appears in the Town and Country translation by Grant (268). Malaquais was quite specific about it with his English translators, although he did not incorporate it himself; the dashes do not appear in either the Arche story or in the 1947 and 1999 French editions of Planète sans visa, although the misunderstanding is the same. They do appear in the Doubleday translation. 122. Victor Serge, Unforgiving Years, trans. Richard Greeman (New York: New York Review Books, 2008), 283. 123. Hélène Cixous, “My Algeriance, in other words: To depart not to arrive from Algeria,” trans. Eric Prenowitz, in Stigmata: Escaping Texts (London: Routledge, 1998), 155. Cixous’s neologism—passporosity—in this essay conveys a sense of joy in France as a country that can be passed through thanks to its ports (like the Port of Marseille) and shores. 124. World without Visa, 97; Planète sans visa, 135. 125. World without Visa, 111, 105; Planète sans visa, 145, 153. 126. World without Visa, 106 (translation modified); Planète sans visa, 146–47. 127. World without Visa, 111; Planète sans visa, 154. 128. World without Visa, 111; Planète sans visa, 154. 129. John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 107. 130. Clifford Rosenberg, Policing Paris: The Origins of Modern Immigration Control between the Wars (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 7. 131. Ibid., 48. 132. In their introduction to Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001),

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editors Jane Caplan and John Torpey analyze the “tensions between identity and identification” (3). See also Craig Robertson, The Passport in America: The History of a Document (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), regarding the historical processes that created the modern passport, and the notion that “identity could be documented” (10–11). 133. Seghers, Transit, 61. 134. Arendt, “We Refugees,” 115. 135. Ibid., 116. 136. Ibid., 111. 137. Jean Malaquais to Justin O’Brien, October 30, 1942, container 5.7, Jean Malaquais Papers. 138. Gide and Malaquais, Correspondance, 141–42. 139. Jean Malaquais to Justin O’Brien, April 17, 1942, container 5.7, Jean Malaquais Papers. 140. Jean Malaquais to Justin O’Brien, November 20, 1941, container 5.7, Jean Malaquais Papers. 141. Ibid. 142. Justin O’Brien to Jean Malaquais, February 23, 1942, container 5.7, Jean Malaquais Papers. 143. Ibid. 144. Justin O’Brien to Jean Malaquais, May 30, 1942, and November 7, 1942, container 5.7, Jean Malaquais Papers. 145. Jean Malaquais to Justin O’Brien, November 19, 1942, container 5.7, Jean Malaquais Papers. Malaquais wrote to O’Brien on December 16, 1942, that they had received the transit visa. 146. Leon Trotsky, My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography, trans. Joseph Hansen (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), 578. 147. Ibid., 578–79.

Chapter 3

1. Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac, “Ces messages de combat et d’espoir . . . ,” in Ici Londres, 1940–1944: Les Voix de la liberté, ed. Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac (Paris: La Documentation française; Le Club français des bibliophiles, 1975), 1:xiv–xv. The series featured P. Bourdan, Jacques Duchesne, Jean Oberlé, and M. Van Moppès (66). 2. Ibid., 1:67. 3. Ibid., 1:194. This episode was broadcast on March 2, 1941. 4. Michael Holquist underscores the simultaneous nature “dialogic exchange” in a literary text: “Simultaneity is a dialogue between the different meanings the same word has at different stages in the history of a given national language, and in various situations within the same historical period.” Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World (London: Routledge, 1990), 68–69. Another reading of the different registers

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within the language would be Abdelkebir Khatibi’s theorizing of Maghrebi Francophone writing as being French translated into French. Abdelkebir Khatibi, “Diglossia,” trans. Whitney Sanford, in Algeria in Others’ Languages, ed. Anne-Emmanuelle Berger (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 157–60. 5. M. M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 262. 6. Ibid., 276. 7. Ibid., 324. Holquist defines Bakhtinian heteroglossia as “a way of conceiving the world as made up of a roiling mass of languages, each of which has its own distinct formal markers” and as a situation that “govern[s] the operation of meaning in the kind of utterance we call a literary text.” Holquist, Dialogism, 69. Although Holquist is not referring to multiple national languages, his frame of understanding is useful for examining multiple languages represented in French. See also Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 139–45. 8. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 278. 9. Benjamin Bailey sees the usefulness of heteroglossia, which “encompasses both mono- and multilingual forms,” to theorize bilingual speech. Even if the Bakhtinian concept relates to different varieties and intonations within one language, it provides an alternative that problematizes the approach of code-switching. Benjamin Bailey, “Heteroglossia and Boundaries,” in Bilingualism: A Social Approach, ed. Monica Heller (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 258; see 257–74 for a general discussion. 10. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 275 (Bakhtin’s emphasis). 11. Benjamin Fondane, Le Mal des fantômes, rev. ed. (Paris: Non Lieu; Verdier, 2006), 169. 12. Holquist, Dialogism, 89. 13. This differs from a “hierarchically constructed heteroglossia” in which a narrator has a position of authority. See Valerij Tjupa, “Heteroglossia,” trans. Alastair Matthews, in Handbook of Narratology, ed. Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), 125. 14. “Chronique de France: Propagandes et opinion,” La France libre 2, no. 7 (May 24, 1941): 67. In a different article, Robert Vacher reports that Parisians call Frenchcensored newspapers “La Presse allemande de langue française.” See Robert Vacher, “J’étais à Paris en janvier dernier,” La France libre 2, no. 8 ( June 20, 1941): 171. 15. Theodore R. Weeks, “Jews and Others in Vilna-Wilno-Vilnius: Invisible Neighbors, 1831–1948,” in Shatterzone of Empires: Ethnicity, Identity, and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands, ed. Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 82. See also Czesław Miłosz, Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition, trans. Catherine S. Leach (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968), 54–68, for his discussion of Vilnius.

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16. For a description of the situation of Jews in Vilnius during World War I, see Weeks, “Jews and Others,” 90–91. 17. It is difficult to establish exact dates, and, as Anissimov notes, we do not know where they were between 1915 and 1921. Myriam Anissimov, Romain Gary, le caméléon (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), 33. 18. David Bellos, Romain Gary: A Tall Story (London: Harvill Secker, 2010), 19. 19. Anissimov, Romain Gary, 48. 20. Ibid., 32, 28. 21. Bellos, Romain Gary, 18. 22. Ibid., 20. 23. Bellos remarks that it seems implausible that Gary would have been educated entirely by private tutors. Bellos, Romain Gary, 29. 24. Romain Gary, La Promesse de l’aube (Paris: Gallimard Folio, 1980), 102. 25. Romain Gary, Promise at Dawn, trans. John Markham Beach (New York: New Directions, 1961) 42; Gary, La Promesse de l’aube, 56. 26. Nancy Huston, Tombeau de Romain Gary (Arles: Actes Sud, 1995), 22. 27. Anissimov, Romain Gary, 144. 28. Ibid., 143. 29. Romain Gary, “L’Orage,” Gringoire, February 15, 1935; “Une petite femme,” Gringoire, May 24, 1935. 30. Romain Gary, L’Orage (Paris: L’Herne, 2005), 41. 31. Ibid., 24. 32. Anissimov, Romain Gary, 148. 33. See Anissimov, Romain Gary, Appendix 1, for a list of the different versions of Gary’s father’s name. 34. Ibid., 15. 35. Ibid., 70. 36. Christopher L. Miller, Imposters: Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 106. 37. Ibid. 38. Anissimov, Romain Gary, 29. 39. In Romain Gary: A Tall Story, David Bellos focuses on multiplicity. 40. Huston, Tombeau, 12. 41. Romain Gary to Christel Kriland Söderlund, April 1, 1939, Fonds Romain Gary, Musée des lettres et des manuscrits, Paris. 42. Anissimov, Romain Gary, 172. 43. Ibid., 135–36. 44. Bellos, Romain Gary, 79. 45. Ibid. 46. Janine Ponty, “La Relation triangulaire entre Polonais, Français et Anglais au sein de la Résistance et de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale,” in La Résistance et les

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Européens du Nord, ed. Robert Frank and José Gotovitch (Brussels: Le Centre, 1994), 2:43–47. Regarding the relationships between these three countries, see also Jan E. Zamojski, “The Social History of Polish Exile (1939–1945): The Exile State and the Clandestine State; Society, Problems and Reflections,” in Europe in Exile: European Exile Communities in Britain 1940–45, ed. Martin Conway and José Gotovitch (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001), 183–211. On Polish diplomacy and the Grand Alliance, see Halik Kochanski, The Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). Regarding the French in England, see Nicholas Atkin, The Forgotten French: Exiles in the British Isles, 1940–1944 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). There is a large literature on de Gaulle and the Free French Force’s fraught relationship with Great Britain; see, for example, Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac, La France libre: De l’appel du 18 juin à la Libération (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 239–318; and Robert Gildea, Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance (London: Faber and Faber, 2015). 47. See François-xavier Coquin and Michel Masłowski, eds., Le Verbe et l’histoire: Mickiewicz, la France et l’Europe (Paris: Institut d’études slaves / Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2002). 48. Ponty, “La Relation triangulaire,” 43. 49. Bellos, Romain Gary, 91–92. 50. Raymond Aron, Mémoires: 50 ans de refléxion politique (Paris: Julliard, 1993), 188–89. For Aron’s own developing views, which shifted in 1943, on Europe as well as on revolution and liberation, see Joël Mouric, Raymond Aron et l’Europe (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013). 51. Kochanski, Eagle Unbowed, 358. 52. Cited in Fabrice Larat, Romain Gary: Un itinéraire européen (Chêne-Bourg, Switzerland: Georg, 1999), 63. The radio show aired on September 18, 1945. 53. Christopher Flood, “André Labarthe and Raymond Aron: Political Myth and Ideology in La France libre,” Journal of European Studies 23, no. 1 (March 1993): 141–42; Crémieux-Brilhac, La France libre, 191–92. 54. Flood, “André Labarthe and Raymond Aron,” 139. 55. Aron, Mémoires, 171. 56. Jean Oberlé, Jean Oberlé vous parle . . . : Souvenirs de cinq années à Londres (Paris: La Jeune Parque, 1945), 104. 57. Flood, “André Labarthe and Raymond Aron,” 140. 58. Aron, Mémoires, 168, 172. 59. Ibid., 172. 60. Alexandra Lapierre, Moura: La Mémoire incendiée (Paris: Flammarion, 2016), 669, 671–72; Mireille Sacotte, “Correspondance avec Raymond Aron,” in Romain Gary, ed. Jean-François Hangouët and Paul Audi (Paris: L’Herne, 2005), 130. 61. Atkin, Forgotten French, ix and 100–3. On exile, see also Guillaume Piketty, “Combatant Exile during World War II: Free French and Spanish Republicans,” in

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War, Exile, Justice, and Everyday Life, 1936–1946, ed. Sandra Ott (Reno: Center for Basque Studies Press, University of Nevada, 2011), 171–90. 62. La France libre 2, no. 8 ( June 20, 1941); H. R. Kedward, “Le Résistance et le discours de l’exil,” Matériaux pour l’histoire de notre temps 67 (2002): 52. 63. For a discussion of England as a “zone of hospitality” and for her study of the production of Kessel’s novel, see Angela Kershaw, Translating War: Literature and Memory in France and Britain from the 1940s to the 1960s (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 29–65. 64. Gary, Promise at Dawn, 87; Gary, La Promesse de l’aube, 104–5. 65. Zygmunt Nowakowski, “Conspiration d’un peuple,” La France libre 3, no. 14 (December 15, 1941): 138. 66. Other articles related to this theme include Ladislas Folkierski, “Un millénaire d’affinités,” La France libre 5, no. 25 (November 16, 1942): 48–55; Ksawery Pruszyński, “La Légende retrouvée,” La France libre 5, no. 26 (December 15, 1942): 114–16; and Ksawery Pruszyński, “Notre-Dame de Comblessac,” La France libre 7, no. 32 ( June 1943): 127–34. 67. I thank Mariola Odzimkowska for her help with the question of rhyme. 68. André Labarthe, “L’Héroïsme polonais dans la littérature française,” La France libre 3, no. 16 (February 16, 1942): 302. 69. Ibid., 303. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid. 72. Jules Michelet, Cours au Collège de France: 1838–1851 (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 1:618. The interruptions are indicated in the text of the lesson and in Michelet’s introduction. 73. Labarthe, “L’Héroïsme polonais,” 305–6. See also W. Lednicki, “Mickiewicz at the Collège de France, 1840–1940,” Slavonic Year-Book 1, American Series (1941): 149–72. 74. Labarthe, “L’Héroïsme polonais,” 306. 75. Ibid., 305. 76. Ibid. 77. Maria Kuncewiczowa, “Une ‘matinée perdue,’” La France libre 6, no. 35 (October 20, 1943): 370–73. 78. For an analysis of this play, see Natella Bachindjagiane, “L’Image du héros dans l’historiographie du romantisme polonais et du symbolisme russe,” trans. Antoine Nivière, in La Philosophie de l’histoire des XIXe et XXe siècles: Pologne, Russie, Europe, ed. Stanisław Fiszer and Antoine Nivière (Paris: Le Manuscrit, 2011), 95; Jean Lajarrige, “Le Mythe de Novembre dans l’œuvre dramatique de Stanisław Wyspiańki,” in Pologne, l’insurrection de 1830–1831: Sa réception en Europe; Actes du colloque organisé les 14 et 15 mai 1981 par le Centre d’étude de la culture polonaise de l’Université de Lille III, ed. Daniel Beauvois (Lille: Université de Lille III, 1982), 273. 79. Kuncewiczowa, “Une ‘matinée perdue,’” 371. Michel Masłowski refers to the official ceremonies during the interwar period linked to this famous translation in

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“France-Pologne au xxe siècle: Rencontres culturelles,” in L’Autre Francophonie, ed. Joanna Nowicki and Catherine Mayaux (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2012), 44. 80. Kuncewiczowa, “Une ‘matinée perdue,’” 371. 81. Zbigniew Grabowski, “La Littérature de l’émigration polonaise,” La France libre 3, no. 18 (April 17, 1942): 479–81. 82. Ibid., 479. 83. Zbigniew Grabowski, Creative Peace: Integration of Europe a Necessity (Glasgow: W. Maclellan, 1944), 41–44. 84. Ibid. 85. La France libre 4, no. 21 ( July 15, 1942): 235. 86. Bellos, Romain Gary, 119. 87. Ibid., 109. 88. Ibid., 113. 89. Romain Gary, “Le Continent englouti,” La France libre 8, no. 45 ( July 1944), 204–9; “Grandeur nature,” La France libre 8, no. 47 (September 1944), 356–59. For details about the dates of composition, including dating the epilogue to 1944, see Bellos, Romain Gary, 99–102. 90. Dominique Bona, Romain Gary (Paris: Mercure de France, 1987), 93–94. 91. For the history of the changes from the 1940s to the 1960s, see David Bellos, “Le Malentendu: L’Histoire cachée d’Éducation européenne,” in Romain Gary, ed. JeanFrançois Hangouët and Paul Audi (Paris: L’Herne, 2005), 162. 92. Ibid. 93. Romain Gary, Forest of Anger, trans. Viola Gerard Garvin (London: Cresset Press, 1944), 34; Romain Gary, Éducation européenne (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1945), 38; Gary, Éducation européenne (Paris: Gallimard, 1956), 68. In Nothing Important Ever Dies (London: Cresset Press, 1960), Gary returns to the “five Polish hills” (51). 94. Ralph Schoolcraft, Romain Gary: The Man Who Sold His Shadow (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 29. 95. Gary, Éducation européenne (1945), 24. 96. The Polish spelling of Dobranski’s name would be Dobrański or Dobrzański, but in the novel the name is Gallicized. 97. Gary, Éducation européenne (1945), 38. 98. Ibid., 40. 99. Winston Churchill, “Wars Are Not Won by Evacuations,” in Blood, Toil, Tears, and Sweat: The Speeches of Winston Churchill, ed. David Cannadine (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), 155–65. 100. Gary, Forest of Anger, 38. 101. Gary, Éducation européenne (1945), 41–42. 102. Gary, “Le Continent englouti,” 204–9. 103. Gary, Éducation européenne (1945), 57.

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104. Ibid., 59. The italicized words appear in German in the text. 105. Ibid., 61. 106. Bellos, Romain Gary, 86. 107. Gary, Éducation européenne (1945), 21, 85. Similar statements are found in Forest of Anger, 18, 81. 108. Gary, Éducation européenne (1945), 86–87. The English editions of the novel from 1944 and 1960 accidentally refer to these as Thursday evening services. 109. Gary, Forest of Anger, 83–84. 110. Anny Dayan Rosenman, “Des Cerfs-volants jaunes en forme d’étoiles: La Judaïté paradoxale de Romain Gary,” Les Temps modernes 568 (1993): 37. 111. Ibid., 53. On the trope of the absence of Yiddish as “a metonym for the tragic loss of its speakers,” see Jeffrey Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland: Language & Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 18. This is a much discussed concept, and one that is often resisted in recent scholarship. 112. Romain Gary, Le Judaïsme n’est pas une question de sang (Paris: L’Herne, 2007), 24, 26. Interview by Richard Liscia originally published in L’Arche (April 26–May 25, 1970): 40–45. For an analysis of Gary’s interviews and his existential approach to Jewishness, see Maxime Decout, Écrire la judéité: Enquête sur un malaise dans la littérature française (Seyssel, France: Champ Vallon, 2015), 130–32. 113. Gary, Éducation européenne (1945), 109. The same scene appears in Forest of Anger, 107–9. 114. Gary, Éducation européenne (1945), 111. 115. Ibid., 113. 116. I thank Marta Skwara for this reference. 117. Renée Poznanski, Propagandes et persécutions: La Résistance et le “problème juif,” 1940–1944 (Paris: Fayard, 2008), 551–53. 118. Ibid., 551, 553. See also Olivier Wieviorka, Histoire de la Résistance 1940–1945 (Paris: Perrin, 2013), 229–33. 119. Regarding the complexities of this situation, see Jan Láníček and James Jordan, eds., Governments-in-Exile and the Jews during the Second World War (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2013). In this context, we are not talking about a silence. See also David Engel, In the Shadow of Auschwitz: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1939–1942 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); and David Engel, Facing a Holocaust: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1943–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). 120. Poznanski, Propagandes et persécutions, 324. See also Jean-Louis CrémieuxBrilhac, “La France libre et le ‘problème juif,’” Le Débat 162, no. 5 (November–December 2010): 53–70. 121. Poznanski, Propagandes et persécutions, 329. Aron discusses his regret but defends the tone of his “Chroniques de France” column in Mémoires, 174–77.

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122. “Dans Paris occupé,” La France libre 3, no. 15 ( January 15, 1942): 233–40. 123. Stanisław Mikołajczyk, “C’est en Pologne qu’on apprend à connaître l’Allemagne,” La France libre 5, no. 28 (February 15, 1943): 261–67. See Poznanski, Propagandes et persécutions, 391. 124. Cohen’s text appeared in four installments: La France libre 6, no. 32 ( June 15, 1943): 99–105; La France libre 6, no. 33 ( July 15, 1943): 189–99; La France libre 7, no. 40 (February 15, 1944): 280–87; La France libre 8, no. 43 (May 15, 1944): 47–54. See also Jean Oberlé, “Max Jacob: Poète et martyr,” La France libre 8, no. 44 ( June 15, 1944): 102–4. 125. By chance, Simon Cukier was a member of the French Resistance in the FTPMOI and was born in Poland. See Simon Cukier, Dominique Decèze, David Diamant, and Michel Grojnowski, Juifs révolutionnaires: Une page d’histoire du Yiddishland en France (Paris: Messidor, 1987). 126. Harold B. Segel, “Adam Mickiewicz (1799–1855): Pan Tadeusz (1834),” in Stranger in Our Midst: Images of the Jew in Polish Literature, ed. Harold B. Segel (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 71. Aleksander Hertz calls this character an expression of “the idea of the Jews’ kindredness,” noting that Mickiewicz still represents Jankiel as different from the other Poles. See Aleksander Hertz, The Jews in Polish Culture, trans. Richard Lourie, ed. Lucjan Dobroszycki (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 29–30. 127. Adam Mickiewicz, Pan Tadeusz, or The Last Foray in Lithuania, trans. Kenneth Mackenzie (London: Polish Cultural Foundation, 1964), 279. 128. Ibid. 129. Magdalena Opalski, The Jewish Tavern-Keeper and His Tavern in NineteenthCentury Polish Literature ( Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for the Furtherance of the Study of Jewish History, 1986), 52. 130. Karen C. Underhill, “Aux Grands Hommes de la Parole: On the Verbal Messiah in Adam Mickiewicz’s Paris Lectures,” Slavic and East European Journal 45, no. 4 (Winter 2001): 725. See also Artur Eisenbach, The Emancipation of the Jews in Poland, 1780–1870, trans. Janina Dorosz (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 337–40. 131. Underhill, “Verbal Messiah,” 725. 132. Adam Mickiewicz, The Books and the Pilgrimage of the Polish Nation (London: James Ridgway, 1833), 23–24. Translator not named. 133. Ibid., 73. 134. Ibid., 11–12, 74. 135. Ibid., 74. 136. Charles Maurras, Romantisme et révolution (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1922), 2. 137. Antoine Compagnon, “Maurras critique,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 105, no. 3 (2005): 523. 138. Maurras, Romantisme et révolution, 4.

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139. David Carroll, French Literary Fascism: Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and the Ideology of Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 74. I am grateful to Clémentine Fauré-Bellaïche for sharing her work, André Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes, and the Religion of Literary Modernism (forthcoming). 140. Carroll, French Literary Fascism, 78–79. 141. Maria Kuncewiczowa, “Paris, mon Paris,” La France libre 2, no. 12 (October 15, 1941): 502–5. 142. Ibid., 504. 143. Michael Curtis, Three Against the Third Republic: Sorel, Barrès, and Maurras (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959), 206. 144. Kuncewiczowa depicts Polish antisemitism directed at a young girl assumed to be Jewish because her name is Rose. Maria Kuncewiczowa, The Stranger, trans. B. W. A. Massey (New York: L. B. Fischer, 1945), 34–37; Segel, Stranger in Our Midst, 295. 145. Gary, Judaïsme, 23. 146. Jean-Marc Dreyfus, L’Impossible Réparation: Déportés, biens spoliés, or nazi, comptes bloqués, criminels de guerre (Paris: Flammarion, 2015), 57–58, 68.

Chapter 4

1. Albert Camus to Elsa Triolet, May 29, 1943, “L’Amitié en guerre: Une séléction de la correspondance d’Albert Camus et Elsa Triolet (1943–44),” ed. Julia Elsky, La Nouvelle Revue Française 640 ( January 2020): 64. 2. Alice Kaplan, Looking for the Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 61. 3. On women in the Académie Goncourt, see Olivier Boura, Un siècle de Goncourt (Paris: Arléa, 2003), 166–84. 4. See Maurice Samuels’s discussion of the changing role of difference in the history of French universalism, which “evolved in the modern period largely as a discourse on Jews.” The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 5. 5. Pierre Birnbaum, introduction to Histoire politique des juifs de France: Entre universalisme et particularisme, ed. Pierre Birnbaum (Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1990), 13–14. 6. For information on the Kagans’ multilingualism, see Lilly Marcou, Elsa Triolet: Les Yeux et la mémoire (Paris: Plon, 1994), 11–15; see also Huguette Bouchardeau, Elsa Triolet (Paris: Flammarion, 2000), 12. 7. See Marcou’s and Bouchardeau’s biographies of Triolet for information on her early years. See also Roman Jakobson’s letters to Triolet in Roman Jakobson, My Futurist Years, trans. Stephen Rudy, ed. Bengt Jangfeldt (New York: Marsilio, 1997), 109–41. 8. Elsa Triolet, “Ouverture,” in Œuvres romanesques croisées d’Elsa Triolet et Aragon (Paris: Laffont, 1964), 1:14.

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9. Ibid., 1:26. 10. Bouchardeau, Elsa Triolet, 41. 11. Ibid., 32, 42. 12. Triolet, “Ouverture,” in Œuvres romanesques croisées, 1:14 (Triolet’s emphasis). 13. They had a ceremony in Paris in 1919 as well. Marcou, Elsa Triolet, 46. She would have obtained French citizenship without a déclaration or decret, following the law of June 26, 1889. I thank Annie Poinsot of the Archives nationales for this information. 14. Barbara Alpern Engel, Women in Russia, 1700–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 142, 134. 15. Patrick Weil, Qu’est-ce qu’un Français?: Histoire de la nationalité française depuis la Révolution, rev. ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 19. 16. See Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). 17. Marcou, Elsa Triolet, 49. 18. Catherine Raissiguier, Reinventing the Republic: Gender, Migration, and Citizenship in France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 3–4. 19. Marcou, Elsa Triolet, 54–63. 20. See Leonid Livak, Russian Émigrés in the Intellectual and Literary Life of Interwar France: A Bibliographical Essay (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010). 21. Marcou, Elsa Triolet, 64, 71. 22. Triolet, “Ouverture,” in Œuvres romanesques croisées, 1:17–18; Elsa Triolet, Écrits intimes, 1912–1939, trans. Lily Denis, ed. Marie-Thérèse Eychart (Paris: Stock, 1998), 208n1. 23. Bouchardeau, Elsa Triolet, 87–88. 24. See Florence Calame-Levert, ed., De Neige et de rêve: Les Bijoux d’Elsa Triolet (Vanves, France: Le Chêne, 2015). 25. Marcou, Elsa Triolet, 74. 26. Triolet, Écrits intimes, 220. 27. See, for example, Jean Digne and Sylvie Buisson, eds., Montparnasse déporté: Artistes d’Europe (Paris: Musée du Montparnasse, 2005), catalog for an exhibition of the same name presented at the Musée du Montparnasse, May 12–October 2, 2005. 28. Triolet, Écrits intimes, 220. 29. Eychart, preface to Triolet, Écrits intimes, 16. 30. Ibid., 17. 31. Triolet, Écrits intimes, 58. 32. Ibid., 66. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 119. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., 114. 37. Ibid., 268. Entry dated September 23, 1938. 38. Ibid., 269, 271. Entries dated September 26 and 28, 1938.

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39. Elsa Triolet, Zashchitnyy Tsvet (Moscow: Federatsiya, 1928), 41–42; translated by Léon Robel as Camouflage, in Œuvres romanesques croisées, 39:197. I thank Risa Chubinsky, Natalia Khomenko, and Aleksandra Pomiećko for their translations from the original Russian. 40. Triolet, “Ouverture,” in Œuvres romanesques croisées, 1:24–25. 41. Marcou, Elsa Triolet, 85. See Angès Varda’s short film Elsa la Rose (1966) for Triolet and Aragon’s reenactment of their meeting. 42. Marcou, Elsa Triolet, 89. 43. Anne Simonin, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1942–1955: Le Devoir d’insoumission (Paris: IMEC, 1994), 110. 44. Marianne Delranc-Gaudric, “La Genèse de Camouflage,” Recherches croisées Aragon/Elsa Triolet 3 (1991): 75. 45. Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour, Alien Tongues: Bilingual Russian Writers of the “First” Emigration (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 67–70; Delranc-Gaudric, “La Genèse de Camouflage,” 37–81. See also Stéphanie Bellemare-Page, “Elsa Triolet: Au carrefour des Lettres françaises et russes,” in Écrivains franco-russes, ed. Murielle Lucie Clément (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 73. 46. Delranc-Gaudric, “La Genèse de Camouflage,” 76–77. 47. Ibid., 77n1. 48. Ibid., 80. 49. Klosty Beaujour, Alien Tongues, 68. 50. Elsa Triolet, La Mise en mots (Geneva: Albert Skira, 1969), 54. 51. Triolet, Écrits intimes, 235–36. Entry dated September 1, 1938. 52. Triolet, “Ouverture,” in Œuvres romanesques croisées, 1:32. 53. Hélène Cixous, “The Names of Oran,” trans. Eric Prenowitz, in Algeria in Others’ Languages, ed. Anne-Emmanuelle Berger (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 187. 54. Ibid., 188. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid., 190. See also Hélène Cixous, “Mon Algériance,” Les Inrockuptibles 115 (August 20–September 2, 1997): 70–74, in which Cixous also discusses her name, and other neologisms like passeporosité (passporosity), as discussed in chapter 2 and in the epilogue. 57. Laurie Corbin, “The Other Language: The Language of the Other in the Work of Assia Djebar and Hélène Cixous,” MLN 129, no. 4 (September 2014): 816. 58. Ibid. 59. Hélène Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber, Hélène Cixous: Photos de racines (Paris: Des Femmes, 1994), 190. For a discussion of her family background and its effect on her relationship to French, see, for example, Ronnie Scharfman, “Narratives of Internal Exile: Cixous, Derrida and the Vichy Years in Algeria,” in Postcolonial Theory and Francophone Literary Studies, ed. H. Adlai Murdoch and Anne Donadey (Gainesville:

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University of Florida Press, 2005), 87–101; and Alison Rice, Time Signatures: Contextualizing Contemporary Francophone Autobiographical Writing from the Maghreb (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 231–58. 60. Corbin, “The Other Language,” 814. 61. Triolet, “Ouverture,” in Œuvres romanesques croisées, 1:26. 62. Ibid. 63. Dominque Eddé also uses the image of a corset in her novel Pourquoi il fait si sombre? (Paris: Seuil, 1999). See Michelle Hartman, Native Tongue, Stranger Talk: The Arabic and French Literary Landscapes of Lebanon (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2014), 270. 64. Klosty Beaujour, Alien Tongues, 76. 65. Ibid., 75. 66. Elsa Triolet to Lili Brik, July 12, 1938, in Lili Brik and Elsa Triolet, Correspondance 1921–1970, trans. Marianne Delranc, Jean Pérus, Hélène Ravaisse, Léon Robel, Hélène Rol-Tanguy,  and Simone Sentz-Michel, ed. Léon Robel (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 126 (Triolet’s emphasis). 67. Triolet to Brik, December 28, 1938, Correspondance, 134–35. 68. Marcou, Elsa Triolet, 142–43. 69. Frédéric Vitoux, La Vie de Céline (Paris: Grasset, 1988), 295–303. 70. Brik to Triolet, November 21, 1944, Correspondance, 157. 71. For information on Triolet’s Resistance activities, see Gisèle Sapiro, La Guerre des écrivains, 1940–1953 (Paris: Fayard, 1999), 474–84; Marianne Delranc-Gaudric, “Elsa Triolet dans la Résistance: L’Écriture et la vie,” Europe 979–80 (November–December 2010): 225–40; George Aillaud, “Chronologie d’Aragon et d’Elsa Triolet (1939–1945),” Les Annales de la Société des amis de Louis Aragon et Elsa Triolet 16 (2014): 11–209; and Triolet’s own various prefaces referenced throughout this chapter. 72. Marcou, Elsa Triolet, 234. 73. Triolet, “Préface à la contrebande,” in Œuvres romanesques croisées, 3:27. 74. Pierre Seghers, La Résistance et ses poètes: France, 1940–1945, 2nd ed. (Paris: Seghers, 1974), 69–74. 75. Triolet, “Préface au désenchantement,” in Œuvres romanesques croisées, 9:14. 76. Christophe Dauphin, Ilarie Voronca: Le Poète integral (Cordes-sur-Ciel: Rafael de Surtis; Paris: Editinter, 2011), 147. 77. Triolet, “Préface à la contrebande,” in Œuvres romanesques croisées, 3:38. 78. Simonin, Les Éditions de Minuit, 117; Gisèle Sapiro, The French Writers’ War, 1940– 1953, trans. Vanessa Doriott Anderson and Dorrit Cohn (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 362. 79. Triolet, “Préface à la clandestinité,” in Œuvres romanesques croisées, 5:12. 80. For histories of immigrants in the MOI, see Stéphane Courtois, Denis Peschanski, and Adam Rayski, Le Sang de l’étranger: Les Immigrés de la MOI dans la Résistance (Paris: Fayard, 1989); Annette Wieviorka, Ils étaient juifs, résistants, communistes,

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rev. ed. (Paris: Perrin, 2018); and Renée Poznanski, “On Jews, Frenchmen, Communists, and the Second World War,” in Dark Times, Dire Decisions: Jews and Communism, ed. Jonathan Frankel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 168–98. 81. Its original name was Main d’œuvre étrangère (Foreign Workforce). 82. See Wieviorka, Ils étaient juifs, 117–18. 83. Renée Poznanski, Propagandes et persécutions: La Résistance et le “problème juif,” 1940–1944 (Paris: Fayard, 2008), 176. See Poznanski’s explanation of debates about Jews in the Communist Resistance (11–13). 84. Annie Kriegel, Réflexion sur les questions juives (Paris: Hachette, 1984), 52. 85. Ibid., 51. 86. Annie Kriegel, Ce que j’ai cru comprendre (Paris: Laffont, 1991), 194. See also Kriegel’s discussion of Triolet (570–75). 87. Aronowicz provides another counterexample of Jewish-Communist activity: Haim Sloves, who was a Jewish-Communist, “the hyphen indicating a peculiar hybrid.” Annette Aronowicz, “Haim Sloves, the Jewish People, and a Jewish Communist’s Allegiance,” Jewish Social Studies 9, no. 1 (2002): 96. 88. “Rapprochement des immigrés aux peuples de France: Politique de notre Parti envers la M.O.I.,” Supplément consacré au travail dans la M.O.I., La Vie du Parti (November 1943): 3. See also “Rendre plus étroite la liaison des immigrés avec le peuple français,” La Vie de la MOI (December 1943): 6. Both sources are held by the Musée de la Résistance nationale, Champigny-sur-Marne, France. 89. “Périodiques diffusés en France en langue arménienne, espagnole ou catalane, roumaine, russe, tchèque” and “Périodiques clandestins diffusés en France en langue polonaise,” Périodiques clandestins diffusés en France de 1939 à 1945, Per Micr D 8, Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF). See a full list and further information in Renée Roux-Fouillet, ed., Catalogue des périodiques clandestins, 1939–1945 (Paris: BnF, 1954). 90. See Wieviorka’s study of the June 25 and September 1, 1941, issues in Ils étaient juifs, 117–20. 91. Italia libera: Organo del Comitato d’azione degli Italiani in Francia per la liberazione nationale 1 ( January 5, 1944), BnF. This is the only issue that exists. România liberă/ La Roumanie libre and Nové Československo (August 1944) would be other examples of bilingualism in the clandestine press. 92. Musée de la Résistance nationale, Champigny-sur-Marne, France. 93. Elsa Triolet, “Les Voyageurs fantastiques,” Les Lettres françaises 18 ( July 1944): 4. 94. Jean Marcenac, Je n’ai pas perdu mon temps (Paris: Temps Actuel, 1982), 315–18. 95. Elsa Triolet, “Aux armes, citoyens!,” Les Lettres françaises 16 (May 1944): 5–6. See François Eychart and Georges Aillaud, eds., Les Lettres françaises et Les Étoiles dans la clandestinité, 1942–1944 (Paris: Cherche Midi, 2008), 145. 96. A. Louise Staman, With the Stroke of a Pen: A Story of Ambition, Greed, Infidelity, and the Murder of French Publisher Robert Denoël (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2002), 165–69.

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97. Bouchardeau, Elsa Triolet, 167. 98. See Jean Sauvageon, “La Drôme en armes: Introduction,” Les Annales de la Société des amis de Louis Aragon et Elsa Triolet 12 (2010): 9–20. This issue is devoted to La Drôme en armes. 99. See Pascal Fouché, L’Édition française sous l’Occupation, 1940–1945 (Paris: Bibliothèque de littérature française contemporaine de l’Université Paris 7, 1987), 2:202–5; and Staman, With the Stroke of a Pen, 205–7. 100. For the history of the publication of “Les Amants d’Avignon,” see Simonin, Les Éditions de Minuit, 109–16. 101. Triolet, “Préface à la clandestinité,” in Œuvres romanesques croisées, 5:13–14. 102. Ibid., 5:21–22. 103. Elsa Triolet, A Fine of Two Hundred Francs, trans. Helena Lewis (London: Virago Press, 1986), 68 (translation modified). Originally published in French as Elsa Triolet, Le premier accroc coûte deux cents francs (Paris: Denoël, 1945), 99. 104. Maurice Samuels, Inventing the Israelite: Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 37–38. 105. Fine of Two Hundred Francs, 69 (translation modified); Le premier accroc, 100. 106. Fine of Two Hundred Francs, 99; Le premier accroc, 144. 107. Elsa Triolet, notebook 135, Le premier accroc coûte deux cents francs, “Alexis Slavsky I,” p. 5, Bibliothèque nationale de France mss., Fonds Triolet-Aragon en dépôt du CNRS. 108. Ibid., p. 1. Both grandmothers are also Jewish in an alternate opening of the novel. Triolet, notebook 140, Le premier accroc, “Alexis Slavsky VI,” p. 7, Fonds TrioletAragon. The expression “pas très catholique” does find its way into the published version as well. Le premier accroc, 99. 109. Fine of Two Hundred Francs, 72; Le premier accroc, 104–5. 110. Fine of Two Hundred Francs, 85 (translation modified); Le premier accroc, 123. 111. Triolet, notebook 136, Le premier accroc, “Alexis Slavsky II,” p. 6v, Fonds Triolet-Aragon. 112. Fine of Two Hundred Francs, 85; Le premier accroc, 123. 113. Fine of Two Hundred Francs, 130 (translation modified); Le premier accroc, 191. 114. Diana Holmes, French Women’s Writing 1848–1994 (Athlone: London, 1996), 180. 115. Fine of Two Hundred Francs, 100; Le premier accroc, 146. 116. Fine of Two Hundred Francs, 101 (translation modified); Le premier accroc, 147. 117. Triolet, notebook 136, Le premier accroc, “Alexis Slavsky II,” p. 8v, Fonds Triolet-Aragon. 118. Ibid. 119. Fine of Two Hundred Francs, 79 (translation modified); Le premier accroc 114. 120. Le premier accroc, 114, 119. The rue de la Juiverie does not appear in notebook 136, but it does in notebook 137, Le premier accroc, “Alexis Slavsky III,” and in notebook

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141, “Alexis Slavsky and Henri Castellat (Milles regrets),” Fonds Triolet-Aragon. The name of the street in Lyon is actually the rue Juiverie. 121. Fine of Two Hundred Francs, 87 (translation modified); Le premier accroc, 120. 122. Fine of Two Hundred Francs, 170; Le premier accroc, 250. 123. Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years 1940–1944 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 228, 480. 124. Fine of Two Hundred Francs, 173; Le premier accroc, 255. 125. Fine of Two Hundred Francs, 238 (translation modified); Le premier accroc, 348. 126. Fine of Two Hundred Francs, 238; Le premier accroc, 348. 127. Elsa Triolet, Le Rendez-vous des étrangers (Paris: Gallimard, 1956), 361–62. 128. “Une Française décapitée à la hâche,” Les Étoiles ( July 1, 1943): 1; and “Le ‘Camp de l’exécution lente,’” Les Étoiles 10 (August 1943): 3–4. No author is named, although Triolet, who was involved in the production of these clandestine publications, could very well have written the articles. See Eychart and Aillaud, Les Lettres françaises, 219, 229. 129. Triolet, “Préface à la clandestinité,” in Œuvres romanesques croisées, 5:21. 130. Triolet, notebook 140, Le  premier accroc, “Alexis Slavsky VI,” Fonds Triolet-Aragon. 131. Le premier accroc, 387. 132. See Triolet, notebook 145, Le Premier accroc, “Le premier accroc coûte deux cents francs,” Fonds Triolet-Aragon. 133. Le premier accroc, 387. 134. Claire Andrieu, “Women in the French Resistance: Revisiting the Historical Record,” French Politics, Culture & Society 18, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 13–27; and “Les Résistantes: Perspectives de recherche,” Le Mouvement social 180 ( July–September 1997): 69–94. 135. Delranc-Gaudric, “Elsa Triolet dans la Résistance,” 239; and Andrieu, “Les Résistantes,” 89. 136. Paula Schwartz, “Redefining Resistance: Women’s Activism in Wartime France,” in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, ed. Margaret Randolph Higonnet, Jane Jenson, Sonya Michel, and Margaret Collins Weitz (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 141–53; see also Hanna Diamond, Women and the Second World War in France, 1939–1948: Choices and Constraints (London: Longman, 1999), 98–100. 137. Paula Schwartz, “Partisanes and Gender Politics in Vichy France,” French Historical Studies 16, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 127. 138. Valerie Deacon, “Fitting in to the French Resistance: Marie-Madeleine Fourcade and Georges Loustaunau-Lacau at the Intersection of Politics and Gender,” Journal of Contemporary History 50, no. 2 (2015): 259–73. 139. Jane Cavani, “Elsa Triolet et le Prix Goncourt 1944: Consécration littéraire ou expédient politique?,” in Prix Goncourt, 1903–2003: Essais critiques, ed. Katherine Ashley

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(Oxford: Peter Lang, 2004), 132. See also Marie-Thérèse Eychart, “Réception du Prix Goncourt 1944: Elsa Triolet ou la constitution d’une légende,” Recherches croisées Aragon/ Elsa Triolet 5 (1994): 197–228. 140. Elsa Triolet to Hannah Josephson, May 4, 1945 and May [?], 1945, Matthew Josephson Papers, YCAL MSS 26, box 10, folder 227, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 141. Diana Holmes, “Ordinary Heroines: Resistance and Romance in the War Fiction of Elsa Triolet,” in European Memories of the Second World War, ed. Helmut Peitsch, Charles Burdett, and Claire Gorrara (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999), 14; and Andrea Duranti, “Elsa Triolet: Une vie étrangère,” in L’Identité féminine dans l’œuvre d’Elsa Triolet, ed. Thomas Stauder (Tübingen: Narr, 2010), 321. 142. Triolet, “Préface à la clandestinité,” in Œuvres romanesques croisées, 5:12. 143. Ibid., 5:24. 144. Fine of Two Hundred Francs, 199; Le premier accroc, 294. 145. Fine of Two Hundred Francs, 226 (translation modified); Le premier accroc, 331. 146. Fine of Two Hundred Francs, 226; Le premier accroc, 331. 147. Fine of Two Hundred Francs, 183 (translation modified); Le premier accroc, 270. 148. Le premier accroc, 332–33. 149. Fine of Two Hundred Francs, 223 (translation modified); Le premier accroc, 327. In the manuscript version she writes that intellectuals are generally this way, but she changes it in the final version. See Triolet, Le premier accroc, “Cahiers enterrés sous un pêcher,” notebook 2 of 6, p. 62, Fonds Triolet-Aragon. 150. Jean Lescure, interview by Gisèle Sapiro (October 25, 1995), quoted in Sapiro, French Writers’ War, 368. 151. Fine of Two Hundred Francs, 225 (translation modified); Le premier accroc, 330. 152. Fine of Two Hundred Francs, 225; Le premier accroc, 330. 153. Fine of Two Hundred Francs, 228; Le premier accroc, 334 (see also 339). 154. Triolet, Le premier accroc, “Cahiers enterrés sous un pêcher,” notebook 2 of 6, p. 70, Fonds Triolet-Aragon. 155. Triolet, “Préface à la clandestinité,” in Œuvres romanesques croisées, 5:14. 156. Ibid., 5:22–23. 157. Le premier accroc, 349. 158. Bouchardeau, Elsa Triolet, 183. 159. Triolet, “Préface à la clandestinité,” in Œuvres romanesques croisées, 5:24. 160. Triolet, “Préface au mal de pays,” in Œuvres romanesques croisées, 27:14. 161. Ibid. 162. Ibid., 27:15. 163. Ibid., 27:13. 164. Triolet, Le Rendez-vous des étrangers, 361–62. 165. Triolet “Préface au mal de pays,” in Œuvres romanesques croisées, 27:15.

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1. Ruth Franklin, “Scandale Française,” New Republic, January 30, 2008. See also Francine Prose, “The Némirovsky Paradox,” New York Times, May 6, 2010. Myriam Anissimov does not refer to the absence of Jews in her “Préface” to Suite française, although she categorizes many of Némirovsky’s interwar stories as having antisemitic descriptions that reveal her self-hatred. Myriam Anissimov, “Préface,” in Suite française by Irène Némirovsky (Paris: Denoël, 2004). As Susan Suleiman points out, the reference to self-hatred in Anissimov’s preface was removed from its English translation. See Susan Rubin Suleiman, The Némirovsky Question: The Life, Death, and Legacy of a Jewish Writer in Twentieth-Century France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016). 2. Jonathan Weiss, Irène Némirovsky: Her Life and Works (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 139. 3. Alice Kaplan, “Love in the Ruins,” Nation, May 29, 2006. 4. Suleiman, Némirovsky Question, 5. 5. Ibid., 172. 6. See Leo Spitzer, Lives in Between: Assimilation and Marginality in Austria, Brazil, West Africa, 1780–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 7. For Némirovsky’s biography, see Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt, La Vie d’Irène Némirovsky: 1903–1942 (Paris: Grasset; Denoël, 2007). 8. Catherine Gousseff, L’Exil russe: La Fabrique du réfugié apatride (1920–1939) (Paris: CNRS, 2008), 12. 9. Irène Némirovsky to Madeleine Avot, n.d., NMR 5.1, Fonds Irène Némirovsky, Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine, Saint-Germain-la-Blanche-Herbe, France. The word “flirts” appears in English in her letter. 10. Irène Némirovsky to Madeleine Avot, May 15, 1922, NMR 5.1, Fonds Irène Némirovsky. 11. Frédéric Lefèvre, “Une révélation: Une heure avec Irène Némirovsky,” Les Nouvelles littéraires, January 11, 1930. She says she wrote it in 1923 at the age of eighteen, although she would have been twenty years old then. 12. Irène Némirovsky, “The Child Prodigy,” trans. Julia Elsky, Yale French Studies 121 (Spring 2012): 230. Published in French as Irène Némirovsky, Un enfant prodige (Paris: Gallimard Jeunesse/Folio Junior, 2005), 18. I refer to the novella by its original title, L’Enfant génial, published by Les Œuvre libres (April 1927): 331–75. 13. “Child Prodigy,” 230; Un enfant prodige, 18. 14. “Child Prodigy,” 232; Un enfant prodige, 23. 15. “Child Prodigy,” 237; Un enfant prodige, 25. 16. “Child Prodigy,” 237; Un enfant prodige, 32. 17. “Child Prodigy,” 239; Un enfant prodige, 37. 18. “Child Prodigy,” 240; Un enfant prodige, 37. 19. “Child Prodigy,” 246; Un enfant prodige, 38.

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20. “Child Prodigy,” 241; Un enfant prodige, 41. 21. “Child Prodigy,” 242; Un enfant prodige, 41. 22. “Child Prodigy,” 244; Un enfant prodige, 47. 23. “ Child Prodigy,” 250; Un enfant prodige, 58. 24. Advertisement for David Golder, Les Nouvelles littéraires, December 7, 1929. 25. See Lynn A. Higgins’s study of the film in “Némirovsky’s ‘David Golder’: From Novel to Film and Back,” Yale French Studies 121 (2012): 54–68. 26. Susan Rubin Suleiman, “Choosing French: Language, Foreignness, and the Canon (Beckett/Némirovsky),” in French Global: A New Approach to Literary History, ed. Christie McDonald and Susan Rubin Suleiman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 482. 27. Irène Némirovsky, David Golder, trans. Sandra Smith (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2007), 94. Originally published as Irène Némirovsky, David Golder (Paris: Grasset, 1929), 131. 28. Naomi Seidman, Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 4. 29. David Golder (2007), 150; David Golder (1929), 182. 30. David Golder (2007), 156; David Golder (1929), 189. 31. Suleiman, Némirovsky Question, 182. 32. Irène Némirovsky, The Wine of Solitude, trans. Sandra Smith (New York: Vintage, 2011), 17. Originally published as Irène Némirovsky, Le Vin de solitude (Paris: Albin Michel, 1935), 26–27. 33. Wine of Solitude, 61; Le Vin de solitude, 81–82. 34. Wine of Solitude, 103–4; Le Vin de solitude, 133. 35. Wine of Solitude, 104; Le Vin de solitude, 133–34. 36. Irène Némirovsky, The Dogs and the Wolves, trans. Sandra Smith (London: Chatto & Windus, 2009), 119. Originally published as Irène Némirovsky, Les Chiens et les loups (Paris: Albin Michel, 1940), 143. 37. Dogs and Wolves, 119; Les Chiens et les loups, 143–44. 38. Dogs and Wolves, 119; Les Chiens et les loups, 143–44. 39. Dogs and Wolves, 55; Les Chiens et les loups, 72. 40. Dogs and Wolves, 95 (translation modified); Les Chiens et les loups, 115. 41. Dogs and Wolves, 97; Les Chiens et les loups, 115–17. 42. Dogs and Wolves, 97; Les Chiens et les loups, 117–18. 43. Dogs and Wolves, 97; Les Chiens et les loups, 118. 44. Dogs and Wolves, 151; Les Chiens et les loups, 180. 45. Dogs and Wolves, 151; Les Chiens et les loups, 180–81. 46. Dogs and Wolves, 91 (translation modified); Les Chiens et les loups, 112. 47. Dogs and Wolves, 153; Les Chiens et les loups, 184. 48. Robert Brasillach, “Causerie littéraire,” L’Action française, May 31, 1934. 49. Robert Brasillach, “Causerie littéraire,” L’Action française, January 7, 1932.

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50. Unsigned review of David Golder, by Irène Némirovsky, D’Artagnan, February 20, 1930; quoted in Angela Kershaw, Before Auschwitz: Irène Némirovsky and the Cultural Landscape of Inter-war France (New York: Routledge, 2010), 126; Lefèvre, “Une révélation.” 51. Luce A. Klein, Portrait de la Juive dans la littérature française (Paris: Nizet, 1970), 57. 52. Anne Freadman, “From Assimilation to Jewish Identity: The Dilemmas of French Jewry under the Occupation,” French Cultural Studies 28, no. 1 (2017): 55. 53. Jeanine Delpech, “Chez Irène Némirovsky ou La Russie boulevard des Invalides,” Les Nouvelles littéraires, June 4, 1938. 54. Ibid. This is likely the caricature of Némirovsky that accompanied Lefèvre, “Une révélation.” 55. Nina Gourfinkel, “L’Expérience juive d’Irène Némirovsky: Une interview de l’auteur de David Golder,” L’Univers israélite, February 28, 1930, 677. 56. See Sander Gilman’s study of discourses about the Jewish nose and the question of whiteness in The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991), 169–93; and Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 171–200. 57. Kershaw, Before Auschwitz, 25. See also Leonid Livak’s study of the RussianFrench dichotomy and how Russian émigrés responded to it in How It Was Done in Paris: Russian Émigré Literature and French Modernism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 14–44. For a discussion of French Jewish responses to Jewish Orientalism, see Nadia Malinovich, “Orientalism and the Construction of Jewish Identity in France, 1900–1932,” Jewish Culture and History 2, no. 1 (1999): 1–25. A number of essays in Colonialism and the Jews, ed. Ethan B. Katz, Lisa Moses Leff, and Maud S. Mandel (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2017), study Orientalism in terms of the Jews of North Africa and the Middle East. 58. Lefèvre, “Une révélation.” 59. Delpech, “Chez Irène Némirovsky.” 60. Kershaw, Before Auschwitz, 23–24. 61. Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 4. 62. Delpech, “Chez Irène Némirovsky.” 63. Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 15. 64. Ibid., 16. 65. Ibid., 107. 66. Ibid., 147. 67. Ibid., 213. 68. Quoted in Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, 214. 69. Ibid., 14. 70. Ibid., 18–21. 71. Dogs and Wolves, 97; Les Chiens et les loups, 117.

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72. Nina Gourfinkel, “L’Expérience juive d’Irène Némirovsky,” 677–78. 73. Ibid., 678. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid. 76. Janine Auscher, “Nos Interviews: Irène Nemirovski,” L’Univers israélite, July 5, 1935, 669. 77. In her 1938 interview with Delpech, Némirovsky said she recently saw a Russian production of the novel as a play and was surprised by how harsh the character Golder appeared. She says here too that she would have written it differently now. Delpech, “Chez Irène Némirovsky.” 78. Auscher, “Nos Interviews,” 670. 79. Dogs and Wolves, 105; Les Chiens et les loups, 127. 80. Dogs and Wolves, 125; Les Chiens et les loups, 150. 81. Weiss, Irène Némirovsky, 96; Philipponnat and Lienhardt, La Vie d’Irène Némirovsky, 318. 82. Denise Epstein, Survivre et vivre: Entretiens avec Clémence Boulouque (Paris: Denoël, 2008), 52. 83. Denise Epstein, interview by Vera Frankl, August 17, 2005, Toulouse, France, French transcript, p. 15, Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 84. Élisabeth Gille, The Mirador: Dreamed Memories of Irène Némirovsky by Her Daughter, trans. Marina Harss (New York: New York Review Books, 2011), 204. 85. Anissimov, “Préface,” 19. 86. Weiss, Irène Némirovsky, 92. See also Philipponnat and Lienhardt’s discussion in La Vie d’Irène Némirovsky, 314–18; and Suleiman, Némirovsky Question, 90. 87. Suleiman, Némirovsky Question, 82–85. 88. Ibid., 92. 89. George Higgins, “Les Conrad français,” Les Nouvelles littéraires, April 6, 1940. 90. Irène Némirovsky, Carnet avec poèmes et notes, NMR 7.1, Fonds Irène Némirovsky. 91. Irène Némirovsky, Carnet avec poèmes et notes, n.d., NMR 7.1, Fonds Irène Némirovsky; also published in Irène Némirovsky, “Annex I: Notes manuscrites d’Irène Némirovsky sur l’état de la France et son projet Suite française, relevées dans son cahier,” in Suite française (Paris: Denoël, 2004), 395. 92. Némirovsky, Carnet avec poèmes et notes, July 3, 1942, NMR 7.1, Fonds Irène Némirovsky; also published in Némirovsky, “Annex I,” in Suite française, 404–5. 93. Némirovsky, Carnet avec poèmes et notes, 1942, NMR 7.1, Fonds Irène Némirovsky; also published in Némirovsky, “Annex I,” in Suite française, 397–98. 94. Némirovsky, Carnet avec poèmes et notes, NMR 7.1, Fonds Irène Némirovsky; quoted in Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt, The Life of Irène Némirovsky: 1903–1942, trans. Euan Cameron (New York: Knopf, 2010), 362.

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95. Irène Némirovsky to Robert Esménard, October 13, 1941; published in “Annex II: Correspondance 1936–1945,” in Suite française, 415. 96. Némirovsky, Carnet avec poèmes et notes, June 30, 1941, NMR 7.1, Fonds Irène Némirovsky; also published in “Annex I,” in Suite française, 398. 97. Irène Némirovsky, Suite Française, trans. Sandra Smith (New York: Knopf, 2006), 45 (translation modified). Originally published in French as Némirovsky, Suite française (2004), 74. 98. Suite Française (2006), 102; Suite française (2004), 138. 99. Suite Française (2006), 102 (translation modified); Suite française (2004), 138. 100. Suite Française (2006), 147; Suite française (2004), 185. 101. Suite Française (2006), 147; Suite française (2004), 185. 102. Nathan Bracher, After the Fall: War and Occupation in Irène Némirovsky’s Suite française (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 30. 103. Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940, trans. Gerard Hopkins (New York: Norton, 1968), 1–24. 104. Ibid., 3. 105. Ibid. 106. Suite Française (2006), 168; Suite française (2004), 208. 107. Suite Française (2006), 286; Suite française (2004), 335. 108. Suleiman, Némirovsky Question, 44. 109. Irène Némirovsky to Mlle Le Fur, August 9, 1940; published in “Annex II,” in Suite française (2004), 413. 110. Ibid. 111. Irène Némirovsky to the journal Candide (various dates), NMR 5.29; Irène Némirovsky to M. Breuty, November 8, 1940, NMR 5.29, Fonds Irène Némirovsky. 112. Irène Némirovsky to Jean Fayard, October 11, 1940, and October 17, 1940, NMR 5.29, Fonds Irène Némirovsky. 113. Jean Fayard to Irène Némirovsky, October 14, 1940, and October 22, 1940, NMR 5.32, Fonds Irène Némirovsky. 114. Irène Némirovsky to Horace de Carbuccia, n.d., NMR 5.30, Fonds Irène Némirovsky. From the context of her correspondence this letter can be dated to February 1942. 115. Irène Némirovsky to Philippe Pétain, September 13, 1940, NMR 5.39, Fonds Irène Némirovsky; also published in Gille, Mirador, 207–8. 116. Gille, Mirador, 207. 117. Ibid. 118. Ibid., 208. 119. Irène Némirovsky, “Les Cartes,” in Les Vierges et autres nouvelles, ed. Olivier Philipponnat (Paris: Denoël, 2009), 123. This story was not published during her lifetime. 120. Irène Némirovsky, “L’Ogresse,” in Dimanches et autres Nouvelles (Paris: Stock, 2000), 326. Originally published in Gringoire, October 24, 1941, under the pseudonym Charles Blancat.

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121. Némirovsky, “La Peur,” in Les Vierges et autres nouvelles, 127–29. This story was not published during her lifetime. 122. Irène Némirovsky, “Mr. Rose,” in Dimanche and Other Stories, trans. Bridget Patterson (New York: Vintage International, 2010), 231. Originally published in Candide, August 28, 1940. 123. Némirovsky, “L’Inconnu,” in Dimanches et autre nouvelles, 223–41. Originally published in Gringoire, August 8, 1941, where the author is listed as “a young woman.” 124. Némirovsky, “En raison des circonstances,” in Les Vierges et autres nouvelles, 101–18. Not published during her lifetime; dated “Paris, end of November, war.” 125. Jewish refugees are mentioned only briefly in “Le Spectateur,” which was written before the Fall of France. Némirovsky, “The Spectator,” in Dimanche and Other Stories, 219. Originally published in Gringoire, December 7, 1939. 126. Némirovsky, “L’Honnête Homme,” in Dimanches et autres nouvelles, 183 (quotation marks in original). Originally published in Gringoire, May 30, 1941, under the pseudonym Pierre Nérey. 127. Némirovsky, “La Confidente,” in Dimanche et autres nouvelles, 243–64. Originally published in Gringoire, March 20, 1941, under the pseudonym Pierre Nérey. 128. Némirovsky, “L’Inconnue,” in Les Vierges et autres nouvelles, 131–38. Not published during her lifetime. 129. Némirovsky, “La Voleuse,” in Les Vierges et autres nouvelles, 139–55. Not published during her lifetime. 130. Némirovsky, “Les Vierges,” in Les Vierges et autres nouvelles, 209–27. Originally published in Présent, July 15, 1942, under the pseudonym Denise Mérande. 131. Némirovsky, “L’Ami et la femme,” in Les Vierges et autres nouvelles, 179–95. Not published during her lifetime; undated. 132. Irène Némirovsky, “Un beau mariage,” in Destinées et autres nouvelles (PinBalma, France: Sables, 2004), 263–80. Originally published in Présent, February 23, 1943, under the pseudonym Denise Mérande. 133. Némirovsky, “La Grande Allée,” in Les Vierges et autres nouvelles, 208. Not published during her lifetime. 134. The stories originally appeared in the following issues of Gringoire: “Destinées,” December 5, 1940; “Les Revenants,” September 5, 1941; and “L’Incendie,” February 27, 1942. “Les Revenants” is reprinted in Les Vierges et autres nouvelles; “Destinées” is reprinted in Destinées et autres nouvelles; and “L’Incendie” is reprinted in Dimanche et autres nouvelles. 135. Philipponnat and Lienhardt, La Vie d’Irène Némirovsky, 329. 136. “Demon, Roger Louis,” Righteous Among the Nations Database, Yad Vashem, accessed December 5, 2016, https://righteous.yadvashem.org. 137. Weiss, Irène Némirovsky, 150. 138. Némirovsky, “Destinées,” NMR 4.21, Fonds Irène Némirovsky. 139. Ibid., p. 2.

NOTES TO CHAP TER 5 AND EPILOGUE

257

140. Ibid., p. 10. 141. Némirovsky, “Destinées,” in Destinées et autres nouvelles, 246. 142. Némirovsky, “Déstinées,” NMR 4.21, p. 2, Fonds Irène Némirovsky; Némirovsky, “Destinées,” in Destinées et autres nouvelles, 246. 143. Némirovsky, “Déstinées,” NMR 4.21, p. 10, Fonds Irène Némirovsky. 144. Ibid. 145. Ibid. 146. Némirovsky, “Destinées,” in Destinées et autres nouvelles, 254. 147. Michel Epstein to Ambassador Otto Abetz, July 27, 1942, NMR 5.10, Fonds Irène Némirovsky. 148. Némirovsky, Carnet avec poèmes et notes, December 6, 1940, NMR 7.1, Fonds Irène Némirovsky. 149. Epstein, Interview, 28. 150. Olivier Le Naire, “La Passion d’Irène,” L’Express, September 27, 2004. 151. Ibid.

Epilogue

1. Biographical note on Myriam Anissimov, in Voices of the Diaspora: Jewish Women Writing in Contemporary Europe, ed. Thomas Nolden and Frances Malino (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 33. 2. Myriam Anissimov, “A Yiddish Writer Who Writes in French,” trans. Thomas Nolden, in Voices of the Diaspora, 37. I do not believe that Anissimov uses the term hybridity as Homi Bhabha defines it in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004). 3. Anissimov, “A Yiddish Writer Who Writes in French,” 37. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., 35. 7. Ibid., 36. 8. Ibid., 38. 9. Hannah Arendt, Hannah Arendt: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2013), 22. Victor Klemperer makes the opposite claim in his discussion of “the language of Nazism.” Victor Klemperer, Language of the Third Reich: LTI (Lingua Tertii Imperii): A Philologist’s Notebook, trans. Martin Brady (London: Continuum, 2000), 2, 4. 10. Hélène Cixous and Cécile Wajsbrot, Une autobiographie allemande (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2016). 11. “Cécile Wajsbrot,” author’s site, Éditions Zulma, accessed May 26, 2020, https:// www.zulma.fr/auteur-cecile-wajsbrot-119.html. 12. Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 5 (Hirsch’s emphasis).

258

NOTES TO EPILOGUE

13. Ibid. 14. Cixous and Wajsbot, Une autobiographie allemande, 16. 15. Ibid., 21. See Jacques Derrida, “Abraham l’autre,” in Judéités: Questions pour Jacques Derrida, ed. Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly (Paris: Gallilée, 2003), 12; and Sarah Hammerschlag, “Another, Other Abraham: Derrida’s Figuring of Levinas’s Judaism,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 26, no. 4 (Summer 2008): 74–96. 16. Cixous and Wajsbrot, Une autobiographie allemande, 21 (Cixous’s emphasis). 17. Ibid., 22. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 73. 20. Ibid., 83, 95. 21. Ibid., 84. 22. Ibid., 96. 23. Ibid., 36, 39. 24. Ibid., 26–27. 25. Ibid., 27. 26. Ibid., 40, 26. 27. Hélène Cixous, “The Names of Oran,” trans. Eric Prenowitz, in Algeria in Others’ Languages, ed. Anne-Emmanuelle Berger (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 191. 28. Cixous and Wajsbrot, Une autobiographie allemande, 63. 29. Jeffrey Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language & Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 4. 30. Ibid. 31. Samuel J. Spinner, “Reading Jewish,” PMLA 134, no. 1 ( January 2019): 151. 32. Ibid. 33. Cixous and Wajsbrot, Une autobiographie allemande, 75. 34. Ibid., 92–94. 35. Ibid., 94.

I N D Ex

Page numbers in boldface refer to tables. Académie française: parody of, 93–95 Accent: dangers of revealing, 16, 63, 65; dissemblance versus ressemblance in, 64–65, 73–79 (see also Fleischer, Alain); as living force, 78; origin of, 64; “panorama” of, 83; portrayed in fiction, 65, 74, 75–78; and representations of authority, 65, 86–90; as sign of displacement, 64, 65, 76. See also Accent, Jewish; Malaquais, Jean Accent, Jewish: as expression of love, 65; mocked by xenophobic press, 20, 65, 79, 82–86, 180; portrayed in fiction, 73, 79–82, 84–87, 175–77; richness in emotion of, 79, 92, 176. See also Bilingualism, Jewish L’Action française, 126 Adamov, Arthur, 35–36, 72 Adrey, Georges, 48 Affiche rouge, 15 Agen, 147 Alliance israélite universelle, 34, 220n100

Angers, 102 Anissimov, Myriam: on Romain Gary, 100–1, 128, 205; on “hybrid” French, 204–6; on French language and Jewish identity, 205–6, 210–11; and Lyon, 204; on Irène Némirovsky, 184, 191, 205; on Suite française, 201, 251n1; on Yiddish, 203–6; 209 Antisemitism: of French authors, 19–20, 83–85, 99, 142, 147; in French North Africa, 26; in the French press, 16, 65, 84, 175, 192; and laws under Vichy, 6–7, 13, 43, 48, 61; in Poland, 122; in Romania, 30–38; Yiddish and the rise of, 79–84. See also Nationality (French); see also under the names of individual authors and journals Aragon, Louis: and Céline, 141; founds CNE, 144; and Communist Party, 137, 143; in conflict with Jean Malaquais, 74; and Manouchian Group, 15; as Surrealist, 10. See also under Triolet, Elsa

260

INDEx

Aragon, Louis (works): Les Beaux Quartiers, 141; Les Cloches de Bâle, 141; Œuvres romanesques croisées d’Elsa Triolet et Aragon, 136, 138, 147, 163; Les Yeux d’Elsa, 162 Arendt, Hannah, 10, 90, 205 Arnovitch, Serge-Victor, 36 Aron, Raymond: on coverage of Jewish persecution, 122–23; “Dans Paris occupé,” 122; memoirs of, 103, 104–5, 238n50; on propaganda, 95; supports Gary, 105, 112 D’Artagnan, 177 Assimilation: linguistic, 16, 19; politics of, 19; as portrayed in fiction, 170, 171, 174, 181; and writers, 24, 166, 178 Auscher, Janine, 182–83 Auschwitz: Delbo’s memoirs of, 143; and Fondane, 14, 62; and Marseille, 66; and Némirovsky, 14, 165, 201; portrayed in fiction, 155; and Vel d’Hiv roundup, 14; and Wajsbrot family, 206 Austro-Hungarian Empire, 29–30, 33; cf. 104 Avant-garde: in Bucharest, 31; and Discontinuité, 35; French, 30; major figures of, 35; Russian Futurist, 131. See also Dadaism; Surrealism Bakhtin, Mikhail: on heteroglossia in “Discourse in the Novel,” 94–95, 236n7, 236n9; and Tower of Babel, 94, 103; in Vilnius, 95 Balkans, 37, 110 Ballard, Jean. See under Cahiers du Sud Balzac, Honoré de, 85–86, 168, 171 Bastille Day, 55 BBC (British Broadcasting Company), 16, 93, 104 Beilis, Mendel: trial of, 135

Benjamin, Walter, 10, 67, 76 Bergson, Henri, 184 Bertillon, Alphonse, 89 Bespaloff, Rachel, 40 Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 40 Bibliothèque nationale de France, 157 Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, 1, 10, 67 Biélinky, Jacques, 80–81 Bilingualism: haunting of, 64; political meaning of, 31, 146–47; Romanian, 31, 32, 60; as source of inspiration, 60. See also Monolingualism; Multilingualism; see also under Triolet, Elsa Bilingualism, Jewish: and creation of multilingual French, 22; “external,” 21, 79, 145–46; “internal,” 21 ; myth of, 180–81. See also Antisemitism; Hebrew; Yiddish; see also under Malaquais, Jean; Némirovsky, Irène Birnbaum, Pierre: (with Ira Katznelson) on Jewish emancipation, 8–9; on particularism, 130; on political use of Yiddish, 16–17 Bloch, Marc, 190 Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas, 35 Bolshevik Revolution. See Revolution, Bolshevik Bouches-du-Rhône, 19 Boully, Monny de, 36 Bousquet, Joë, 40, 143 Bracher, Nathan, 189 Brancusi, Constantin, 35, 38, 40 Brasillach, Robert, 83–84, 177, 180, 214n6 Brauner, Victor, 35, 36, 72 Bréchard, l’Abbé, 187 Breitscheid, Rudolf, 67 Breton, André: Surrealist, 10, 35, 36; at the Villa Air-Bel, 72 Brik, Lili: and Osip Brik (husband), 131; and Mayakovsky, 131; and Vitaliy

INDEx

Primakov (husband), 160; provides Russian contacts, 137; correspondence with Triolet (sister), 141, 142; Bucharest: Fondane and, 30, 33, 35, 40; and Insula theater, 31; as “Little Paris,” 31; portrayed in fiction, 34 Budberg, Moura, 105 Buenos Aires, 39 Bukovina, 29–30, 33, 80 Cabris, 71 Cahiers du Journal des poètes, 42–43 Cahiers du Sud: Jean Ballard as editor of, 40, 41; circular for Fondane’s citizenship published in, 40, 71–72; located in Marseille, 67, 71 Camus, Albert: The Myth of Sisyphus, 129; and Triolet, 129, 144. See also O’Brien, Justin Candide ( journal), 175, 192, 194 Carbuccia, Horace de, 192, 193, 201 Carcassonne, 143 Carrefour. See under Marseille Casanova, Danielle, 143 Casanova, Pascale, 24–25, 26, 33 Catholicism: and Gary, 100; cf. Jacques Maritain, 62; in Charles Maurras, 126; and Némirovsky, 183; as portrayed in fiction, 188 Cazin, Paul, 109, 110 Celan, Paul (Paul Antschel): “Chanson juive,” or “An den Wassern Babels,” 51; Die Niemandsrose, 40; on writing in German, 51 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand: as antisemite and collaborationist, 147; Bagatelles pour un massacre, 142; Malaquais compared to, 68–69; Mea culpa, 142; Voyage au bout de la nuit, 69, 141–42 Censorship, 41, 42

261

CGTU (Confédération générale du travail unitaire), 15, 144. See also Communist Party, French “Le Chant des partisans,” 14–15. See also “La Marseillaise” Château Espère-Visa. See under Marseille: Villa Air-Bel Chirico, Giorgio de, 134 Chirik, Marc and Sarah, 67, 72 Chopin, Frédéric, 109–10, 124, 127 Churchill, Winston, 115 Ciołkosz, Adam, 105 Cioran, Emil: Breviarul învinșilor, 36, 37; on Fondane, 41; intervenes for Fondane’s release, 62; on writing in French, 34, 36–37 Cixous, Hélène: (with Cécile Wajsbrot) Une autobiographie allemande, 206–10; on French language and identity, 25–26, 88; “Les Noms d’Oran,” 139–40, 208 Clandestinity, 5, 147, 148. See also Publications, clandestine; and individual authors and titles Clément, René, 47 Clermont-Tonnerre, Stanislas de, 8 CNE (Comité national des écrivains), 5, 144, 160 Cocteau, Jean, 184 Codreanu, Corneliu Zelea, 33–34 Cohen, Albert, 105, 122 Cold War, 180 Colette, 130, 216n40 Collège de France, 107–8, 111, 125 Comédie-Française, 109 Communist Party, French, 15, 137, 143, 144–45, 160 Communist Resistance. See Resistance, Communist Confluences, 144

262

INDEx

“Les Conrad français.” See under Les Nouvelles littéraires Conrad, Joseph: “Amy Foster,” 121; as model for French writers, 70–71, 185; reception of, 111 Contimporanul, 35 Copeau, Jacques, 31 Cosmopolitanism, 65, 69 Crémieux Decree of 1870: abrogation of, 26, 61, 88; grants citizenship to Algerian Jews, 26; reinstatement of, 207. See also Cixous, Hélène; Derrida, Jacques; Nationality (French) Croque-Fruits, 72, 73 Curtis, Jean-Louis, 74 Cuza, Alexandru C., 33–34 Czernowitz, 51 Dąbrowski, Jan Henryk, 124, 127 Dadaism: “L’Amiral cherche une maison à louer,” 62. See also Avant-garde; Surrealism; Tzara, Tristan Declaration of the Rights of Man, 8. See also Universalism Decour, Jacques, 143 de Gaulle, Charles: on the BBC, 93, 122; reinstates Crémieux Decree, 207. See also under Gary, Romain Delaunay, Robert and Sonia, 133 Delbo, Charlotte, 143 Deleuze, Gilles (with Félix Guattari): Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 22, 24–25 Delpech, Jeanine, 178, 179 Demon, Roger, 196 Denaturalization. See under Nationality (French) Denoël, Robert, 147–48 Deportation: and accent, 16, 65; fear of, 11; and Fondane, 62; memorialized, 1, 210; and Némirovsky, 201; portrayed in

fiction, 155, 157; threat of, 13, 48; Triolet at risk of, 142; Vel d’Hiv, 14 Derrida, Jacques: 25–26; on the êtrejuif of Abraham, 207; Le Monolinguisme de l’autre, 21, 60–61 . See also Monolingualism Diamond, Hanna, 11–12 Diaspora, Jewish. See Jewish diaspora Discontinuité (group), 35–36, 42 Discontinuité ( journal), 35–36 Dissemblance versus ressemblance. See under Accent Domínguez, Óscar, 72 Doubleday Publishing Company, 74–75 Drancy: Fondane and, 29, 53, 62; Max Jacob at, 122–23; portrayed in fiction, 79 Dreyfus Affair, 19, 80 Drieu La Rochelle, Pierre, 99 La Drôme en armes, 147 Drumont, Édouard, 20 Druon, Maurice, 15 Duchamp, Marcel, 72, 133 Dudach, Georges, 143 Dumas, Alexandre, 106 Duvivier, Julien, 171–72 Éditions Albin Michel, 175, 187, 192 Éditions de Minuit. See Publications, clandestine Éditions Fayard, 192 Éditions Gallimard, 62, 112, 113 Éditions Grasset, 168, 171, 196–97 Éluard, Paul: as Surrealist, 10, 36, 45; “La Terre est bleue comme une orange,” 44 Emancipation ( Jewish): in Algeria, 61; defined, 8; in Romania, 9, 37; in the Soviet Union, 134 Enlightenment, 8, 23, 180, 213n2 Epstein, Denise, 3, 183, 201. See also Némirovsky, Irène

INDEx

ERC (Emergency Rescue Committee), 72, 73, 77, 91 Ernst, Max, 72 Esménard, Robert, 187, 192 Exodus (exode of June 1940): accounts by émigré authors of, 12–13, 15, 47–48; émigré experience of, 12–14; flight from Paris, 11–12; as prophesized by Fondane, 46. See also under Fondane, Benjamin; Némirovsky, Irène; Triolet, Elsa Exodus, book of, 47, 59 FAFL (Forces aériennes de la France libre), 102 Far Right: and Céline, 142; as critical of Romanticism, 123; and Gringoire, 99; and Jewish immigrants, 7, 20, 79, 83, 84; and racial classifications, 19; rejected by Malaquais, 65, 82–83; and women, 158 Fayard, Jean, 192 Ferré, Léo, 15 Feuchtwanger, Lion, 47, 90 Fittko, Hans and Lisa, 76 Fleischer, Alain, 63–65, 75, 76, 82, 87. See also Accent Fogg, Shannon, 12 Folkierski, Władysław, 105 Fondane, Benjamin (Benjamin Vecsler): applies for French citizenship, 38; arrest of, 62; colonialism and, 55–56; death of, 62; double exile of, 46, 48; and Éditions sans fin, 43; and the exode, 46–50, 52, 55, 60, 61; on writing in French, 37–38, 43, 60, 203; use of Hebrew by, 20, 29, 50, 52, 58, 59, 60; and Insula theater, 31; and leper image, 52–54; Line (sister), 62; prisoner of war, 12, 40–41; pseudonyms of, 29, 56; revises poems during the Occupation, 41–46, 49; Geneviève Tissier (wife), 29, 38, 62; and Jewish Ulysses, 38, 44;

263

at Val-de-Grâce hospital, 41, 48; and wandering Jew, 38, 44, 56 Fondane, Benjamin (works generally): “Le Chant du prisonnier,” 49; “Exercice de français,” 35, 57, 159; Imagini şi cărţi din Franţa, 31–33; “Journées de juin,” 54; Le Mal des fantômes, 41, 62; “La Philosophie vivante,” 41; “Poèmes épars,” 60; “Psalmul leprosului,” 54 Fondane, Benjamin (L’Exode): “alephbet” poems of, 50, 52, 58; L’Exode: Super flumina Babylonis, 46–52, 107; “Intermède: Colère de la vision,” 49, 54 Fondane, Benjamin (Ulysse): “Chanson de l’émigrant,” 58; Ulysse, 38–46, 57–58, 62 Fontaine. See Publications, clandestine Fontane, Theodor, 31 Français de souche, 12 La France libre: articles by Polish exiles in, 103–6, 110–11, 125–26; beginnings of, 104–6; dialogue between Poland and France in, 103–12, 116; Kessel published in, 105, 106; and multilingual resistance, 103; on propaganda, 95; vision of European democracy described in, 103, 106, 110. See also under Aron, Raymond; Gary, Romain Francophonie: as challenged and redefined by authors in Writing Occupation, 5, 7, 203, 210–11; (European) defined, 4, 22–26; (Eastern European) characterized, 179, 211; and Jewish Francophonie, 25–28, 203–10; as Other Francophonie, 23; Romanian, 31–32; (Postcolonial), 25–26, 84 Frank, Anne, 6 Franklin, Ruth, 165, 191 Free French Forces: on the BBC, 93; and Gary, 14; headquartered at Carlton Gardens, 15; literary works by members of, 105. See also de Gaulle, Charles

264

INDEx

Free Zone. See Southern Zone French Resistance. See Resistance, French French Revolution. See Revolution, French Fry, Varian, 67, 72, 91; as portrayed in Planète sans visa, 73, 87 FTP-MOI (Franc-tireurs et partisans– Main d’œuvre immigrée), 15, 17, 144, 145, 146, 147 Gallimard. See Éditions Gallimard Garvin, Viola Gerard, 112, 112, 117 Gary, Romain (Roman Kacew): as Emil Ajar, 100; autobiographical myths of, 100–1; named Compagnon de la Libération, 102; depicts common European identity, 118; early life of, 96–98, 100; early writing of, 98–99; and La France libre, 96, 103–5; and French language, 99–100; and French universalism, 96, 100, 101, 128; and heteroglossia, 112–18; publishes in Gringoire, 98–99; and de Gaulle, 27, 93, 97, 101–2, 103, 111, 113; and Jewish identity, 97, 100, 101, 120; and Jewish languages, 118–23; as Roman Kacew, 96, 97, 101; in London, 96, 101–2, 103, 117; military service of, 101–2; wins Prix Goncourt twice, 100. See also Anissimov, Myriam; Huston, Nancy; Mickiewicz, Adam Gary, Romain (works): “The Bourgeois of Paris,” 112, 114, 115–16, 121, 123—originally published as “Le Continent englouti,” 112, 115–16; Les Cerfs-volants, 98; Éducation européenne, 95–96, 101–11, 112, 114, 117, 118, 124–25, 169; Forest of Anger, 112; “The Good Snow,” 114; Le Grand Vestiaire, 98; Nothing Important Ever Dies, 112; “L’Orage,” 98–99; “The Outskirts of Stalingrad,” 114; “Une petite femme,” 98–99; La Promesse de

l’aube, 97–98, 100; “Simple conte des collines,” 113, 114–15; La Vie devant soi, 98 Gematria, 58 General Jewish Labor Bund in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, 67 German Social Democratic Party, 67 Ghyka, Matila Costiesco, 106 Gibraltar, 102 Gide, André: translated by Triolet, 141. See also under Malaquais, Jean Gille, Élisabeth: Le Mirador, 183–84; 201. See also Némirovsky, Irène Gilman, Sander, 84, 180, 181 Giono, Jean, 72 Giraudoux-Montaigne, Jean-Pierre, 105 Gold, Mary Jayne, 72 Gourfinkel, Nina, 178, 181–83 Grabowski, Zbigniew, 105, 110 Grant, Peter, 75 Grasset. See Éditions Grasset Greene, Graham, 106 Grieg, Nordahl, 106 Gringoire: as antisemitic, 99, 192; political evolution of, 98–99. See also under Gary, Romain; Némirovsky, Irène Groper, Jacob, 31 Guattari, Félix (with Gilles Deleuze): Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 22, 24–25 Guernica (town), 46–47 Guggenheim, Peggy, 73 Gurs, 53 Halevi, Judah, 51 Harshav, Benjamin, 17 Hartford Bridge, 103, 112 Hebrew: in Algeria, 61, 140, 208; and antisemitism, 17, 81; in prayer and religious tradition, 59–60, 96, 97, 118–20, 125, 169; and Yiddish (as Jewish Languages), 7, 19, 123, 130

INDEx

(see also under Gary, Romain). See also Bilingualism, Jewish; Heine, Heinrich; Yiddish; see also under Fondane, Benjamin Heine, Heinrich, 51 Hemingway, Ernest, 10, 98 Hérold, Jacques, 72 Herța, 29–30 Heteroglossia: defined, 6, 25, 94–95; limits of European, 115; multilingual, 95–96; political stakes of, 95; rejection of German, 111, 117. See also under Bakhtin, Mikhail; Gary, Romain; London Higgins, Georges, 185. See also Les Nouvelles littéraires Hilferding, Rudolf, 67 Hitler, Adolf, 47, 182; cf. 114 Holocaust, the: discourse of, 6; cf. 10. See also Shoah, the L’Honneur des poètes. See Publications, clandestine Hugo, Victor, 106, 107 Hülsenbeck, Richard, 62 Human Rights League. See Ligue des droits de l’homme Huston, Nancy, 98, 100–1, 128 Hyman, Paula, 11, 16, 17 “L’Internationale,” 69 Internment camps. See under the names of individual camps: Drancy; Gurs; Pithiviers; Rivesaltes Ionesco, Eugène, 174 Iron Guard, 33–34, 37 Israel, 51, 155 Italia libera, 146 Itkine, Sylvain, 72 Jacob, Max, 122–23 Jakobson, Roman, 131 Janco, Marcel, 62

265

Jansen-Lecoutre, Martha, 104–5 Jassy: antisemitic riots in, 33–34; birthplace of Fondane, 29, 30; Jewish renaissance in, 31 Jerusalem, 40, 45, 49, 50, 57, 59, 126 Je suis partout, 83–84 Jeu de Marseille, 72 Jeunesse communiste–MOI. See Resistance, Communist Jewish Jewish diaspora: in Fondane, 49, 50–51. See also under Mickiewicz, Adam Jewish organizations: offering help to new immigrants, 80–81; and Polish Government-in-Exile, 122; in the Resistance, 14. See also Alliance israélite universelle Jewish Statutes: 11, 207; and Némirovsky, 192, 193 Josephson, Hannah, 158 Joyce, James, 10, 98 Judges, book of, 50 Jus sanguinis, 19 Jus soli, 19 Jutrin, Monique: on L’Exode, 54; on fate of the Jewish writer, 60; on Fondane’s pseudonyms, 221n3; on Ulysse, 44 Kafka, Franz, 24 Kaplan, Alice: on Brasillach trial, 214– 15n6; on Némirovsky, 165–66, 191; on Rebatet, 83–84 Katznelson, Ira (with Pierre Birnbaum): on Jewish emancipation, 8–9 Kazakhstan, 94 Kershaw, Angela, 178, 179–80, 214n13 Kessel, Joseph: L’Armée des ombres, 106; translates “Le Chant des partisans,” 14–15; in Paris, 98. See also under La France libre Khatibi, Abdelkebir, 235–36n4 Kiev, 3, 77, 135, 167, 172, 173, 175

266

INDEx

Kishinev, 172 Kriegel, Annie, 145, 156 Kristeva, Julia, 58, 227n112 Kuncewiczowa, Maria: on Chopin, 109–10; Cudzoziemka, 127; in La France libre, 105; “Une ‘matinée perdue,’” 109, 127; Miasto Heroda: Notatki Palestyńskie, 127; “Paris, mon Paris,” 126–27 Labarthe, André, 104, 107–9 Lam, Wilfredo, 72 Langer, František, 106 Langfus, Anna, 6 Language, National: Bakhtin on lack of unitary, 95; Fondane’s revision of, 30, French as a Jewish language, 203; as French, for Némirovsky, 166, 181; Gary’s common European, 115, 116; and Jewish multilingualism, 16–22; multiplicity of political languages in, 94; versus international language of Malaquais (in Les Javanais), 69 Lechoń, Jan (Leszek Serafinowicz), 105, 111 Lefèvre, Frédéric, 177, 178 Left, the: 19, 158. See also Communist Party, French Léger, Fernand, 133 Lescure, Jean, 160–61 Les Lettres françaises, 143, 146, 147, 162 Levi, Primo, 6 Leviticus, book of, 52–53 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 40 Libération (newspaper), 116, 121 Ligue des droits de l’homme, 19 Line of demarcation, 11, 143, 186 Lipchitz, Jacques, 143 London: as base for Free French, 14, 15, 93, 94, 122; as base for Polish Government-in-Exile, 15, 103, 126; as common ground for French and Polish exiles,

102, 104, 106, 107, 109; as heteroglossic, 95, 103, 117–18. See also La France libre Lupasco, Stéphane, 62 Lyon: “capital of the Resistance,” 144; portrayed in fiction, 149, 150, 151, 152–53. See also under Anissimov, Myriam Mahler, Alma, 67 Malaquais, Jean (Vladimir Malacki): accent in works of, 75–86; carrefour, 65–66; on writing in French, 71, 203; and André Gide, 68, 71, 72, 91; Jewish bilingualism in, 79–86; magical imagery in, 88, 90; negative reviews of, 74–75; panorama in, 65, 75; revises Planète sans visa in 1999, 74; wins Prix Renaudot, 68; and Trotsky, 69–70; Yurkevich, Galina (“Galy”), 71. See also Grant, Peter; O’Brien, Justin; Ryan, William Granger Malaquais, Jean (works): Les Javanais, 68–70, 73, 75, 147; Journal de guerre, 74; Journal du métèque, 73, 127; “Marseille: Cap de Bonne Espérance, 66, 67, 75, 78–79; Le Nommé Louis Aragon ou le Patriote professionnel, 74; Planète sans visa, 64–65, 67, 71, 72–78, 79–92, 176 Malinovich, Nadia, 17, 80 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 37 Mann, Heinrich, 67 Manosque, 72 Manouchian Group. See Manouchian, Missak Manouchian, Missak, 15 Mântuirea, 51 Maquis, 146, 154, 162 Marcenac, Jean, 146, 147, 162 Marinetti, F.T., 35 Maritain, Jacques, 62, 184 Maritain, Raïssa, 184

INDEx

Marly, Anna, 14–15 Marrus, Michael R., 13 “La Marseillaise,” 14, 113, 115 Marseille: “apocalyptic,” 73; Basso’s, 67; rue Beauvau, 67; Au Brûleur de loups, 66–67; La Canebière, 66; as carrefour, 63, 64–66; Le Cintra, 66; L’Évêché, 77; Hôtel Normandie, 67; plurilingualism in, 64; quai des Belges, 66–67; Quartier de la Pomme, 72; Saint-Barnabé, 72; Hôtel Splendide, 67; as springboard, 66, 71; Vieux-Port of, 66–67, 77; Villa Air-Bel, 72 Masson, André, 72–73 Mauco, Georges, 19 Mauriac, François, 184 Maurras, Charles, 126, 127 Maxy, M. H., 31 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 131, 133, 141, 162 Mazovia, 109–10 “Mazurek Dąbrowskiego,” 113 McDonald, Christie, 22 Memmi, Albert, 221–22n100 Métèque, 36, 73, 127, 194 Meyer, Jules, 17 Michelet, Jules, 107–8 Michonze, Grégoire, 36 Mickiewicz, Adam: and Jewish diaspora, 124–26; Księgi narodu i pielgrzymstwa polskiego, 125; as métèque, 127; and Michelet, 108; national poet, 102, 111; Pan Tadeusz, 123; on Polish exile and Jewish scripture, 125; translated, 110 Mikołajczyk, Stanislaw, 105, 122 Milicje Patriotyczne—Polskie Siły Zborojne we Franeji, 146 Millenarianism, 145 Miller, Christopher, 100 Moldavia, 29–30 Molière, 35, 31, 106–7

267

Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, 102, 160 Monolingualism: and Fondane, 46, 60, 61, 95; and Némirovsky, 4; as political tool, 21; rejection of, 203–4, and Triolet, 130. See also under Derrida, Jacques Montparnasse. See under Paris (buildings, regions, and streets) Montparnasse, Kiki de, 133 Montpellier, 48 Moscow: Céline in, 142; Némirovsky and, 167, 168; Radio Moscow, 16; Triolet and, 131, 133, 134, 136 Moscow trials (1937), 77, 160 Mosjoukine, Ivan, 100 Multilingualism: and the Communist press, 145; defined, 6; French, 2, 25, 208; Jewish, 11, 16–22, 27, 205; and the Resistance, 95, 103, 113–14. See also Bilingualism; Bilingualism, Jewish; Heteroglossia; Monolingualism Munich Agreement (1938), 135 Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration, 8 Musset, Alfred de, 109 Nadeau, Maurice, 75 Nansen, Fridtjof, 110 Napoleonic Wars, 102; cf. 124, 127 Naquet, Alfred, 19 National Convention, 1 Nationality (French): as arbitrary, 140; Vichy’s attempt at a code of, 19–20; and denaturalization under Vichy, 9, 13; and freedom of thought, 179; Jewish émigré writers and, 6–7, 21, 25, 37–38, 48, 54, 130, 142, 149; and Law of August 10, 1927, 9, 132; as nationality of choice, 184; and reforms of immigration law, 19; and women, 132. See also Crémieux Decree of 1870

268

INDEx

Nationality (identity): as inessential, 36, 139, 208; and passports, 89–90; peripheral, 32; portrayal in fiction of 54, 69, 77, 87, 90, 96, 121, 136, 199. See also Crémieux Decree of 1870; Language, National Naye Prese, 18 Némirovsky, Irène: arrest and internment of, 200–1; in Burgundy, 12, 165, 166, 186, 197; converts to Catholicism, 183–84; death at Auschwitz of, 14, 165, 201; early life of, 3, 167–68; depicts the exode, 12, 165, 186, 188–91, 194; discovery of Suite française, 3, 165, 201–2; Michel Epstein (husband), 168, 200–1; and Issy-l’Évêque, 186–87, 193, 196–97, 200; on Jewish bilingualism, 166–77, 180–81, 184; appeals to Pétain, 192–93; pseudonyms of, 193, 194, 196, 197, 198; publishes in Gringoire, 99, 192, 193, 194, 196, 201; portrayal by the press of, 166, 177–180, 181–83, 184–86; removal of Jewish voice by, 2, 3, 4, 15, 20–21, 22, 27, 28, 165, 168, 189–91, 193–94, 201–2, 203–4; and “Suite Montjeu,” 166, 196– 200. See also Epstein, Denise; Gille, Élisabeth Némirovsky, Irène (works): “L’Ami et la femme,” 195–96; “Un beau mariage,” 196; Les Biens de ce monde, 189; “Les Cartes,” 193, 195; Les Chiens et les loups, 168, 174–77, 181, 183, 197; “La Confidente,” 195; David Golder, 168, 171–72, 177, 178, 181, 182, 201; “Destinées” (originally “Les Inhumains”), 196, 198–200; L’Enfant génial, 168–71, 175, 177, 181, 191; “En raison des circonstances,” 195; Les Feux de l’automne, 195; “La Grande Allée,” 196; “L’Honnête Homme,” 195; “L’Incendie,”

196, 197–98; “L’Inconnu,” 194–95; “L’Inconnue,” 195; “Monsieur Rose,” 194; “L’Ogresse,” 193–94; “La Peur,” 194; Le Pion sur l’échiquier, 177; “Les Revenants,” 196, 197; Suite française, 3, 165, 186–91, 194, 195, 201–2; Le Vin de solitude, 168, 172–74, 177; “Les Vierges,” 195–96; “La Voleuse,” 195 Neveux, Georges, 36 Nice, 10, 98, 101, 143–44 Nîmes, 147, 188 Normandy landings, 148, 156 Nouvelle Revue Française, 68 Les Nouvelles littéraires: “Les Conrad français,” 70, 184–85; and Malaquais, 185; and Némirovsky, 168–69, 177, 178–79 November Uprising. See under Poland Nowakowski, Zygmunt, 105 Oberlé, Jean, 104, 122–23 O’Brien, Justin, 91–92 Ocampo, Victoria, 38 Occupied Zone: and antisemitism, 13; Némirovsky in, 165–202; origin of, 11; portrayed in fiction, 15, 76, 151; Triolet’s clandestine activity in, 143; see also Southern Zone Odessa, 169, 182 Les Œuvres libres, 169 Oran, 66, 88, 139, 140, 206–7, 208 Ordre de la Libération, 157 Paczkowski, Thadée, 102 Pale of Settlement, 9, 97, 131 Pană, Sașa, 31 Paris: population decline of, 12; exodus from, 11–12; as literary center, 24; Nazi invasion of, 46; and Polish Government-in-Exile, 102–3

INDEx

Paris (buildings, regions, and streets): Belleville, 9, 80; rue du Cardinal Lemoine, 10, 98; rue Campagne-Première, 133; place de la Contrescarpe, 98; rue Campagne-Première, 133; Le Marais, 9; Montmartre, 80–81; Montparnasse, 35; 10; 127, 133, 134, 135, 137; boulevard du Montparnasse, 133; Panthéon, 1, 210, 213n1; place du Panthéon, 2; rue Racine, 36; rue Rollin, 10, 98; Saint-Paul, 80; River Seine, 37, 49, 52, 56; rue Soufflot, 1; rue de Vaugirard, 35, 52 Paris Peace Conference (1919), 33 Parizer Haynt, 81 Particularism, 8, 17, 130, 142, 154, 203. See also Samuels, Maurice; see also under Birnbaum, Pierre; Universalism Partisan Review, 91 Paulhan, Jean, 62, 143 Paxton, Robert O., 13, 26 Péguy, Charles, 184 PEN Club, 127 La Pensée libre, 143 Pétain, Philippe, 11, 192–93 Petit, Henri-Robert, 83 Philipponnat, Olivier, 191 Phoney War (drôle de guerre), 11, 13, 40 Pia, Pascal, 144 Picabia, Francis, 133 Picasso, Pablo, 133 Pierre-Quint, Léon, 40 Pirandello, Fausto, 133 Pithiviers, 14, 200 Plessix, Tatiana du (Tat’yana Yakovleva), 133 Poésie. See Publications, clandestine Pogroms: 38, 39; Kishinev, 172 Poland: and cultural relations with France, 96; Great Emigration from,

269

102, 123; Nazi invasion of, 102, 109; November Uprising in, 102, 104, 109; Partitions of, 102; and relations with France and Great Britain, 102–12. See also Mickiewicz, Adam Polish Army, 101, 102, 104 Polish Government-in-Exile: documents murder of Jews, 122; escapes to London, 103; memorialized in Gary’s Éducation européenne, 15; in Paris, 102, 106; political goals of, 103. See also La France libre Polish Romanticism: contemporary revival of French Romanticism and, 107, 125–26; Adam Mickiewicz and, 102; and philosemitism, 123–24, 126–27 Politzer, Georges, 143 Popular Front, 18, 84 Pour la Victoire, 66 Poznanski, Renée, 122, 144–45, 155 Présent, 193, 194, 196–97 Prix Goncourt, 5, 74, 100, 130, 158, 163 Prix Renaudot, 3, 68–69 Propaganda: Communist, 145–46; Free French, 122; German-Francophone, 15, 95. See also Radio programming Prose, Francine, 191 Proust, Marcel, 35, 159 Pruszyński, Ksawery, 105–6 Psalms, book of: 50, 52, 80; Psalm 95, 119; Psalm 137, 49–51, 56–57 Publications, clandestine: Éditions de Minuit, 147–48; Fontaine, 41; L’Honneur des poètes, 41, 54; Poésie, 41; Resistance tracts, 43 Quai d’Orsay, 128 Quartier de la Pomme. See under Marseille Quinet, Edgar, 108

270

INDEx

Radio programming: characterized by the Far Right, 83–84; characterized by La France libre, 95; “Les Français parlent aux Français,” 93; “Honneur et patrie,” 93; and Némirovsky, 193; “Paris vous parle,” 104; “La Petite Académie,” 93; portrayed in fiction, 113, 139; Quatre discours, 105; Radio Moscow, 16. See also BBC; Propaganda Ray, Man, 133 Rebatet, Lucien, 83–84, 147 Renan, Ernest, 109 Republic, French: breakdown of, 27; Fourth, 26; and memorialization of writers, 1; 27; and messianic Republicanism, 125–26; and Polish Romanticism, 101, 104; portrayed in fiction, 149; Third, 11, 26. See also Universalism Resistance, Communist (in France): organization of, 15; portrayed in fiction, 154, 158, 160–61; and Triolet, 128, 129, 146–47, 160. See also FTP-MOI Resistance, French: and L’Armée des ombres, 15; and Éducation européenne, 15, 96, 116; propaganda in, 122; role of women in, 157–58. See also de Gaulle, Charles; Free French Forces Resistance, Jewish, 14, 122 Resistance, Jewish Communist, 145. See also Kriegel, Annie; Manouchian, Missak; Yiddish press Resistance, Polish, 106–7 Ressemblance. See under Accent Revolution, Bolshevik: Futurists’ support of, 131; Gary and, 96–97; Jewish residency restrictions and, 9; Némirovsky and, 167, 172, 193; portrayal in fiction of, 77, 172, 173, 199; Triolet and, 131 Revolution, French, 8, 55, 126. See also Universalism Revolution, Romantic, 110, 123, 126

Reynaud, Paul, 11 Ribemont-Dessaignes, Georges, 62 Rivesaltes, 53 Robel, Léon, 136 Romania, 9, 30–37, 46, 51 Rothschild, Edmond de, 17 Rousselot, Jean, 75 Rousset, David, 66 Russia Abroad, 133 Russian Empire: Jewish emigration from, 2–3; restrictions on Jews in, 9, 97, 167. See also Pale of Settlement; Revolution, Bolshevik; Soviet Union Russian Futurism. See under Avant-garde Ryan, William Granger, 75, 87–88 Sabatier, André, 196–97 Sadoul, Georges, 146–47 Sahl, Hans, 66 Saint-Amour, 12 Saint-Donat: 147; portrayed in fiction, 149, 153–57 Saint-Éxupery, Antoine de, 12 Saint-Germain, Jacques, 84–85 Saint Petersburg, 3, 9, 15, 167, 172, 173, 174 Salon-de-Provence, 101, 102 Samuels, Maurice, 8, 85, 150 Sapiro, Gisèle: on “cultural capital,” 5–6; on the CNE, 144 Schiffrin, Jacques, 40 Schloezer, Boris de, 62 Schor, Ralph, 20, 83 Schwarz-Bart, André, 6 Sebastian, Mihail, 34 Second Temple, 46, 49, 50 Seghers, Anna: Transit, 66, 76–77, 90 Seghers, Pierre, 41, 143 Seidman, Naomi: on Holocaust memoirs, 6; on Yiddish speech act, 80, 172, 232n79 Sekulic, M., 106

INDEx

Semprún, Jorge, 10 Serge, Victor: Les Années sans pardon, 88; as portrayed in Planète sans visa, 77; on relations with Malaquais, 230n39; and son Vlady, 72, 73 Sernet, Claude (Ernest Spirt): corresponds with Fondane, 39, 40, 44, 49; Fondane’s posthumous coeditor, 62; Romanian poet, 10, 31, 36 Shema prayer, 59, 119 Shestov, Lev, 38 Shibboleth, 50 Shklovsky, Viktor, 131 Shoah, the: and Celan, 51; in France, 8, 13; honoring victims of, 1, and language, 64, 204–6; memory of, 6, 204; and writers studied in Writing Occupation, 5, 8, 26. See also Holocaust, the Sikorski, Władysław, 102, 106. See also Polish Government-in-Exile Sissoeff, Sacha Kardo, 98 Sobibor, 80 Société des gens de lettres, 168 Solidarité movements, 144 Solomon, Jacques, 143 La Sorbonne, 167, 178 Sorkin, William, 91 Southern France, 65, 68, 142; cf. 76 Southern Zone (Free Zone): Aragon founds CNE for, 144; deportations from, 14; described by writers in Writing Occupation, 15, 92; Fondane and, 49, 226n84; formation of, 11; invaded by Axis powers, 144; Malaquais flees to, 71; Triolet displaced to, 142 Soviet Union: factored into plans for Europe, 103, 106, 110; Nazi invasion of, 77; point of origin for Eastern European Jews, 2–3; as portrayed in fiction, 160–1; rights of women in, 132; Trotsky expelled from, 92; Triolet’s publishing

271

ventures in, 141. See also Revolution, Bolshevik Spanish Civil War, 10, 13, 30, 64, 66, 76; portrayed in fiction, 199, 200 Stalingrad, Battle of, 112, 114 Statutes, Jewish. See Jewish Statutes STO (Service du travail obligatoire), 153–54, 162, 210 Suleiman, Susan: defines the global, 22; on exclusion of Jews from the French nation, 3, 191; on Holocaust memoirs, 6; on Némirovsky and religion, 184, 191; on stereotypes, 166, 171–72, 191; on use of Yiddish in David Golder, 172 Surrealism: and design, 133; and film, 38; forms, 44, 61–62; and “exquisite corpse” game, 72; major figures of, 10, 36. See also Avant-garde; Dadaism; and the names of individual authors Szabó, Zoltán, 48 Szymończyk, Stanisław (“Staro”), 104 Tavernier, René, 144 Theater of the Absurd, 35 Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, 31 Thomas, Édith, 162 Thorstad, Per, 106 Tissier, Geneviève. See under Fondane, Benjamin Treitschke, Heinrich von, 180 Triolet, Elsa (Ella Yur’evna Kagan): and antisemitism, 135; and Louis Aragon (husband), 133, 137, 141, 143–44, 149, 158, 245n41; arrest ordered for, 147; and bilingualism, 130, 136–48; active in Communist Resistance, 129, 142–47; on diaries, 161; early life of, 131–32, 134; and the exode, 142–43; becomes French citizen, 132; imagery in novels of, 129–30, 137, 148, 163; Jewish identity in novels of, 148–49; and Jewish particularism, 151, 203; and

272

INDEx

Triolet, Elsa (continued) nationality, 138–39; wins Prix Goncourt, 130, 158; in the Southern Zone, 142; and translation, 141–42; and André Triolet (husband), 131, 132, 143; on writing in French, 137–41, 163–64, 203. See also Brik, Lili Triolet, Elsa (works generally): “Aux armes, citoyens!,” 147, 162; Bonsoir, Thérèse, 135, 139, 141; Le Cheval blanc, 147, 154; Mille regrets, 147; La Mise en mots, 138–39; Na Taiti, 136; “Qui est cet étranger qui n’est pas d’ici?, ou Le Mythe de la Baronne Mélanie,” 129; Le Rendez-vous des étrangers, 154, 163–64; Zashchitnyy tsvet (Camouflage), 136–37, 138, 139, 159; Zemlyanichka, 136 Triolet, Elsa (Le premier accroc): Le premier accroc coûte deux cents francs, 129–30; “Les Amants d’Avignon,” 148; “Cahiers enterrés sous un pêcher,” 154, 157–62; “La Vie privée ou Alexis Slavsky, artiste-peintre,” 149–54 Triolet, Elsa (Œuvres romanesques croisées): Œuvres romanesques croisées d’Elsa Triolet et Aragon, 136, 138, 147, 163; prefaces in Œuvres romanesques croisées d’Elsa Triolet et Aragon, 163; “Préface à la clandestinité,” 155–56, 159, 161, 162; “Préface à la contrebande,” 163; “Préface au mal de pays,” 163 Trotsky, Leon, 92. See also under Malaquais, Jean Troyat, Henri, 185 Tsvetaeva, Marina, 40 Tzara, Tristan: Dadaist, 35, 62; “Exil,” 52; and Triolet, 133 Ukraine: 29; portrayed in fiction, 80. See also Kiev; Pale of Settlement Underwood, Nick, 16, 17–18

Union des femmes juives, 144 L’Univers israélite, 16, 80, 81; Némirovsky interviews in, 178, 181–83 Universalism: failure of, 210; French as language of, 2, 23, 24; and gender, 132; and the Jews, 7–8, 17, 56, 243; legacy of, 7–8; portrayed in fiction, 151; versus particularism, 17, 130; suppressed under Vichy, 1, 3–4. See also under Gary, Romain L’Université libre, 143 Unzer Vort, 17, 144, 146 Vel d’Hiv roundup, 14 Verdun, 11 Vichy regime: antisemitic legislation under, 6–7, 9, 13, 21, 61, 88; and antisemitic writers, 19–20, 83–84; denaturalization under, 9, 13, 26, 61, 140; and deportations, 13–14; exclusive discourse of, 203; as covered by La France libre, 122; and Jewish émigré writers, 4, 6, 27; language and assimilation under, 19, 20, 65; memorializing victims of, 1, 210; persecution of Jews under, 8, 20, 30; portrayed in fiction, 73, 150, 151, 153–54; publications critical of, 144. See also Pétain, Philippe La Vie du Parti, 145 Vieux-Port. See under Marseille Villa Air-Bel. See under Marseille Vilnius: and Bakhtin, 95–96; birthplace of Romain Gary, 95, 96–97; in Gary’s fiction, 113; in World War I, 96–97 Vitebsk, 80 Voronca, Colomba, 143 Voronca, Ilarie, 31, 35, 36, 143 Vox media, 106–7 Wajsbrot, Cécile (with Hélène Cixous): Une autobiographie allemande, 206–10

INDEx

Wandering Jew. See under Fondane, Benjamin War and Peace, 187 Warsaw: 9; émigrés in Paris from, 102, 104; and Romain Gary, 98; and Jean Malaquais, 67, 78 Weightman, J. G., 105 Weil, Patrick, 13 Weinreich, Max, 21, 79 Wells, H. G., 106 Werfel, Franz, 67 Werth, Léon, 12 Wiadomości Polskie, 106–7 Wiesel, Elie, 6 Wolff, Larry, 180 World War I: German occupation of France in, 46; and Jewish immigration to France, 16; and origins of modern migration control, 89–90; portrayed in literature, 38, 194, 195, 197; and reform of naturalization laws, 9; and Romania, 33; trench warfare in, 11; and women’s fashion, 139 World War II: Czernowitz in, 51; and Francophonie studies, 22, 26; as historical context for writing, 129, 135, 198, 206-7; and plurilingualism, 64; and

273

transformation of French literature, 2. See also Normandy landings; Stalingrad, Battle of Wyspiański, Stanisław, 109 Yad Vashem, 196 Yiddish: absences of, 120, 204–6, 241n111; and the Bund, 67; curses in, 79–80; as forbidden language, 3, 209; as hidden language, 180; Paris as cultural hub for, 7, 16, 17–18; political use of, 16–17; as portrayed by Némirovsky, 168–73, 174–77; as postvernacular, 209; speech act, 80, 82, 172; Wiesel’s Night in, 6. See also Assimilation; Bilingualism, Jewish; Language, National; Multilingualism; Universalism; Yiddish press; see also under Anissimov, Myriam; Antisemitism Yiddish press: 17–18; Communist, 144–45. See also the titles of individual newspapers Yurkevich, Galina. See under Malaquais, Jean Zion, 50, 57 Zones (in France). See Occupied Zone; Southern Zone (Free Zone)

Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture David Biale and Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Editors This series features novel approaches to examining the Jewish past in the form of innovative work that brings the field into productive dialogue with the newest scholarly concepts and methods. Open to a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches, from history to cultural studies, this series publishes exceptional scholarship balanced by an accessible tone, illustrating histories of difference and addressing issues of current urgency. Books in this list push the boundaries of Jewish Studies and speak compellingly to a wide audience of scholars and students. Alma Rachel Heckman, The Sultan’s Communists: Moroccan Jews and the Politics of Belonging 2020 Golan Y. Moskowitz, Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Queer Jewish Context 2020 Devi Mays, Forging Ties, Forging Passports: Migration and the Modern Sephardi Diaspora 2020 Clémence Boulouque, Another Modernity: Elia Benamozegh’s Jewish Universalism 2020 Dalia Kandiyoti, The Converso’s Return: Conversion and Sephardi History in Contemporary Literature and Culture 2020 Natan M. Meir, Stepchildren of the Shtetl: The Destitute, Disabled, and Mad of Jewish Eastern Europe, 1800–1939 2020 Marc Volovici, German as a Jewish Problem: The Language Politics of Jewish Nationalism 2020 For a complete listing of titles in this series, visit the Stanford University Press website, www.sup.org.

l i t e rary st udie s

“In this fine book, Elsky discusses five Jewish writers who explored the possibilities of writing in a ‘Jewish voice’ in French and grappled with issues of Jewish belonging during Vichy. Written in a clear and graceful style and based on original archival research, Writing Occupation will be of interest to all those concerned by the fate of Jews in France, before and after the Second World War.” Susan Rubin Suleiman, author of The Némirovsky Question: The Life, Death, and Legacy of a Jewish Writer in Twentieth-Century France

“This brilliant and highly original study of Jewish exiles living in France during World War II shows us that multilingualism demonstrates the porousness of national boundaries and serves as a crucial vehicle for exploring the multifaceted complexities of Jewish identity.” Susannah Heschel, author of The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany

“A welcome addition to a growing body of literature focused on the rich hybrid culture created by immigrant and first-generation Jews in early twentieth-century France, Julia Elsky’s nuanced and perceptive book draws important parallels between immigrant Jewish and postcolonial francophone writers.” Nadia Malinovich, author of French and Jewish: Culture and the Politics of Identity in Early Twentieth-Century France

Among the Jewish writers who emigrated from Eastern Europe to France between the two world wars, a number chose to write primarily in French rather than in their languages of origin. Under the Nazi occupation of France from 1940 to 1944, these Jewish émigré writers—among them Irène Némirovsky, Benjamin Fondane, Romain Gary, Jean Malaquais, and Elsa Triolet—continued to write in their adopted language, even as the Vichy regime and Nazi occupiers denied their French identity through xenophobic and antisemitic laws. In Writing Occupation, Julia Elsky considers how these writers reexamined their Jewishness and expressed multiple cultural, religious, and linguistic identities through the language in which they wrote. jul ia elsky is Assistant Professor of French at Loyola University Chicago.

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