Post-war Jewish Women's Writing in French

Juives Francaises Ou Francaises Juives?

Lucille Cairns

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781906540401
• eBook ISBN: 9781351194013
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

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

CHAPTER 1
World War II: The Shoah and its Psycho-Memorial Legacies

The focus of this chapter is on three discrete experiences of World War II. The first is the experience of the female narrator qua Jew of either imprisonment in Gestapo and political prisons, or of deportation to Auschwitz. Whilst accounts of the latter are now legion, accounts of the former are less so. Particular attention will be paid to the two different types of torture recorded in three representative texts. Notable in Anna Langfus’s Le Sel et le soufre (1960)¹ is the violent physical torture inflicted on her as a political prisoner by the Gestapo. A less obviously violent, more protracted form of torture which is both physical and moral — starvation, degradation, dehumanization — is evidenced in the two Auschwitz testimonies, Françoise Maous’s Coma Auschwitz, no. A.5553 (1996),² and Ana Novac’s Les Beaux Jours de ma jeunesse (1968; second, supplemented edition 1996).³

The second form of experience considered in this chapter is that of Jewish women or girls who escaped imprisonment or deportation but not the anti-Semitic measures imposed by the Vichy regime, which constrained them to nomadism and pain-of-death clandestinity. As early as 1968, William Niederland contended that Jews who lived through the Third Reich in hiding were exposed to a psychological strain which to some extent equalled that of the camps.⁴ Whilst stressing the ‘to some extent’, I aver that the same could be said of French Jews who lived through Vichy in hiding, particularly after the November 1942 abolition of the so-called Free Zone. Many would censure as sheer insult any homologization of the psychological strain endured by Jews living clandestinely in fear of arrest under Nazi-occupied states with the psychological strain of Jews imprisoned in camps equipped with gas chambers. Yet fear is not easily measurable. The strain of uncertainty about whether one might possibly escape arrest, and thus about whether or not to exercise agency, was arguably greater than the strain of merely waiting and knowing there was little if anything one could do in the camps to escape selection for the gas chambers. The sample texts for this second category are Dominique Arban’s La Cité d’injustice (1945)5 and Elisabeth Gille’s Un paysage de cendres (1996).⁶

The third form of experience examined in this chapter is that of Jewish women or girls living in a ‘Liberation’ France that, reverting to its universalizing Republican tradition, refused to recognize the unique horrors experienced by the Jewish victims of Nazism and of French fascism during WWII (this despite the fact that two-thirds of those deported from France were Jewish). This was a refusal in which some French Jews were complicit, unwilling to risk renewed extrusion or persecution as a singular and alien community. The psychological disorientations of this third form of experience include the trauma of coming to terms with the Shoah, with the death of family, friends, and in the case of deportees, camp-mates; the not infrequent syndrome of survivor’s guilt;⁷ acting out; the slow and painful process, not always successfully or fully achieved, of psychic reintegration; the difficult reassimilation, or failure to reassimilate, into French collective identity. The textual case-studies for this third category of experience are Francine Christophe’s Après les camps, la vie (2001)⁸ and Yaël Hassan’s Souviens-toi Leah! (Eden, 2004).⁹

Since many readers will be unfamiliar with these texts, only one of which (Langfus’s) has come even close to canonical status within the male-dominated field of French-language Holocaust literature, in all three sections below a short plot summary of each novel is provided in order to contextualize the subsequent analysis. The reader may wonder why such plot summaries are provided here but not in subsequent chapters. The answer is that a clear idea of the facts and their sequentiality is especially important in the case of Shoah/Holocaust testimonies, given the contestation of such testimonies by historians. While these primary texts do not purport to be historiographical texts, they may, provided their historical veracity is not put into question, feed into historiography (see Conclusion).

WWII: Imprisonment/Deportation

With testimonial literature, a tacit assumption is that the author will tell the unadulterated truth about her or his experience of atrocity. This seems ostensibly to exclude the novel form, whose fictionality might be assumed to vitiate the evidentiary basis on which testimonial discourse generally lies. Yet Anna Langfus’s Le Sel et le soufre, recipient of the Prix Veillon for 1960, is most certainly a novel. Pierre Horn describes it as ‘an autobiographical novel in which she invented nothing, but rather selected from her war memories, omitting what she referred to as “bad taste” episodes’.¹⁰ Le Sel et le soufre certainly cannot be qualified as a conventional autobiography, for two reasons. First, it does not cover a sufficiently broad temporal span, restricted as it is to a five-year period in Langfus’s life, and is thus not a writing (graphy) of a (whole) life (bio). Second, eschewing a(n early) Lejeunian pact with the reader,¹¹ it does not institute a nominal correspondence between the author, Anna Langfus, and the first-person, homodiegetic narrator,¹² Maria Janczewska. Only some three-quarters of the way through the narrative does it transpire that Maria Janczewska is a ‘faux nom’ (p. 262) [false name]. Madeleine Cottenet-Hage claims that the narrator ‘has been renamed Maria in the course of one of several reinventions of her identity to ensure that she will pass as a Christian’;¹³ and it is not immaterial that Langfus’s allegedly adored daughter was named Maria. Despite these two caveats, it is clear that Langfus flouts the codes of traditional autobiography by disabling a straight equation between author and first-person narrator; further, the name ‘Anna’ appears nowhere in the text. What is beyond doubt is that Le Sel et le soufre does draw heavily on material from Langfus’s own life and bases its narrator on its author, but that it is nonetheless a re-working, a re-creation of reality rather than a transparent rendering of the reality of Langfus’s life. She herself stated of Maria ‘l’héroïne, c’est moi, bien sûr [...] Mais je crois qu’aussi j’ai récréé la réalité’ [the heroine is me, of course [...] But I also believe that I recreated reality].¹⁴

Why this opting for the novel over the testimonial form? As Ellen S. Fine points out, this deliberate and considered choice granted Langfus ‘cette distance, et donc cette liberté, propres à saisir la vérité de l’expérience intérieure’ [that distance, and so that freedom, that help us grasp the truth of inner experience].¹⁵ I would define this necessary distance as the distance of the present writing subject from the past traumatized subject who actually experienced the horrific events being mediated in writing. That distance has prompted many critics to condemn the character Maria as callously cold, selfish, and indifferent.¹⁶ This moralizing verdict ignores the fact that egotism and suspension of compassion for others may have been necessary survival mechanisms in such extreme circumstances as the death-camps — a point made cogently by the eponymous protagonist of Souviens-toi Leah! also discussed below: ‘Au loin, les gueules des cheminées crachaient leur fumée âcre. [...] Je marchais tête baissée. Ma peine me suffisait amplement. Je me refusais de la surcharger de celle des autres’ (Souviens-toi Leah!, p. 76) [In the distance, the chimney mouths were spitting out their pungent smoke. [...] I was walking along with my head bowed. My own pain was quite enough for me. I wasn’t prepared to take on other people’s too].

Despite its status as a novel, Le Sel et le soufre does, then, have documentary credentials due to its basis in Langfus’s own wartime experiences of the Warsaw ghetto, of underground resistance activity, of arrest, imprisonment, and torture by the Gestapo, and, finally, of a less than joyous liberation. Further, autobiographically based evocation of the Warsaw ghetto makes Langfus’s text unique within the entire corpus treated in this monograph. While many of the authors to be examined are of Polish origin, only Langfus delivers a sustained representation of the Warsaw ghetto; the fact that she ended up writing it in French some fifteen years after the event is a function of Ashkenazic patterns of deracination and exile (to be explored in Chapter 3) imposed by WWII. As a displaced person, Langfus migrated almost aleato ril y to France after the war, where she remained until her premature death in 1966.

The plot of Le Sel et le soufre may be summarized as follows. At its opening, Maria has just returned from Belgium with her husband Jacques to her parents’ Polish home. When war breaks out in 1939, she and her family immediately become targets of virulent anti-Semitism, mainly from the occupying Germans but also from the indigenous Poles. The dark, sometimes almost random ordeals of Maria’s family represent those of many Polish Jews during WWII. Jacques is arrested and then, surprisingly, released. He, Maria and her parents flee the ghetto, to which her parents subsequently return and which will finally be bombed. Her parents are deported to and die in the camps; Maria and Jacques are initially helped and protected by an atypical German, but then, rather more typically, arrested by the Gestapo; Jacques is shot dead, and Maria tortured, then sent to a political prison. When she is finally liberated, she has lost her entire family, along with any sense of meaning to life, and is afflicted — as readers of the novel’s powerful sequel, Les Bagages de sable (1962),¹⁷ will particularly appreciate — by anhedonia.

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

A subversion of normative gender roles emerges from the narrative of Jacques’s arrest by a German officer, for while her father is passive, Maria is active, remonstrating with the officer and then reproaching her father: ‘Vous n’avez rien fait pour empêcher qu’on l’emmene, rien!’ (p. 19) [You did nothing to stop them taking him away, nothing!]. In a later crisis she again is agentic, contestatory and self-preserving, her husband Jacques passive and self-sacrificing.¹⁹ Yet there is also a sense in which Jacques’s exhortations to calm could be construed, and indeed are construed by Maria, as a form of masculine control, in that he, is whether consciously or not, infantilizing his wife’s rebellion: ‘Que l’enfant nous sorte toutes les bêtises qu’elle a dans sa petite tête [...] Tu vois, je prends soin de toi’ (p. 78) [Let the child get all that nonsense out of her little head for us [...] You see, I’m taking care of you]. Further indices to her infringement of gender norms include her robust resistance to the anti-Semitism expressed by the wife of the Polish policeman who hides them. When the policeman tells his wife to make tea for them, she is incensed: ‘ “C’est à moi que tu dis ça! C’est à moi que tu dis de servir des youpins!” Suivent des cris, des injures, des imprécations’ (p. 84) [‘You’re telling me that! You’re telling me to serve yids!’ Shouts, insults and curses followed]. The Polish woman herself is of course also defying gendered norms according to which she is a mere servant of her husband, but her anti-Semitic hostility certainly complicates the feminist reader’s response. Even less gender-normative is Maria’s response, for although she does not actually kill the woman, she threatens to do so and even asserts the legitimacy of such a hypothetical murder (p. 84).

Later on however, when Maria realizes that Jacques is doomed, her will to live disintegrates and she slides from violent resistance to suicidal nihilism: ‘Ils savent que Jacques est juif. Donc c’est la fin. Le reste, auquel je ne comprends rien, m’est absolument égal’ (p. 234) [They know that Jacques is Jewish. So, it’s the end. The rest, which is a complete mystery to me, I couldn’t care less about]. Yet this bleak knowledge is also construed as a form of liberation (p. 235). It is in this spirit that she withstands excruciating physical torture (pp. 236, 250), at first showing ironic derision of her torturers (pp. 250–51), but gradually learning to put aside her pride and submit passively, switching off mentally to physical pain (p. 260). In a 1962 interview, Langfus used precisely the word ‘débrancher’ [disconnect] to describe her mental survival-mechanism: ‘Quand, dix ans après, j’...

Table of contents

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