The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  Hardly had the blackmailers left than Paulette, fearing they might come back, and desperate to protect Monny, grabbed their bag – which always stood packed and ready in case they had to disappear – and got out of the apartment as quickly as she could, asking the concierge to warn Monny the moment he returned and to explain things to me if I showed up on my own the following morning. She hid with her elder sister, Sophie, in their mother’s family home in Clichy. Sophie, too, spent the war years in Paris but did not suffer the same worries because she was married to Antonio (known as Toni) Gaggio, a pure-blooded Venetian. Sophie was a great beauty with dark eyes, she had no stammer, no Jewish nose and it brings tears to my eyes whenever, looking through the photos in the Auschwitz Album, taken by the Nazis on the Judenrampe as convoys of Hungarian Jews disembarked, most of them destined for the gas chambers, I come upon an uncanny photograph of my aunt’s double, waiting for the selection process to begin. She is Sophie, her beautiful face stamped with suspicion and anguish; she knows she is going to die and she cannot, does not want to believe it.

  There is no possible comparison to be made between Monny and Toni, except for one thing: Toni loved Sophie as much as Monny loved Paulette. He proved it when, after years of ceaselessly, fruitlessly courting her, he had himself circumcised at the age of thirty-five to please my grandfather, Yankel Grobermann, a Jew of strict observance – ‘affectations’, as my intractable mother translated – and a former horse-breeder or groom, I don’t remember which, 1.94 metres tall, born in Kishinev, the city of the pogroms, in Bessarabia, who would have considered allowing his eldest daughter to marry an uncircumcised man the worst sacrilege. The trauma of his belated entry into the Covenant was such that my uncle by marriage spent the rest of his life playing cards – belote mostly – in the bistros of Clichy, where he became a celebrated champion.

  The concierge at number 97 did not leave me in that lovely, bright room but led me, from terrace to terrace, rooftop to rooftop, to a building far from the rue Compans. He opened the door to a maid’s room in the attic furnished only with a bed and told me to wait there until he received further instructions. Exhausted and bewildered, I fell asleep, waking later that evening with nothing familiar in sight that might dispel my confusion. A stranger finally came to pick me up and took me, by ways and means of which I have absolutely no memory, to my mother, in an apartment outside the city at an address I have long since forgotten too. I remember only an excess of gilded softness. Everyone was there: Sophie and her daughters, my cousins Micheline and Jacqueline with their long Venetian-blonde hair, beautiful, shapely, attractive; Toni, whom I think I met for the first time that night; Monny, my fixed star, his face again a mask of fear; and my mother to whose powerful embrace and kisses stronger than death I had to submit before I even had a chance to look at her. She hadn’t changed, though her big lips as she kissed me publicly, voraciously, made her nose seem smaller. I barely noticed her stammer, so completely was it tempered by the circumstances – the cool-headedness she had shown, the blackmail, the appointment she was to keep with the Germans the next day, the necessity of once again having to find a new refuge.

  The most pressing issue was to decide whether my mother should keep her German appointment at the scheduled place and time. She was in favour; everyone else was against the idea, she was alone in wanting to go. Furthermore she wanted to bring money – a derisory sum compared to what had been agreed – but she believed her persecutor would take the money as a gesture of goodwill, and besides, in accepting it, he would compromise himself. Monny, Toni and I pointed out the madness of this plan: the officer might get angry and arrest her there and then. Why throw herself into the lion’s jaws again, now that the cover of the house on the rue Compans had been blown and they would have to look for somewhere else in any case? I cannot now remember the name or address where the meeting was to take place. It was a large café that Paulette knew; spacious, with lots of tables. But there could be no question of her going alone: Monny and I would go in first and sit at a table like father and son, so we could check out the café, look for any warning signs that this might be a trap. My mother made her entrance; exquisitely made-up, feminine, seductively radiant at the age of thirty-nine. She glanced around, taking in the whole room, careful not to linger when she saw us, then headed straight for a table some distance away, a table we had paid no attention to, where he was waiting for her. We could not bear to look. Everything happened quickly. He was the first to leave. My mother had asked for another forty-eight hours so that she could bring some more money – it would take her two weeks to get hold of the whole sum, she explained, offering to pay him in instalments, every two days, in the same café. She never went back.

  The following day my mother decided that I was dressed like a peasant, my wooden-soled shoes were provincial and her elder son should wear something a little more elegant, more Parisian – even if the new shoes would inevitably have wooden soles. We went to Chaussures André, a famous Jewish emporium – now Aryanized – on the boulevard des Capucines, with an extensive clientele, countless shop assistants and a vast selection of shoes. This, as it turned out, proved to be the source of the problem. Because to choose is to kill. My mother was incapable of choosing, she wanted everything. I’m like her. The title of my dissertation for my philosophy degree was Possibles and Incompossibles in the Philosophy of Leibniz, ‘incompossible’ referring to the fact that there are things that cannot coexist. To choose one is to preclude the existence of the other. Any choice is a murder, and leaders, apparently, can be defined by their capacity to murder, we call them ‘decision-makers’ and we pay them handsomely for it. It is no accident that Shoah runs to nine and a half hours. The shop assistants addressed themselves to me, but it was my mother who answered – to her, I was still the little boy she had not seen for almost four years. As she spoke, her stammer became worse and worse, taking longer and longer since she was absolutely determined to finish every sentence – she could not bear to be second-guessed before she finished, still less for someone to have the nerve to complete a sentence for her: she had to enunciate every last syllable even if one had already understood. Shoes and boxes piled up around the stool where I sat, trying them on; none of them seemed right to her and if, by chance, she narrowed the choice down to two pairs, the torment of choosing, of hesitating between the two, only made her stammer worse, her voice louder. Distraught and exhausted, the salesgirl moved her stepladder from shelf to shelf, took down yet another box, yet another pair of shoes only for my mother to reject them. I tried on pair after pair, even I was exhausted simply from trying them on. There were pairs I had liked that my mother had dismissed, and I was so desperate for the whole thing to be over that I went into raptures over each new pair. Time passed, trickling by more and more slowly. The colleagues of the girl serving us had finished work; they watched, they stared at us, as did other customers; Paulette did not even notice. I felt panic well up; I could see, could hear what these people could see and hear, the terrible stammer, the enormous Jewish nose of my mother, who remained utterly oblivious to the situation, to the danger she was putting us both in. The head of the department came over, visibly hostile, looked my mother up and down and said, ‘Is something the matter, madame?’ From the bottom of the pile, I dug out my peasant boots, slipped them on and, unable to contain my rising panic, I rushed out, weaving between the displays, until I came to an exit and I ran. So terrified was I that my mother would catch up with me and I would have to walk with her, travel on the métro with her, listening to her furious diatribe, that I did not stop running until I was some distance from the shop.

  There was in France, in the history of torture, one medieval method known as ‘the Boot’, which was designed to crush the legs of the person from whom one wanted to force a confession: for the ‘ordinary question’, four wedges were hammered between narrow pieces of board, securely lashed around the calves, creating unbearable pressure on the bone; for the ‘extraordinary question’, eight w
edges were driven in. For a long time, whenever I described this unbearable incident at Chaussures André, I would refer to it as ‘the day of the Boot’. It is no laughing matter: I could not stop myself from deserting my mother, leaving her alone in what was an exceedingly dangerous situation, because she was putting me in danger. I was afraid of her, I was ashamed of her; that afternoon I behaved like a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite of the worst kind: a Jewish anti-Semite. There is no room for argument, I have no excuses and retelling that scene in the shoe shop as though I were trying to explain or to justify my cowardice, to excuse my abandonment with a concatenation of reasons, can no more wash away the horror of what I did than all the perfumes of Arabia could sweeten the bloody hands of Lady Macbeth.

  Earlier I wrote that in 1938 – the period we spent in Paris with my father and his beautiful new companion Hélène, between the two periods we lived in Brioude – I had become aware of the power, the viciousness of the anti-Semitism at the Lycée Condorcet. But I also became aware of the fear and the cowardice in myself. Hiding behind a pillar in the school playground I watched – petrified, making no attempt to intervene, terrified that I might be discovered – as my classmates all but lynched a lanky, red-haired Jew named Lévy who had all the features of pre-war anti-Semitic caricatures. They were twenty against one and they beat him until he bled. Lévy simply tried to dodge the blows, making no attempt to defend himself, and the prefects turned a blind eye; it became a sort of ritual: once a week, they would ‘get’ the Jew. Fear pervaded the school. I remember in class, while the teacher was discussing Shylock’s ‘pound of flesh’ in The Merchant of Venice, one of my classmates turned to me and hissed, between clenched teeth, ‘You’re another little Jew, aren’t you?’ Instead of leaping to my feet and punching him, I protested, denied it, brushing aside the insult as though answering a question of fact politely put to me; ‘No, I’m not a Jew.’

  None of this is news, it is an old, old story, one that is written in our genes, one difficult to understand today when circumstances have changed so much. In Groutel, a primitive hamlet of about ten farms between Le Mans and Alençon, where my paternal grandparents had retired, my grandmother, Anna, born in Riga and utterly unable to read or write French, asked my father, as soon as I graduated to the sixième, to get me to write to her in Latin – a language she could no more read than she could French. I was, as I have said, a docile child and I did as I was told, and sent Anna née Ratut missives in dog-Latin. What did she do with them? She tramped the six kilometres of dusty or waterlogged dirt track that ran from Groutel to Champfleur, the nearest parish, and asked, in the inimitable pidgin French she spoke when not speaking Yiddish, to see Monsieur le Curé. Then, blushing with pride, she would brandish my latest screed: ‘Look, Father, my grandson, he can write in Latin.’ My dog-Latin, in some way I do not understand, reinforced Anna’s ‘vieille-France’ status, brilliantly emphasizing that the enzymes of integration were at work, ringing my formidable grandmother’s head with a halo of conformity.

  But from Anna, I must return to Paulette: the tribunal that awaited me when, penniless and having nowhere to go, I reappeared that evening dragging the heels of my ugly, tattered boots, showed absolutely no mercy. Nor did I seek any; I admitted everything. My mother did not stammer once and her perfect diction, which, more than anything, attested to her anguish, had me sobbing, hiccupping and sniffling. The question of filial love, which was to haunt both of us all our lives, was openly, explicitly at issue that night and it could not be resolved with words or with pretence. She knew this, I knew this, it was abandonment for abandonment, the inexhaustible subject of our later conversations, arguments, promises and attempts to make peace. Monny proved a tactful and sensitive diplomat, and it was thanks to him that I did not leave Paris mortified with shame to return at once to the Auvergne. But the man who truly cured me, who delivered me from shame by helping me to understand what had happened to me, describing in perfect detail what I had felt on ‘the day of the Boot’, was Jean-Paul Sartre. When, four years later, after the war, I read his Réflexions sur la question juive [Anti-Semite and Jew], I first devoured the chapter ‘The Portrait of the Anti-Semite’, and with every line I felt alive again or, to be more precise, I felt I had been given permission to live. Later, I came to the description of what Sartre calls the ‘Jewish inauthenticity’ and in it I suddenly found a portrait of myself, perfectly depicted: I was all the more moved because if Sartre, the greatest French writer, understood us as no one else had ever done, he never condemned: ‘When there is another Jew with him he feels himself endangered by this other […] He is so afraid of the discoveries that the Christians are going to make that he hastens to give them warning, he becomes himself an anti-Semite by impatience and for the sake of others and he who a moment before could not even see the ethnic characteristics of his son or his nephew now looks at his coreligionist with the eyes of an anti-Semite. Each Jewish trait he detects is like a dagger thrust, for it seems to him that he finds it in himself but out of reach, objective, incurable, a given […]’

  Paulette stammered because – just as later, in the Polish ghettos during the Nazi ‘actions’, newborn babies were muffled up and concealed in secret hiding places known as malines so their cries would not lead to the discovery of whole families – just so had my mother had a pillow pressed over her face so she could be secretly stowed away in Odessa, where she was born, on to a ship bound for Marseille. This was in 1903; she was three months old. After the terrible pogrom of Kishinev, Yankel, my gargantuan grandfather, like so many other Jews, had decided to leave for the West. This would also mean he avoided having to spend seven years in the Tsarist army, serving as cannon-fodder in the far-flung limits of the empire during the Russo-Japanese War. This, aside from the pogroms, was what awaited the Jews. They arrived penniless in Paris after a breathless, tortuous journey to find scant help from a relative who had arrived there some years earlier. They lived in terrible poverty on the barrière de Clichy then known as la zone. ‘They’ meaning Yankel, a diligent, tireless worker, an observant Jew, contemptuous of women, who ignored his two daughters Paulette and Sophie and worshipped his two sons, particularly the elder, Robert, known as Bobby; then there was Perl or Perla, my grandmother of whom I have only a vague memory from when I was a small child, a memory of great dark eyes set in a pale face at the end of a corridor, or paler still, lying down, her heavy hand stroking my hair, in a bed with white sheets, possibly her deathbed, though she was still alive. I maintain that I remember Yankel and his funeral, but my mother tells me that this is impossible because I was too young, that it was because my father, doubly loved by Yankel for being both male and Jewish, talked to me so often about him that I imagined that I knew him. In the photographs I have of him he has broad, square shoulders and a neck as short as my own with a head that seems to sink into his chest. My father told me that, one summer afternoon after a picnic, the two of them were standing side by side, relieving themselves, when suddenly my grandfather started to piss blood; he died in excruciating pain of cancer of the bladder.

  Every day Yankel and his elder son left Clichy dragging a hand cart behind them, heading for the auction rooms on the rue Drouot. There, they bought cheap, clapped-out folding metal beds, spending their nights patching up and repairing them so that by morning they were presentable and serviceable once more. Working like a galley-slave and hoarding every penny – apparently he refused to pay for his daughters’ sanitary napkins when they first got their periods – he was the living embodiment of what Karl Marx calls the primitive accumulation of capital. Soon, the hand-cart was replaced by a horse-drawn carriage, they diversified in what they bought and sold and no longer lived from day to day, they needed warehouse space, and so on. Yankel Grobermann became a respected name in the singular world of the salvage trade at the auction rooms. But a qualitative leap occurred during World War I, at the end of 1916 or the beginning of 1917: an American dealer arrived in Paris looking for a supplier who could deliver liv
ing- and dining-room furniture in bulk – armchairs, sideboards, overmantels, four-poster beds and I don’t know what else, authentic furniture for the first film studios in the United States, which by then were blossoming like spring flowers. Unlike my paternal grandfather Itzhak Lanzmann, who became a French citizen in 1913 at the age of thirty-nine and was called up in 1914 to serve in the infantry with young men of twenty, ‘the class of 1914’, the very same day a brick was thrown through the window of his furniture shop at 70 rue Lamarck in the 18th arrondissement because his name sounded German; Yankel had not been in France long enough to claim French citizenship. This was his good fortune: he was not called up and, after he met the American, he began to clean out the châteaux of France, buying up antique furniture of any style, any period, from aristocrats who to their amazement found themselves being paid in cold hard cash by this tall, lanky, broad-shouldered man with an unrecognizable accent. The patrimony of France languished for weeks or months in the Grobermann warehouses at Clichy before it was shipped by the carriage-load, the train-load, the boat-load to the New World. My mother told me that, in the 1920s, when watching Chaplin or Buster Keaton films with Yankel, she would sometimes get a shock and shout, right there in the cinema, ‘Look, Papa, it’s the red sitting room!’

  My mother’s real name was not Paulette, but Pauline, and I have never understood why she was never called Pauline. So, Pauline and her sister Sophie were both brilliant students. Pauline was gifted in maths and the sciences, although she also had a strong affinity with words and books. But Yankel paid no heed to his daughters’ talents and refused to sign their school reports. For the girls this was simply the way it was and each routinely signed their father’s name on the other’s report. During the war, catastrophe struck. At sixteen, Bobby, the eldest boy, looked ten years older than his age, heavy-set like his father with a rugged face and a powerful masculinity that appealed to women. He was murdered by a Breton woman who was pregnant by him; she put a bullet in his head as he lay sleeping. She was thirty-five years old. She was arrested, imprisoned and received a long sentence, giving birth in prison. Yankel was devastated by the murder of his son, and everyone in the family refused to see the child who was the fruit of the crime. Everyone except Pauline: she saw him, took care of him, claiming that he had already paid a terrible price, and I remember when I was about twelve spending an afternoon with him and my mother in Luna Park. He seemed gentle, too gentle. He was my cousin, but we had nothing in common. I’ve forgotten his first name and I never knew his surname; I never saw him again. Later my mother told me that he had been killed during World War II.