The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  Simone de Beauvoir has already described how our love affair began. She did it in her way, I will do it in mine; we don’t remember the same things, which is normal. In July 1952, after my second article appeared in Les Temps modernes, I decided to leave for Israel, to spend some time there and write a feature, as I had done in East Germany. Strangely enough, during the creation of Israel, just when the War of Independence was at its height, Germany kept me busy; I was living in Tübingen and Cold War Berlin. My life was moving at a different pace to that of history and current events. It needed to wander, to take shortcuts that would later cohere and converge in other accomplishments. The morning after a party at the rue de la Bûcherie to celebrate the departure of Cau and Jacques-Laurent Bost for Brazil, I found the courage – or the gall – to phone Simone de Beauvoir and invite her to the cinema that evening. I myself was leaving the following day for Marseille where I would take a boat to Israel. ‘Which film?’ she asked bluntly, clearly ill-disposed to wasting her time. ‘Any film,’ I said, my way of saying that it was not the point of my invitation. She understood. We did not see a film, but spent the whole evening in her room lined with red drapes on the top floor of 11 rue de la Bûcherie, gazing at Notre-Dame, nocturnal and unreal. I don’t remember now whether we ate; what happened afterwards has overshadowed all the rest. I took her in my arms, each of us as nervous and as frightened as the other. We lay wrapped together for a long time after we made love. She put her head on my chest and said: ‘Oh, your heart, how it beats!’, which overwhelmed me. Suddenly, hurriedly, as though she absolutely owed me a truth I had never asked for, she said, ‘I must tell you, there have been five men in my life,’ and she gave me their names. Then she added, again without my asking, that for a long time her relationship with Sartre had been neither romantic nor sexual. I was even more moved: this was not going to be a brief affair, she was establishing a different, infinitely more serious relationship between us. I was to be the sixth man, she had decided as much; pride and anxiety fought within me. The following morning, she left to join Sartre in Italy, at the wheel of an Aronde, her first car, which she was driving for the first time. I went to catch the train to Marseille.

  Chapter 11

  Perhaps I was playing at scaring myself, but the boarding of the Jews onto the SS Kedmah felt to me like a deportation to the death camps. Why the double line of riot police, armed, helmeted, ready for action, flanking us on either side, forcing us to mark time under the sweltering early August sun until we came to the gangway? The immigrants had reached Marseille after long journeys from Romania, Bulgaria, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Iraq, Iran by the various daring paths that had been opened up since 1947 by the Jewish Agency for Israel and the men of Mossad to circumvent the British blockade. They were gripped by a single idea: leaving Europe, or their former homelands, to make a new life for themselves far away in Eretz Israel. Whole families peacefully waited their turn, anxious about their exile. I could not understand the need for this brutal deployment of police. And why – given that I had very little money – was I assigned a first-class cabin? I shared it with a rabbi, a chief rabbi from Marrakech if I remember rightly, who was going to Israel on a reconnaissance trip. In any case he was – to my shame – the first rabbi I had ever met. He was in the prime of life, and I was astonished by how tall and thin he was, by his silver beard, his eyes of a piercing blue that was not at all African, and the big hand-knitted and flawlessly white wool socks he wore day and night. He spoke only Arabic and Hebrew, both languages unintelligible to me, and the moment I entered the cabin he pointed a cruel accusing finger at me and asked, ‘Yehudi?’ I realized that it was important for him to know my affiliation and I answered, using one of the few words of Hebrew I knew, ‘ken’, ‘yes’. He looked at me, his sharp blue eyes like knives, trying to decide whether I was not only a liar but an impostor, refuting my ‘ken’ with a furious ‘lo’, no, I was not Jewish, I couldn’t be Jewish. Sartre’s statement from Réflexions sur la question juive, ‘it is the anti-Semite that creates the Jew’, or indeed the book of my friend Robert Misrahi, La Condition réflexive de l’homme juif [The Reflexive Condition of the Jewish Man], which worked to generate a Jewish identity in a conceptual vacuum, were both dealt a serious blow even before the SS Kedmah had weighed anchor. After three days at sea, my chief rabbi – I’ve just remembered his name, though I can’t be sure: Maklouf Abyssirar – knew the full measure of my heathenism. I had left our cabin one Friday afternoon shortly before the start of Shabbat – in fact, I then knew nothing whatever about that fundamental, ancestral rite, which had never been observed in my family – and I had left the light on. I spent the night on deck under the stars, which studded the deep, dark sky, chatting to some Israelis I had just met – to Dahlia Kaufmann, who captivated me by her seriousness and the story of her life as she told it to me; to Yigal Alon, a senior officer in the Palmach, an élite unit of the Israeli army at its inception and later Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs, who was on his way back from a sabbatical year at Oxford and heading for Ginossar, his kibbutz on the western bank of the Sea of Galilee; and to Julius Ebenstein, the Mozartian born in Vienna, managing to escape just after the Anschluss, but retaining an enduring nostalgia for the city. I returned to the cabin at about four o’clock, just before dawn, and found the rabbi lying on his berth in his socks, his eyes wide open and the lights still on. The ancient tenets of our religion forbade him from turning off the lights and on the ship there were no Shabbes goys – Shabbat goys – like those who operate the lifts in Israeli hotels nowadays, as required by Jewish-American tourists. In that dawn, I was summarily excommunicated and cursed, both in Hebrew and in Arabic.

  On the second day of sailing, our first morning at sea, a cleaning woman came into the cabin carrying a bucket and a scrubbing brush, knelt on the floor and began to clean it. It was too much for me, I couldn’t bear for an Israeli woman – it was clear to me that that was what she was – to be my maid. I got up, explained to her in English that I would do it myself, took the bucket and the brush and attempted to finish what she had started. She stared at me in astonishment, obviously upset and understandably convinced I was mad. In the days that followed, she arranged to come in and clean while I was out. I could easily imagine Jewish cleaning women in France or anywhere else, but not in Israel. I knew very little about the country, but the image uppermost in my mind – one shared by most of the immigrants aboard the Kedmah to whom I spoke during the crossing – was the image of the desert. Israel had to be a desert, a virgin land to be conquered, where each man would be the first, and would begin the world anew with bare hands in a spirit of unprecedented brotherhood and equality. I could not conceive of Israel as an actual society of classes, of rulers and the ruled, of old hands and newcomers, with all the inertia and the weight of the real. I was wrong, of course, but I was also right. I realized this when Dahlia began to tell me her life story under a starry sky in the prow of the Kedmah, whose stem I could hear slicing through the water with the powerful, regular sigh of silk being torn. She was a German Jew and had been one of the famous group of Aliyah Youth that the Jewish Agency had managed to get out of Germany in 1938 shortly before Kristallnacht. Raised as Zionists, by the time they were adolescents they were enthusiastic, ardent pioneers, founding the Beit Ha’arava kibbutz on the shores of the Dead Sea, 400 metres below sea level, on the rugged, lunar, sweltering plain that stretches the length of the Jordan Rift Valley from Jericho to Qumran where the famous Dead Sea Scrolls were later found in a cave. She told me how they shuttled back and forth with buckets and wheelbarrows, drawing fresh water from the River Jordan to water the desert land they had been given, washing away the deep layer of salt that made it barren. The flowering of the first tomato plants, the intense red of the fruits, was celebrated as a great victory of farming over nature. She told me of the hard, rough, uncompromising life of the first kibbutzim who were entirely communitarian and egalitarian; the way it aged a body prematurely, the strictness of the laws impos
ed – the first woman to wear lipstick was regarded as a heroine by some and corrupt by others. In Beit Ha’arava, Dahlia had married Hoshea Kaufmann. The creation of the state, the War of Independence, the treaties – not peace treaties, but an armistice between Israel and its Arab enemies, under the terms of which Beit Ha’arava became part of Transjordan – were a tragedy to those who had founded it. They all lost not only their lands, but the sense of their own lives; the ties that bound them were broken. Having lost their kibbutz, they went their separate ways, couples drifted apart, Dahlia moved to another ‘pioneer’ kibbutz by the sea in the very north of Israel, on the Lebanese border, Gesher Haziv, which had recently been founded by Argentinian and Brazilian Jews, while Hoshea left to teach in the large, highly politicized Hashomer Hatza’ir kibbutz of Mishmar Ha’emek in the Jezreel Valley. I would later meet him through Dahlia; he seemed utterly disconsolate about everything. Another night on the ship, Julius Ebenstein took over from Dahlia: he talked to me about young Israelis – he had two children waiting for him at home in Tel Aviv – about their devotion, their selflessness, their limitless idealism. A bright sliver of crescent moon shone in the west as Julius pointed a finger as commanding as that of the chief rabbi towards the heavens: ‘You can ask the impossible of them and they’ll go for it.’ He invited me to come and visit him when I was in Tel Aviv. At the time, little did I know how generous he would be to me.

  The Israeli coast was approaching, and as we slipped into the beautiful harbour of Haifa, we could see the different strata of Jewish immigration rising in terraces up the slopes of Mt Carmel, could clearly see that the oldest settlements at the top of the mountain were the richest and that Israel, unquestionably a promised land, was not the virginal desert of our imagination. Dahlia wanted to guide my first steps in Haifa, to help me find a hotel or perhaps take me north to her kibbutz, where we could go for a midnight swim on my first eastern Mediterranean beach. She said, ‘As a foreigner, you’ll get through customs quickly; for Israelis coming home, going through customs is arduous, meticulous and fussy, they search every bag. You’ll be finished long before me so why don’t you wait for me at the Eden Café just outside the port? I’ll come and find you.’ She wasn’t wrong, it was quick, I walked down the gangway with my suitcase, which was very heavy. At four o’clock, the afternoon heat was oppressive, so I decided to take one of the taxis waiting for passengers. I gave the driver the address: Eden Café. He drove precisely 350 metres, past the entrance to the port and stopped almost immediately on a white, deserted square, crushed by the sun, which made me think of the square in Argos in Sartre’s play Les Mouches [The Flies]. He pointed to the Eden Café, its entrance hidden behind a curtain of beads like long rosaries. I asked the driver how much I owed him and was stunned by his response. I paid, resolving never again to take a taxi: with fares as high as this, I could not afford to.

  Blinded by the harsh light, I parted the amber pendants of the curtain and suddenly found myself in darkness. I could no longer see anything and it took some time for my eyes to adjust. But I could hear, from the depths of the room, women’s coarse voices, speaking in a language that sounded unfamiliar although I still understood snatches of this strange French, one that I had never heard before. I worked out that stockings were being fiercely bartered for lipstick. To my left, I made out a counter that served as a bar and a little man behind it. He asked me if I had just arrived on the Kedmah. I nodded and asked him in turn, ‘Tell me, sir, the taxis in Israel are very expensive.’ ‘How much did he take you for?’ Our exchange was conducted in English, but barely had I replied than the barman gave a booming laugh and in gruff Hebrew began to recount my misadventure to the silhouettes I now made out in the gloom. They all laughed until they cried, their echoing laughter rising rather than fading as though they were proud of how easily my gullibility had been abused. Then suddenly, a screaming figure appeared before me, so close he might have touched me: ‘Death to the Jews! Death to the Jews! Death to the Jews!’ I stood petrified and incredulous as he went on, ‘Ha ha, you’ve been conned by the Jews. Death to the Jews! Death to the Jews!’ No one in the Eden Café protested, the mocking laughter increased around me, I didn’t know what to think and decided that these Jews must be remarkably open-minded, that the irreverent man was probably an Arab regular, a bit mad, but they put up with him as though he were part of the furniture. Then, timidly, in a small voice, I dared to ask, ‘But… aren’t you Jewish?’ He roared, ‘Of course I’m a Jew, I’m a Jew, but a Jew of the heart. I’d rather be called a “filthy Jew” in Casablanca or Marrakech than called a “filthy Schwarze” here.’ Such was my introduction to Israel – unusual, I grant.

  I had been brutally confronted by an issue that I would have time to explore at leisure throughout my stay. The women in the outrageous make-up haggling over stockings and lipsticks were Jewish prostitutes from the Maghreb and this doomsayer was their pimp. I saw him again during my few days in Haifa, and we got along well. I learned a lot from him. ‘Les Schwarzes’, meaning ‘blacks’, referred to the Sephardic Jews of recent aliyahs, part of the mass immigration Israel encouraged by any means necessary, lying unstintingly and making false promises about living standards. As Léon Rouach, curator of the Dimona Museum, would put it twenty years later in my film Pourquoi Israël [Israel, Why], ‘Lying is bad, but the country itself was seriously under threat. To build it we had to fill it, and to fill it we had to lie!’ And one should read into these words no naïveté, no cynicism, no resentment, but on the contrary the overwhelming candour of the men and women who complied, understanding and endorsing the liars’ justifications through the very suffering inflicted on them.

  From north to south, from east to west, from Galilee to Negev, the country was dotted with ma’abarot, vast tent ‘cities’ in which destitute immigrants waited for what was called their klita, their ‘integration’. They were, in fact, refugee camps where these newcomers might have to stay for months or even years before jobs were found for them, or houses built. I visited a number of these ma’abarot with a thirty-year-old Ashkenazi bureaucrat employed by the Jewish Agency, who dealt with everything related to the klita, whom I met again years later as Israel’s ambassador to the UN, and later still as president of a university. I didn’t like his stupidly superior way of evaluating those in his charge. Of the Romanians, he said, ‘They’re good material’; Bulgarians, Iraqis and Iranians also occupied a higher echelon of his value system. Moroccan Jews he considered to be the dregs of the Chosen People. As we arrived at what seemed to me an immense ma’abara in Beit She’an Valley, with hundreds upon hundreds of family tents that he had to inspect, I noticed on the road near the entrance groups of unshaven men gaping and staring at us with a malevolent air. My guide said, ‘You’ll see, they’re very unhappy because they’ve been assigned two Ashkenazi rabbis. It’s war between them and the Jewish Agency.’ The idlers clearly had keen ears and realized that I spoke French. They rushed over and surrounded us, questioning me, ‘Monsieur, Monsieur, vous êtes froncé?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Oh, la Fronce, Monsieur, la Fronce.’ And they went on: ‘Israel, Monsieur, Israel is worse than the Gestapo!’ My guide, assessor of human material that he was, gave a forced laugh, but was not displeased to see his view of the lowest orders thus confirmed. I asked, ‘You experienced the Gestapo?’ ‘No, Monsieur, but we know.’ They complained about everything: Ashkenazi oppression, the heat, the paltry sums of money they had been given, and the work offered to them that was unworthy of their talents and their former positions. I knew that kibbutzim bemoaned a shortage of kibbutzniks, of volunteers, of manpower. ‘Why don’t you join a kibbutz?’ I asked. ‘Men like you are in demand.’ ‘Never!’ they roared in concert. ‘We could never do that. You need a brain like a mule to live that kind of life.’ Then one of them, who appeared to be the leader, remonstrated, ‘Only one man can save us, Monsieur, you don’t see who?’ I honestly didn’t and answered, ‘I very much doubt only one man can save you, you would need a great many. Most
of all, you will save yourselves.’ I also explained – it goes without saying that this all took place at the end of my trip – the enormous difficulties faced by this tiny newborn country, unwittingly becoming a quasi-official propagandist as I did so. They harped on with their riddle about the supreme saviour: ‘Just one man, Monsieur, one man, honestly, you don’t know who?’ The cat got my tongue. ‘Rothschild, Monsieur, only Rothschild can get us out of this place.’ They were not from the rich Jewish élite of Arab countries, but came from poor communities living in the mellahs, the ghettos of Morocco, and were accustomed to receiving regular donations from wealthy Jews in other countries, of whom the Rothschilds, whose reputation as generous donors was well established, were the best-known. Nothing had prepared these men for what Israel required of them. When I asked what they had done in their former lives, again they replied in glorious concert, ‘Driver.’ Whether of taxis and trucks, I had no idea, but I had never imagined that the People of the Book had produced so many charioteers. They had, in fact, been shopkeepers, barbers or beggars. Twenty years later, during the filming of Pourquoi Israël, I had a similar experience with another immigrant, Russian this time. He too claimed to have driven heavy goods vehicles, in Kiev (the Ukraine was not yet independent). Just as the Moroccans had not been able to contemplate giving up their imaginary trucks for pickaxes, so he found it demeaning to have to work in a soya factory instead of rattling along the potholed roads of Bessarabia. For all of them, there was clearly something honourable about being a driver, devouring the immense spaces between here and elsewhere, ubiquitous and supreme.