The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  The generosity and the warmth shown me by Julius Ebenstein and his wife when, in 1952, I showed up unannounced at the door of their apartment at 19 Mapu Street, Tel Aviv, were remarkable. They asked how long I planned to stay; I answered, ‘One night.’ I stayed for three months. They were renting a four-room apartment overlooking a small garden on the ground floor of a three-storey building built on piles, like most of those dating from the 1920s, and it was already considerably dilapidated thanks to the heat and cheap construction materials. Their children, Sivit and Gaby, who each had their own room, were made to share one and I was given the other. Whenever I left Tel Aviv to journey inland, they kept the room for me. With a trust I found staggering, they gave me keys to the house on my second day there, and I could come and go, day or night, knowing I would find the bed made up. The two children were touchingly beautiful, Julius was about forty and his wife, who was also Viennese, had the classic face of a Jewish intellectual, her glasses perched on a strong, straight nose. In the stories of their lives, they were the quintessence of Israel. Fleeing the Nazis, they had first worked in a kibbutz and adapted to the harsh work of community life, entirely forsaking private property. But in their heart of hearts, both of them still had an ineradicable nostalgia for the big city. Though Tel Aviv could not compare to Vienna, after a few years they left the kibbutz for Mapu Street. But the feeling was illusory, since what they really missed, despite their two marvellous little sabras, their native-born children, was Vienna. Julius, a composer by profession, was obsessed with the idea of founding a Mozarteum in Tel Aviv to connect him with his native Prater, thereby allowing him to make three or four trips a year to his former homeland. The Mozarteum was his obsession, he spent most of his time coming up with improbable plans to finance it, and decided that, since I knew Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, I might be able to help. It was on Mapu Street that I received my first letters from Castor, which became longer and longer and arrived almost daily once she knew that they were reaching me. The Ebensteins, in all their contradictions and heartbreak, were my family, my compass in all the strangeness I had to contend with. Nostalgia for Europe is one of the main themes of Pourquoi Israël; it was the memory of Julius that guided me while I was filming and it is Gert Granach, the Spartacist singer who, from the opening scenes, through the inhalations and exhalations of his accordion, incarnates the overwhelming feeling of Sehnsucht of German-speaking Jews, his beautiful, sad, ironic voice evoking Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg to whom I also pay tribute, as I mentioned, whenever I am in Berlin, standing for a moment in silence on the Landwehrkanal on the spot where her corpse was dumped. I also still associate Mapu Street, this haven of peace, of contemplation and hospitality, with rationing and ravening hunger, day and night, the worst I have ever known. The Ebensteins had little money and I had almost none, we did not know how to find the black market and to be honest I don’t believe it existed: all of Israel was starving. I remember long, hopeless shopping trips, pleading just to be able to bring back a beef sausage, a rare and wonderful delicacy. I have just said that the memory of Julius guided me. Why the memory? Nostalgia, Sehnsucht, finally proved too strong: he left Israel and went back to Austria; his wife, refusing to admit defeat, visited him every three months before she finally packed her bags and moved back to Vienna; Gaby, their wonderful sabra son, became a chef de rang in a hotel in Carinthia. Only Sivit stayed behind: she is a psychoanalyst, extremely left-wing, and has a complex relationship with Israel. I was stunned when I heard that Julius had moved back to Vienna; somehow I felt betrayed, but I know all too well that human beings should never ask of themselves things that are too difficult. Many of my other friends in Israel missed ‘l’Europe aux anciens parapets’ [‘the Europe of the ancient parapets’], and ‘la flache noire et froide’ [‘the cold black pool’] in ‘Le Bateau ivre’ can be a cure for an excess of harsh sunlight, the merciless constancy of threats and violence.

  The moment he saw me, Ben Gurion did not beat about the bush; he prodded my chest with a steely finger and said, ‘So, what are you waiting for? When are you coming? We need men like you here.’ The guide from the Jewish Agency who accompanied me almost everywhere and who had arranged this meeting with the mythic Prime Minister and his wife, the charming Paula, had probably advised him I was ‘good material’. Ben Gurion, like Begin, was impressive but the former had defeated the latter because he had not been afraid to fire on the Altalena, the ship that, just after independence was declared, had brought to Israel’s shores not only fighters but also weapons for the Irgun. Ben Gurion would not tolerate any power that challenged his authority and resigned himself to the fact that Jews would kill other Jews, the founding act of a true state. As we have seen, Menachem Begin had to wait almost thirty years before, in turn, becoming Prime Minister, to the horror of the bourgeois Ashkenazi Jews of Jerusalem and Haifa who could already see the proles invading their living rooms. Ben Gurion had an obvious charisma that was difficult to resist, yet to his annoyance I stammered that I needed to see the country, to think about it; he would have preferred a passionate response. I do not know what would have happened if I had not been receiving Simone de Beauvoir’s expansive love letters promising me a future and committing me, even if I did not write as often as she did. I felt at ease in Israel and this first trip might easily have lasted much longer.

  In a sense, I am of old French stock, much older certainly than most French Jews. My father was born in Paris on 14 July 1900, my family has been in France since the late nineteenth century; I would go so far as to say that I feel so securely French that Israel has never been problematic for me as it has been for the more recently assimilated Jews who arrived in France between the wars or after World War II. They experienced the creation of Israel as something disturbingly personal rather than a gain for the Jewish people: the choice they had made to settle in France seemed fragile, revocable; the existence of another possibility challenged or even contradicted their difficult initial decision, throwing them back into a Jewish world from which they had emerged at times with great difficulty. Some fought in the War of Independence, returned to France and over the years became hardened into an anti-Zionism about which they never ceased to theorize. Israel mattered and was of concern to me for very different reasons: I might be of old French stock through language, education, culture, and so on, but these Jews from Lithuania, Bulgaria, Germany or Czechoslovakia whom I knew neither from Adam nor Eve reminded me of the contingent nature of my nationality. Like them, I might have been born in Berlin, in Prague, in Vilnius; that I had been born in Paris was merely a quirk of geography. Going to Israel revealed to me that I was both innately French and yet also coincidentally French, not at all ‘of old stock’.

  I remember two brothers who owned a hotel where I spent the night in the holy city of Safed in Galilee, two tall, thin men with blank faces, as silent as the shimmering stone of the steps on which they sat for hours in the sun without saying a word. Safed, the city of mystics celebrated in the kabbala, the city from which, it is written, the Messiah will set out for Jerusalem and which, through the twenty centuries of the Jewish diaspora, was never abandoned by its Jews, whether kabbalists or grocers, kabbalists and grocers. Like Hebron, it was one of the focal points in the 1929 Palestine riots, an organized uprising during which many Jews were massacred. In 1948, when independence was declared, the Arabs attacked again, certain they would be victorious; the Jews of Safed took up arms and, with the help of reinforcements from the Haganah, held the city for Israel. With rapt attention I spent hours watching these two property-owning brothers, who had clearly unhesitatingly defended their possessions and were so firmly rooted in this land that language seemed to have become useless to them. The distance between them and me was infinite, I am not even sure that they were aware of my presence; nothing that I might think mattered to them. These silent men were truly Israeli ‘of old stock’, they carried their country, its ancient and recent history, in their bones, their blood. Compared to them, I
was an elf, I carried no weight: neither Joan of Arc nor the Vase of Soissons nor Bertrand du Guesclin flowed through my veins, and the symbols of the glory of France that so enraptured de Gaulle as a child – ‘night falling over Notre-Dame, the majesty of evening at Versailles, the Arc de Triomphe in the sun, flags of conquest waving in the vault of the Invalides’ – these symbols did not anchor me, did not bind me. I was an insider and an outsider in France, an outsider and an insider in Israel, which from the first seemed both strange and familiar. If the flags of conquest waving in the vault of Les Invalides did not move me as they moved the future General, at least I was aware of them. But I knew nothing about Israel, about the language, the history, the rules, about the mores, the religion or the influence it exerted.

  Nightfall in Israel I found particularly disturbing; twilight was very brief, night came suddenly, unannounced. Not knowing that all life ceased as though by magic even before the Shabbat began, one Friday I found myself trapped in Afula, a bleak little town in lower Galilee in the Jezreel Valley. I had intended to return to Tel Aviv that evening but it proved impossible: there were no buses until the following evening, no means of transport, not a café nor a restaurant was open, there was no one in the only hotel to welcome a lost traveller, the streets were deserted, there were no cars, no pedestrians; it was a ghost town, petrified as though after the eruption of some Vesuvius. I never want to relive that night in Afula, which remains in my memory as the epitome of hostility and terror, a nightmare so terrible that I wanted to flee the country. Even today, when I go to Israel, I dread the weekly return of the Shabbat and the uneasiness I feel every time, regardless of where I am. The entire life of Afula had taken shelter, strictly observant, it had converged, without a single exception, on the synagogues. If I wanted to see another human being, it was to a synagogue I had to go. And so I loitered like a fearful thief outside these places of worship, not daring to enter, not understanding what was said, what was read, what was happening; feeling rejected, brushed aside, excluded by those I stubbornly, desperately considered my own people because by chance or by geography I might have been in their place and they in mine. But they were real Jews, they had the knowledge, knew the prayers, the liturgy, some of them undoubtedly knew the Talmud. Whatever the case, that night, I understood the true might of religion, the power of strict observance. And still I had seen nothing yet.

  In Jerusalem for Simchat Torah – the Rejoicing of the Torah – people in the synagogues and surrounding streets celebrated the end of the cycle of Torah readings, and the beginning of the new. This timeless celebration takes place once a year. In Mea Shearim, a neighbourhood of uncompromising, ultra-Orthodox Judaism, I could not tear my eyes from the astounding spectacle I was witnessing: on a hot October night, clothed in heavy caftans and shtreimels – fur hats – designed for the Polish weather, capable of dancing through the entire night with no rest, no break, with the endlessly renewed passion required by the sublime rapture of the event, their right arms clasping to their chests newborns long since lulled to sleep by their fathers’ tireless gallopade, their left hands clutching the sacred scroll of the Torah whose public reading will begin again at dawn, ecstatic and bathed in sweat, the ultra-Orthodox Hasidim attest to the powerful mystic dimension of radical Judaism. That same power possessed by miraculous, venerated rabbis to whom Talmudic scholars flock like supplicants, determined to be taught only by such masters who in turn sat at the feet of another great master, who in turn… Such is the sanctity of the tradition, the burning heart of Judaism. The day after Simchat Torah I was taken to the yeshiva of the most venerated of the masters of his generation, a descendant of one of the founding Lithuanian families – a very old man who had, by extraordinary chance, survived the Shoah. He presided at the head of a very long table, surrounded by men in black, the teachers of his congregation, and by students, all wearing their black broadbrimmed hats, arranged down each side of the table in diminishing order of age and importance. A plate was set before each guest and, as one moved down the table away from the master, so the commotion increased. Already, though I did not understand why, people were jostling, trying to get closer to the table, which was at least ten metres long. Then suddenly, everyone froze in a vast palpable, deferential silence, all conversation ceased and all eyes, shining with desire, converged on plates of herring being set before the master. He began to eat heartily, from time to time taking a herring to give to one of those standing nearby who would thank him effusively, expressing both his gratitude for the food and his devotion for the transubstantiation the master’s touch brought to an ordinary Jewish meal. Meanwhile, at the other end of the table, the starving, fed all day on Talmudic studies, exhausted from a night of twisting and dancing, were pawing the ground impatiently. Then, with the almost diabolical nimbleness and precision of a knife-thrower or a javelin-thrower, the elderly rabbi grabbed a herring and tossed it onto this or that plate, rarely missing his target. The elect, flushed at having been chosen, immediately had to defend his herring from his neighbours’ ravenous mouths. But the old master of the Talmud was also a master strategist: there would be enough for everyone; when he tired of throwing, his assistants took over with regrettably poorer aim, sparking greedy scuffles. To me, the scene was primal, initiatory, powerfully moving, not at all picturesque. These herring eaters, in the middle of the Tzena, this dauntless, uncompromising community, were my people, the Jewish people, stronger than a thousand dead and I would not disown them. I wished that Sartre, author of Réflexions sur la question juive, my friend, had been with me that evening. I would tell him what I had just seen.

  In Pourquoi Israël there are two metaphysical leitmotifs running through the film that give it power and vis comica: one concerns normality and abnormality, the other – which is open-ended and offers no solution – concerns the question ‘Who is a Jew?’ Ben Gurion’s celebrated words, ‘Israel will be a normal country the day we have our own prostitutes, our gangsters, our police, our prisons,’ were already a reality for me, as we have seen, the moment I arrived in Haifa and set foot in this promised land. And yet, Ben Gurion, that great architect of the state, fell a little short: he was unable to see Israel as I did, as other new arrivals did. For me, as I showed in a number of scenes in the film, it was this very normality that was abnormal and which created what I call the playful nature of the Jewish state. In one hilarious sequence in the film, a group of Jewish-American tourists visits a supermarket in Jerusalem that looks just like any other supermarket in the world. And that’s precisely what they love about it, it is the banality that astonishes them: ‘Jewish bread!’ ‘Jewish tuna! In pure oil!’ ‘It’s amazing!’ etc. They can’t believe it: for as long as there are new, innocent eyes in the diaspora to look in wonderment – in an endless, dizzying dialectic of sameness and otherness, of within and without – on the existence of a Jewish state, a Jewish army, Jewish police, Jewish strikers or a sacred union between rich and poor, the country will still have – all the more so if it remains ringed by enemies – a long road to travel before reaching the non-paradoxical normality Ben Gurion set out as an ideal. It will not happen soon.

  ‘“Who is a Jew?” The most important issue in Israel, the only issue worthy of consideration, is not poverty, education, the lack of money to buy fighter bombers or the defence of the country in general; it is to know who is Jewish. The former are technical problems, they can be solved, there is no doubt about that. While “Who is a Jew?” questions the very meaning of a Jewish nation.’ This is what Zushy Posner says to me as we make our way through the orange groves heavy with ripe fruit in another scene from Pourquoi Israël. A Hasid and a Lubavitcher, Zushy’s mission is to spread Judaism among the Jews. The Hasidim, weary of the harshness and intransigence of the Law, aim to promote spirituality and infectious Joy. They are always good-humoured, they smile and talk to strangers, immediately offer to give them tefillin, phylacteries, which they wind around their arms with the skill of a conjurer. They do not proselytize, they are
not interested in converting gentiles. The issue for them, the only important issue from their point of view is, what is the use of a Jewish state if the population is made up of the ignorant or unbelievers? Posner immediately recognized that I was the perfect prey. And yet, in the thrust and fire of my questions, he immediately became caught up in tortuous questions of identity, even as the combination of his radical pessimism about human nature, his cheerfulness and his humour allowed him to extricate himself from anything with grace and intelligence. I ask him, ‘So you think you could make a good Jew out of me?’ He replies, ‘You are a good Jew. Every Jew is a good Jew. But some could be better.’ I tell him that what he is saying is terribly unjust: ‘You’re saying that you would prefer me, who knows nothing about Judaism, to a non-Jew who has worked hard, studied and overcome every obstacle the process of conversion puts in his path just because my mother is Jewish?’ ‘So, start studying,’ he says, a cynical twinkle in his eye, indicating he knows I will do nothing of the sort.