The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  Nor did I. I could not do it. It was not laziness, but primeval choice, an act of non-thétique consciousness that involved my entire existence. I would never have made Pourquoi Israël or Tsahal if I had chosen to live there, if I had learned Hebrew, if, in other words, I had ‘started studying’, if integration had been my goal. Just as I could never have devoted twelve years of my life to a work such as Shoah if I had been sent to the camps. These things are mysterious, or perhaps they are not. There can be no true creation without opacity, the creator does not have to be transparent to himself. One thing is certain, the role of the witness, which became mine on my first visit to Israel and has constantly grown and reconfirmed itself with time and with each film, required me to be both within and without, as though I had been assigned a precise position.

  Pourquoi Israël premièred at the New York Film Festival on 7 October 1973. The morning before the screening I was shaving in the bathroom of my room at the Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street when I heard a scream. It was Angelika, whom I would marry in Jerusalem a year later, watching a small television: Egyptian troops were crossing the Suez Canal, destroying the forts on the Bar-Lev line. As a result, my screening took place in singular and distressing circumstances. During the press conference that followed, an American journalist, possibly Jewish, asked me, ‘But sir, what is your homeland? Is it France? Is it Israel?’ Brusquely and without taking time to think, I answered, and perhaps it sheds light on the mystery I have just outlined: ‘Madame, my homeland is my film.’

  Chapter 12

  But I wasn’t thinking about a film when, twenty years earlier, I boarded a boat in Haifa on a bleak November morning to head back to France. My mind was teeming with dark thoughts; I was sad to leave this country and I knew deep down, though I could not clearly formulate the thought, that I would not complete the project that had brought me here: a feature for Le Monde along the lines of the one I had written the previous year about the German Democratic Republic, published, you will remember, under the title ‘Germany Behind the Iron Curtain’. For me, Israel had passed from the public to the private domain, the most intimate, truth be told: the questions this young nation prompted, forced me to confront, were personal and I felt it would be somehow obscene to expose them to the glare of publicity. Would I even have been capable of doing so? I am convinced that I would not; I was not equipped to answer them in the way I intended and the idea of producing supposedly objective and necessarily superficial articles about Israel seemed to me impossible and undignified.

  Returning to Paris, to Simone de Beauvoir, whom I knew from her letters to be more and more in love, more determined, impatient and understanding, only served to increase my anxiety. I had spent one night with her and her boldness had now committed me more quickly and more deeply than I might have wished. One part of my life was coming to an end, and something else, mysterious and weighty, was beginning. I had the feeling of being carried headlong by fate; in short, I felt I no longer had complete mastery of my actions, my plans and, especially, of my own internal time.

  The reality of nature would quickly put an end to these doubts, revealing them for what they truly were: a luxury, which carried little weight in the face of the frenzied elements. A storm broke in the dead of night some hours after we left Haifa. Until this year of 1952, no ship in living memory had had to ride out a Mediterranean storm as prolonged, as relentless and as ferocious as this one. We were pitched into troughs ten metres deep and it seemed impossible that this fragile skiff, its very structure groaning mournfully between cliffs of water, desperately, might scale another mountain only to be pitched down again towards the next wave. Aside from the crew, some of whom were quite ill, two people, only two, watched over this bateau ivre for four days and nights: the captain, Eliezer Hodorov, formerly of the Soviet merchant navy, and me. I would not have gone into the bowels of the ship for anything in the world, not even to escape the torrential spray sweeping the decks or the force 10 gale: the acrid stench of human vomit – people threw up in the cabins, in the gangways, the latrines were like cesspits – sapped the will. I refused to go down, it was as simple as that. The valiant Eliezer agreed to my request; I was tightly lashed to the poop deck facing the bow and, in order to hold out, I imagined myself slicing through the waves, as though I were the prow, the figurehead. At dinnertime, as the wind and the groaning of the Zim Israel Shipping Company steamer redoubled, Captain Eliezer and I sat facing each another, the only people in the first-class dining room, drinking Greek wine and – laid on for my benefit – a fine Bordeaux. The storm eased and finally cleared after four days. Damage to the ship, both inside and out, was considerable and everything had to be cleaned and disinfected. As sole master on board, Eliezer decided to call in at Naples, an unexpected stopover, where we spent forty-eight hours before heading back out to sea, which remained calm all the way to Marseille.

  Castor’s eyes, her arms, her mouth, her hands moving over my body as though to recognize it, the long, slightly tremulous embrace of our reunion, as we stood in the red room, on the top floor of the rue de la Bûcherie, calmed all my fears. Joy, in her, did not preclude seriousness; on the contrary, they melded into a rare attentiveness to the humanity of the other. Without my saying a word she understood the complex feelings that this strange return to a home that was not mine after such a journey aroused in me. I instinctively began to speak, to tell her my doubts, my hesitations; the love between us was not love at first sight, it had to be learned and take its time. But she had sensed all this, knew it just as I did. From the beginning, the rapport between us was both intellectual and carnal. Without even discussing it, we settled down together, into this single room, furnished before I arrived with a large round table, a bed, a bookcase and her school desk. I complied. It all went without saying. The only change to the room was the addition of another desk, identical to hers but which, unlike hers, did not face Notre-Dame but a windowless side wall. Although Castor’s rigorous, inflexible discipline, second nature to a brilliant student and a professional writer, was completely unfamiliar to me, I tried to submit to it. I endeavoured to outsmart myself, sitting down to write at my brand new desk, in the way a man of little faith is advised to kneel in order that he might believe. It didn’t work. I sat gazing, feeling cramped and restricted by a timetable that was not my own. I wasn’t ready. Turning, I saw Castor’s beautiful face, moving in its concentration, as I watched her pen race – what am I saying? – fly, hardly seeming to touch down, as she worked on a novel for which she had not yet found a title. I would soon find one for her: Les Mandarins. The rhythm of the ordinary days was unchanging: we spent the mornings together, she wrote and I did not always pretend to, she lunched with Sartre, or with me or with someone else – sometimes the three of us had lunch. She spent her afternoons in Sartre’s office, where she had her own desk. One evening was reserved for Sartre, the next for me; the nights we spent together. But we also often had dinner together, sometimes the three of us, on occasion with the rare friends, such as Giacometti, of whom Sartre was particularly fond.

  Castor arranged for us to lunch with Sartre the day after my return. We met at La Palette, a restaurant in Montparnasse he liked, where we could talk without people at neighbouring tables eavesdropping; sadly, the place no longer exists. This, obviously, was the first time I saw Sartre in my new role as Castor’s lover: he gave his blessing to this union, this ‘marriage’, to use Castor’s word, who in her love letters referred to me as her ‘husband’, and often signed them ‘your wife’. Sartre knew everything about me that she did, she had read him all my letters, following the rule of radical transparency that she later urged on me despite my resistance. He beamed at her palpable happiness, was cheerful and genuinely friendly towards me. Both, with touching seriousness, questioned me about Israel, or rather they listened since I did all the talking, revealing a world completely unfamiliar to them, a world that my letters had only hinted at. I explained to Sartre how his Réflexions sur la question juive ne
eded to be reviewed, revised, augmented, that Jews had not waited for anti-Semites in order to exist, that I had discovered a whole world out there, a religion, secular traditions, a people subject to history in its own way, in spite of pogroms, persecutions, the Holocaust. I told them I had given up the idea of writing articles for Le Monde, the pretext for my trip, since everything I had seen and experienced challenged me, raising personal questions that I did not dare to reveal publicly. Here, once again, I witnessed Sartre’s intellectual good faith, his openness to other people, his ability to recognize his errors. He told me, ‘You have discovered the singularity of Jewishness. You’re right to give up writing articles about Israel. Write a book.’ I was inspired by his words. This was the solution. In a book I could elaborate on the Jewish condition, about Israel, about myself, about Israel and myself, freely, without indecency. But it proved to be more difficult than I thought. I was raw, although I did not realize it. I would have to go far in my questioning, face realities that even now I find difficult to name; confess to things at the age of twenty-seven that I can barely relate, even today, in these pages. But I set to work, writing in the afternoons rather than the mornings, when I was alone in our room. I wrote about a hundred pages, now lost unfortunately. Sartre and Castor read them, judged them to be excellent and encouraged me to carry on. But I couldn’t; I no longer wished to, I postponed writing, realizing that I needed to grow up, to grow older, if I were to resolve the questions that stirred in me differently. One cannot simply sit down to write and transform the material of one’s life into a book; this is often the weakness of professional literary writers. I was a man slow to mature, I was not afraid of the passing of time. Something told me that my life would reach its full potential in its second half.

  Twenty years later, the articles I did not write and the book that came to nothing were to become Pourquoi Israël, a film I made relatively quickly because I knew precisely what I wanted to say. True, I had gone back to Israel several times. The shock of my first visit had led to other discoveries that were crucial to me, such as the role of German Jews in the making of the country, other torments, such as the wars: the 1956 Sinai War, the Six Day War in 1967, the ‘war of attrition’ of 1968–9. My knowledge of Israel constantly increased, especially as I spent a lot of time working on a special, 1,000-page issue of Les Temps modernes devoted to the Arab–Israeli conflict in which Arabs agreed, for the first time, not to debate or discuss, but to appear alongside Israelis in the same publication. Many moments came together in Pourquoi Israël and contributed to its being made, but the final trigger, the last event and certainly the most crucial, was falling in love with Angelika Schrobsdorff in Jerusalem, so that making the film was the only way for me to see her again. I met Angelika seventeen years after I began to share my life with Simone de Beauvoir to whom, if you will forgive this herniated digression into my chronology, I now return.

  We truly shared our lives. We lived together as a married couple for seven years, from 1952 to 1959. I am the only man with whom Simone de Beauvoir lived a quasi-marital existence. We even succeeded in living together for two years in one twenty-seven-square-metre room and were, she as much as I, when we thought or talked about it, justifiably proud of our relationship. I found it normal and reasonable that she went away, or spent a large part of her holidays with Sartre; he found it normal and reasonable that she did the same with me. I was sometimes sad, found that time dragged when she was away on long trips, to China or Cuba, for example, but I never felt the slightest pang of jealousy. Before going on a journey, she was immensely considerate, going so far as to draw up charts or tables listing every stopover, how long she would be in each place, the names of hotels, consulates and embassies where I could reach her in case of emergency. But these separations also meant salvoes of letters; some days I received machine-gun bursts of extraordinarily detailed letters, peppered with unfamiliar names that I found difficult to decipher. All three of us were easy to live with. She and Sartre – and this has long been my conviction too – believed that it was only possible truly to discuss things with those with whom one is already in agreement on the fundamentals. This was why they loathed polite small-talk and large, typically French formal dinners, preferring the intimacy of the tête-à-tête. Two people together, talking to each other, was to them – and to me, it is something I learned from them – the only way for individuals to understand one another, to get along, to move forward, to think. The formula for this relationship was ‘Chacun sa réception’, ‘each to his own’.

  In the spring of 1953 or, rather, shortly before spring, the three of us went to Saint-Tropez ostensibly to take a break, which for Sartre meant working relentlessly, even more so than he did in Paris, because it was more peaceful. Saint-Tropez was delightful and deserted; we were staying at the Hôtel la Ponche. Sartre had his room; Castor and I ours. Only two restaurants on the harbour were open; they were next door to each other, their terraces separated by a thick canvas partition, which limited what one could see, but not what one could hear. Curious, I wondered how ‘Chacun sa réception’ was going to work in practice given our extreme proximity. It went like this: on Monday, Castor had dinner with Sartre in one of the two restaurants, while I dined in the other – we were invariably the only diners in our respective restaurants. Castor had a voice that carried, she knew that I was just on the other side of the canvas and she had no secrets from me: I heard every word she said, nor did I miss any of Sartre’s metallic pronouncements. I read – or tried to read. That night, when she and I retired to our room, she recounted in detail everything I had already heard. Then on Tuesday, it was Sartre’s turn to be exiled and overhear every word we said, which Castor faithfully repeated to him the following day. Wednesday was more civilized: the three of us had dinner together, which spared us one account of the proceedings. Yes, the understanding between us was idyllic. Our afternoon drives to Les Maures or to L’Esterel – with Sartre, if we managed to tear him from his work – were, for me, who had travelled little in France at that time, an initiation into seeing, into the world. I was learning to look through their eyes and I can say that they shaped me; but it was not entirely one-sided, we had intense, closely argued discussions, and the admiration I felt for both of them did not make them any less egalitarian. They helped me to think; I gave them food for thought.

  Conformism being utterly alien to them, neither of them saw any contradiction, any break with the unity of self – a self in which they firmly did not believe – in the fact that I was writing for Les Temps modernes (I wrote rather a lot for the periodical that year) while earning my living as a rewriter at France Dimanche. This scandalized certain fine souls of the patrician press, who were none the less calmly prepared, whenever sales dropped, to boost circulation with licentious ads including addresses and phone numbers. France Dimanche had another considerable advantage for me: I had long ‘holidays’. The management knew about my relationship with Castor, and when I was due back at work, she and I would make up a sudden illness or an accident and she would dispatch a telegram from Estremadura or the Peloponnese explaining that my return had to be postponed. No one believed it, but they were indulgent, and flattered to receive these anxious messages from Simone de Beauvoir. One of my co-rewriters, Gérard Jarlot, who had published an anti-novel entitled Un chat qui aboie [A Cat That Barks] in Gallimard’s Collection Blanche, was the lover of Marguerite Duras, but their adventures never took them further than Neauphle-le-Château and he was always back at work on time. Pierre Lazareff and his immediate colleagues were Jewish, but there were a number of dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semites on the editorial staff at France Dimanche who came out with coarse, unsubtle anti-Jewish jokes week after week for years after the war as though nothing had happened. One of them, who was closely related to a famous geographer and author of a set text in schools, who had lost an arm in some battle or other, brandished his empty sleeve proudly like a banner and did his best to hire former miliciens who had been convicted after the Libera
tion. The entire rewriting team threatened to resign en masse; I felt as though I were reliving the episode at Lycée Louisle-Grand where the students had tried to have our study hall named after Brasillach. France was still infected to the marrow.

  Castor’s thirst for travel was unquenchable; she looked at the world with eyes that were never jaded, and revisiting places she knew with me – teaching me, in other words – allowed her to see them through fresh eyes, rekindling the feelings she had had the first time. She wrote extensively about our adventures and peregrinations in her Memoirs, never getting a date wrong, since she kept a log. As I have already said, we do not have the same memories and I leave chronological fidelity to her and recount here, randomly and chaotically, those things that, to me, are unforgettable. It is important to know that Sartre and Castor took their holidays according to the school timetable, like the teachers they had once been: two months in summer, Christmas, Easter, and so on.