I understood that to erase my original sin, to become a real Israeli, one not infected by the Altalena virus, I had to observe and report. I did …
You may wonder how the would-be informant could understand conversations in Czech. My Czech returned within two or three weeks of hearing the language spoken again all day long, as the case had previously been with German. However, my mission soon ended, after I conveyed totally irrelevant details and demonstrated my complete lack of talent in this line of work. But I had watched, and although I was sixteen at the time and utterly disoriented, I cannot get over it to this day.
My readiness to “watch” can be explained by my intense desire to belong to the community I had enthusiastically joined. Yet this need probably had deeper roots: upon the disappearance of my parents (I should add that I was an only child), I embraced my new identity — Catholicism, and the seminary that hid me — with all the intensity of a ten-year-old, taken in by a collectivity that was strong, protective, and nurturing. I ran away once, at the very outset, but was brought back and relented; ultimately, I fully submitted. The nuns believed that my path to priesthood was assured.
But after leaving the seminary in early 1946, and after my stint with Communism, I found another community, an even more compelling one, to which I became irresistibly drawn. I embraced the idea of Israel and the dream of total acceptance. Under those circumstances, arriving on the Altalena could look like a sin that needed to be redeemed; after all, I had seen with my own eyes that we had not been welcomed and that the Irgun had been disbanded.
Yet, notwithstanding my initial enthusiasm to strike roots in my “ancestral homeland,” I increasingly felt an urge to return to France — for a while at least. I didn’t understand at the time (and grasped only years later) that as much as I craved to belong, I feared it. During the war, I knew that the Catholic milieu into which I had assimilated was not naturally my own and that if I did not adapt corps et âme (body and soul) I could be rejected, possibly even delivered to some mortally dangerous “elsewhere.” My submission was genuine, but I couldn’t remain totally unaware of the fact that it was a guarantee of survival.
Over the following decades, a kind of seesaw between these two opposing drives — fervent commitment on the one hand, constant search for an escape route on the other — would come to define most of my life. This is probably why I was holding teaching positions in two countries — simultaneously — for the major part of my university career. I never found a compelling argument that could explain this strange pattern.
Thus, during these first years in Israel I did everything in my power to become an Israeli through and through. I was my high school’s valedictorian, worked as a messenger boy at the Foreign Ministry, became a civilian employee in the army for six months, then served in the same highly secret intelligence unit (Intelligence 2, the earliest form of what was to become Unit 8200, the Israeli NSA) for another two and a half years.
Yet the urge to return to France grew nonetheless. (During my service I had drawn the map of the Paris underground, the Métro, from memory, and got it partly right.) Such nostalgia for France occasionally materialized in strange ways. Thus, when a documentary showed the Piscine Deligny (the Deligny public swimming pool, possibly the most famous in Paris), I felt such a sudden pang of homesickness that I vividly remember it to this day. As I had never been inside this piscine — nor any other, for that matter (except in Prague, at age five), as I’d never learned to swim — this reaction was especially absurd.
The explanation I provided for returning to France sounded plausible enough: the teaching of political science was, at the time, better in Paris than at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
3
My cultural identity has remained essentially French throughout my life. On the occasion of my German publisher Wolfgang Beck’s sixty-fifth birthday in 2006, most of his authors contributed a short essay on books that changed their lives, for a volume entitled Ein Buch, das mein Leben verändert hat. In the opening paragraph of my essay, I mentioned — without giving it too much thought — that I would avoid the “great books” that I read and reread, such as Proust’s Recherche or Flaubert’s Éducation, and turn instead to a slender novel that, for my generation and for a prior one, defined the field of adolescent dreams: Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes. I hadn’t even noticed that in the first paragraph of my text I had referred to three books that, each in its own way, were quintessentially French.
In my essay, it was the primary school of Sainte-Agathe — from where the narrator and Meaulnes, the main protagonist, set out on their dreamlike adventure — that became my very specific “site of memory.” It appeared to me as the model of the école communale which I attended for two years in Néris-les-Bains, from the summer of 1940 to 1942 (half a century after Meaulnes). To stress that point, I entitled my text “L’École communale.” As in Sainte-Agathe, and probably as in schools all over France at that time, my école comprised one elongated building, subdivided into three parts: la petite classe (the lowest grade), le cours moyen (the middle grade), and le cours supérieur (the upper grade); the building opened onto a vast courtyard with a covered section (le préau); you had to cross the courtyard to reach the gate and the street.
I didn’t make it to the cours supérieur but in the petite classe and in the cours moyen I became irrevocably French. There was nothing more hegemonic (at the time, in any case) than French education; it led you, step by step, whether you wanted it or not (and I certainly wanted it), into a unique mode of perception and expression. (Today, I write in English for practical reasons as I live in the United States, but I still think in French — and would do better writing in French.)
Such attachment to a culture actually goes well beyond basic schooling. In my case at least, I fell in love with the sheer beauty of the French language. From early on, maybe from the second year at the école primaire but certainly during the years spent at the seminary, we had to take a weekly dictée, a dictation, to check our progress in orthography. For me the dictée was a special moment: I loved the texts chosen from some volume of selected excerpts illustrating perfect style. I didn’t mind whether it was Jules Renard’s Poil-de-Carotte or Bossuet’s Oraisons funèbres; I simply loved the style: “Madame se meurt, Madame est morte.” It reminds me that Kafka had this same love for beautiful French style, particularly in Flaubert’s Éducation sentimentale; he quoted sentences from it to his friend Felice Bauer, sentences he deemed perfect both in their diction and their structure.
The avatars of memory that I experience are by far more mysterious to me than I put it in the Prologue. Over the last few months I have noticed that the disappearance of words and mainly names of people I know well is worsening. How come, however, that these words and names reappear, sometimes days later, after a relentless quest or just so, on their own? Does it mean that when words disappear they are not entirely effaced? Is there a “hard disk” of human memory? Are there various levels of effacement and various modes of retrieval? How is it, also, that when a forgotten word reappears, I know immediately that it is the right one?
Long-term memory is even more puzzling. As time goes by, I notice that poems I must have learned by heart in high school and entirely forgotten since, are reappearing in their pristine forms (parts of them at least). Thus the first strophe of Paul Valéry’s “Le Cimetière marin” (“The Graveyard by the Sea”) is suddenly present, in full. Where was it stored for seventy years or so? And why did it reappear instead of Lamartine’s “Le Lac,” for example, of which only a verse here and there returned?
No less strange is the working of “traumatic memory.” While studying interviews with Shoah survivors, Lawrence Langer noticed that if the interviewer managed to break through the “standard” story of the interviewee, a sudden outburst of chaotic reminiscences surfaced, some kind of “deep memory” overcame the previously built defenses. I guess that in many cases, deep, traumatic memories reappear on their own in old age, like
forgotten poems. They carry along forgotten fears.
Aside from French, significant fragments of a Prague-Jewish/German heritage that had vanished for a few years during the war slowly resurfaced, refusing to be ignored anymore. This earliest identity linked up somehow with the Israeli one; it never left me since, although there were fluctuations. The only cultural environment that does not seem to have left an imprint is the American one with its added Los Angeles hue. There is nothing intentional in this resistance; it probably derives from the simple fact that I was too old for adding one more identity when I arrived in Los Angeles for my first extended stay in 1982 (at age fifty) and then, more permanently so, in 1988.
The Prague-Jewish part became the “guiding impulse” of When Memory Comes, which dealt primarily with my childhood and adolescent years; the title of the book derived from the reshuffling of a quote belonging to Gustav Meyrink’s Der Golem, a somewhat gothic novel that my father loved and of which he possessed a magnificent copy, illustrated by the lithographs of Hugo Steiner-Prag. He took it along into exile. The book is all about the magic of Jewish Prague, about the labyrinths of the ghetto and the no less mysterious ones of memory and knowledge. Later, when I read it, it triggered in me the nostalgia for a world about which I knew very little; it revealed traces hidden until then. It reminded me of my father. Decades later, I wrote a small essay on Kafka; here was Jewish Prague again, to a point.
There was more than nostalgia to my Prague heritage. The main component, one that influenced my life and possibly even saved it, turned out to be my parents’ total assimilation. They were “non-Jewish Jews,” to use Isaac Deutscher’s term, to the point of not having me circumcised. During a long and serious illness in the seminary (diphtheria), the physician who took care of me may, politically, have been on any side. Luckily, there was no visible indication that I was a Jewish boy, hidden under a false name. Later, after I came to Israel, this “omission” bothered me. The Nirah physician to whom I talked before joining the army told me that many immigrants from Central Europe shared “my fate.” He gave me the name of a surgeon, just in case. I did not pursue it. When I underwent the initial medical examination at the draft and later, during several weeks in a military hospital, nobody seemed to pay attention.
It is by way of language that my cultural belonging to Israel is evident. Two years after my arrival, I successfully took the high school final exams in Hebrew. To pass, I had to study the Tanach (the Hebrew Bible) and an entire Talmud chapter (with commentary, partly in Aramaic, on objects lost and found). I enjoyed it as much as somebody allergic to pollen enjoys strolling in a flower garden in the spring, but I complied and passed the exams.
Both my first and second wives were born in Israel, and throughout these two marriages, from 1959 to this day (2015), we’ve spoken Hebrew at home and also with the children (and some of the grandchildren). For several decades, first at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and then at Tel Aviv University, I lectured only in Hebrew and, quite naturally, went through daily life in Israel in Hebrew. Yet — and there is a small “yet” — I never quite enjoyed reading books in Hebrew, nor have I ever written a book in Hebrew. And, strangely enough, whether I lecture in Hebrew or in English, to this day I still write my notes in French.
One last element has to be added to my cultural profile: traces of Catholicism. As I indicated, after some initial resistance, I became a devout — even ecstatic — Catholic. Some of Catholicism’s marginal impact resides in its aesthetic dimension: Romanesque, Gothic, and Baroque churches and cathedrals fascinate me to this day, and religious music (particularly organ music) touches me very deeply, as do religious choirs. It could have been so even without my Catholic adolescence, but I believe that those years added intensity to my listening emotion as an echo of the bliss which that music evoked in me at the time. More important by far, however, was the fact that, as a consequence of the religious force-feeding to which I was submitted, I became from adolescence on, and remain so to this day, totally indifferent to any religious belief. I am not a militant atheist; I simply don’t care.
By far more consequential, though, was the deep and pervasive sense of guilt that the fundamentalist brand of Catholicism practiced at my seminary ingrained in me and, I am sure, in many others like me. We were constantly reminded of our sinful tendencies, warned against indulging in any mauvaises pensées, and sent weekly to confession. The mauvaises pensées were thoughts about sex; this was never stated and the notions we had about sex were utterly vague for most of us (including me); the word “sex” was unknown.
Incidentally, I do not remember any sign of sexual abuse or homosexual relations. I remember that the older boys were quite taken by one of the nuns, younger than the others and quite pretty (I liked her too). One of them said that he had once seen her in a bathing suit, which I doubt. Notwithstanding the innocence of it all, pervasive, indefinable guilt remained.
While for most people cultural identity merges with the feeling of “home,” it never was so for me. I like being in France but I certainly do not have any sense of arriving “home” when the plane lands at Roissy — or, for that matter, anywhere else in the world.
This being said, if anyone were to ask me what I consider my core identity, beyond any cultural imprint, something I would never be willing to deny or give up, I would answer without the least hesitation: I am a Jew, albeit one without any religious or tradition-related attachments, yet indelibly marked by the Shoah. Ultimately, I am nothing else.
Life’s ironies are not always amusing. This one, however, is to a point: that I, with my European “roots,” my French education, my love of much that derives from it, will most probably end my life in Tarzana, California, where Orna and I live now. This is quite paradoxical, to say the least.
Moreover, at the time of writing, it is the place where I do little else than follow Israeli politics. On the eve of the March 2015 elections, I, like so many others, hoped for a long-overdue change. It was touch and go, as for years the nationalist religious right, supported by over 50 percent of the population, has dominated the political scene. Add to it the growing rift between the Israeli prime minister and the American president and you are facing a downward slope partly of Israel’s doing, in fact a series of provocations coming from its side. It reminds me of a drawing by the Israeli cartoonist Dosh, printed some decades ago on the occasion of some other Israeli confrontation with the United States: a tall Uncle Sam leans toward the small Israeli boy (Dosh’s typical representation of Israel) wearing the equally typical kova tembel (a hat that makes you look silly) and offers him a handful of dollars. While the little boy extends one hand toward the money, with the other he directs his peeing on Uncle Sam’s shoes.
Today, Israel is no little boy anymore; he has turned into a defiant adolescent who still doesn’t hesitate to pee on the shoes of his protector against much of the world.
4
My various identities found their expression in a series of name changes. I was Pavel, called Pavlíček, in Prague, Paul on arrival in France, Paul-Henri-Marie Ferland in the seminary, Shaul after my arrival in Israel (where I also Hebraized my family name for a short while), then Saül in France again, and finally Saul, a compromise between Paul and Shaul.
Some names, usually the most familiar ones, remained hidden from me for decades. My mother’s first name was Elli. I assumed (and never asked my uncles about it) that this was a diminutive of Elisabeth or, in Hebrew, Elisheva. Thus, when filling out forms where the mother’s name was required, I confidently put Elisabeth or Elisheva Glaser. It was only some years ago, when working on my Kafka essay, that I discovered that one of Franz’s sisters, Elli Kafka, was in fact named Gabrielle, which was shortened to “Elle” and more commonly to “Elli.”
My father was Hans in German and Jan in Czech; that much I knew. But other than his sister, Martha, who lived in Prague and whom I dearly loved, I knew nothing of my father’s family. I never inquired whether he was born in Lemberg (Lwów or
Lviv) or in Prague. In recent years, somebody discovered my father’s place of birth, near Prague, and the names of his parents: Arnold and Babette. Arnold and Babette? I had no clue, and I still wonder in what context my paternal grandmother’s nickname, Babette (for Barbara?) could have emerged.
For a long time, I was puzzled by one of my own middle names. Officially, I had been given the following middle names (here in their French version): [Paul] Henri Félicien (Felician in German). “Félicien” was particularly unusual (“Henri,” at least, was relatively common). By pure chance, I discovered the likely origin of “Felician” in two unrelated stages. First, when I met with my childhood nanny Vlasta in Prague, in 1967, she told me that before I was born, my mother had had a miscarriage and that she had been advised not to become pregnant again. That, in itself, led nowhere, except that I’ve since wondered whether my conception was intentional or not.
Years later, in Berlin in 1985, I read Arthur Schnitzler’s 1908 novel The Road into the Open (Der Weg ins Freie), and suddenly it clicked. In Schnitzler’s novel, an Austrian aristocrat, Georg von Wergenthin, has an affair with a middle-class woman he loves, Anna Rosner. She becomes pregnant. Georg, who is encouraged and supported by his brother Felician, wants to give his brother’s first name to the newborn. Anna has a miscarriage, and Georg promises her that should there be another child and were it to be a boy, they would call him Felician. Thus, little by little, I discovered the literary origins of my strange middle name and the events that led to its choice.
When Memory Comes Page 2