As we continued to live in Jerusalem, finally in our own house, I became a wanderer among three cities: Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Geneva. I soon adapted to Tel Aviv University and, once again, experienced the enthusiasm of new beginnings. Quite different from the Hebrew University, the Tel Aviv campus was an urban one, entirely integrated into a city that fed it with its own energy and drive. It appeared to me as a university much more open to all, in contrast to the snobbishness of Jerusalem. By and large, however, the students were the same, with the same smattering of military uniforms among an attentive audience, reminding one that this was Israel, barely three years after the Yom Kippur War.
* * *
* Avner Cohen, “When Israel Stepped Back from the Brink,” International Herald Tribune, October 4, 2013, p. 8. Cohen’s article was published in Hebrew in Haaretz.
† Saul Friedländer and Mahmoud Hussein, Arabs and Israelis: A Dialogue, Holmes & Meier, New York, 1975, pp. 216–17.
CHAPTER TEN
The Mount of the Blessing
I never felt entirely at ease in our Jerusalem house, into which we moved in early 1974. Somebody once told me: “You look like a stranger in your own home.” It was partly true. The house itself was quite an achievement: right from the entry, you saw the dining room, the vast living room, and the garden as one continuous space; works by excellent Israeli painters, discreet furniture, and a Beckstein grand piano defined the living room. Hagith truly had an eye for design, and had produced impressive results.
The house comprised two separate and identical parts which both could be accessed through the common garden. My in-laws, to whom Hagith was extremely close and devoted, came to live in the other part; their proximity was a great help, and I had agreed to it. Yet as far as I was concerned, their constant presence also created problems I should have foreseen.
In more general terms, such a grand house may have been too much for me. Until then we had rented, in Geneva and in Israel; this was my first home, since childhood. Perhaps I couldn’t feel completely at home anywhere. Hence my slight — yet apparently noticeable — discomfort.
And yet it was the house where I spent most of my life in Israel, where I saw my children grow, graduate from high school, thrice over, at five-year intervals; where I had a glimpse of, then met, their dates. It was where they congregated with their friends (mostly in the basement), where we celebrated the boys’ bar mitzvahs and Michal’s bat mitzvah, where Eli and Michal (Eli’s Michal) were married, where we had house concerts in which our little Michal would soon participate, and where we (Hagith was the master of ceremonies and the superchef) frequently entertained our friends from home and many a guest from afar. And it’s there that I read Mireille, l’abeille (Mireille the bee — in French the two words rhyme) to Thom, my first grandson (David and Fabienne’s son), when they came visiting from Paris. But all of this was still hidden in the future as we entered the house in February 1974.
1
My domain was the study, contiguous to the living room but separate from it. My books had arrived from Geneva and, half consciously, I reconstructed the private and secluded space that had been my father’s study in Prague.
I loved the presence of books, not stacked in any library but in my library: I loved to sit, empty-minded, just vaguely contemplating, among my books. I never had — and don’t have — a hobby: I was not interested in sports or cooking or collecting tin soldiers. My main pastime was reading and so it remains to this day. It would be pointless to follow the meandering of my taste in literature; in that domain, very little remains stable outside of the core that I mentioned previously: Flaubert, Proust, Kafka, Dostoevsky, and Thomas Mann, at times. In short, my basic staple was and is ultraconventional.
There were exceptions, but not particularly original ones: Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, James Joyce’s Dubliners, Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno, and, of course, the three Roths, Henry, Joseph, and Philip (just to be clear, I am alluding to Call It Sleep in the first case and Radetzky March in the second; as for the third Roth, I particularly liked his early books, Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint, and still enjoy his generally ironic, iconoclastic view of American Jews and American society more generally).
You may be astonished that I mention Dubliners and not Ulysses; it shows my simplistic taste, or rather what I really loved: I used to read aloud the last paragraph of “The Dead” to whoever, in the family, was ready to listen or else to myself.
Simultaneously, I read or started reading and abandoned whatever novels, biographies, memoirs, diaries that I sampled rather haphazardly, according to reviews and rumors. I also devoured every new Le Carré and, over the years, any P. D. James I laid my hands on. Unfortunately, in both cases, their earliest books were their best.
Literature was and is a necessity but, in terms of time, it remained marginal to other domains — apart from the strictly professional reading — from literary criticism to the history of ideas, theories of history, the history of philosophy, and the like. I say history of philosophy and not philosophy as such, as I have but limited ability for abstract reasoning (it already was the case, decades beforehand, with science and mathematics in particular).
Closer to home, I systematically perused the publications of the Annales school and over the years came to know personally most of its main representatives. I liked the work of these French historians but could not apply their concepts and methods to my domain. There was no way to use the longue durée in conceptualizing the history of the Shoah, an event-dominated period par excellence. Much had to be rethought in the history I was dealing with, but it demanded approaches of a very different kind that I first conceived of in 1974–75 but that would come to fruition only from the 1990s onward.
Let me add at this point that although I personally liked Le Roy Ladurie, Furet, Besançon, and others, I was perplexed by their political move from the Communist Party after the war to extreme conservative positions in the following decades. Why not stop midway, at social democracy for example? In fact, it wasn’t a peculiarity of Annales historians but rather one of the French and other intellectuals of their generation and of the following one, whose onetime Maoists became the sharpest critics of the gods they had once adored. I never quite understood the need to move from one extreme to the other. This possibly was some psychological trait, a “closed mind,” as it was tagged at some stage. Here in the States, you would find the same move from the far left to the far right when following the trajectory of the Commentary group, for example, among the many neoconservatives of the first generation.
A fascinating personification of such a total change of sides was the excellent historian of the French Communist Party, herself a high-ranking member of that party after the war, Annie Kriegel; she became a truly obdurate right-winger not only in regard to French politics but also concerning Israeli policies. Incidentally, when my dialogue with Mahmud Hussein was published, she declared that I should be shot. I didn’t take that fatwa very seriously.
Many years beforehand, in 1966, I had met Pierre Nora, who belonged to this cohort of French historians without adopting the same kind of bipolar extremism. We became friends. In 2014, we participated together in a ceremony and a debate at Tel Aviv University, where we shared the Dan David prize in history. The charming Anne Sinclair, Pierre’s companion, also came: I had met her in the 1980s when she arrived in Israel with a TV crew to report on the political situation under Begin; I said what I deemed necessary. I don’t know whether it was ever broadcast.
I often ponder about the splendid series of volumes that Pierre conceived, commented on, and edited: Les lieux de mémoire (Realms of Memory), those sites that a nation keeps revering and which supposedly become, over the years, the only remaining foundations of national identity. There is actually one sentence from the introduction to Les lieux de mémoire that perfectly defines Pierre’s project: “There are lieux de mémoire, realms of memory, because there are no longer
milieux de mémoire, real environments of memory.”
When the first volume, La République, was published, in 1984, I wrote the review for Le Figaro. It was very positive but I wondered nonetheless whether different communities, even within a homogeneous nation such as France, didn’t have different realms of memory, together with remaining milieux de mémoire, sites of living memory, beyond the official and ritualized ones. The framework can hardly apply to more heterogeneous national entities such as the United States. In a country so diverse, where even these days (2014) flying the Confederate flag is passionately defended by many throughout the South, the choice of generally recognized sites of memory, to say nothing of the many remaining environments of memory clung to by dozens of different ethnic and religious groups, would be impossible. In any case, this achievement opened the doors of the Académie française to Pierre.
We went on living in Jerusalem and I drove down to Tel Aviv two or three days a week. The new house wasn’t the only reason for this slightly tiring arrangement. We had Jerusalemite friends, most of whom did not belong to my fields at the university, so that the ostracism that some of my former colleagues (including the Scholems) maintained against us for my rejection of the Hebrew University in favor of Tel Aviv and Geneva did not have an impact on our everyday life. Our small group was quite homogeneous as far as politics were concerned. Some were even more critical than I, others slightly less so; all in all, we were left of center regarding main issues.
Hagith and I also felt real attachment to the city as such. Every day, for years, I took a walk of about an hour, always along the same route and usually alone. I went down our street, Pinsker Street, along a small public garden on the right side and the lush grounds and trees of some institution on the left; I crossed Keren Hayesod, passed the Montefiore windmill, and proceeded down the Yemin Moshe stairs and over Gei-Hinnom (Gehenom) valley. Yemin Moshe is one of the most picturesque and ancient residential areas of Jewish Jerusalem, with an elegant guesthouse for a chosen few, mostly foreign visitors, a music center, and villas built during the Ottoman period; the view from Yemin Moshe encompasses the western walls of the Old City and part of the hills descending toward the Dead Sea.
From Gei-Hinnom, I followed the road ascending Mount Zion and crossed over to the Old City, usually through the gate facing the last part of the Armenian quarter, just before one reaches the first houses of the newly rebuilt Jewish quarter. From there alleys descend toward the Western Wall. I rarely stopped at the Wall, but usually crossed the square in front of it and climbed back to the Jewish quarter, then followed the path home.
Nowadays, on occasional visits about forty years later, I do not venture into the Arab part of the Old City anymore. The danger of getting attacked is real. Mainly, however, I cannot bear the hate-filled looks that follow you if you are identified as an Israeli, nor can I stand the sight of gun-toting settlers, easily recognized by their knitted yarmulkes, strutting down the alleys. As for Jewish Jerusalem, it has much changed over time, populated as it is by an overwhelming mass of Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews.
2
We spent the sabbatical of 1975–76 in Geneva. For all of us, this was, I think, a happy period. In October 1975, Eli was admitted into tenth grade at Collège (high school) Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the best in the city, with Jean Calvin. As he had remained bilingual, there was no problem of adaptation. David, also bilingual, moved to the equivalent of junior high, and Michal (this was the biggest school event) entered first grade in a school very close to where we lived and, within a few weeks, babbled only in French. For the boys there were ski outings later in the year with all the excitement of a few days in the “wild,” the fondues, the new friends, and whatnot.
Some three years beforehand, a major confrontation with Eli had taken place. Over time, the boys had read a lot in French, from the children’s book series Babar, Tintin, and Astérix, to tearjerkers such as Hector Malot’s Sans famille, most of Jules Verne, and so on. At some stage in the early 1970s, it occurred to me that it was high time for Eli to read Victor Hugo’s Les misérables. He said no. It became a matter of paternal authority against filial rebellion. Nothing helped: Eli refused to read Les misérables. Why, I never figured out, nor did he, probably. Finally, I gave in. I had no choice, the less so that I had never read Les misérables myself …
It is at about that same time that I took Eli for a first visit to Paris. We saw the well-known tourist sites and my own lycée, of course; we visited museums, as Eli was a passionate drawer and painter. We were flying back from Orly and as usual, we arrived very early for a flight that moreover was delayed, so we went to the airport cinema and saw The Green Berets with John Wayne. I love to remember that as something special. Generally, I loved to see films with the children, even after years.
It is during those months that, for the first time, I decided to write down the memories of my childhood and wartime adolescence. Why then? Hadn’t I shown a measure of indifference regarding my personal past for many years? I had embraced the history of the Shoah as my professional domain — which, in itself, indicated a growing sensitivity to the collective past — but, precisely, the “detached” dealing with the collective fate had probably become a way of pushing back too close a contact with personal memories.
I don’t know what produced the change. Could it have been the rejection that I felt when the Hebrew University confronted me with its ultimatum, or the ostracism that I mentioned once I chose Tel Aviv? It sounds ridiculous, but such seemingly inconsequential events can be invisible triggers of disproportionate emotional reactions. This is the only explanation I can offer and it is but partly convincing, as my first attempts at writing that story were as “distant” from the personal past as ever. I had tried repeatedly — and repeatedly failed.
The same scene surged forward each time as a necessary beginning. I had been brought to the seminary in Montluçon sometime in early September 1942. At first, I hated the place, still empty during summer vacations; I hated the nuns, the catechism they imposed on me, the disgusting food. I decided to run away. I knew, probably from overheard conversations, that my parents were hiding for a few days in the hospital of the town, before leaving for Lyons and starting their trek to the Swiss border. I waited near the main gate of the seminary until nobody was in sight, slipped out, and was on my way to the hospital.
In my early attempts, I described the scene time and again in one page or so, found it unsatisfactory, and tore up each successive draft. And yet no other beginning came to my mind. I had even found a title for the book that says it all: Le portail (The Gate).
After a number of unsuccessful attempts, I decided on drastic measures: I left Geneva for a self-imposed retreat in nearby Annecy, in a hotel on the lakeshore (I probably imagined that the lake of Annecy would provide better inspiration than Lac Léman). And, lo and behold, my fortnight-long seclusion seemed to work: I started writing. Back in Geneva, I rapidly completed a first draft of the memoir and sent it to Flamand. The gist of his response was an elegant rejection: “Interesting but lacks all feeling.” According to him, I had produced a lifeless narration of events. I instantly recognized that Flamand was right but I didn’t believe I could do any better.
I then suggested turning the memoir into a conversation that, so I thought, would help me overcome my emotional paralysis. I asked Claude Lanzmann if he would agree to be my “interviewer.” He accepted. We had become good friends and saw each other frequently when he was in Jerusalem. Claude was not exactly easygoing; later on, he would not take criticism or contradiction with a smile. I had no reason or desire to criticize him, so we got along smoothly. Yet, after making all the arrangements for the dialogue, I stalled. This wasn’t the right way.
A few months went by. In the meantime I had received a letter from a former friend of seminary days. He had been ordained and was a monk in Sept-Fons, a Trappist abbey on the Loire River. In When Memory Comes, I have told the story of my visit to Georges A., of our spontaneous
and entirely natural reconnection and of our exchange of memories about “Les Samuels.” When I returned to Geneva, I realized that we had discussed much, except what preceded the seminary: my life in Prague, in Paris, in Néris, as well as his life in Toulon from where he came. I started a long letter that I never sent: in addressing Georges, I had found my voice.
It is during these feverish months that I decided to locate the road probably followed by my parents to cross the Swiss border. From a letter my father had sent to Madame de Lépinay, I knew that after their arrest they were kept in Saint-Gingolph for a day or so. For the first time, I drove to Saint-Gingolph. But, I thought, that couldn’t have been the crossing point, as this little town had but one street, following the lake, with the French and Swiss border police and customs stations right in the middle of it. It didn’t take me long to discover Novel, a hamlet well above Saint-Gingolph, in the mountains; my parents had most plausibly reached it, but I didn’t know what happened then. Did their guide take them along some forest lane that would lead to Switzerland around and beyond Saint-Gingolph? At the time of writing, I had no answer; I only knew that they had been arrested. Now, I know the course of events, having read Swiss and French police documents at the end of the 1990s.
The group of fifteen Jews, including several couples with small children, indeed reached Novel, and from there descended to Saint-Gingolph. At around three in the morning they all started walking along that one street which, at this hour of the night, was empty of border guards on both sides; they reached the Swiss side of the stretch. By a fateful coincidence, some youngsters coming out of a bar spotted them and called the police. The entire group was arrested. The next morning, parents with small children were allowed to stay in Switzerland (a very brief exception), while my parents and another couple without a child were kept overnight and, on the following day, delivered to the French police in Saint-Gingolph, then sent to the French camp of Rivesaltes, followed by Drancy, followed by Auschwitz.
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