Polish Jews in Paris: The Ethnography of Memory 0253312523, 9780253312525

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Polish Jews in Paris

The Modern Jewish Experience Paula Hyman and Deborah Dash Moore, editors

POLISH JEWS IN PARIS The Ethnography of Memory

JONATHAN

BOYARIN

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington and Indianapolis

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3 3‘ -0

6‘73”;

This book is based on fieldwork conducted with the help of Elissa Sampson. Publication was assisted by a grant from The Lucius N. Littauer Foundation.

©

1991 by Jonathan Boyarin All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses‘ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI 239.48-1984. @vu

Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Boyarin, Jonathan. Polish jews in Paris : the ethnography of memory /]onathan Boyarin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0—253-31252-3 (cloth) 1. Jews, Polish—France—Paris. 2. Jews—France—Paris. "

3. Holocaust survivors—France—Paris. 4. Yiddish language—France-— Paris. 5. Paris (France)—Ethnic relations. I. Title. DSl35.F85P245 1991

944’.36004924—dc20 123459594939291

90-27427

Dedicated to the memory

of

BENJAMIN SCHLEWIN

MOSHE SZULSZTEIN YEHEZKEL KORENCHANDLER DOVID MALKI

Yiddish writers

of Paris

CONTENTS PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGM ENTS

viii

Introduction I.

What is a

Landsmansbaft? Part 1 The Work of the Past

II. III. IV. V.

Children of the Century From the Pale to the City of Light Maybe There Is a God Getting By

Part 2 Pieces of the Mirror

29

33 46 54 68

81

VI. Reports of the War in Lebanon VII. Déjeuner Solennel VIII. High Culture and Folklore IX. Leaders and Intellectuals X. Mourning XI. Children and Other Strangers

94 106 119 131 152

Postscript The Landslayt and the End of the Century

171

REFERENCES

181 192

INDEX

vii

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is common among a certain class of American families for children to be rewarded with a European trip upon graduation from college. I am fortunate enough to belong to such a family. My trip, however, was delayed. Rather than going to Europe immediately upon graduation, I moved to New York City to study Yiddish and anthropology in the summer of 1977. The following summer I went to Paris to join my friend Fred Cohn, who had spent the previous year as an English assistant at a Parisian lycée. At the time, I wore a knitted yarmulke wherever I went. This visibly disturbed Fred’s leftist friends but drew warm greetings from young Jews I encountered in the streets. After several weeks in Paris, I decided that I wanted to live there for a time. I also realized I would only feel at home there if I were among Jews. Hence my plan to find a suitable topic for a dissertation to be based on fieldwork among Jews in France. Over the next few years, alone, and then with my wife, Elissa Sampson, I returned to Paris on several occasions to explore different possibilities. A study of the Parisian landsmanshaftn, mutual aid so— cieties of Jews from the same towns and cities in Eastern Europe, initially seemed the most prosaic and least promising of the cultural settings 1 considered. All the members of the landsmans/aaftrl are elderly, and the societies‘ main function today is the provision of burial plots. Eventually I realized that because they constituted a formal link between the immigrants’ present lives and their childhood origins, these societies were an appropriate place to begin a study of the continuities and disruptions that marked the course of the im— migrants‘ lives. My initial plan was to concentrate on two or three of the most active landsmansbaftn, following their activities throughout the cycle of a year and collecting life histories from as many members as possible. I hoped that I would then be able to construct an account of Jewish migration from specific places in Poland to Paris in a way that reflected “structural” influences and also individual choice and circumstance. I did not adhere strictly to this plan. For reasons this ethnography should make clear, it took longer than I expected to find [andslayt (Iandsmansbaft members, people from the same area) willing to be interviewed. Furthermore, I was overwhelmed by the political and organizational complexity of the immigrants‘ world, and, to an extent, I simply abandoned myself to finding out as much about that world as posmble. Nevertheless, I refer frequently in this book to the Warsaw, Radom, and Lublin societies.‘ Not only are these among the largest landsmanshaftn, but each had

home

1. Such shifts in focus are routine in anthropological fieldwork. See, for example, Gulick 1977.

viii

Preface and Acknowledgments

ix

officers who were interested in assisting the work of a young Jewish scholar. The connections among my formal proposal, my field experience, and my finished ethnography thus raise in another form the questions of direction, control. and retrospective narration in life history which are central to this hook. Roughly defined, this is a study of the Labor Zionist, (,ommunist, and ex— Communist Yiddish-speaking community of Polish Jews in Paris. These are the largest factions among a highly politicized immigrant group, living in a country where politics are central to social identity.2 Of course, the immigrants‘ views were not always mine, and not simply because we were members of different “cultures." Yet, despite the differences in age, background, native language, and experience, we shared the fundamental concern of constantly redetermining what links and separates Jews and all humanity. At twenty-six, however, I had hardly a whit of the political experience that most of those with whom I spoke had by that age. The researcher Paul Buhle, slightly older than I, working in America and a veteran of the struggles of the 19605, found a connection with older activists that made him “wise enough to recognize that I belong to the same family as my antecedents, all of them" (198723). By contrast, my connection to the immigrants did not so much challenge my fixed political sensibilities as it challenged me to commit myself to politics. That my eventual stance toward a central issue for Jews today—the project of Israeli-Palestinian peace (see Boyarin and Boyarin 1989)—was different than theirs had been at the time of my fieldwork does not lessen at all the debt I owe for what they taught me. The experience of fieldwork has made my attitudes more complex, my judg— ments less hasty. I still do not thoroughly understand the immigrants’ lives nor the differences among us, yet I feel less afraid of history, knowing a community that has maintained its identity, with limited resources, in the midst of the greatest violence the world has yet seen. Despite my care, my account may still seem uncharitable at points. If so, I can only beg a forgiveness I probably do not deserve, since holding those who are “one’s own" to a higher standard than others may be as dangerous as overlooking their flaws. My first expression of thanks goes to Fred Cohn, for introducing me to Paris.

Jack Kugelmass has been a colleague and mentor since I began graduate school. Barbara Kirshenblatt—Gimblett introduced me to the critical questions in Jewish ethnography. All my teachers and colleagues at the YIVO Institute for Jewish

Research helped me to gain competence in Yiddish culture. Elissa Sampson shared with me both the fieldwork and the effort to understand the immigrants. When I use the word “we" in accounts of fieldwork experiences in this book, I refer to Elissa and myself. She and Maury Silver encouraged and edited suc— cessive versions of this text. David Weinberg, Rayna Rapp, Judith Friedlander,

2. The Jewish Labor Bund figures in this ethnography .is well. because of its centrality in maintaining Yiddish culture, but for the most part its members did not ioin landsmanshaftn.

x

Preface and Acknowledgments

and Michael Fischer have offered advice, moral support, and practical help at various critical points. Daniel Boyarin has helped me overcome my “resistance to theory." Of the colleagues who welcomed Inc in Paris, I wish to name here Sylvie Goldberg, Nicole Benoit-Lapierre, Jacques Gutwirth, Alex Dcrczansky, and Moshe Zalcman. My thanks to the heirs of Yisrocl Belchatowski for permission to include my translation of a full chapter from his memoir. The issue of proper names in ethnography is complex. I have tried to respond to two conflicting demands. The first is the simple right to privacy of those who are encountered as private individuals, which dictates that I refrain from using their real names without their approval. The second is the task of placing a previously marginalized group of people within the larger history of Europe in the twentieth century. This latter demand contradicts the usual ethnographic practice of changing everyone's name; as the teacher whom I was only privileged to meet on one occasion wrote, “there are circumstances which call for identification rather than disguise" (Myerhoff 1988:271). I have imperfectly resolved this in the following way. Those whom I wrote about only in public contexts are referred to by their real names. If I cite private conversations, I have changed the names of those who chose not to have their real names used. In a few cases, this has the awkward result of my using pseudonyms for people who are well—known in the community; I trust they and their friends will rec— ognize them. Finally, I indicate here those whose names I was graciously per— mitted to use, either by themselves or their heirs: Henri Bulawko, Michel and Beatrice Luksenberg, Yisroel Belchatowski, Moshe Zalcman, Benek Kac, Eliezer Lokiec, Nicole Zoberman, Gitele Edelstein, Yossele Testyler, Kiva Vaisbrot, Mmes. Rodgold mére et fille, Matis Zelazo, Szulim Brycman, Isaak Opatowski, Olek Najgeborn, and Simone, Olga, and Jenny Dykmann. Translations of French or Yiddish documents or conversations are my own. I have followed the system of transliteration from Yiddish developed by the YIVO Institute. Thus, “Sholem—Aleykhem” rather than “Sholom-Aleichem,” Iandslayt rather than landsleit, et cetera. My fieldwork in 1982—1983 was funded by an International Doctoral Research Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies, and completion of the dissertation on which this book is based was aided by a grant from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. 1 could not have written this book or become an anthropologist without the help of Elissa Sampson, and of my parents, Sidney and Alice Boyarin.

Polish Jews in Paris

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INTRODUCTION

Paris appears on a map as an imperfect circle, flattened somewhat horizon— tally. The Seine interrupts the perimeter of the circle at two points, flowing generally east—west and bending toward the north to encircle the Cathedral

of Notre Dame. Imaginary lines leading north and east of the cathedral define a quadrant of the city that has traditionally been occupied by workers and immigrants. In accordance with the spiral administrative division of the city, this area comprises the Third, Fourth, Tenth, Eleventh, Twelfth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth arrondissements of Paris. A visitor from New York looking to hear Yiddish spoken on the street in this city will probably be sent to one of three places. The first and most fa« mous is the ancient Jewish quarter, Le Marais. The name of this neighborhood, which means “the swamp,” suggests how the Jews probably acquired the dubious privilege of living there centuries ago. Located immediately across from the cathedral on the northern bank of the Seine, and hence technically part of the “rive droite," it contains none of the haute bourgeoisie that name evokes. Though Jews were banned from Paris from 1306 until 1791, Le Marais once again became identified as Jewish in the nineteenth century, when it was settled by immigrants from Alsace. The Polish Jews who came in increasing numbers from the end of that century gave it their own name—“dos pletsl," the little square, after the Square St. Paul which sits above the métro stop. The housing in this area is among the oldest and most picturesque in Paris. For the new Jewish immigrants, however, the buildings were not quaint, but miserable and overcrowded. Like Jewish immigrants to other urban centers, they left the original neighborhood as quickly as they could. Those who moved out were partially replaced by North African Jews in the 19505 and 19605. Today Le Marais has become a chic, arty neighbor— hood, because of its proximity to the Pompidou Center and the beauty of its narrow streets and overhanging buildings. Yet the stores on its main street, the rue des Rosiers, remain largely Jewish. This is so thanks mainly to the determination of the Jewish storekeepers, anchored by the delicatessen owner Jo Goldenberg, and to the Lubavitch Hasidim, mostly young and from North

2

Polish Jews in Paris

African families, who provide clientele and an Orthodox presence. But our visitor might stroll back and forth along the rue des Rosiers without hearing any Yiddish spoken. If she knew the metro lilies well, she might then walk over to the Rambu— teau station near the Pompidou Center and take the metro direct to the station at Belleville. Coming out, she would be at the place where the Tenth, Eleventh. Nineteenth, and Twentieth arrondissements meet, and she would see drab old buildings on one side, facing garish, inexpensive new apartment projects on the other. Belleville has been a symbol of working-class and immigrant Parisian life for about a century; Edith Piaf is perhaps its most illustrious native. It became the major Polish Jewish neighborhood in Paris between the two world wars. But La Lumiere de Belleville, the first Polish Jewish cafe' on the Boulevard de Belleville, is now a kosher North African restaurant, as are most of the stores next to it. The residents are still immigrants, but from other places now: North African Jews, who are themselves leaving as the Polish Jews once did; North African Moslems; West African and Caribbean Blacks; Yugoslavs; and, increasingly, Chinese. The only way a visitor to Belleville is likely to hear Yiddish is by finding the Charcuterie Ber— nard on a certain side street and addressing the proprietor in that language. Though she may have been told there was a Polish Jewish baker on the same comer, she will be disappointed; the baker has died, and the bakery is now run by Arabs. Let’s say the visitor is energetic, feels frustrated at storekeepers’ reaction to her poor French, and must find someone to speak Yiddish to. She may then try the third possibility, the Place de la République, roughly midway between Le Marais and Belleville. This is a large, unattractive square bounded on three sides by department stores, a café, a Holiday Inn, and the headquarters of the Garde Républicaine. One of the several newsstands on the Place sells the Yiddish daily (which actually appears four or five times a week), Undzer Vort. The visitor buys the paper for four and a half francs, and, her feet being sore and the day warm, she sits at a table outside the café called the Relais d’Eguisheim to read it. At last, good fortune: not only does she overhear three elderly people speaking Yiddish at a table nearby, but she can tell by their dialect that they come from the same part of Central Poland as she does. When she approaches them and they find out where she’s from, they invite her to sit down and order her a cup of tea. The most talkative of her hosts then offers an impromptu but detailed description of Yiddish life in the area around République. Nearly all the institutions founded by those who joined the mass immigration of Polish Jews to France between the two world wars are still located nearby. The New York visitor is envious: the combined effects of real estate speculation, outward mobility, racism, and poor transportation have doomed most of New York’s secular Jewish immigrant institutions. The Fédération des Sociétés Juives en France has its headquarters on the rue de la Folie Mericourt, between the Avenue de la République and the Boulevard Richard

_

Introduction

3

Lenoir. Here, those immigrant organizations which have been generally identified with moderate socialist Zionism since before World War [I have their home. Political discussions, lectures, memorial ceremonies, and business meetings are held here, all in Yiddish. Here as well is the Centre Israel Jefroykin, which holds cultural events, discussions, and classes for young people, partly in an attempt to assure some continuity to the societies which make up the Federation. A few blocks closer to République is the editorial office and print shop of Undzer Vort. Once one of several competing Yiddish newspapers, it is now the only daily in Paris. Within the framework of Zionist and national Jewish interests, it purports to represent a wide range of opinion. In addition to political news, it carries announcements of interest to the community: upcoming functions of immigrant societies; congratulations on the weddings of children, the birth and bar mitzvahs of grandchildren; and frequent funeral announcements.

On the other side of the Place, between the Boulevard St. Martin and the Boulevard Magenta, is the headquarters of the Paris chapter of the Jewish Labor Bund and the Bibliothéque Medem, named for one of that organization‘s founders. This organization was a pioneering socialist party in the Russian Empire at the turn of the century. Its bitter opposition to Soviet-style Communism and coolness toward Zionism still reflect its origins. The members of the local chapter have provided space here for Yiddish classes attended by children and grandchildren of immigrants, and thereby recruited new users for the library, which contains the largest Yiddish collection in Paris. A bit further away from République, but still in the triangle formed by the Boulevard St. Martin, the Boulevard de Magenta, and the Boulevard de Strasbourg, is the headquarters of the Union des Socie’te’s Juives de France, more commonly known by its Yiddish name as the Farband. This is another umbrella organization of immigrant societies, which once rivaled but now cooperates with the Fédération. Near the Farband headquarters are the offices and meeting halls of the Yiddish Communist organization, formally known as the Union des Juifs pour la Resistance et l’Entraide (U.J.R.E.). At one address are a medical clinic, the print shop of the now-weekly newspaper Naye Presse, and a lec— ture hall. Before and just after World War II, this was perhaps the most fav mous address in the immigrant community; the Communist movement dominated the social and political life of the Polish Jews who arrived in the 19205 and 19305. Now, those immigrants who remain loyal to the Communist U.J.R.E. are seen as a diehard minority, both by themselves and by their erstwhile comrades in the Farband, which was also housed here until the early 19705. Several other immigrant organizations round out the map of the community. The Pioneer Women, the club of the Left Labor Zionists (Poalei Tsion), and the children’s-welfare organization called La Colonie Scolaire are not far away. The Jewish presence is further reinforced by the concentration of the

4

Polish Jews in Paris

Parisian garment and textile industry in this section of the city. Linens, bedding, and towels on the rue Popincourt out toward the cemetery of PEre Lachaise; women‘s clothing around the rue d‘Aboukir, between République and les Halles; sheepskins and furs in the Tenth Arrondissement, near the offices of the Farband and the Union: the Yiddish—speaking immigrants remain ac— tive in all these branches of the industry. The workers in the sweatshops now come from immigrant groups such as the Yugoslavs and Chinese. Many of the day laborers are Pakistani. A number of the proprietors have been bought out by the North African Jews who worked for them on their arrival in France in the 19505 and 19605. To the extent, however, that the immigrant generation is still economically active, this industry is its focus. Most of those active in the immigrant organizations still live in northeastern Paris, though there has been some dispersion. A few of the immigrants still live in the same apartments they have occupied since before the war. Others who fled Paris during the war returned to find their apartments occu— pied, and rather than struggling, took whatever they could find anywhere in Paris or the nearby suburbs. Some have moved into decent modern housing built on the site of former Belleville tenements. Many moved out from the narrow old streets to the “grands boulevards" around République during the prosperous years after the war. Even for members of the immigrant commu— nity who no longer live in the neighborhood, it is fairly easy to take a bus or the métro, come in for a meeting, and have a chat at the usual café before returning home. If the visitor from New York allowed herself to hope for an invitation to dinner, she may well be disappointed: her compatriots, while cordial, never— theless maintain a certain reserve. Still, she has good news to bring back home: Yes, there still are some Jews in Paris.

This little conceit—the preface which introduces the reader to a place through the eyes of a fictive traveler—announces that a text belongs to the genre of ethnography (Pratt 1986), as do the parenthetical name and year which are the standard form of citation in anthropology. It seduces the reader, suggesting, “You are the traveler. Come along on a journey to another culture.” By intro— ducing the ethnography as a vicarious experience, it fosters the illusion that time has stopped, and the exotic world being described can be entered whenever the book is opened (Fabian 1983). The classic ethnographic monograph proceeds as if the life of an entire community could be preserved, sealed, and displayed within the pages of a book, like a museum panorama. This may have as much to do with the anthropologists’ professional anxiety as with professional arrogance, for once anthropology chose to base itself on form rather than history, anything which escaped the book became an embarrassment (see de Certeau 1980). My Parisian pastorale represents yet another ethnographic device as well. It suggests that the book the reader has just opened is a path—perhaps the only path—to a simpler, warmer microcosm, the last traces of which are captured

Introduction

5

in the ethnography. In fact, Paris is striking (especially to American visitors) for the way it combines hypermodernity with stubborn continuity. That effect was brilliantly captured decades ago by Louis Aragon in his surrealist “ethnography” Le Paysan de Paris (The Peasant of Paris, I926). Aragon's book reads in retrospect like a response to the recent call for a “post-modern ethnography” (Tyler 1986), suggesting that the constraints on ethnographic form are not so much theoretical or chronological as institutional. Be that as it may, fictions such as “the illusion of timelessness” persist to varying degrees in this, as in virtually all fieldwork reports. Of course, the lives described in any ethnography do not really stand still. This is dramatically true in an ethnography of the elderly: several of the people I write about below will have died by the time this book reaches print. The illusion of timelessness is more dangerous than that, however, because despite the impressive persistence of their communal institutions, the people I am writing about here have been all but overwhelmed by the press of time, of external history. Their progress from youth through maturity to old age has been marked not by hallowed rites of passage, but by crises utterly unanticipated by tradition. Their childhood was disrupted by World War I; their departure from home became emigration, an almost total break, with no chance for resolution with their parents after the genocide of World War II; their children are the mark of their successful implantation in France, not their cultural heirs; many of them, as former Communists, have even betrayed themselves in the universalist faith with which they replaced the Messianic reassurance their grandparents possessed. To present them outside the context of the catastrophe of twentieth-century Europe would be a grave injustice. Hence I must reveal myself as an amateur historian, as well as (I trust) a competent ethnographer. During my fieldwork with these Polish Jews in Paris, I was engaged in a dialogue with them. I needed them in order to complete my work, and they thus had the chance not only to shape my conceptions, but to refuse me their discourse and presence if I failed to act or explain myself in a satisfying way. For me this interdependence was unnerving at times, but morally reassuring. Once my fieldwork was completed and I came home to write, my “dialogue” was not with people but with my own notes and tapes. The people I am writing about “control" the process of creating an enduring public record only through the claim they hold on my memory. Those who were “you” when I was with them are now “he” or “she," third persons, objects. Myerhoff refers to this creation as “an ‘ethno-person’ . . . born by virtue of the collusion between interlocutor and subject" (1988:281). Perhaps because her opportunities for repeated dialogue and “playback" were greater than mine, I am less confident about the status of my own collaboration.‘ I am not the first anthropologist to reflect in this fashion. In fact, it almost

1. For a sharp and informative debate on the possibility of dialogism in ethnography, see the exchange between Dennis Tedlock (1987) and Stephen Tyler (1987).

6

Polish jews in Paris

seems that ethnographers are forced to state their unease with the genre in

which we write. As Paul Stoller has complained, ethnographers “do not usually write what we want to write" (1984:100). Perhaps this can be rewritten as, “we want to experience writing as play—a free, interactive creation of ourselves—but it's usually work—production according to externally imposed criteria." There is a bad consciousness which comes of treating subjects as “material" to be “worked on." My desire to find a moral in the immigrants‘ lives, to convert them to a usable product, entails this bad consciousness. But calling for “play" instead of“work," rather than overcoming the dichotomy between them, would only re-create the dilemma (see Baudrillard 1975:39— 41). Moreover, anthropologists and other intellectuals might be rewarded for a kind of playful production which still would not challenge the alienation of most “workers."2 I will return briefly to this larger problem at the end of this book. Perhaps our problem stems largely from the fact that we are no longer sure who our intended audience is, or what we want to tell that audience. Once, the idea that anthropology was a science with methods ideally analogous to those of the “hard," physical sciences justified the image of ethnographies as simultaneously romantic adventure and no-nonsense, objective “reports to the Royal Academy.” But the “scientific” aura has been largely dispelled over the last two decades (for two early milestones of this critique, see Hymes 1972 and Asad 1973). Another model, predominant in American ethnography earlier in this century, was the pluralistic idea of cultural relativism, intended to inculcate in the citizenry an appreciation of the value of difference within the human family. That liberal ideal has almost been driven underground by the rise of the militaristic, businesslike New Right and by exclusivist religious ideologies. A new model may be cohering as our century closes, one in which those written about (or filmed) become the intended audience of the final product.3 But this idea of the ethnographic subject as reader is still quite new. Radical attempts to preserve in books the openness of ethnographic dialogue have been courageous but disappointing (Crapanzano 1980; Dwyer 1982), sug— gesting that new theories of how to write ethnography cannot absolve us of the sin of making a person into an object (Said 1989). But perhaps narratives— 2. Dominick LaCapra suggests that “a massive problem in modern society and culture is how y've all jobs a craft component and to articulate them with more ‘playful' or carnivalesque activities in a different rhythm of social life—a problem denied or occluded both in the rarified Haberrnassian ideal speech situation based on a restricted notion of serious, rational communication and in the prevalent idea that one needs to increase leisure time on the basis of functionally specific and at times automatic work” (19882385). 3. A corollary of this “experimental moment in the social sciences" (Marcus and Fischer 1986) is that anthropologists know they are also writing about themselves and their own dilemmas. The anxiety produced by this confusion between observer and observed, writer and written, is reflected in the sarcastic title “The Anthropology of ‘Authenticity’: Everyman His Own Anthropologist" (Kaplan 1974), given to a review of Hymes’s Reinventing Anthropology. Would that every woman were indeed her own, every man his own anthropologist!

to

Introduction

7

those our subjects tell us, and those we create out of our encounter with them— may evoke the persons we are writing about (see again Tyler 1986;, in a way that engages the reader‘s capacities for both empathy and critical self—reflection. Storytelling is quite popular among intellectuals today. Scholars such as Paul Ricoeur argue that narrative is constitutive of humanity: “We tell stories because in the last analysis human lives need and merit being narrated“ (1984:75; see also White 1987). The creation and repetition of narrative is central in the face-to-face communities that anthropologists study, a recapturable resource of lived cultures (Bertaux 1981233). In an ethnographic account, as Lawrence Wylie (1974 [1957]) shows, narrative is an excellent way to preserve the identities of the ethnographer and the community while illuminating both through their interaction. Still there are several problems with the simple suggestion that we reintegrate narrative into our practice. The first is that the normal flow of narrative excludes explanation (Ricoeur 1984:150; Benjamin 1969:91). Yet any ethnography—at least any in which the distinct identities of the anthropologist and the subject community are to be preserved—needs both explanation and analysis. There are at least two basic stories being told in the text that follows: that of my year with the immigrants, and that of their lives. In order to communicate what I learned from and about the immigrants, I must be able to step back at points and explain. This expla— nation is not a dissection from a “higher” or superior perspective, but rather it is evidence of the different frames of meaning that always persist. Had I understood fully the lives of those I am writing about (if such a thing were possible) I would tell the story without interruptions such as this. But I cannot do that, and neither, as will become evident, can the immigrants themselves. The blend of explanation and narrative can also be accounted for more posiv tively. My project here is twofold. First, along with other scholars (mostly students of literature—see Handelman 1982; R. Schwartz 1988), I aim to relate the study of Jews to postmodern cultural theory. At the same time, I am trying to show that the problematics of postmodernism are addressed not only in seminars, published texts, and artifacts, but also in the conscious experience of a particular group of people living in the postmodern world. This double goal implies a balancing act which I have barely attempted and certainly not perfected. If anything, there is an imbalance toward theory at the beginning and end, and a preponderance of descriptive narrative in between. There is then a disarticulation between theory and ethnicity—perhaps even an antagonism between them—which is endemic to and constitutive of ethnography. If there is more ethnicity than theory in this book, so be it. A second problem concerns “life history,” the past in the present. This appears here both in individual recollections and in communal constructs. I am considering both the course of people’s lives, and events in a particular year of their lives. The various chapters below reflect this disjuncture and my attempt to relate “narrative continuity and structural unity” (Ricoeur 1984).The chapter on the war in Lebanon, for example, describes the immigrant community‘s

8

Polish Jews in Paris

reaction to current events in the context of their past experience. Conversely, in the chapters on the immigrants’ life histories, I have preserved in most cases the context in which a particular bit of narrative was produced. Finally, a practical and political question. I am making the claim that narrative, with its redundancies and idiosyncrasies, can communicate more significantly to a wider audience than can structural analysis, which groups particular events, concepts. or persons into categories and tries to show the logical rela« tions among them (although this ethnography constitutes an uneasy blend of both strategies). But how is an ethnographic narrative actually communicated to those most concerned? This is a particularly acute problem for anthropol— ogists writing about groups where literacy is not highly developed or valued (although there may be less such than we imagine, caught as we are in our “illusion of timelessness”—for example, see Clifford 1986:116). There, the medium blocks the message. In this respect, my situation and that of other contemporary fieldworkers is relatively convenient. I can realistically intend my ethnography to include a French reading public of Polish Jewish immigrants and their descendants. I will write more on this when I am almost finished.

Toward the midpoint of our year in Paris, I visited the permanent display of the Musée de l’I-Iomme. It consists of dioramas containing cultural artifacts from various human groups, organized geographically. The same principle might have been used in a museum of geology, to give a representative sample of rocks from around the world. Nothing about the exhibition hints at the remarkable fact that its viewers are specimens of what is on display. There is a Jewish display case, but it is rather poor, perhaps because the Jews did not fit neatly into any of the designated geographical areas. The contrast between the museum display’s evidence of human variety and the reductive way in which the material was assembled helped me to understand my anxieties about my own lack of a method. So much of my information comes from personal encounters that even the methodological flexibility of participant observation seems strained: the situations in this account that would not exist without my presence seem to outweigh in significance those in which I was “simply an observer.” Rarely did I record interviews, and when I did, I often found myself distracted, impatient while listening to the narrative I had myself solicited. When I merely sat and listened, I sometimes became anxious if an informant seemed to be giving me “too much” information. How could I possibly retain all of it? What would I do with all of it? Both the removal of myself when the tape recorder is present as a “stand-in” and the anxiety of knowing I couldn’t use or retain everythingI learned threatened to upset a balance of needs that is established in the course of gaining field experience. One of these needs is to see oneself reflected in the eyes of the others, and this requires a focus on the moment of encounter. Another is confidence that one’s knowledge is broadening and deepening as the work progresses and that, as a result, the picture is becoming more coherent (this can

Introduction

9

easily lead to a premature exclusion of anomalous patterns or individuals). A third, of course, is the accumulation of a record sufficiently detailed and vo— luminous to produce a satisfactory ethnography, one that scholars and others can use.

Several dreams I had in Paris reflected these concerns. The first came a few weeks after we had arrived. In it, I was working at a temporary word-processing job in New York City—work that I had done before leaving for Paris. A woman was trying to give me an extremely complicated message over the telephone, pertaining to business in Europe. I grew more and more muddled and disturbed, wanting to tell her, “Look, I’m a word processor, not a secretary!" This dream was consistent with others I had around that time, in which the facts kept changing but I was nevertheless responsible for them. Dreams I had later in the fall reassured me somewhat. Their only trace now is a brief entry in my journal: “Almost every night I have epic dreams based on my fieldwork. . . .Just knowing I’ve had them reassures me that I’m working well, finding new pieces of the puzzle and trying to relate them, even in my sleep.” The mysterious content of all these elaborate dreams is analogous to all those aspects of the immigrants’ lives of which I received only the merest hint— and those aspects constitute most of their experience. When I became obsessed with awareness that my knowledge of my subject must remain so limited, the sense of inadequacy threatened to overwhelm me. When I knew I had captured one of those gems whose facets reflect the brilliant beams of memory, I was

exultant. On a few occasions I was fortunate enough to receive direct indications that I was helping to close a gap sensed by the immigrants. One came from a family named Rodgold,_ whom I visited twice. The first time, although I stayed for some two hours, we did no formal interviewing. The senior Mme. Rodgold, an immigrant, wanted me to come back with my tape recorder, and she wanted to have her own tape recorder going simultaneously. I suggested we arrange a time when her daughter could join us, but both of them agreed it would be easier if the daughter were not there. The mother added that she had been intending to write her memoirs but somehow just hadn‘t gotten started. When I came back, I saw that while Mme. Rodgold’s cassette recorder was not new, it was quite functional. The various buttons bore pieces of tape with their purposes written in Yiddish: “sbpil” for play, “tsuri/z” for reverse, and so forth, except for “STOP,” which is an international word. Before we began, she answered the phone, and the Yiddish conversation seemed like a very involved personal affair. When she sat down, she said: “All these women, with their complaints and their intrigues! It’s fascinating, I really wish I could tape all of their conversations, but I haven’t been able to figure out how to record directly off the telephone yet.” Mme. Rodgold, being fully aware of the interest of her own life and those of her intimates, seemed to regard me as a collaborator.

At other times I felt more like a social worker or simply a dutiful relative.

10

Polish Jews in Paris

When I went to meet Eliezer Lokiec at the municipal retirement home in I’antin, outside Paris, he was outside waiting for Inc. Fortunately, it was a nice day. He was dressed in dark solid pants, a gray wool jacket, .1 maroon-patterned sweater, and a blue necktie with white polka dots. He told me that people at the home gave him a hard time for dressing so well, but that it was one of the ways he reminded himself that he was still alive. “Most people here," he said, “act like they‘re in Death‘s antechamber, waiting to be called.” He was pleased that I was taping our conversation, and wanted to be sure that he was being helpful to me. When I left, he addressed me politely as “Mr. Yonatan,” and, complaining that at the home “you go crazy from being alone all the time,” he thanked me for giving him “three hours of normalcy.” Who am I in relation to these people, and how do I come to write about them? I received funds to go to Paris partly because few American anthropologists had thought of doing fieldwork there before. The immigrants came to Paris largely because it was one of the few places they could emigrate to between the wars. Yet the immigrants and I also chose to go there. Part of the attraction of Paris for the immigrants and me was its enduring image as a capital of enlightenment; one woman told me her first sensation in Paris was “freedom.” This openness and anonymity are both exhilarating and disorienting. Any newcomer must think about who he or she is and wants to become. Much as new immigrants depended on a network of relatives and Iandslayt, I attached myself to Paris through the Jewish community. I shared the comforts of association with that community, as well as some of the constraints—especially the moral dilemma of Israel’s Lebanon war (see below, chapter 6). Whereas most of the Paris immigrants arrived between the wars, my grandparents came to America before World War I. Most of the Paris immigrants came from central Poland, especially its larger towns and cities. One of my grandfathers, by contrast, came from a traditional Lithuanian rabbinical family, and my other set of grandparents came from a classic shtetl in White Russia—— all before the immense disruption caused by the Great War. Because the height of the wave of immigration to France was later than the mass immigration to the United States, I and my generation in America tend to be grandchildren rather than children of immigrants, while the children of immigrants in Paris are frequently our age. The Paris immigrants have suffered much greater alienation and physical danger as Jews than my parents or immigrant grandparents did—they all survived the Holocaust in one way or another. As a consequence their children often were given little in the way of Jewish literacy and tradition. The children know that their personal history is inseparable from that of their parents, but they have had insufficient insight into their parents’ life history. The blocks in communication between these immigrants and their descendants (see the last chapter below) stem at least in part from that lack of insight. The “shortage” of cultural heirs experienced by these Paris immigrants is analogous to the situation of a group of elderly Jews (also mostly immigrants) who met at a senior citizens’ center in Venice, California:

Introduction

11

Center elders required witnesses to their past and present life and turned to each other for this, though it is a role properly filled by the succeeding generation. Lacking suitable heirs to their traditions and stories, they were forced to use peers who, they realized, would perish along with them, and thus could not assure the preservation of that they had witnessed. (Myerhoff 1978233,

When Barbara Myerhoff studied these people, she very adroitly moved into the space abandoned by the Center members‘ own children; her ethnography of the Center is largely based on the transcriptions of the Living History class that she ran there. In my work, too, many of those who helped me the most were clearly motivated by the urge to pass on memories. Here, my knowledge of Yiddish was crucial in establishing me as a legitimate adopted heir. Yisroel Belchatowski, who wrote a story I have included in chapter 2, introduced me to the Yiddish writer Benek Kac by proudly saying to him, “Here’s your youngest reader.” Myerhoff stresses the elders’ need to integrate their egos through time—to return to their childhood, to review the acts of their adulthood, to construe the continuity of their selfhood through and despite the many displacements they have experienced. Loss of homeland and family is a recurrent theme in Jewish popular memory; but the “loss” of one’s children to a different cultural world, common as it may be, remains in large measure an unalleviated source of pain. The immigrants in Paris, like the elders Myerhoff writes about, suffered all these forms of loss. Myerhoff also emphasizes the elders’ need to create new social networks of mutual support and recognition despite the limited circumstances in which they find themselves now. Actually the need to integrate the self through the shaping of a life story and the need to find a group with which to share that story are part of the same process. The individual seeks validation from peers in the present, while looking for consistency among the many difficult choices made in life. The past is both a resource and a barrier to the creation of new ties, as old loyalties and hostilities limit and shape the reintegration of memory (see I-Ialbwachs 1980). The need for personal integrity both over the course of an individual life and among a given group of peers can go a long way toward explaining the conflicts of loyalty that have so consistently marked the immigrants’ lives: between their ancestral traditions and their desire to make their children French; among their duty to landslayt, their townspeople in Poland, and their desire to succeed in their new home; between their loyalty to the Jewish people and their vision of a world proletarian fraternity. If certain of the immigrants’ decisions don’t seem to reflect this attempt at integration, it may be because their choices are extremely limited. One disappointing commitment may later close off alternatives: In some cases, misfortune or the fraud of others have rendered the task difficult or even impossible; in others, imprudence, miscalculation. and lack of insight

Polish Jews in Paris

12 have point or another closed the experience. (Simic l978bz79) at one

avenues to

significant past ties and

When working with people like these Polish Jews in Paris, only rarely is one rewarded with a clear sign that an avenue to the past has been reopened (as when Zionist immigrants asked me, with friendly curiosity, about the wellbeing of erstwhile Communist comrades with whom they no longer have personal contact). Furthermore, it is difficult to write about such a fragmented community; the classics of ethnography took the cultural integrity of the groups they studied for granted. Here, the attempt to give coherence to my experience and perceptions both draws on and is intended to reinforce the same attempt on the part of the immigrants and their children. The rituals created by the immigrants, for example, help both them and me to make sense of their lives. Because fragmentation is so clearly a theme in these rituals and in the life stories which were told to me, I lay no claim to having subsumed the experience of the immigrants (or distilled its “essence”) in the account that follows. I do not think it is an inadequate account because of that. Rather, I hope to look back on this work in the future as a sound and honest account of an attempt to understand a transitional generation. If I am indeed successful, perhaps my “restoration of memory” will be like those deliberate cultural acts of “restoration of behavior” which sometimes “are arranged with such care that after a while the restored behavior heals into its presumptive past and its present cultural context like a well—set bone” (Schechner 1982253). Schechner’s simile, and hence my writing, may be related to the Jewish textual tradition. In the account of Jacob’s contest with the angel, we are told that Jacob is wounded in a part of his body usually translated as “the hollow of his thigh,” though a more correct reading, apparently, would be “the socket of his hip.” In any case, we read immediately afterward “Therefore the Jews do not eat (whatever this piece of flesh is) until this day.” The connection is puzzling— especially since we learn soon afterward that Jacob was healed. What links the patriarch’s body to the anatomy of a cow we are about to eat? I would suggest that at least one lesson is that consciousness of the wound is both constitutive of any possible Judaism, and imperative for all who cling to reason at the shadowed end of our catastrophic century. Even if the wound does heal well, we are wrong to forget it, as Edmond Jabés’s Reb Alcé says: “Mark the first page of the book with a red marker. For, in the beginning, the wound is invisible.” This book intends both to make the wound visible and, simultaneously, to help heal it. The strategies of exposure and healing are shared by the immigrants. They, too, are motivated both by the need to construct narrative and by the decon— structive urge to disperse clogged meanings. They are no more willing to retreat within an antirationalist celebration of ethnicity than to dissolve their group identity. In this sense, my ambition of finding a place for this book in the world

Introduction

13

of academic theory is not a betrayal of the immigrants‘ universalist faith, though I realize it may undermine my portrayal of their group." Whatever else it is, postmodernism involves an ambivalent doubling back on both “the modern" and “the traditional." The particular postmodernism of this group involves the simultaneous loss of what Lyotard (1984) describes as the traditional master narrative of redemption, and the Enlightenment master narrative of progress. In that sense, these immigrants are exemplary not only in their life experience through and despite all the major convulsions of Europe in the twentieth century, but also in their current cultural dilemma. Insisting on this may allow me to offer an account of the immigrants which is both more generous and more critical than one which treated them in isolation. Nevertheless, what I am left with is fairly standard in structure—not a postmodern ethnography, but perhaps an ethnography of postmodernism. Or perhaps it is wrong to expect radically new structures. As Linda Hutcheon explains, the postmodern aesthetic is defined not so much by a revolution in form as by an expressed consciousness of form as part of history: In short, the postmodern is not as negative (of the past) or as Utopic (about the future) as is, at least, the historical modernist avant garde. It incorporates its past within its very name and parodically seeks to inscribe its criticism of the past. (1988247)

Hutcheon’s formula also serves as a corrective to the dogmatic assertion by Stanley Fish (1988) that it is impossible simultaneously to practice a discipline and to reflect on one’s practice. Awkward as it may sometimes be, that is what the best ethnography does.

The first chapter below is about landsmanshaftn, which are found in East European Jewish émigré communities on five continents. The landsmansbaftn are the organizational core of the Polish Jewish community in Paris. They are also continuing reminders of the life history of the immigrants. Through the funeral benefits they provide, they serve as the bridge linking memory to destiny. And yet they are not portable miniatures of the places where the immi~ grants were born, nor do they reflect the particular character of different cities and regions as much as I had expected. To a much greater extent they are vehicles of a pan-Yiddish identity. The next section of the book, comprising four chapters, reviews the course of the immigrants’ lives and the external constraints they faced. Their stories almost all include childhood dislocation, emigration, survival of the Nazi aggression, and postwar reconstruction in France, and these are the divisions

.

In

4. For discussions of similar tensions between ethnic loyalty and theoretical desire. specifically regard to black literature and criticism, see Christian 1987 and Fromm 1988.

14

Polish Jews in Paris

I mark in my account. The precise topography and chronology of different individuals‘ stories differ greatly—for example, some survived the war in the Resistance in France, some were concentration camp inmates in Poland, some refugees in the Soviet Union. Thus I have had to sacrifice continuity in the record of individual lives in order to preserve some coherence in the collective

account.

The chapter which opens Part 2, on the immigrant community‘s response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, is intended to illuminate how these people’s life histories shape their present attitudes toward Jewish politics, the center of their group identity. The next several chapters are more classically “anthro— pological." Though comparison is not my primary purpose, they suggest that the immigrant community’s struggle to represent itself is emblematic of larger cultural questions in our decades: how to integrate past and present in cyclical public celebrations; how to enable critical intellectuals to challenge and energize the group, rather than threaten and be excluded by it; how to make “folklore” an opportunity for living exchange in a world of alienated “media"; how to bury the dead without losing them or being stifled by them. “Déjeuner Solennel” (the phrase means “formal luncheon”) focuses primarily on the annual balls held by landsmanshafm and other mutual-aid societies, in which the various cultural associations the immigrants have assembled are all brought together. “High Culture and Folklore” concerns the secular Yiddish culture which sustains this community, and the increasingly difficult attempt to meet within Yiddish the aesthetic standards of modern European bourgeois culture. The following chapter contrasts intellectuals are also political activists with those who assume a more private or sident stance, and I argue here that both types are necessary to the community’s vitality. “Mourning” focuses on the immigrants’ striking compromise between Jewish law and tradition on one hand, and the practical realities of death in France on the other. The chapter on “Children and Other Strangers” primarily discusses the ways in which the immigrants’ histories affect their children’s situation, and the dif— ficulties the children have had in recapturing those memories. I am already indebted to the immigrants for seeing fit to share some of their world If the immigrants' children accept my imperfect contribution to their inheritance, I will be grateful to them as well.

who even-dis-

with me.

WHAT IS A LANDSMANSHAFT?

At the end of October in 1982, I requested and was granted permission to attend a meeting of La Société de Varsovie et Ses Environs, a society founded immediately after World War II to unite Jewish émigrés from the Warsaw area who were now in Paris. My notes from the meeting follow.

The Annual Business Meeting of the Warsaw Society President Sharfstein: Opens meeting. Announces the presence of one of the oldest members, Lokiec, who‘s been away from Paris for eleven years. Sharfstein reads testimonials to French Jewish leader Alain de Rothschild and former Prime Minister Pierre Mendes-France, both of whom had passed away recently. He then moves on to a brief discussion of the situation in Israel. He reviews P.L.O. crimes, emphasizes the importance of the Palestinians’ weapons cache in southern Lebanon, and reasserts that the recent Israeli invasion was intended to secure peace in the Galilee. He cites the protest demonstration of 400,000 in Tel Aviv, and Shimon Peres’s statement that the Israeli army should have prevented the slaughters in the refugee camps, as proofs of Israeli democracy. He also cites Pierre Mendés-France’s statement condemning the one-sided coverage of the Lebanon war by the French media. Sharfstein announces that the society has pledged 1,000,000 old francs (10,000 new francs, or the equivalent of about $1,500 at that time) to help pay for a forest of 80,000 trees in Israel, representing the 80,000 French Jewish victims of Nazism. Sharfstein complains that not enough people came to the annual mass memorial ceremony at the Bagneux cemetery, and states that more should come to honor those who “did not have the fortune of being buried in their own graves." Treasurer’s report: Since the Warsaw Society is a progressive organization rather than a burial society, they have spent a good deal of money on cultural programs. In 1981, total receipts were 101,000 (new) francs, and total expen< ditures were 42,000 francs. General Secretary: Thanks friends for calling and visiting during his recent two-and-a-half-month sickness. His entire family died in the Warsaw Ghetto, 15

Polish Jews in Paris and now his landslayt are his family. Perhaps everyone agrees with the president‘s statements about Israel, but the main thing is that the society remain united, since they are one family. Comrade Epl: What happened in many societies in Paris didn’t happen at this one. Everybody does agree with what the president said. After their recent purchase of a Cdl't’du (a grave with room for thirty coffins), the society won't be buying any more tombs. The society has too much money, and should decide to spend more on the forest where “our Parisian jewish names will be inscribed." The society doesn’t have to spend much on social assistance for its own members; everybody knows why there aren’t any poor people left to sup16

not

port (P).

Question from audience: Does the society still support the Jewish old—age home in Warsaw? No reply. Comrade Orlow: The reason no money is spent on social assistance is that nobody volunteers to go visit the sick, who do need money. Sharfstein: We do visit the sick, and we bring gifts to raise their morale. We go whenever we know someone’s in the hospital, but usually they don’t let us know. We give 500 francs to the Farband, which sends Passover packages to poor people, though none of our members receive such packages. We also pay for necrologies and congratulations in the newspaper. Comrade Zelda (Mme. Sharfstein): Our society doesn’t only have material purposes, but is also responsible for continuing the thread of Warsaw Jewish culture. Thus we have to “arranger [2 coin,” as the French say—batten down the hatches, avoid fanaticism, and remain tolerant. Treasurer: Society has commissioned a bust of Ber Mark (leftist historian of the Warsaw Ghetto), to be placed at Yad Vashem (the Holocaust memorial in Israel). It also supports the Reuven Brainin Clinic in a poor neighborhood of Tel Aviv. Comrade Szapiro: Society should support Brainin Clinic more. Also more money should go to support Jewish writers, sculptors, etc. There have been times in the past when there wasn’t enough money to pay for a funeral, but the society has remained solvent. Question from audience: What is the role of the society when a member passes away? Sharfstein: When the present committee came in eight years ago, there was a debt of 50,000 francs; that situation has been turned around, but money is still needed. People in Argentina, Canada, and even Central America leave money in their wills to Yiddisbe Kultur and the Freiheit (New York ex-Communist Yiddish periodicals)—why shouldn‘t members here leave some money to the society? Treasurer (a clarification): The reason why the society had to purchase a new caveau was because the prefecture informed them that sixty graves were filled with water. New graves were purchased and the coffins were moved oven

What is a Landsmanshaft? Sharfstein: Announces the members of the committee. About twenty bers, including several couples. Reelected with none opposed.

17 mem-

Several themes of Yiddish community life in Paris were touched on at this meeting. Political attitudes toward the Israeli invasion of Lebanon were articulated and reiterated. The community expressed pride in its continued support of Israel. Burial and commemoration were discussed as group functions. The contradiction between a continued need for mutual immigrant friendship now that the immigrants have grown old and frail, on one hand, and the desire— acquired as part of their socialization into urban French society—to maintain an appearance of dignified self—sufficiency, appeared in the discussion of visits to the sick. Finally, reference was made to an international ex-Communist Yiddish culture. The message here was that if the immigrants supported that culture financially, they could perpetuate their own moral heritage after death. The Society of Warsaw and Its Environs and the many similar societies of Yiddish-speaking immigrants in Paris are the heart of this study because they have survived as the major single form of immigrant sociality. Constituted by people willing to identify with a particular foreign origin—an assertion which entails its own problems in France—their central task has been nonetheless to help the immigrants come to feel at home in the “new” country where they have lived for half a century. The term landsmansbaft may fairly be glossed as “hometown society.” But where is home for the members of these organizations? Many were born not in the towns and cities whose eponymous societies they now belong to, but in smaller towns or in the surrounding countryside. They only came to live in cities after the First World War, joining their parents’ search for bread and work. In different situations, and according to their various temperaments, the immigrants today recognize three “homes." The nostalgic home for the Polish Jewish immigrants in Paris is in Poland. Immigrant writers and public speakers say that even though these birthplaces can be physically returned to, in fact they continue to exist only in memory. However, events in Poland remained central to Parisian immigrant politics until the 19708, and only in recent years have the immigrants professed indifference toward current events there (see M. Wieviorka 1984). The everyday home is France, where the immigrants have spent most of their years and where they expect to die. The immigrants’ attachment to France can be seen in the typically Parisian rhythms of their daily lives, their long summer absences, and their general satisfaction with their children’s successful integration into the French academic, business, and professional worlds. Their unwillingness to lose themselves in French society is shown by the maintenance of the immigrant social network and by a carefully measured expression of ambivalence about their children‘s failure to be “more Jewish." The most recent addition to the immigrants’ concepts of “home" is the ideological homeland. With the exception of longtime Zionists, in earlier years these immigrants would have thought of themselves as exiles from Poland rather than

18

Polish Jews in Paris

as exiles from the biblical Land of Israel. As the mass of organized immigrants

became disillusioned with Communism and less optimistic about the reconstruction of Jewish life in the Eastern Bloc, however, they have gradually shifted their allegiance to Israel. Their identity now derives as much from their solidarity with the modern Jewish state as it does from their shared East European heritage. Their current attachment to Israel offers them a new home to love and nurture but, at their age, not to live in. The tension between origin and destiny which all migrants share is thus made vastly intricate for these people: two of their three homelands are now denied them.1 Kliger (1988) similarly discusses three foci of loyalty among the New York landslayt whom she studied. In her conclusions she indicates that, “Rather than the triangle of relationships which I anticipated, the associations’ priorities are mainly shaped by the society in which the group presently resides” (154). I found, however, that the priority of the Paris landsmanshaftn is perpetual mediation of the three conflicting and problematic claims for loyalty. In Yiddish, the term landsman is used to refer to someone from the same town or region as the speaker, in much the same way as Italians call someone from the same rural area paesano. By identifying someone as his landsman or paesano, an individual immigrant establishes his social identity. People who might have had nothing to do with each other before their migration discover, far from home, that common origin becomes an overriding basis for solidarity, Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame, writing about a different group of migrants, confirms this: It is only in Paris that [immigrants from the French region of Creuse] discover themselves as ‘Creusois’. . . . In this situation regional identity will confer a new identity. (1981:282)

From this perspective the creation and perpetuation of a shared identity is clearly central to the various social and moral functions of immigrant mutualaid societies. The Italian immigrants to New York City founded benevolent societies based on the principle of common geographical origin, some of which still hold annual street festivals to raise money for charity. Such voluntary associations of immigrants exist among groups of varying origins in different parts of the world. In Paris as well, mutual-aid societies of immigrants from the various provinces have long played a role in the lives of the city's workers and storekeepers; landsmansbaftn (or amicales, to use the French term) for 31 towns in the Au— 1. This set of associations was alluded to recently by an Israeli Yiddish journalist. Referring to émigre’s from the Polish city of Lublin now living neither in Lublin nor in Israel, he used the term “Lublin diaspora,” contrasting them to “those from Lublin living in Israel" (Stokfish 1980). For

Stokfish, to be part of the Lublin diaspora is to be dispersed both from the home city (Lublin) and from the homeland (Israel).

What is a Landsmanshaft? vergne held inaugural balls in Paris between 1896 and 1907 (Gerard 401).

19 1982:4Uf)~

These geographically—based association patterns differ from the kinshipbased patterns of other urban workers who, whether or not they are ethnically identified, are native-born. As Hareven writes: Kin assistance as the almost exclusive source of social security has been identified as a pervasive pattern in urban working-class populations ranging from nineteenth-century Lancashire textile workers to the contemporary residents of East London and Italian residents in Boston‘s West End. . . . (1982:366)

On the other hand, the more recently founded landsmanslmftrr differ significantly from the amicales in terms of their original class hase. Whereas the landsmanshaftn were explicitly proletarian and egalitarian, Bertaux-Wiame writes that the societies of regional French migrants attracted particular category of immigrants only: those who have succeeded in life. .. . [and are] interested in maintaining in Paris itself the kind of social relations which existed in rural society—relations of patronage, the influence of charismatic leaders, and so forth. (19812253) a

These differences seem to be closely linked to the differing home situation of the two groups of migrants. Most of the internal migrants intend to and apparently do retire to their native provinces, whereas the Polish Jews knew they were making a permanent break from a desperate situation. The French émigrés absented themselves from a social structure in which traditional class relations were somewhat intact, whereas the Yiddish-speaking immigrants were raised in a period of constant social crisis. The amicales might beviewed as a detached, replaceable fragment of an ongoing community; the Iandsmansbaftn are a fragmentary relic of a home that no longer exists. No group of emigrants anywhere in the world so enthusiastically developed the landsmansbaft type of communal reconstitution as did the East European Jews who emigrated during the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries. A study of the New York Iandsmansbaftn came up with a figure of 2,468 societies (including ladies’ auxiliaries, youth organiza— tions, and the like) (Y. L. Perets Shrayber Ferayn [Yiddish Writers’ Union] 1938210). Landsmansbaftn founded at various points in the past century still exist in North and South America, South Africa, Australia, and Israel. In Paris there were 78 landsmansbaftn proper and 83 other Jewish mutual-aid societies in the 19305 (Szajkowski 1942:218). One model for this type of organization among Jewish emigrants may have been the centuries-old tradition of Jewish exiles’ founding new congregations made up of their townspeople. The first society of Polish Jews in Paris, established in 1856, was indeed a devotional congregation, the Société de Secours Mutuel des Israélites Polonais de la Loi Rabbinique. The names of the members

Polish Jews in Paris

20

as officially entered reflect their diverse origins and occupations: “ ‘Reb Chaim Tinsmith of London, Reb Chaim Manufacturer of Caps, Doctor from Warsaw, Avigdor Plotsker, Visitor from Dizan (P) . . . Levi Teacher, Zalman Slaughterer. . . Alexander the Hungarian . . . a Little German,‘ etc.” (Szajkowski 1937). But the need to pray together can hardly explain the many societies founded between the two world wars, for their members were almost all committed secularists. The landsmanslmfm stem more directly from the various organizations of the classic autonomous East European Jewish community. Until the nineteenth century, these communities were autonomous bodies, whose various social and religious functions were performed by an interlocking set of brotherhoods. Among these were the gmilas kbesed, or free loan society; the bikur kbolim, which cared for the sick; and the bakbnoses orlelaim, which sheltered the everincreasing numbers of homeless wanderers. The most prestigious of these was the kbeure kedishe—literally, “holy association“ and in fact a male burial society. Its members bore responsibility for the details attendant upon a Jew‘s death, the most important such being the maintenance of a constant watch over the corpse from the time of death until the funeral. Members of this society celebrated together on Jewish holidays, and the society’s continued functioning was assured by fees Charged to mour— ners. In at least one town, Kovel, communal trust in the burial society was marked by the custom of having its secretary guard the town chronicle in his home, suggesting that the burial society was also regarded as the guardian of memory (Kugelmass and Boyarin 1983:23, 40—42). The new landsmanshaftn combined several of the old societies’ functions, ignored others, and added some of their own. Services that closely resembled traditional communal welfare included free loans and medical benefits or clinics. Other services filled similar functions, but in a format unrecognizable to nineteenth—century slatetl Jews. These included the annual balls (described in detail in chapter 5 below), which helped “green” young immigrants meet each other, helping to promote marriages in a different way than the traditional bakhnoses kale fraternity, which provided dowries for poor brides. Still other services, chiefly intervention on behalf of illegal immigrants in their dealings with French police and immigration authorities, were altogether new to the landsmansbaftn. A simple need for conviviality and the creation and reinforcement of a shared identity partly fostered by a shared difference from those around them underlay all these reasons for forming or belonging to a lands-

manshaft.

The sentimental tie to the old shtetl order is made explicit in a contemporary of the founding of the Tomaszow—Mazowieck Society in Paris:

account

The big city enslaves and harries a man. There’s no time to get together with a landsman and talk things over. Now the lives of us Tomaszower are altogether different. We see each other often, and we have our comrade Itshke Nayberg to thank for this. He united the Tomaszower landslayt with his hard effort. He ran

What is a Landsmanshaft?

2]

from building to building, knocking on doors like Tevye the shame; (sexton) with his hammer, and he finally succeeded in bringing together the dispersed Tomaszow wanderers in Paris. (Gershonovitsh 1969:536)

Invoking the town’s Jewish sexton, the author of this article recalled one of the most persistent, idealized images of shtetl life. The sexton, making his rounds every morning and calling male Jews to prayer, reaffirmed the cohesion of the group and the mutual responsibilities of the individual. The final sentence with its reference to “dispersed Wanderers" implicitly identifies the creation of a [andsmanshaft with the Messianic ingathering of the exiles. Various needs sparked the founding of different landsmanshaftn and other mutual-aid societies. Burial provisions have naturally become ever more important with the aging of the immigrants, but they were a concern in the dangerous and lonely early days as well. Szulim Brycman, who pointed out to me at Bagneux in 1980 that “where’s there’s no cemetery, there’s no living community either,” explained the establishment of the Zelbsthilf(Mutual Aid) thus: “In those days we worked in the sort of closed or hidden workshops where Algerians and Yugoslavs work today. One of my comrades was working on rubber raincoats in a shop tucked away in the third courtyard in from the street. A machine containing benzine was knocked over, and he was burned to death. We were faced with the problem of burying him. That’s when we founded the Zelbsthilf. We raised money from among our comrades, as well as from people in the street—it was a terrible accident, even for Paris. Two people had died and several others burned by the time the police got to the third courtyard. With the money we raised, we purchased our first cat/eau.” Brycman’s qualification, “even for Paris," testifies to the danger the immigrant workers experienced then, just as they do today, but it also suggests that in Paris, life was cheap. The physical isolation of the immigrants in their workplaces, which has persisted at least since the turn of the century, demonstrates one source of the psychological need for new organizations. The account confirms the impression given by the previous reference to “Tevye the Shames," that one motivation for establishing mutual societies was the re-creation of some form of structured, yet intimate, relationship. A new place, especially if it is a large city, can be physically dangerous even without the hazards of workplaces in which workers’ lives are considered dispensable. Yekhiel Grynszpan, one of the oldest of the immigrants I spoke to, described the fate of a hometown friend he looked up on first arriving in Belgium. “He wasn’t at the address I’d been given, so another friend and I began to search for him. After two or three days, we came to the town hall of a certain industrial town. There they told us that, just after starting a new job. he had had an accident. A streetcar had approached from a direction which he had not anticipated, and he was killed.” The younger, newer immigrants had already been far removed from the tra‘ ditional shtetl world long before their emigration to France. These people often looked down on what they saw as the petty outlook of the average Itmdsman-

__

- Jews Polish

aw

-

In

Paris -

shaft member. or “sosyvtc-yid“ as they called him. In the years before the war, they were more likely to join and form patrormm, organizations devoted to assistance for political prisoners and sometimes general relief for the Jewish community remaining at home. The patronatn were started mostly by Communists and left Labor Zionists. sometimes individuals who had themselves left Poland as political refugees. After the war, the parronatn lost their purpose. The absorption of many of the surviving members into Iandsmanshaftn rein— forced the leftist character of the latter. Still other societies were not founded until after World War [1. Among these is perhaps the largest landsmanshaft today, the Warsaw Society whose meeting is described in the beginning of this chapter. As President Sharfstein explained to me, the rest of his family joined him in Paris after having spent the entire war period behind the lines in Russia. Before the war, Sharfstein and his comrades hadn’t been especially interested in landsmanshaftn; the Communist groups provided them with a rich enough social life. After the war, however, there was the problem of the refugee landslayt, which led to the society’s founding in the Sharfsteins’ living room in 1947. Letters requesting aid were sent all over the world, and Sharfstein recalls that the first contribution came from a cousin of his in Buenos Aires. Since Paris was either a stopping place or a destination for thousands of survivors immediately after their departure from displaced persons camps, such appeals must have been made from Paris to landslayt from many different places throughout the world. The explicit goals of the landsmanshaftn, along with the members’ motivations for joining, have shifted over the years. While burial provisions seem in fact always to have been at the core of the societies’ functions, it is clear that young, healthy, secular immigrants did not want to see themselves as members of a khevre kedishe. In a jubilee volume published by the Farband in 1948, the article about the Praga Society states that it was established in 1924, and the author continues: “Unlike many societies, which were mainly concerned with the provision of funeral benefits, the Praga Society conducted a cultural life.” The central cultural activity was a dramatics group, and the book contains a photocopy of the poster for the first production, a benefit performance of a play called The Talmud Scholar, held at la Salle de la Cooperation, at 17 rue de Sambre et Meuse, near Métro Belleville. The poster reads in part: Notice! We want to remind the Jews of Paris that whoever wishes to enjoy himself should come see the bright comic duo Adolf and Bela Rybojad, who will appear in the beloved comic roles of Motl and Khayke, and also sing comic duets. (Anonymous 1948:93)

The article also notes a comic incident at the time the society bought its first caveau, in 1926: A member of the society spoke trustees.

at a

general meeting and sharply criticized the

What is a Landsmanshaft? “What‘s going on here?" he complained. ”Why are

23 we

burying strangers?"

He got so wrapped up in his indignant criticism that he concluded with the words: “Let’s hope that a year from now everybody in the cavcau Will be from Praga!" (ibid.:92)

Similarly, an account of the founding of the Radom Society—still one of the largest in Paris—explains that because its members resisted the idea, no caueau was purchased until three years after the society was established. Typical also is the next paragraph in that account, which discusses the society‘s efforts to assist more recent immigrants from Radom during the bitter years of the late 19305 (Huberman 1961). Mutual aid and companionship are generally stressed in accounts of the interwar landsmanshaftn. President Szpiro of the Lublin Society told me that the founders in 1929 had been motivated by the lack ofany social security in France (until the mid-19305) and by the immigrants‘ alienation “in regards to language . .. and other things.” The historian Nancy Green has noted that there may have been historical reasons other than anti—Semitism why the use of Yiddish in public was especially problematic: “In the period before World War I, anything resembling German was suspect” (1986:78). jewish immigrants needed a place where they could speak Yiddish and where Yiddish would be valued. Until the establishment of central offices and meeting rooms by the Féde’r» ation des Sociétés Juives en France and the Union des Sociétés Juives de France—the two rival umbrella organizations that unite Iandsmanshaftn, trade associations, and other immigrant benevolent societies—meetings were commonly held on Sundays at particular cafés in the northeastern arrondissements of Paris where most of the immigrants lived. Such meetings afforded the newcomers a chance to relax among familiar faces and at the same time to engage in a very French activity. In the years immediately after World War II, the Iandsmanshaftn were involved in aiding survivors from Eastern Europe and in the task of reestablishing the devastated immigrant community. A huge percentage of the jewish victims of Nazism in France had been Yiddish—speaking immigrants. Those who had come to France before the war and remained afterward had no doubts that they, too, were “survivors.” Thus, there seem to have been none of the tensions between prewar immigrants and the new arrivals from displaced persons camps that sometimes occurred among landslayt in New York. Everyone to whom I spoke in Paris was horrified at the thought; and a report published in the Farband’s 1948 volume explains: Indeed, the “Union" had to concern itself with [assistance to the refugees]; after all, whom does a Vilner, a Galitsianer, a Lodzer seek out when he comes to Paris? Naturally, he seeks a landsman who‘s been here a long time already and is established here. The “Union," which best coordinates all of the benevolent

Polish jews in Paris

22

shaft member, or “sosyete-yid" as they called him. In the years before the war, they were more likely to join and form patronatn, organizations devoted to assistance for political prisoners and sometimes general relief for the jewish community remaining at home. The patronatn were started mostly by Communists and left Labor Zionists, sometimes individuals who had themselves left Poland as political refugees. After the war, the patronatn lost their purpose. The absorption of many of the surviving members into landsmansha/tn reinforced the leftist character of the latter. Still other societies were not founded until after World War II. Among these is perhaps the largest landsmanshaft today, the Warsaw Society whose meeting is described in the beginning of this chapter. As President Sharfstein explained to me, the rest of his family joined him in Paris after having spent the entire war period behind the lines in Russia. Before the war, Sharfstein and his comrades hadn’t been especially interested in landsmanshaftn; the Communist groups provided them with a rich enough social life. After the war, however, there was the problem of the refugee landslayt, which led to the society’s founding in the Sharfsteins’ living room in 1947. Letters requesting aid were sent all over the world, and Sharfstein recalls that the first contribution came from a cousin of his in Buenos Aires. Since Paris was either a stopping place or a destination for thousands of survivors immediately after their departure from displaced persons camps, such appeals must have been made from Paris to landslayt from many different places throughout the world. The explicit goals of the landsmanshaftn, along with the members‘ motivations for joining, have shifted over the years. While burial provisions seem in fact always to have been at the core of the societies’ functions, it is clear that young, healthy, secular immigrants did not want to see themselves as members of a khevre kedishe. In a jubilee volume published by the Farband in 1948, the article about the Praga Society states that it was established in 1924, and the author continues: “Unlike many societies, which were mainly concerned with the provision of funeral benefits, the Praga Society conducted a cultural life.” The central cultural activity was a dramatics group, and the book contains a photocopy of the poster for the first production, a benefit performance of a play called The Talmud Scholar, held at la Salle de la Cooperation, at 17 rue de Sambre et Meuse, near Métro Belleville. The poster reads in part: Notice! We want to remind the Jews of Paris that whoever wishes to enjoy himself should come see the bright comic duo Adolf and Bela Rybojad, who will appear in the beloved comic roles of Motl and Khayke, and also sing comic duets. (Anonymous 1948:93)

The article also

notes a

comic incident

at

the time the society bought its first

caveau, in 1926:

A member of the society spoke trustees.

at a

general meeting and sharply criticized the

What is a Landsmanshaft? “What's going on here?" he complained. “Why are

23 we

burying strangers?"

He got so wrapped up in his indignant criticism that he concluded With the words: “Let's hope that a year from now everybody in the cat/eau will l’)(: from Praga!" (ibid.:92)

Similarly, an account of the founding of the Radom Society—still one of the largest in Paris—explains that because its members resisted the idea, no caveau was purchased until three years after the society was established. Typical also is the next paragraph in that account, which discusses the society‘s efforts to assist more recent immigrants from Radom during the bitter years of the late 19305 (Huberman 1961). Mutual aid and companionship are generally stressed in accounts of the in— terwar landsmanshafm. President Szpiro of the Lublin Society told me that the founders in 1929 had been motivated by the lack of any social security in France (until the mid-19305) and by the immigrants’ alienation “in regards to language .. . and other things.” The historian Nancy Green has noted that there may have been historical reasons other than anti-Semitism why the use of Yid— dish in public was especially problematic: “In the period before World War I, anything resembling German was suspect" (1986:78). jewish immigrants needed a place where they could speak Yiddish and where Yiddish would be valued. Until the establishment of central offices and meeting rooms by the Fédération des Sociétés Juives en France and the Union des Sociétés Juives de France—the two rival umbrella organizations that unite landsmanshaftn, trade associations, and other immigrant benevolent societies—meetings were com— monly held on Sundays at particular cafes in the northeastern arrondissements of Paris where most of the immigrants lived. Such meetings afforded the newcomers a chance to relax among familiar faces and at the same time to engage in a very French activity. In the years immediately after World War II, the landsmanshaftn were involved in aiding survivors from Eastern Europe and in the task of reestablishing the devastated immigrant community. A huge percentage of the jewish victims of Nazism in France had been Yiddish—speaking immigrants. Those who had come to France before the war and remained afterward had no doubts that they, too, were “survivors.” Thus, there seem to have been none of the tensions between prewar immigrants and the new arrivals from displaced persons camps that sometimes occurred among landslayt in New York. Everyone to whom I spoke in Paris was horrified at the thought; and a report published in the Farband’s 1948 volume explains: Indeed, the “Union" had to concern itself with [assistance to the refugees]; after all, whom does a Vilner, a Galitsianer, a Lodzer seek out when he comes to Paris? Naturally, he seeks a landsman who‘s been here a long time already and is established here. The “Union,” which best coordinates all of the benevolent

24

Polish jews in Paris

organnanons,

immediately became the natural center of aid.

. ..

iAverbukh

1941“

The same volume includes eleven pages of lists of names, bordered in black. These were the Lmdsldyl and comrades of other societies who died in the Holocaust. Some lists include names of immigrants' family members who died in Poland. Several lists begin with names of members who died as volunteers in the Spanish C|\'il War, or during the French army‘s defense against the invading Germans. These lists signal what became a new, vital activity of the Iandsmanshafm during the postwar decades: commemoration, and the attempt to preserve the cultural heritage of the destroyed communities. Like the kbewe kedisbe, the [andsmansbaftn combined burial with the safeguarding of memory. In addition to an annual maSs ceremony at the Bagneux cemetery (described below in the chapter on mourning), many societies hold annual memorial meetings, frequently on the anniversary of the liquidation of their town or city‘s Jewish ghetto by the Nazis. At these ceremonies, kaddi'sh and El mole rakbamim, the memorial prayers for the dead, are pronounced. These may be the only properly religious ceremonies many of these lifelong secularists attend, Several societies have erected monuments at Bagneux, or have had inscriptions for those killed by the Nazis engraved on their caucaux. For years now, however, the ranks of the Iandsmansbafzn have been diminishing through death and it is clear that funerals are the most common landsmanshaft activity. Immigrant funeral arrangements reveal most dramatically the compromises the immigrants have made between being Jewish and being French.These arrangements will be discussed below. Here, I will anticipate the chapter on mourning by saying that my experience at funerals and memorial meetings has shown me that the Iandsmansbaftn, though greatly diminished in force, still fill a vital need. The landsmansbaft studies done by Szajkowski in Paris and by the New York group in the 19305 which I referred to above presented the results of an ex— haustive survey. My methods are different. While the “Yiddish sector" in Paris is tiny in comparison to what it was even in the years after the Nazi slaughter, the organizational structure stubbornly remains intact. Szajkowski had found 78 landsmanshafm. For a reliable minimum figure today, I will cite the 56 announcements placed by landsmansbaftn (some of them established after World War II, either as a result of political splits or because of the influx of refugees) in the Israel Independence Day issue of Undzer Vort. Indeed, the continued publication in Paris of one of only three Yiddish dailies in the world symbolizes the stubborn yet fragile persistence of this constrained immigrant community. Despite the appearance of continuity created by institutions such as the landsmanshafm, their survival is not “natural,” nor does their decline represent the exhaustion of some quantum of extra cultural energy brought along on the journey from home. The immigrant group has survived largely by means of

WM is a hnckrnanshah?

ZS

constant improvisations, drawing on and recasnng vannm symbols. summoning old loyalties to new situations. Beyond its practical innmmn. the Linds— Yet the »Ianslnfl has served as a stmcture in which intimacy may he nurnned. home community—the external referent on which that structure is pounded—no longer exists and had long since stopped serving as an active locus of col< lective sentiment. “Like Tevye the shames?" Yes and no. Yes. because the land; musinft and the traditional prayer quorum are both expremom of the belief that jews can only be Jews together. No. because Tevye never had to bend imam did not need recourse to another archetype behind him", did not need to serve as a stopgap Messiah in yet another way station of exile, and

those who founded the landsmansbafm had to do all these things.

Part 1

The Work

of the Past

. . . we have much more of a shared European past than we can easily imagine. . . . the rise of mass politics and socialism, the counter—thrust of Fascism, the Resistance and the two World Wars almost everywhere provided the turning points which divided period from period and the issues which united the

victors and the defeated.

——Paul Thompson (1982110) After the ordeals of the 19305 and the war years, the loss of the colonies, the seizure of

political predominance by the superpowers, Western Europeans feel, more or less con— fusedly, that their normal historical development has been interrupted, that their past has been devalued, that their highest achieve— ment—nationality—has plunged them into disaster followed by impotence, that they have moved from the age of self-determination to that in which the outside world determines their fate. The more distant past thus seems alien—not a prelude to the present; it is perhaps even a reproach. —Stanley Hoffman (1981:217)

THE WORK OF THE PAST

I argued in the previous chapter that the culture of the landsmanshaftn and of their individual members is based on discontinuity and disruption at least as much as it is on continuity. This does not mean that their identity has been completely shattered. Yiddish culture is used by the immigrants as a creative, renewable resource in their collective effort to make sense of fragmented lives. In order to understand why they have reimagined that culture in a certain way, a retrospective on the course of their lives is indispensable. The task of providing some minimal sketch of their history is a daunting one—which is perhaps why no professional historian has yet attempted to chart their course from childhood in Poland to retirement in Paris. My attempt to construct such a sketch is guided by my analysis of the community in the present. It cannot be thorough nor can it be unbiased. It is intended to reveal these Polish jews in Paris not merely as proletarian youth, immigrants, survivors, workers, and landslayt in turn, but as people who have struggled to maintain integrity despite all these categories used to predefine and constrain them. In the chapters which follow, I face two major difficulties, and I enjoy one real advantage. The first difficulty is that the experience of the immigrants has been so powerfully shaped by larger forces affecting twentieth-century European society. Thus it is impossible to do a strictly “internal” sort of group life history. For every period and region, I need to refer to secondary written sources as well. This may seem to interfere with the immigrants’ effort to present an account demonstrating their consistent application of coherent values in vastly changing circumstances—their autonomous action in history. Yet, since at virtually every point external conditions militated against their exercise of autonomy, that larger history plays a great role in these people’s present struggle for integrity. To achieve that integrity, the immigrants must see themselves as actors, not merely as victims.I The awesome scale of the forces which impinged on them makes this an uncertain and risky task. 1. Herzfeld (1987) discusses “fate" as the designation for impositions of superior power which be successfully resisted. The landslayt rarely spoke of their losses and disappointments as the result of fate, perhaps because they still believe that human beings collectively determine their cannot

29

30

Polish jews in Paris

But, unlike some other “ordinary people" whose lives and stories have been recorded by scholars (e.g., Graftcaux 1985), the immigrants certainly were “actors in the public arena,“ and unlike the account given by another such person (if her chronicler is to be believed), neither the order nor the content of what they told me was “higgledy-pigglcdy“ (Smith 19852xviii). Talk— ing to me was part of the immigrants‘ work of comprehending their public actions. Neither they not I could separate those actions from the larger forces they were intended to shape, prevent, or otherwise respond to. The second difficulty I faced in sketching their history is that while all of these people were born in Poland and now live in Paris, their experiences in between vary considerably. Thus, for example, it appears that most immi— grated between the two world wars, but some came only after World War I]. Some of the latter were in concentration camps, while others survived the war in the Soviet Union. Many never were Communists; some became disillusioned with Communism in the 19505, some in the 19605; some are still Communists. Thus I have no choice but to lay out in gross terms the situation within which choices were made and to present in turn bits of narrative presented to me by the individuals who made those choices and experienced

their consequences. The advantage I enjoy is that the immigrants are acutely conscious and ea— ger to analyze their own history. In brief interviews, they provided me with summaries and vignettes which I could use in assembling a group portrait. Since these oral accounts are my most important source, I should describe the context in which I obtained them and explain what they tell us about the im— migrants” personal investment in their own life stories. The accounts integrated below were gathered for the most part in informal interviews at informants’ homes or at various communal functions. Few of the quotes are verbatim, since I found that using a cassette recorder invariably resulted in my losing attention and becoming impatient with an informant‘s narrative} The interviews gave me some insight into people’s home lives, helped me gather materials for a comprehensive ethnography, and helped me establish personal if not intimate relations with those who fur— nished my primary social ambience for one year. For the immigrants, my availability as a Yiddish-speaking auditor provided an opportunity to revise, to construct, and to transmit a life history which was rarely fully articulated before the interview.J own history. Those who do mention fate are perhaps less ideologically inclined; see the accounts of the younger Mme. Rodgold and of Leon Alberstein below. 2. Compare John Gulick's caveat concerning the impulse to record an informant's discourse on the spot: “I never tried to copy down the other person’s discourse, for I knew that to do so would have destroyed not only that particular conversation but very likely the whole relationship as well" (1977:100). Using a cassette recorder, which requires little attention, made it clear to me that the danger lies in the ethnographer’s, as well as the informant’s, reaction to the mechanics of recording. 3. For an extraordinarily nuanced account of the dialectics of memory among Polish jewish émigrés, see Lapierre 1988.

The Work

of the Past

3|

Langness and Frank have given several examples of corrective efforts in people's accounts of their lives, whereby informants try to make their accounts appear more consistent and unidirectional (1981:106—108).4 One such adjustment that I noticed was the claim that “all of the youth among the Jewish proletariat in Poland [during the decade following World War II were attracted to Communism." In fact, Communism was a minority movement, even among Jews. Although the Communists may have indeed attracted a majority in some Warsaw neighborhoods, I heard the same claim made by people from smaller towns, where Communism was at best one of several competing movements. More common than such rationalization in the immigrants’ accounts, however, is a clear stress on the discontinuities and conflicts of loyalty they have suffered. This is as true of one woman’s bitter recollection of her Hasidic father’s forbidding her as a girl to learn rabbinic texts, thus forcing her to— ward secular literature, as of another woman’s fresh regret at her youthful rejection of her parents’ traditional Judaism. Perhaps the greatest threat to personal integrity, however—overshadowing the Nazi occupation in many accounts—is the long period of gradually increasing disillusionment with Communism. The immigrants’ physical home, legal status, and ideological identification have shifted so many times that it seems they can achieve and maintain a group identity only through constructing this retrospective picture of the drama of their lives. Though, like the elderly Jews with whom Barbara Myer— hoff worked, these immigrants sometimes reach back to the memory of a stable shtetl childhood, they often emphasize the tensions they knew even then, as a prelude to their ideological careers. This impression is consonant with Paul Ricoeur’s claim that we are inclined to see in a given sequence of the episodes of our lives “(as yet) untold" stories, stories that demand to be told, stories that offer anchorage points for narrative. . . . It is the quest for personal identity that assures the continuity between the potential or inchoate story and the actual story we assume responsibility for. (1984:74)

Broadly put, the story these immigrants “assume responsibility for” tells of a lifelong struggle for individual, Jewish, and universal freedom. Those who told me of their lives frequently grant that in some basic ways they misunderstood the historical context within which they acted. Perhaps the confidence that they were speaking to someone who had a sympathetic interest in their stories (it took months of seeing me at meetings of the Yiddish community before a significant number of immigrants would agree to an interview) en-

4. The notion that lives do or should possess “direction“ at all is itself a cultural construction.

Polish Jews in Paris

32

the consistency of their search for freedom through and abled them despite the contradictions.g That they should both welcome and mistrust a chalice to do so is understandable. Those who remain loyal to the Communist Party tend to be particularly wary of sharp questioning by outsiders, and I only succeeded in interviewing a few. Those who have recently embraced Zionism know that this, too, is a problematic identity; it was especially so during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, when my fieldwork began. Still they recognized my curiosity and ability to converse with them in their native language as a chance “to confer to the past experience a certain meaning; a meaning which will contribute to the meaning of the present (and even to the ‘future' whose image lies in the present, and in projections on the children)” (BertauxWiame 1981:257—258; cf. Hareven 1982:379). In some ways (as Myerhoff understood very clearly in her case), I served as a surrogate heir for the immigrants, most of whose children are still not ready to hear their parents’ stories. On a prosaic level, I could afford to spend the time that is indispensable to the reweaving of the storytelling web between the generations (see Bertaux 1981:44). More particularly, the immigrants and 1 enabled each other “to learn and to teach," a privilege which observant Jews request in their daily prayers. No individual could teach me all I needed to know. That is why the chapters that follow contain secondary references, and why they are arranged by period, rather than following an individual from childhood to the present. All the immigrants portrayed here spent their youth in Poland; most immigrated before the war; all survived the war somehow; and all reestablished their lives in France after the catastrophe. The chapters in this retrospective account are arranged in accordance with those four themes. to test

5. Richard Price (1983) has published an unusually considered account of the situation within which he collected and chose to publish the “secret" folk history of a group in Surinam. Price contends that his work coincides with an awareness on the part of the group’s elders that their store of oral accounts is threatened by larger forces, and that they therefore agree to the wisdom of publication: “Fortunately, the growth of my own knowledge coincided with an independent realization by some elders that knowledge of First-Time (at least the nonritual parts of it) had better be written down soon or else be lost forever" (17). Presumably, however, Price would agree that the situation which compelled them to that realization was not a “fortunate" one. The irony is compounded by his confidence that the effects of publication on these people will be minimized, since “the book's contents will only very gradually and very partially penetrate to the level of those elders who most directly participate in the system of knowledge" (23). In other words, their secret is safe because they are isolated from its publication! But this criticism of Price forces reconsideration of my own claim above that my critical inter— rogation of the immigrants is justified by the fact that “I can realistically intend my ethnography to include a French reading public of Polish Jewish immigrants and their descendants.“ Or, as James Clifford states the dilemma, “Ethnographers seem to be condemned to strive for true encounter, while simultaneously recognizing the political, ethical, and personal cross-purposes that undermine any transmission of intercultural knowledge" (1983:152—153). I don’t know what we can do, except continue trying to convey the situation and value of the Other, while repeatedly noting that we work within a context in which the Other must constantly struggle against effaceanL

II CHILDREN OF THE CENTURY

World War I appeared as an immense turning point in the history of East European Jewry. The most obvious change was political: formerly subjects of empires, the Jews were now citizens of republics. National borders had changed as well. Most important for the lives of those who were later to emigrate and settle in Paris, Poland had regained its independence for the first time in over a century. In the new Soviet Union, the Jews were accorded full legal civil rights, which they had never known under the tsars. In Poland, the minority-rights clauses insisted upon by the victorious powers at the Versailles Conference granted Jews the right to develop Jewish culture and freedom from discrimination (Friedlander 1983z8).

The war brought destruction as well as new possibilities. The ruin of the Polish countryside and of Poland’s industrial base during the First World War accompanied tremendous dislocation of its Jews and its population in general. Productivity in the immediate postwar years was a fraction of what it had been just before the war (Watt 1979:202). Worse, immediately upon the creation of the Polish state, a wave of pogroms broke out across the country (Korzec 1980275). Some of the most important changes Jews experienced were in the accepted norms of social life. People who were young at the time later recalled that women who had stopped wearing wigs to cover their own hair, men who had stopped wearing the traditional fur hat on festive occasions, did not return to these customs after the war (Valensi and Wachtel 1986:129—134; Boyarin n.d.). Journalists chronicling what life had been like before the war spoke of “ruined worlds” (Zaks 1917). And one immigrant recently reminded interviewers that the passion of Hasidism—the ethos so many Polish Jews adhered to before the First World War—can be revolutionary as well as traditionalist. “You know. when a Hasid changes, he changes completely" (Valensi and Wachtel 1986:130). The legal and economic situation of the Jews in independent Poland gradually deteriorated from the establishment of the state until the Nazi invasion of 1939. The professional ambitions of many young Polish Jews were frustrated by a numerus clausus in the universities which grew more severe over the years and which many gentile students enthusiastically helped to enforce (Korzec 33

34

Polish Jews in Paris

1980: 142). In 1924 and 1925, the government of Wladyslaw Grabski instituted a rigorous anti-inflationary policy, the effects of which fell mostly on the commercial sectors in which so many Jews were active. Furthermore, local tax collection was entrusted to “citizens’ commissions," on which Jews were underrepresented. Among the effects of Grabski’s policy were “a wave of suicides among the ruined Jewish merchants" and “an increased tendency toward emigration“ (150). Although with the coming of Marshal Pilsudski‘s authoritarian but liberal government in the late 19205 the general economic situation improved and the political hopes of the Jews rose once again, the question of nationalities was secondary to the Marshal, and his government did not forcefully oppose the anti-Jewish maneuverings of the rightist parties. Thus, the right—wing National Democrats declared their slogan in parliament in the winter of 1934, inspired partly by Hitler’s accession to power in Germany: “No room for the Jews in Poland!“ (225). The late thirties were marked by a growing turn toward Fascism on the part of the Polish government, including active repression ofJews: “It is in the 19305 that the phrase ‘a youth with no future’ began to be used to describe the new Jewish generation. But even in the 19205 the handwriting was on the wall” (Mendelsohn 1981210). Yet during the short generation of Polish independence, Jews had been ex— traordinarily active in a wide range of political movements, from the religiously orthodox and politically accommodationist Agudas Yisroel to the small Com— munist Party. The latter was illegal, having refused to register with the government in 1919 as required by law (Watt 1979291). Korzec holds that the bulk

of the Polish Jewish population remained conservative and loyal to the govern(1980211); and Mendelsohn writes: “the election results of 1919 . . . demonstrated the moderate social views of a basically conservative [Jewish— J.B.] population much more interested in protecting its civil and national rights than in promoting social change” (1981251). Nevertheless, participation even in parliamentary politics was a very new experience for Jews, as well as for virtually the entire Polish population. The lack of political unity within the Jewish community furthered the breakdown of social solidarity—a process which had begun when the Haskalab, the Jewish Enlightenment, had come to the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires. . Most important for understanding the Iandsmanshaft population is a brief account of Jewish leftists in Poland. Within the Jewish community, these consisted of Bundists, who advocated Yiddishist cultural autonomy and socialism within the Diaspora; Poalei T5ion, or the Labor Zionists, who advocated social change in the Diaspora as well as settlement of Palestine; and Jewish Com— munists, who anticipated world proletarian revolution‘on the Soviet model, and the guarantee of Jewish rights by a dictatorship of the proletariat. (There were Jewish participants in the Polish Socialist Party, but they were more commonly Polish-speaking intellectuals than workers or Yiddishists, and had little impact upon the Jewish community.) ment

Children

of the Century

35

The Bund, whose independent stance had been attacked by Lenin as early as 1903, bitterly opposed the Bolshevik regime, and at the same time regarded any form of Zionism as inherently reactionary. The Labor Zionists, however, experienced massive internal debate over the extent of their support of the Russian Bolsheviks and the Communist International. Even the relatively conservative historian Korzec concedes that there was “a high percentage" of Jews in the Polish Communist Party (which nevertheless remained small in numbers), and a high level of pro-Soviet sympathy among Polish Jewish youth (1980:] 12). This fact was expressed by the saying kol khaveyrim yisroel (“all the comrades are Jews”), a pointed inversion of the traditional phrase [to] yisroel kbaueyrim (“all Jews are comrades").l To these young people, the Soviet Union represented a bastion of Jewish equality, particularly as Poland increasingly adopted anti-Semitism as official policy (Men— delsohn 1983:62). At the fifth world conference of Poalei Tsion, in July 1920, most of the Polish comrades, representing the largest national membership of Labor Zionists anywhere in the world, “supported immediate entry into the Communist International” (Mendelsohn 19812152), thus contributing to an eventual split in the entire movement.Z The majority of the Polish Jewish immigrants to Paris between the wars, and certainly the most politically active among them, came from the central region of Poland. This region contained many of the country’s major commercial and manufacturing centers (including Warsaw and Lodz, “the Polish Manchester”) and, with them, major Jewish urban and proletarian populations. Furthermore, Mendelsohn notes that, partly because the Haskalah had made much less headway here than it had under the relatively liberal (and German«speaking) Aus— trian regime in Galicia, “Jews who went into politics here were more attracted to Polish movements, especially movements of the left, than they were to autonomous Jewish organizations” (1981:20). The workers’ neighborhoods of Warsaw were the greatest bastion of Com— munist sympathy among Jews. Thus Hersh Smolar, a longtime Communist activist in the pre—World War II Soviet Union and in postwar Poland, refers in his autobiography to a major group of postwar Polish Communist activists as “former party functionaries, mostly onetime workers who came from the poor Jewish neighborhoods, especially the northern region of Warsaw” (1982:8). Memorial books for many smaller Jewish communities in Poland chronicle sports clubs, day schools, and other social organizations sponsored by various political parties—consistent with the European model of a party as an everyday 1. Alexander Hertz, however, argues that while “a significant number of people ofJewish origin the leadership of the Communist party. . . . Communist influence was relatively small even in the milieu of the déclassé Jewish intelligentsia in Poland“ (1988: 178—179). 2. Although the separation between Labor Zionism and the Communist movement became clearer in the course of the interwar years, their rivalry for the loyalties of the same constituency is still being played out within the Yiddish immigrant commmunity in Paris. For a description of another aged French population where factionalism between Communists and non-Communists is still a central issue, see Keith 1982.

were in

34

Polish Jews in Paris

1930:142). In 1924 and 1925, the government oleadyslaw (irabski instituted

a rigorous anti-inflationary policy, the effects of which fell mostly on the com mercial sectors in which so many Jews were active. Furthermore, local tax

collection was entrusted to “citizens’ commissions,” on which Jews were underrepresented. Among the effects of Grabski’s policy were “a wave of suicides among the ruined Jewish merchants" and “an increased tendency toward emigration" (150). Although with the coming of Marshal Pilsudski’s authoritarian but liberal government in the late 19205 the general economic situation improved and the political hopes of the Jews rose once again, the question of nationalities was secondary to the Marshal, and his government did not forcefully oppose the anti-Jewish maneuverings of the rightist parties. Thus, the right-wing National Democrats declared their slogan in parliament in the winter of 1934, inspired partly by Hitler’s accession to power in Germany: “No room for the Jews in Poland!" (225). The late thirties were marked by a growing turn toward Fascism on the part of the Polish government, including active repression of Jews: “It is in the 19305 that the phrase ‘a youth with no future’ began to be used to describe the new Jewish generation. But even in the 1920s the handwriting was on the wall"

(Mendelsohn 1981:10). Yet during the short generation of Polish independence, Jews had been extraordinarily active in a wide range of political movements, from the religiously orthodox and politically accommodationist Agudas Yisroel to the small Communist Party. The latter was illegal, having refused to register with the govern— ment in 1919 as required by law (Watt 1979:91). Korzec holds that the bulk of the Polish Jewish population remained conservative and loyal to the government (1980211); and Mendelsohn writes: “the election results of 1919 . .. demonstrated the moderate social views of a basically conservative [Jewish—— J.B.] population much more interested in protecting its civil and national rights than in promoting social change” (1981:51). Nevertheless, participation even in parliamentary politics was a very new experience for Jews, as well as for virtually the entire Polish population. The lack of political unity within the Jewish community furthered the breakdown of social solidarity—a process which had begun when the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, had come to the Austro—Hungarian and Russian empires. Most important for understanding the landsmanshaft population is a brief account of Jewish leftists in Poland. Within the Jewish community, these consisted of Bundists, who advocated Yiddishist cultural autonomy and socialism within the Diaspora; Poalei Tsion, or the Labor Zionists, who advocated social change in the Diaspora as well as settlement of Palestine; and Jewish Communists, who anticipated world proletarian revolution'on the Soviet model, and the guarantee of Jewish rights by a dictatorship of the proletariat. (There were Jewish participants in the Polish Socialist Party, but they were more commonly Polish-speaking intellectuals than workers or Yiddishists, 'and had little impact upon the Jewish community.)

Children

of the Century

35

The Bund, whose independent stance had been attacked by Lenin as early as 1903, bitterly opposed the Bolshevik regime, and at the same time regarded any form of Zionism as inherently reactionary. The Labor Zionists, however, experienced massive internal debate over the extent of their support of the Russian Bolsheviks and the Communist International. Even the relatively conservative historian Korzec concedes that there was “a high percentage” of Jews in the Polish Communist Party (which nevertheless remained small in numbers), and a high level of pro-Soviet sympathy among Polish Jewish youth (1980:112). This fact was expressed by the saying Ital kbai/eyrim yisroel (“all the comrades are Jews"), a pointed inversion of the traditional phrase k0! yisroel khaveyrim (“all Jews are comrades")? To these young people, the Soviet Union represented a bastion ofJewish equality, par— ticularly as Poland increasingly adopted anti-Semitism as official policy (Mendelsohn 1983:62). At the fifth world conference of Poalei Tsion, in July 1920, most of the Polish comrades, representing the largest national membership of Labor Zionists anywhere in the world, “supported immediate entry into the Communist International” (Mendelsohn 19812152), thus contributing to an eventual split in the entire movement} The majority of the Polish Jewish immigrants to Paris between the wars, and certainly the most politically active among them, came from the central region of Poland. This region contained many of the country’s major commercial and manufacturing centers (including Warsaw and Lodz, “the Polish Manchester") and, with them, major Jewish urban and proletarian populations. Furthermore, Mendelsohn notes that, partly because the Haskalah had made much less headway here than it had under the relatively liberal (and German-speaking) Aus— trian regime in Galicia, “Jews who went into politics here were more amacted to Polish movements, especially movements of the left, than they were to autonomous Jewish organizations” (1981:20). The workers’ neighborhoods of Warsaw were the greatest bastion of Communist sympathy among Jews. Thus Hersh Smolar, a longtime Communist activist in the pre—World War II Soviet Union and in postwar Poland, refers in his autobiography to a major group of postwar Polish Communist activists as “former party functionaries, mostly onetime workers who came from the poor Jewish neighborhoods, especially the northern region of Warsaw" (198228). Memorial books for many smaller Jewish communities in Poland chronicle sports clubs, day schools, and other social organizations sponsored by various political parties—consistent with the European model of a party as an everyday 1. Alexander Hertz, however, argues that while “a significant number ofpeople ofJewish origin were in the leadership of the Communist party. . . . Communist influence was relatively small even

in the milieu of the déclassé Jewish intelligentsia in Poland" (1988zl78—179). 2. Although the separation between Labor Zionism and the Communist movement became clearer in the course of the interwar years, their rivalry for the loyalties of the same constituency is still being played out within the Yiddish immigrant commmunity in Paris. For a description of another aged French population where factionalism between Communists and non-Communists is still a central issue, see Keith 1982.

Polish Jews in Paris

36

merely electoral, organization. One account, which describes the refusal of a Communist sports club to participate as part of an “all~ star" team of Jews against Polish Gentiles, reveals a social and political difference in emphasis among the parties—the Bund and Zionists giving priority to national solidarity, the Communists to class solidarity—which would hold true in France as well as Poland, before as well as after World War II (Yismakh 1983). Also, the existence of such organizations made up of Communist sym~ pathizers helps confirm the claim that their numbers went far beyond their membership in the party (which was illegal and dangerous). It was perhaps attendance at the popular schools run by the Bund and by Poalei Tsion, along with the night courses offered to workers by the Communists, which most set apart this generation from its parents, whose own childhoods had usually been spent in the religious school, the traditional beder. Although the traditional Jewish world was disappearing during the immigrants’ youth, the symbols and values of sbtetl life underlie their earliest associations. Those who have produced written memoirs often portray Jews powerfully motivated by tradition—but usually in narratives of cultural crisis. When Yisroel Belchatowski, a member of the Friends of Mapam, wanted to make it clear to me what a fruitful informant he could be, he recounted his memory of a great fire, which appears in his autobiography in the following form. I include it here not because it is necessarily typical of the immigrants‘ childhood experiences—many or most of their families were not so rooted in tradition as Belchatowski’s. Rather it is an unusually vivid representation of the image of the old ways which the immigrant community retains. communal, and

not

The Fire Once on a hot summer day, a great—uncle of mine suddenly appeared at our house. He bore a sack on his shoulders. My grandmother and mother were overjoyed to see him, such a welcome guest! He had disappeared years before. My grandmother had already mourned for him: “We don’t even know where Yoshke’s bones lie!” And here he was, suddenly restored to us. The heat was terrible; he was dressed in a cotton overcoat and a pair of muddy boots. He moved into the room vacated by my Uncle Melekh, who had left for America. Yoshke had once been a merchant—he ran a fabric store. One bitter winter his wife, Fayge, had caught a cold; her sickness had eaten up everything they owned, down to the last yard of cloth. When she passed away childless, Uncle Yoshke had vowed to commission the writing of a Torah scroll in Fayge's name, for both of them to be remembered by. Just after the mourning period, he put on a rucksack. Yet since he was embarrassed to go begging in town, where he was known, he set off across the countryside. He went from village to village, town to town,

Children of the Century

37

across the land begging for alms penny by penny. Where he spent a day, he didn’t spend the night. He slept in taverns, in cattle stalls, in study houses. Thus he wandered months and years, his stick in his hand. For hours I listened to the stories Uncle Yoshke used to tell. He still remembered the Polish rebellion of 1863, when the peasants rose against the nobles. He himself had seen a nobleman allow a peasant to be whipped to death. In his rucksack he carried filthy little bags of blackened sugar. When no one was looking, he gave me little pieces to suck on. He also had small sacks of coins. He went off to a scribe, and handed over the pennies he’d begged in the course of years to have a Torah written. He was left with just enough money to make a party when the Torah was completed. Grandmother told us discretely that Yoshke was perhaps over one hundred years old. All week long he cooked for himself in our kitchen.When the Sabbath came, he went over to his relative Motl Korman. He could be heard coming from a long way off, for he whinnied like a horse. Even on the Sabbath he carried his stick and struck it against the paving stones. After supper, he came home and went on and on about how good the food had been. In the middle of the night he would wake up with a start, shouting that his end was near. “Beyle-Rivkeshe, my crown,” he would call, “save me . . . have mercy. Light a candle, I’m dying. Help me say my last confession . . . A vital crisis permits you to violate the Sabbath . . . " My grandmother got out of bed, lit a candle and pronounced the final confession with Yoshke. Thus it was every Friday night: Uncle Yoshke ate his fill, and prepared himself to die in the middle of the night. But he wasn’t fated to pass away with the words of the confession on his lips. He passed away unconscious. Nor was he fated to bring to the wedding canopy the Torah scroll for which he’d spent years wandering. The completion of the Torah was celebrated on the anniversary of Yoshke’s death. The Torah was carried under a wedding canopy through the streets of Radom with great ceremony. The entire length of Wolowe Street was thronged with people. Youngsters dressed up as Cossacks and rode horses. Fellows made the black night bright with burning torches. Cutups dressed as Purim-sbpilers. I wore my mother’s petticoat inside-out. Thus the holy Torah scroll was borne to Khvat’s Hall. The hall looked like it had been decorated for a wedding. Electric lamps shone brightly. The guests wore holiday clothes. My grandmother wore her black silk shawl, with woven tips on her wig. She and my mother stood in the place of the in—laws, and were the first to inscribe a letter in the Torah. The women whispered among themselves. Some blushed, and wouldn’t approach the Torah. Then the Torah scroll was carried back through the streets to the home of our rich relative, Motl Korman. Services were held at his home every Sabbath, and the Torah portion of the week was read from Yoshke’s scroll. A scroll of the Book of Esther was commissioned as well, which Iinherited years later. Every Purim I would loan it to our neighbors. I loved to look at its squared-off letters with the flourishes and little crowns.

38

Polish Jews in Paris

The whole family was proud of the Torah scroll, our inheritance from Uncle

Yoshke.

Only Uncle Nosn was dissatisfied that the inheritance was shared by everyone. He wanted it to be his private property, so that he could sell it. He constantly came to my grandmother, arguing that the Torah should be sold, and he should be given the proceeds for his business. No one in the family wanted to hear of it. He ran from one to the other, shouting that he had to have the money as a dowry, so he could marry off his only daughter. The family held: “What Yoshke managed to accomplish after so many years of struggle may not be sold. lt would be a sin.”

Nosn went to the rabbi, and called the family to a judgment. The rabbi listened to both sides and ruled: “In order to marry off a Jewish girl, even a Torah may be sold.” In short, the scroll was sold. Uncle Nosn received the money. Berish the Matchmaker came to arrange a marriage. The meeting between Nosn’s daughter and her bridegroom took place at my grandmother’s. One hot Sabbath afternoon they sat together at our home, the bashful youth and the bashful Rokhel. Aunt Miriam and Uncle Nosn sat nearby glowing; their hearts were filled with joy and prayers to God that the match would work. Grandmother made refreshments, brought schav to the table, and gave Sabbath fruits to her grandchildren. Suddenly trumpet calls were heard in the street. People in the courtyard ran to see where the fire was, searching in vain for signs of smoke or flame in the sky. Building custodians stood on the street-corners, trumpeting without letup. My friends waited for me impatiently. Then I ran through the streets with them, asking: “Where’s the fire?" Each one claimed it was on a different street, until we arrived at the street where my Uncle Nosn lived. There I saw that his entire house was engulfed in flames. People young and old, men and women, stood stretched out in a long row, handing buckets and jugs of water from hand to hand, trying to quench the fire. At the well, water was pumped up constantly. Shouts rang out: “Faster, water, water!” I decided to run home and tell my uncle, but just then I saw them all running toward us. My aunt wrung her hands and shouted: “Help,people, save us, save us! All my work is going up in smoke!” My uncle ran back and forth distraught, seeking a way to get into the house without success. The flames and smoke choked him. I stood near my aunt, and couldn’t bear to see her anguish. She wept: “What can we do? We’ll be left on the street.” Rokhel the fiancée also stood in her newly-sewn dress wringing her hands, barely able to stand. The firemen who finally came were barely able to put out the fire. All that remained of the house were the four stone walls. Everything was burned to ashes, everything had gone up in smoke. That night my aunt went with Rokhel to her sister’s house. My uncle returned to my grandmother’s. My Uncle Nosn went to my grandmother, stOr m' “Woe, what has happened to me! Such a tragedy!” mg.

-

Children of the Century

39

My grandmother stood terrified, failing to understand what he was talking about, besides the loss of the house. “What is it, Nosn? Don‘t keep me on tenterhooks . . . ” “A tragedy . . . such a tragedy . . . my entire house burned down . . . the fur— niture, the bedding, and the cupboard which held my Rokhel’s dowry. . . My grandmother stood there, pale, wringing her hands. “How did the accident happen?” “What difference is it to me? I’m out on the street. . . and my Rokhel . . . woe as

is me . . . “Nosn, don’t blaspheme; blasphemy is a sin. Thank God for this. Tomorrow morning, go to the study house and bless God for having rescued you. if the fire had broken out at night, it could have been, God forbid, worse, much worse . . . You see, Nosn, God has punished you, for it was on your account that the Torah was sold, and with it, Yoshke’s memory was wiped out. Go out to the cemetery, to Yoshke’s grave, and beg his forgiveness . . . ”

This entire story, as Belchatowski tells it, took place in Radom, an industrial city that had 30,000 Jews in the 19305. Except for a passing reference to electric lights, it could just as easily have taken place in the eighteenth, rather than the twentieth, century. It reads more like a legend than a memory: There is the return of the wanderer, who lives to be over a hundred years old. His desire for a controlled and ritualized death is typical not only of Jewish, but of virtually all traditional ways of viewing life and death (Ariés 1981). The substitution of a Torah for a human child as a means of preserving one’s memory is echoed in other Yiddish accounts (Kugelmass and Boyarin 1983296) and in accounts of other Jewish groups (Goldberg 1987), and the sale of the Torah to enable the marriage of a child is consistent with the above. Nevertheless, in this story the preservation of memory appears as the highest value: he who would sacrifice the traces of the past for the needs of the present, however valid, is rebuked and thwarted. Thus the imperative of memory forms a backdrop to the immigrants’ earliest childhood impressions. The conflicting claims of cultural continuity and response to drastic change appear again and again in the immigrants’ reminiscences. At one stage the conflict may have been between familial Orthodoxy and modernism. For many in this generation, it evolved into the dilemma of opting for Jewish nationalism within a socialist context, in Poalei Tsion, or working for Jewish liberation exclusively through liberation of the international proletariat by joining the Communist Party. Some of the immigrants have lived through all of these sets of contradictions. They have attained sharp critical reflexes in their work of shaping the past and providing meaning for the present. One such is Gitele Edelstein of the Lublin Society. Although she responded warmly when I first met her in the fall and told her of my work, it was not until May that I was able to interview her: she had had an operation during the winter, and she was busy the rest of the time with her several grandchildren. When I came to her apartment in a new building near the Parc des Buttes

40

Polish Jews in Paris

Chaumont in the Nineteenth Arrondissement, she pointed out that her windows overlooked the playground of a Jewish school named for the Rothschilds on the Avenue Secrétan. She began by telling me of her initiation into party politics as a child, and she continued her account up to her arrival in Paris: “My oldest brother was eleven years older than I, and he was a Poalei Tsionist. When I was eleven myself, he took me by the hand and signed me up at the Borochow Folks-Shule, named after the theoretician of Labor Zionism. You can’t imagine how poor our school was. Sometimes we couldn’t afford candles, and the students all sat together around one lamp. Eventually the Borochow Shule couldn’t go on by itself, and after long negotiations it was merged with the Bund’s Peretz—Shule. The children had to carry the furniture from one building to the other themselves—who could pay porters? And the teachers weren’t the kind who ruled over us, we weren’t afraid of them. They were like fathers to us. They knew the family situation of each one of us. “All of the shules were connected to the Central Yiddish School Organization in Warsaw. Every year there was a graduation ceremony for the seventh grade, and those who wrote the best compositions were sent on to Warsaw to read them. I went one year. I can’t remember the title of my composition exactly but it was something like ‘From the Earthly Tolstoy to the Heavenly Rolland.’ In 1929, when the Bund won eight seats on the Lublin City Council and Bela Shapiro, leader of the Lublin Bund, became one of the national party heads, I wrote an essay celebrating ‘the victory of the workers’ parties.’ My teacher was a Bundist, and he said, ‘Gitele, you have such a good pen, why don’t you write for the [Bundist] Folks-shtime?’ It was true that the Bund had gotten eight seats and Poalei Tsion only one or two, but I didn’t want to write about the Bund.” I was surprised when Gitele told me that in 1934 she had left Poalei Tsion for the Communist Party. I asked her why. “There was [another] split in Poalei Tsion that year. One of the leaders said that the Jewish proletariat would only solve its problems through working with the international proletariat—and the Palestinian question would be solved after the Revolution. The opposing leader argued as Borochow had: the Jewish proletariat had to take care of its own problems first. I ask you: Which one turned out to be right?" . Despite her regrets in hindsight, at that time Gitele took the opportunity to go to the left of Poalei Tsion altogether and become a Communist. “I took eighteen comrades with me, too.” Until the Nazi invasion, she was a party militant: “The leaders had me studying Marx and Engels, day and night, and I absorbed it fast. I remember I had a cousin who had gone to Paris and done quite well. In 1939 he came back to Lublin on vacation. He came to me and said, ‘Gitele, why don’t you put away the books for once and come out dancing with me? You’re a pretty girl’——which I was—‘why don’t' you ever think of enjoying yourself a little bit?’ “I told him: ‘Don’t you know that all over the world there’s a huge class of people who are struggling, who don’t have enough to eat, who'are exploited? I don’t have time to go dancing. Go your own way in good health, and let me go mine.’ Nowadays, I see him sometimes, and he still teases me for refusing

Children

of the Century

to go dancing with

4]

him. The truth is, I don’t know how dance—when would I have learned?" Gitele’s account reveals several common themes in the immigrants‘ life histories: the poor, religious childhood and the early attachment to party youth organizations; militancy and the need to leave the hometown in order to avoid prosecution; the assumption that the Communists were ultimately wrong and the Zionists right. The power of tradition as described in Belchatowski's story is more typical of the smaller communities and earlier times when most East European Jewish immigrants came to America than of the background of this younger generation in Paris. Fewer Jews were willing to defer to a rabbi's authority to settle their financial disputes by the time Belchatowski was a boy. And although many of those who were to emigrate to France were born in shtetIe/zh, a high percentage of them left those small towns with their families when they were young, either as refugees during World War I, or when their parents lost their place in the traditional economy as a result of the war and the economic chaos of postwar Poland. Hence the title of the memoir There Where My Cradle Stood, the last, posthumous work of Moshe Szulsztein (1982), the unofficial Yiddish poet laureate of Paris. It is an account of his childhood in the town of Kurow, and ends with his family’s goods packed in a to

wagon, as they prepare to move to Lublin. Iobtained further testimony on this issue when I turned to a man sitting next to me at the annual ball of the Warsaw Society and asked him how many of

the members had actually been born in Warsaw. I anticipated confirmation of my suspicion that many members either had been born in France to recent immigrant parents, or were spouses or relatives of Warsaw landslayt who had been born elsewhere but joined that society because it was the largest and most active. 50 I was a bit taken aback by my neighbor’s response, the tone of which suggested that I had hit upon a slightly embarrassing revelation: “Very few of them were born in Warsaw! Most of them came to Warsaw like I did, with my parents when I was just four years old. We came to Warsaw because we had nothing to eat.” Along with the poverty and the difficulty of new surroundings came attendant tensions between parents and children. Fathers resented their children‘s ambitions to find more profitable and respectable occupations than they themselves had. The children’s desperation was all the sharper because the artisanal crafts they could inherit were becoming steadily more marginal to the Polish economy. Any movement promising an end to ignorance, unemployment, and anti-Semitism was bound to find adherents, particularly if its agenda included vocational and educational programs. Even those who were actually born in the cities suffered from the dislocation of the war and its aftermath. The ideal for a male child of a traditional education leading to talmudic scholarship and marriage with money became progressively less attainable, less desirable, and seemingly less relevant as Jewish law lost its authority and as the commercial base of the Jewish community shrank. Instead, following perhaps a few years of heder, Jewish boys were forced to go to work

42

Polish Jews in Paris

early. An interview I conducted with one ex-Communist began with an expla< nation of his initial attraction to the Party: “I was born in 1910. My father was a baker; his father had been a teacher in a yeshiva. We lived in a Christian neighborhood near the Vistula, but then we moved to the Jewish ghetto. I went to heder until I was eleven—l learned how to read Hebrew and pray, but I didn’t learn to read and write Yiddish. Sure, there were plenty of Jews in Warsaw who couldn‘t read or write. There were perhaps two hundred people living around our courtyard; maybe five percent of them were literate. It was a luxury to go to school then: I remember in 1920, during the Polish-Soviet war, my father took me pastJewish apartment houses which had been emptied by starvation. “I left the heder and became a tailor’s apprentice at age eleven. When I was fourteen I joined the union, and when I was fifteen I joined the Communist Party. Meanwhile, I had started to go to evening courses to learn to read Yiddish. My first book was Robinson Crusoe. Then, when I was arrested at age sixteen and spent six months in jail for carrying a flag at a demonstration, I got a chance to study subjects like poetry and economics. The Party gave me discipline and a vision of something better. It saved many young people like myself from the abyss.” Largely through the organizations sponsored by political parties, girls as well were increasingly exposed to secular Yiddish and European literature and popular culture. Since their opportunities for religious learning were generally minimal, their turn toward an alternative is all the more understandable. Those who remained in the towns grew up with new movements as well. One woman described the method devised by a young Communist activist for carrying out effective educational work among the neglected proletarian youth of her town: “It was called a ‘box evening.’ You know that after the war there were the pogroms. People’s beards were cut off by force; it was very bad between the that we Jews and the peasants when the Poles took over. The youth had to improve ourselves. They heard the Communists say that things were be a Jew, good in Russia, under Communism everyone was equal, a Jew anyone who insulted a Jew was shot . . . So they began to work leftists. There were young people from the better elements and, at the same time, people and from among the lowest classes, without education, who hardly knew where they were. So the leaders began to gather them together, these children of water carriers, tailors, and the like, who never visited anyone’s home, were ashamed to ask questions, who went around in torn clothes, With their noses running . . . It was truly terrible. A lot of them had fathers who had been forced to turn to peddling in the villages. . “One of the organizers was named Lubinski—he was a grandson of rabbis on both sides. He was extremely charismatic. He had studied the holy texts until he was twenty, until he became a fervent Communist and leading the youth along different paths. He brought them together, and organized what was called a ‘trade union.’ They organized meetings, gave them books to read,

understood could w1th'the who

who

started

Children

of the Century

43

held theatrical productions; the youth were entirely won over, and indeed they looked healthier, they held their heads higher. “At the same time, they were so ignorant—they didn't know what the sun or the moon were. Nothing, nothing at all! The ‘box evenings‘ gave them a chance to ask questions without being embarrassed. Each one wrote out his question and placed it into the box, and later they were read out anonymously: ‘What’s love?’ ‘What’s this thing?’ ‘Where does another thing come from?’ Otherwise, they were afraid of being laughed at. Then the ‘intellectuals‘—-Lu— binski, my brother, and others—would answer the questions." Images of persistent hunger, of poverty and ignorance came up again and again when immigrants spoke of their childhood. Bolek Sharfstein, the younger brother of the president of the Warsaw Society, spoke with passion of the class distinctions among Polish Jewry: “A family that had meat on the table three or four times a week was already considered bourgeois . . . A house where a loaf of bread stood on the table, and the children didn’t grab it all at once, meant that people already had as much to eat as they wanted. Most of the people were terribly poor—poor in every sense: poor in terms of physical and social mobility, poor in ability to lift their heads. That’s why so many people turned to Communism—it seemed the only way to get away from that terrible poverty, and, most of all, to get away from anti-Semitism.” That poverty and anti-Semitism motivated a turn toward Communism was confirmed once again by an immigrant who had grown up among the shtetl underclass described above: “I was born in Yadov, about fifty kilometers from Warsaw. In 1938, when I was twenty, I came to Warsaw and worked as a butcher. I was already a Communist then. It was natural in poor families like mine. My father was a village peddler—he was gone from Sunday until candle-lighting time on Friday, so how could he have shown me a model of traditional Judaism? As I saw it, Communism was the only movement that provided an answer both to antiSemitism and to poverty.” While Jewish sympathy for the Russian Revolution was indeed widespread (Roskies 1984:83), those who formally embraced the Communist Party itself were a small minority of Polish Jewish youth. The Communists seem to have recruited most successfully either where families had been radically dislocated or among those youths who saw the Bolshevik organization as the most uncompromisingly revolutionary among the socialist parties and therefore most worthy of their loyalty. The years immediately following World War Iwere a time of drastic physical misery and endemic anti-Semitic violence. Jews had turned to movements promising imminent salvation after other crises as well, the most important of these having been the large-scale acceptance of the false messiah Sabbatai Zevi, after the Chmielnicki pogroms of the mid—seventeenth century (Scholem 1973). In the twentieth century, the dislocation caused by the war and its aftermath operated on the familial as well as the communal level. The father of the butcher

44

Polish Jews in Paris

quoted above was hardly the only Jew to take up peddling in a desperate search for livelihood (see Kugelmass and Boyarin 1983:83—85). The effect on these Jewish adolescents who would eventually emigrate to Paris is not hard to guess. Erik Erikson writes of adolescence as a time when the individual is particularly vulnerable to social disruption, as he or she must “depend for a breathless interval on a relatedness between the past and the future, and on the reliability of those he must let go of, and those who will receive him” (1964:90). For these migrant or déclassé youth, the traditional Jewish community could no longer promise either physical or spiritual sustenance.

The Communist Party, the Bund, Poalei Tsion Right and Left all offered hungry and often illiterate young people services such as “box evenings,” night classes, and places to meet on an equal basis. To young intellectuals such as the scion of a rabbinical family who ran the “box evenings,” these parties offered an alternative to the traditional doctrines of communal devotion and redemption. In particular, the hope offered by the success of the Russian Revolution, combined with the inadequacy of the Jewish community’s “most general cultural orientations [and] its most down—to—earth ‘pragmatic’ ones” (Geertz 1973:219), led many young people to a deep faith in Communism. For some of the slightly older activists and radical intellectuals, however, doubts about the “dictatorship of the proletariat” began in the first years after the Revolution. The following narrative ends in the early 19205. Its protagonist is older, more literate, and more ideologically supple than most of the other immigrants. Yet it is a fit end to this chapter: its denouement foreshadows an experience of disillusionment that looms large in the immigrants’ lives, but which most would not go through until many years later. Yehezkel Korenchandler was a Yiddish journalist and lecturer who was born in Warsaw at the turn of the century. For most of his career, he was a selfprofessed anarchist, and he wrote for the New York anarchist Yiddish Freie Arbeter Shtime until its last issue in 1978. With an eclecticism typical of a certain kind of anarchist, he was also a member of the Poalei Tsion fraternal organization in Paris, and was the Paris correspondent for the religiously orthodox Yiddish New York weekly Algemeiner journal until its editors discovered that he wasn’t observant. He recounted to me his brief career as a ‘ Communist in these words: . . “In July 1922, Iwas demobilized from my desk job in Polish military. In September I left Poland. You know, since I was fifteen or Sixteen, I had been a member of the Poalei Tsion youth. In 1918 I was one of the first in Poland to become a Communist. Iwas extremely active during the Polish-Soviet war, and my life was in danger several times. Under the martial law then in effect, if we had been captured at a Communist meeting we would have been liquidated within 24 hours. But just after I left the army, the group I belonged to collapsed; the police came after me, but I had been warned, and I escaped across the border. “In 1923 I stopped being a Communist. They had made me a Soviet citizen

the

Children of the Century

45

and given me papers to enter the Soviet Union. I arrived at the Soviet embassy in Berlin to pick up my visa. l was counting the days until I could enter the Garden of Eden. As I sat there, I read all the announcements and posters on the walls. One of them disturbed me so greatly that I left the embassy without

waiting for my name to be called. I said, ‘l’ll come back tomorrow,‘ and the next day Isaid the same thing to myself. It all went out the window: the Soviet citizenship, the Garden of Eden, and I decided to go into exile in France. “It was an odd thing. Iwasn’t a Communist because I’d been influenced by Marx’s theories. I was a Communist out of a sentimental desire for justice in the world. The announcement which turned me away was entitled: ‘To those who are entering The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics!’ It dealt with matters of clothing. 1923 was the end of the civil war in Russia, the entire country was in ruins, and here they were regulating how many sets of new and old clothing, how many clean and how many unwashed, one could bring in! They didn’t forget a thing. I figured to myself: “ ‘I’ll arrive, and they’ll count my clothing: six pairs of underwear 3 man could bring in, a woman could bring four bloomers; socks, three pair clean and three pair dirty; handkerchiefs, three clean and three soiled . . . Here I am, a sentimental Communist, they’ll check at the border to see if I’ve brought my quota . . . What ifI brought in a thousand pairs of underwear, they could distribute them to those who haven’t any! And the guards who‘ll check are probably all loyal Communists. They’ll start counting the soiled underwear—one, two, three . . . I saw how far I was from that sort of approach, and that’s why I left the embassy. I couldn’t swallow it. 1923—finished with Communism!"

III FROM THE PALE TO THE CITY OF LIGHT

If Yehezkel Korenchandler refers ironically now to his decision to settle in France rather than the Soviet Union as an “exile,” he was of course to be in the company of thousands. Vast numbers of Polish Jews, especially young people, wanted to leave Poland between the wars. As small children, many had seen their homes destroyed during the war, been forced to flee as refugees, 0r came to the cities afterwards with parents who were desperately searching for work. They saw little future for themselves in Poland, given the unemployment and anti-Semitism. Their attachment to the structures of traditional, observant Judaism was weak at best, and they were frequently overtly hostile to religious values. Finally, many of them were forced to escape as adolescents or young adults to avoid prosecution and incarceration for subversive political activities. What had been the major destination for Jews leaving the prewar Russian Empire—the United States—was virtually closed by the early 1920s. Some émigrés continued to arrive in the United States in various ways. (According to a report published in 1936, America remained the major single country of Jewish immigration until 1931 [Anonymous 1936:6].) Others found destina— tions such as Argentina or Palestine. Perhaps the greatest number ended their journeys in France, whether they had originally intended to or not; some 150,000 Jews immigrated to France between the wars, most of them from Poland (Hyman 1979:68). France had a tradition of hospitality to Polish émigre’s. During its own revolution, it had welcomed émigrés fleeing after the failure of their rebellion against tsarist rule in 1794 (Watt 1979:19—20). In the years immediately after World War I, however, the French motivation was much more concrete. Well over a million and a half Frenchmen had been killed or wounded during the war (Encyclopedia Americana 1984:329), and the output of the able—bodied was limited by the introduction of the eight-hour working day (Benguigui 1965:7— 8). Thus, the French welcomed foreign laborers. An agreement was even signed between the Polish and French governments providing for the expedition of Polish laborers to France. These labor contracts did not benefit the Jews, however. The Polish authorities were hardly inclined to recruit Jews, and as the 46

From the Pale to the City

of Light

47

French were looking mostly for metallurgy workers, miners, and farmers, few Jews would have qualified in any case. Most Jews who came to France, therefore, came illegally, and qmckly found work on their own. The historian Nancy Green explains why this was possible: The possibility of working at home was useful not only for women With children but for immigrants unable to communicate easily in a new language. Homework allowed maintenance of ethnic or religious traditions while the low capital needs (a sewing machine, purchased on credit) and the division of labor, including many skills easy to acquire for those who had never held a needle in their lives. meant a relatively easy access to work for immigrants anxious to begin employment as soon as possible. . . . Low capital needs, little concentration of the work force, and often a marked seasonality of production all led to easy insertion of immigrant labor in trades searching for lowered production costs as a response to pressures of increasing industrialization and competition. (1986:40,

The next task was to get oneself naturalized. This was not too difficult during the prosperous twenties, but during the Depression the illegal immigrants‘ fate became more and more precarious. A system of immigration quotas was instituted in France in 1932. Although the legal situation of immigrants improved during the Popular Front of the mid—thirties, the French public resisted the growing wave of refugees. The 1935 Laval law, “to protect French artisans from aliens’ competition, penalized foreign needle or garment workers— 10,500 of whom were East European Jews in Paris" (Paxton and .\Iarrus 1981:57).

As previously mentioned, East European Jews tended to settle in the same neighborhoods—particularly among the northeastern arrondissements of Paris, in the old Jewish ghetto of Le Marais, and in the working-class strongholds of Belleville and République (Weinberg 1977:5). They concentrated in arrisanal economic branches—primarily the textile industry—and a good many of them worked at home, reinforcing their isolation from the French working class (ibid.:16; Hyman 1979:74). Their illegal status and their ignorance of French also encouraged them to keep together during their limited leisure hours. At the same time, Polish Jewish immigrants of the twentieth century had begun to establish their own formal organizational network, with its roots in the mid—nineteenth century. By the time of the First World War, the immigrant community was much larger. Both trade and hometown organizations had been established, and their concerns were not limited to common worship. In 1913, many of these groups were united into the first immigrant umbrella organi« zation, which today is known as the Fédération des Sociétés Juives de France. The Fédération, generally apolitical but if anything Zionist in orientation, even< tually cooperated with modest attempts on the part of the native French Jews to effect a rapprochement with the immigrants (Hyman 1979:150). Yet a large number of the immigrants during the twenties and thirties were

48

Polish Jews in Paris

highly radicalized. They were also poorer and more alienated from French life than were the earlier and more successful immigrants who predominated in Federation—affiliated societies. For many, their background in Poland attracted them to organizations at least informally associated with the French Commu~ nist Party, particularly after 1923, when it established a Jewish section and other immigrant sections. The rise of the Communist Yiddish press in Paris is revealing. The weekly Emes was started in 1930. (Emes means “truth” in Yiddish; the Yiddish newspaper in Moscow bore the same name, which is, of course, also the meaning of Pravda.) By 1934 it had grown into a daily, renamed the Naye Presse (Hyman 1979:84). The scope of the French Communist Party‘s Jewish Section’s activity was initially limited by the narrow definition of the “working class.” Not very many Jews in Paris belonged to the industrial proletariat working in large factories, and those who worked in small ateliers or at home were excluded by definition. However, when the threat of Fascism in Europe stimulated the organization of the leftist Popular Front in France, the Jewish Communists joined with the Bund and the left Poalei Tsion in aJewish United Front. This coalition then attempted to incorporate the Federation within its ranks, but met only limited success. The Fédération, unwilling to be officially associated with the Jewish left but without the means to conduct an independent fight against anti—Semitism, re— fused to join as a body but allowed its member societies to decide themselves whether to join. Several did. The Jewish United Front declined precipitously in 1937. First, the Jewish Section of the Communist Party was abolished in March, which naturally damaged the Jewish Communists’ credibility as representatives of Jewish community interests. Second, Leon Blum’s government fell in June, and with it the entire idea of a Popular Front (Weinberg 1977:121 ff.). Yet the Communists had gained sympathizers; the survivors among them would, for the most part, again be enthusiastic members of Communist-oriented immigrant organizations after the war. And, as a result of the pressure for activism against the inertia of the Fédération, a rival umbrella organization—the Farband fun Yidishe Gezelshafm, or Union des Sociétés Juives—was founded in 1938. The dual organization has persisted; not until around 1980 were negotiations toward reunification of the two constituent bodies begun, years after all serious po— litical differences between them had disappeared and left only bitter memories. These were the structures within which the immigrants had to maneuver, and Jewish institutions they found waiting or created by themselves. Several of the immigrants shared with me brief accounts of how they got from Poland to France, how the experiences of the many who arrived after World War 11 compared to those of the interwar immigrants, and how they negotiated the conflicting demands of acculturation and group loyalty. Avoiding prison is, in retrospect, the most romantic of the reasons for leaving Poland. Not all of those who faced jail terms were members of the illegal Com-

some of the

From the Pale to the City

of Light

49

munist Party; President Szpiro of the Lublin Society, for months in the prison fortress of Lublin for having plastered the walls of the city with Poalei Tsion posters hailing the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Sometimes departures from Poland for political reasons occurred under extremely dramatic situations. In mid—August, 1920, the Soviet Army had invaded Poland and stood on the brink of taking Warsaw. Many Jews and others who had been conscripted into the Polish Army simply could not see themselves battling against a revolutionary force. “I was one of 50,000 young men who deserted from the Polish Army then," said one man who is now in his eighties. “We broke out rifles and ran off to the free city of Danzig, risking the death penalty as deserters. We were mostly Jews; maybe there were some Christians among the deserters, but all the ones I was with were Jews. The German-Jewish kehila, the community council in Danzig, helped us a great deal, because we arrived with nothing but the shirts on our backs. From Danzig, we went by ship to East Prussia. Eventually I and many others went to work in the coal mines in Dortmund and Westphalia. I was a yingl, a boy of 21." I asked the man who told me this story whether he knew of any written accounts of the episode, and he shook his head no. He added with grandfatherly affection and pride in his own longevity: “What do you know? You need cinema? l don‘t need any cinema!“ He knew he had a story with an unambiguous moral theme of courageous, principled action. Telling it to me reinforced its authenticity in his memory, as well as his independence from the contemporary mass culture in which he does not participate. It also imputed an aspect of selfdetermination to the fact of his being an immigrant. I was warned by one or two of the immigrants, however, that it would be a mistake to see the majority as having been political refugees. One man with whom I chatted on a train returning from a funeral gave the one-word reply “Economic!" when I asked why he had left Poland. As with most mass migrations, the most powerful motivation for leaving Poland was probably Poland‘s desperate poverty. Not always do the immigrants analyze their reasons in this way. Sometimes they expressed to me an overwhelming desire to leave Poland: “I came to Paris in 1920. I wanted to go to America—I wrote to an uncle in California, but he never responded. I would have gone to Africa. I just wanted to get as far away from Poland as possible." The man who told me this arrived in 1920, when he instance, spent several

was 19.

Most of those who came between the wars (rather than as refugees after World War ll) seem to have come in their late teens or early twenties. They were usually single, or occasionally just married. Many would have left earlier iftheir parents had allowed them. The parents‘ reluctance, born of fear at seeing their children go so far away, was often compounded by a conviction that of all the places to emigrate to, Paris was the most secular and the least conducive to remaining a Jew. The father of one man who eventually arrived after World

50

Polish Jews in Paris

War II had forbidden him to attend the World’s Fair in 1936, saying, “The stones of Paris are treyfliion-kosherJ.” Mme. Rodgold, the woman who told me about the box evenings, cited her father’s use of the same phrase: “In 1926 my husband had obtained a certificate to go to Palestine, but my parents wouldn‘t let us go: ‘You’ll be too far away from us.’ Later we had no choice except to leave, because there was no way to earn a living. In 1930 we came to Paris, since it was no longer possible to go to Palestine. 1 still have the letter in which my father wrote: ‘You see, my child, to the Land of Israel I wouldn’t let you go; but to Paris, where all the stones are treyf, I couldn’t say no.

Nearly all these immigrants arrived in Paris illegally. Many of them came by way of Belgium, where it was easier to get working papers. Toward the end of my fieldwork, I finally got a precise account of one immigrant’s journey from

Poland to Western Europe. Menashe Gorelick—one of those who has remained loyal to the Communist Naye Passe—explained to me that in the late twenties his wife-to—be Naomi’s father had gone from Poland to Brussels, where he had a brother. Menashe knew the family slightly. Menashe was then living with his grandmother, since his recently widowed father had been forced to sell their apartment during his wife’s last illness, and Menashe and his three younger siblings had been split up among the grandparents. “One day a certain smuggler from Belgium whom my grandmother knew came to our home. I mentioned that I wanted to get to Belgium. He said, ‘I’ll come for you Friday at 6:00 p.m. Be ready.’ It was a Tuesday. I didn’t know what ‘Be ready’ meant—I had very little money, I didn’t have the language (French), and I didn’t have a passport. All I had was what was called a metrilze, showing when I was born, where I lived, and so forth. Hardly any real papers at all. He came on Friday and we went to the station. He had some sort of ticket to get me as fat as the border. \When we reached the border, he said, ‘Get under the seat while the conductor comes through.’ I spent the whole trip from the Polish border to Brussels under the bench, and I arrived there without any papers and without a word of French.” The next two moments in Menashe’s story illustrate the term “chain migration,” particularly the way passing acquaintances in the homeland become crucial contacts for newcomers. Menashe quickly found his landsman, Naomi’s father. Naomi received a letter in which her father wrote that though he hardly knew Menashe he’d had no choice but to take him in. In turn Menashe helped raise money to send back to Warsaw so that Naomi and the rest of her family could come to Belgium. Many of those who became and are still today the intellectual leaders of this community left Poland in order to study, forced by the numerus clausus and drawn by the cultural excitement of cities like Paris and Berlin. Jewish politics were continued and elaborated in the student circles—although their focus was further to the right than it was among the worker-immigrants. One student, who was to be a Communist and eventually a Bundist leader, wrote in his memoirs that at Grenoble in the late twenties “the Zionist-Revisionists were

From the Pale to the City

of Light

5]

the most active; they even brought the famous Zionist orator Vladimir Jabotinsky to Grenoble” (Schtager 1979:30). But most came simply looking for work. In his 1937 novel Di yidn fun belt/i1 (The Jews of Belleville), the typesetter and writer Benjamin Schlewin described the scene that took place: Every morning, when the international train arrived at the smoky platform of the Gare du Nord, successful Jewish bosses waited by the crowded entrance for the newcomers, the Jewish youngsters from Poland, in their worn-out, creased suits cut in a long—forgotten style, unshaven and with an uneasy look. All of these frightened young men were warmly welcomed, tugged by the sleeve, given a friendly slap on the back and asked: ”What’s your métier, young man? . . . I mean, that is, well, what’s your trade?“

Those who came under the immediate patronage of an earlier immigrant in this fashion were set up in gloomy rooms in cheap Belleville hotels. Some of the more fortunate immigrants found a relative or a friendly landsman with whom they could board at the beginning. “When I arrived in Paris in 1931," Szulim Brycman told me, “my brother lived with his wife and children in one room with a tiny kitchen. I had managed to get a visa to stay in France for one year, but he himself didn’t yet have his papers altogether in order. Those who had arrived without visas sometimes had to work years to raise enough money to pay a makher, someone who had the necessary connections with the police to arrange these things. “That’s how people lived in those days, very poorly: a room with a kitchen. My brother had bought a machine from a Jewish immigrant called Moyshe the Mechanic, whom he paid in weekly installments. I stayed with my brother a short time, and then I shared a hotel room with [the Yiddish poet] Moshe Waldman near the rue de Belleville. The first night, we were attacked by bedbugs. Then we moved to another hotel—there were three or four of us in a room. Eventually that became too expensive, and Moshe found us a room on the fourth or fifth floor in a building on the Boulevard Rochechouart. Before we could move in, we had to burn out the bedbugs. “In general, people didn’t have hot water in their rooms; if there was cold running water, they were doing well. The toilets were out in the courtyard or on the steps. Once a week we took a shower, or a bath if we could afford it, at the municipal facilities. “Finally my brother managed to get a bigger apartment; I moved in with him, and brought my girlfriend to Paris from Poland. We paid rent every three months, and we had to pay promptly. When immigrants were late with the rent, their ‘sin’ was often inscribed on their dossier on file with the police. We began taking in piccework—Jews worked a lot with rubberized raincoats in those days.” Since so many of the immigrants worked at home for such long hours, there was often no Clear differentiation between earning a living and raising a family.

52

Polish Jews in Paris

A son of immigrants whom I spoke to at his comfortable apartment on the Boulevard Magenta recalls the way piecework came to dominate the family's life: “Maybe that‘s why I never wanted to have the same job; I lived with my father‘s tailoring throughout my childhood. There were thread and cloth all over the apartment; the work came first, and room for living was wherever you could find it. And the other thing was that my father got into the habit of working constantly. If the workshop had been even ten minutes away he would have left for supper and that would have been it. But this way he‘d say to himself, ‘Well, what should I do now?’ And he got into the habit of going back to work: ‘1'” press the hems on some pants, get a head start on tomorrow.’ ” Sometimes working at home affected immigrants’ relations with their neighbors. Motl Singer, the man who told me that he had wanted “to get as far away from Poland as possible," also said that the French weren’t overly fond of the Jews. He added, with a tone of voice that implied he was sharing privileged information, that the Jews were partly responsible for creating anti-Semitism. He explained that the immigrant tailors worked at their machines until late at night and thus disturbed the neighbors. The French came home at six from a day’s work, and they didn’t have any quiet. He, for instance, had lived on the second floor of a house on the rue de Belleville and the landlord had said he could work until ten. A female teacher on the third floor complained about the noise and sent letters to the prefecture complaining that his machine made her furniture rattle. A policeman came and placed a coin on a table in his apartment. “If the coin moves, you’ll have to stop working at night. If it remains still, she can write as many letters as she wants, and you can go on working.” The coin didn‘t move, but Singer thinks in retrospect that she was justified and that the proper thing for him to have done was to have moved to a place where his work wouldn’t have disturbed people: “After all, here they are, nativeborn Frenchmen, and here we come, foreigners, asking them for the right to stay here; we weren’t invited to come." Bolek Sharfstein, who came to Paris after World War II, retains memories of the bigotry of French co-workers that are especially bitter since they come from a time after he had already “been through Hell”: “You take a man who’s seen Death before his eyes a thousand times, and you put him in front of a machine in a room where everybody laughs at him because he doesn’t know the language. I remember there was a song at the time, ‘Ca se fait pas . . . ’ I didn’t understand the words, because it’s not the same in a song as if the words were written out. I asked one of the Frenchwomen what ‘gasefaitpas’ meant. She said, ‘When your nose is dripping and you wipe it with your sleeve, they say, “Ca se fait pas.’ ” That was the example she had to

choose?”

Just as the Arab, Asian, black African, and other migrant workers seem dis— reputable to many native Frenchmen today, the Jewish immigrants must have appeared so simply because they were different. Perhaps I should have interviewed someone who had seen all these strangers coming to live in the neighborhoods around the Place de la République and Métro Belleville. Instead, I

From the Pale to the City

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53

have an image given me by one daughter of immigrants, whose parents regularly took in newly-arrived landslayt, friends of friends, and sometimes people they hardly knew. “They came with their baggage tied up in rope. They brought kosher sausage all the way from Poland—I guess they thought there‘d be nothing to eat in Paris—and for some reason I’ve never understood, they invariably brought bunches of bananas.” Most of the East European Jews who arrived in Paris somehow found work and shelter, struggled for years, and eventually moved into their own apartments and got their papers in order. Many, however, were still living illegally when the Nazis invaded France; and some who came to Paris found it impossible to stay. Elissa’s grandfather came to France from Galicia in 1933, looking for work. In 1984 he still remembered the essential sentences of French he learned: “je suis un casquetier; je cherche du travail" (I’m a capmaker; I‘m looking for work). And he remembered the unvarying response: “je n’ai pas de travail pour vous, monsieur" (I have no work for you, sir). Elissa’s grandfather went back to Poland and managed to come to America in 1936 through an arranged marriage. But the author of the article on the Paris Chelm Iandsmanshaft in the memorial book for that city mourns: Unfortunately it must be said that the immigrant often found it so difficult to grow accustomed to his new surroundings that he took his walking stick in hand and returned to Chelm. And how many such Jews of Chelm who had already come to Paris, grown discouraged and returned home eventually found an end to

to

their wanderings

at

Trawnik, Majdanek, or Auschwitz? (Orlean 1969:710)

managed to hold on in France also would need luck and courage Those who How they—and those who would join them after the catastrophe—

survive.

made it through the occupation is the subject of the

next

chapter.

IV MAYBE THERE IS A GOD

The experience of the Jews in France during World War II, under both Vichy administration and Nazi occupation, is tremendously complex and remains to be synthesized. (For some of the elements that have recently been brought out, see A. Wieviorka 1986; Richard Cohen 1987; Adler 1987; Wellers, Kaspi, and Klarsfeld 1981; Rajsfus 1980, 1985.) Some 75,000 Jews were deported to the east by the end of 1944, and a scant few thousand of them survived (Klarsfeld 1983; Paxton and Marrus 1981:343—344). The majority of these victims were immigrants; they were the most easily identified and rounded up, and they constituted a majority of the French Jewish population by the 19305. Of the many thousands who survived in France, a few hid throughout the war within Paris, some went underground and participated in the Resistance, some (in» cluding thousands of children) were placed with sympathetic non-Jewish families, some survived as French Army prisoners of war in German camps, and a great many fled to the south, where they were relatively safe until the “Unoccupied Zone” was abolished later in the war. Two points in particular stand out from Paxton and Marrus’s 1981 study Vichy France and the jews. The first is that the French attitude toward foreigners—a willingness to accept them, as long as they are willing to assimilate— has as a corollary a sharp intolerance of cultural differences in times of crisis (367). The second concerns the participation of the collaborationist Vichy government, first in the elimination of Jews from their place in French society, and eventually in the “Final Solution.” These efforts rivaled and sometimes anticipated Nazi policy. Paxton and Marrus reach this damning conclusion: During the summer and autumn of 1942, when the French police and administration lent their hands to the task, some 42,500 Jews were deported from France to their deaths—perhaps one third of them at Vichy’s initiative from the Unoccupied Zone. When Vichy began to drag its feet in 1943, the number de— clined to 22,000 sent east in the year 1943. After the last use of French police in January 1944, and despite feverish last-minute German efforts, the number deported up to August 1944 was 12,500. One can only speculate on how many fewer would have perished if the Nazis had been obliged to identify, arrest, and transport without any French assistance every Jew in France whom they wanted to slaughter. (372)

54

Maybe There Is a God

g,

But even Paxton and Marrus's extraordinary study really about the ma» chinery of Vichy, not about the Jews caught in its works. If a comprehensive history of the Jews in France during World War II is ever ertttn, its major themes will be deception, disguise, chance, martyrdom, escape, and resistance. Here it would be premature to attempt to generalize those categories of situation and response. The accounts sketched below should suggest the mixed heritage of mistrust and comradeship with the French people and others, pride in Jewish tenacity, and a sense of the eternal insecurity of Jewish life in Europe that remained with the survivors. For those who are members of the Parisian Yiddish community today, the history of the war is not only “the history of the Jews in France during World War II.” Many of these people were still in Poland when the war broke out. Their stories, too—whether of survival in concentration camps, resistance and hiding in the woods, or suffering and struggling as refugees in the Soviet Union—are part of the community's heritage today. Nor are memories of the war years confined to the years between 1939 and 1945. Even before the war began for these immigrants, the first battle came. Miriam Silverstein told me about her comrade, the Lubliner Yekhezkl Honikshtayn, who volunteered to fight in Spain and crossed the border illegally. Since it was too dangerous to send letters directly to his fiancée, he mailed them to Miriam, who then passed them on. He fell in the last fighting, in September 1938, and, as Miriam explained, he was given a funeral which was turned into a symbolic memorial for all those who had died fighting for the Republic. She concluded: “His father—a religious Jew with a beard—said, ‘My son died a martyr.’ ” The Yiddish phrase generally translated as “martyrdom” literally means “sanctification of [God’s] name.” When Miriam cited these words in this context they bore a double weight. First, by using a term designating the greatest sacrifice a Jew can make, she meant to emphasize the holiness of her comrade’s memory so that I, too, would come to treasure it. Second, if I understood her correctly, she was claiming that the dead man’s father understood his son‘s defense of the republican cause as being also a defense of the Jewish people. Miriam was reminding me that the Jewish leftists, in their struggle against Fascism, had earned their rightful place in the ancient catalogue of the martyrs and heroes of the Jewish people. For Miriam, the Jewish fighters in Spain not only continued the tradition of Jewish martyrdom, but prefigured and inspired those who fought in the Re— sistance during the war. As prophets who volunteered for the deadly struggle against Fascism, they serve in retrospect to validate a vision of the revolutionary left and they help protect that movement’s reputation against charges of failure to prevent Fascism. While we looked through the Lublin memorial book together, she pointed out an article on LublinJews in the French Resistance. There was a description of a clandestine apartment on the rue Lacépéde in the Fifth Arrondissement, where explosives had been made. “One of the group, Salek Bot, played fiddle as a cover while the others worked on the explosives. . . . Is

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Polish Jews in Paris

There was an accidental explosion, and he was killed, together with his comrade Hirsh Tsimerman." She went on to point out an entry on Elye Volakh, an

eighteen-year—old Communist immigrant from Lublin who had corresponded with the aging Romain Rolland. Rolland’s letters, reproduced and translated in the book, contain words of caution and encouragement: “Be careful in your correspondence. . . . You have the good fortune of a long future before you.” Volakh died on July 27, 1942, in the prison at Fresncs; he is buried at l’ereLachaise. Before passing on to the next article, Miriam reminded me, as if invoking a formula: “He was the son of a tailor, a member of theJewish masses, the salt of the earth. . . . ” Resistance always appears in retrospect as the epitome of conscious, intentional moral behavior, whatever may have been the social or political circumstances surrounding the taking up of arms. Stories of apparently random survival often convey an aura of predestination or foreknowledge similar to the stories of the volunteers in Spain (cf. Eliach 1982). Details that would be trivial at other times became so fateful that it seems they could not be simply coincidental, as I learned when I spoke to the daughter of Mme. Rodgold. Mother and daughter still live in the modest apartment on the rue de la Butte aux Cailles in the Thirteenth Arrondissement where they lived at the time the war broke out. Small as the apartment is, Mme. Rodgold fille explained to me, the living room had been a separate apartment before the war. Their family of seven lived in two rooms and a kitchen, and the Frenchwoman below constantly complained of the noise made by the children running around over her head. In 1939, her father was planning to move the family into an apartment where each of the children would have had his or her own room and where there would have been a garden in the back for the children to play. Perhaps he had even put down a deposit, but their plans to move were disrupted by the outbreak of the war, and as the younger Mme. Rodgold explained, this may have saved their lives: At six in the morning of July 16, 1942—the day of the massive roundup of Jews who were to be interned at the stadium called the Vélodrome and then deported—two policemen knocked on the door of the Rodgolds home. Seeing the five children, they looked at each other and said, “Pack your things; we’ll come back later,” thus giving the family a chance to leave the apartment. Had they moved to the new neighborhood, Mme. Rodgold reflects, they might not have encountered such lenient policemen. The children were taken in by the same downstairs neighbor who had complained of their noise. “And then I went out all over the neighborhood to warn my uncles and my cousins that there was a roundup. Imagine, a little girl wearing her Jewish star, out on the streets at six o’clock on the morning of a roundup!" One of us remarked on the element of apparent chance in the immigrantsY fate under the Nazis. I said that was one thing that made my work so difficult—— anthropology is supposed to be a study of norms, not irrational, unpredictable circumstances! She asserted her belief that God is involved with the Jewish people in a special way: “When Jews move from one country to another, or

d’Hiver:

Maybe There Is a God even from one apartment to

57

another, it's more weighty than when other peoples

make the same move. And even for the Holocaust there has to be some reason. We don‘t know what it is; perhaps it‘s the price we had to pay for the State of Israel. Maybe we’ll understand better in a few generations." This was said by a woman who earns her living as a freelance photographer, whose friends are gallery owners and such. Yet she refers to God‘s higher designs rather than absurdity when confronted by the limits of possible understanding of her personal history. This is unusual in the immigrant community, but it seems consistent with the Rodgolds’ intense family unity, their pride in the religiosity of their immediate ancestors (whose portraits hang on the walls of their home), and their recording, through various media, of their community’s history. What they appear to have retained from the tradition is a search for meaning, both in the minutiae of daily life and in contingent external history. This, in turn, has helped rescue them from the disengagement with history suffered by many immigrant survivors. Another woman’s story reiterates the combination of apparent coincidence with some shared element of humanity as a critical factor in survival. In Mme. Rodgold’s case, it was the policemen’s familiarity with her neighborhood; in the case of Sofia from Lublin, it was knowledge of Yiddish. Like many of the immigrants from Lublin, Sofia attended a Jewish gymnasium where instruction was in Polish; even now she prefers to speak in Polish at social gatherings. When we met her at the Lublin Purim celebration, she told us that it was the thirtieth anniversary of Stalin’s death: March 6, 1953. She reminisced that during the six years she had spent under Stalin, as a Polish refugee, each day had felt like a year in itself. “The years since then have flown by . . . When life is good, it goes quickly; well, it hasn’t been all joy since then, but by compar...” Sofia, one of the countless Polish Jews who fled to the Soviet Union when the Germans invaded, was separated from her husband there and ended up hauling logs in a work camp on the banks of the Volga. One day she wanted to send a telegram to her husband, telling him where she was, but she was helpless because everyone at the telegraph station was a Tatar. Suddenly she heard a voice saying, “Maybe you speak Yiddish?” in a Russian Yiddish accent. The man who’d spoken helped her send the telegram. A few days later, an old lung inflammation of hers acted up again; she couldn’t eat for three days. She was in a barrack with non-Jewish Polish prostitutes, who had men come to their beds. She had a little bit of a liqueur because she thought it would do her good, but the next morning she was too sick to get out of bed and go to work. The women in the bunk told the overseer that she hadn’t gotten up because she was drunk. She told him she was sick, and asked to see a doctor, but he said, “There are no doctors here." She insisted that she had a fever, but he said he had no thermometer. He wrote down that she was malingering, for which she would have been punished by being sent to a gulag. As she recalls, she was at the end of her strength; she no longer had the will to resist her fate. Shortly afterward, she saw the man who had helped ison

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her with the telegram coming into her barrack. He had seen her listed as a drunken malingeret and, remembering her, doubted that the report was accurate. He confirmed that she was ill, and she avoided being sent to the gulag. “So," she says, “knowing Yiddish saved my life." The man who helped her, being Russian, might not have been able to communicate with her in Polish, which is her first language. Thus, while both were Jewish, Sofia’s story is explicitly one of sympathy and communication across the boundaries of nationality, just as is Mme. Rodgold‘s. In Sofia‘s case, though, the theological moral is absent. In the story of Mme. Orlow—the wife of Clianoch, the Communist butcher from Yanov—all sense of Providence seems to drop out: what is remarkable is the presence of righteous Gentiles, such as the German officer stationed in her hometovm of Grzymalow in Galicia. When the Soviet divisions had retreated through the town, they had warned the Jews to flee, saying that the Germans were intent on massacre. But that’s what one expects to hear from retreating soldiers, and the Jews weren’t willing to leave their homes. Mme. Orlow’s family lived in a side street with some ten Jewish families and a few Ukrainian families as well. When the Germans occupied the town and began looking for Jews, the Ukrainians stood at the end of the street and waved the Germans away: “Nicbt juden!” Shortly afterward, a German officer came and moved into one of the Ukrainian homes, but he couldn’t communicate with the housewife: “He asked her for butter and she gave him salt; he asked her for salt, and she handed him the butter. He moved into a Jewish home on the same street. He stayed there for three months, making sure that the Jews on the street weren’t harmed and that they got their full rations of bread each day. He didn’t believe in the war; he said that he would rather have been at home with his wife and children.” At the end of the three months, he was taken away. Chanoch assumes he was shot as a deserter, but Mme. Orlow suspects he was sent to the front. Many of the Polish Jews now living in Paris survived the war by fleeing to the Soviet Union. One of these was Gitele Edelstein, whose youth is described in an earlier chapter. In 1939, shortly before the outbreak of the war, Gitele was threatened with a prison sentence in a major crackdown on Communist activists and had to escape from Lublin to Warsaw and go underground. After the Nazi invasion, she fled with two of her brothers to the Soviet Union via Lwow, although she had shrapnel in her shoulder. They eventually stayed in the Western Ukraine. There she met a high Communist Party official, a Jew, who was administering the entire region; they got married, and she had a son. When their child was three months old, the Germans attacked the Soviet Union. Her husband was called up to Moscow, sent to the front, and killed in the defense of the Don Basin. Around that time as well, General Sikorsky arranged for the transfer back to Central Asia of those Polish refugees who had refused Soviet citizenship on entering the Soviet Union, and subsequently been sent to Siberia. Although as the widow of a Party official Gitele had been invited to come to Moscow, she preferred to stay with her brothers and the rest of the

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Polish Jews in Tashkent. There, she and her brothers built a little house, and they set up bunk beds; whenever they saw a homeless Jew wandering in the street, they went out, carried him in bodily if necessary, and gave him something to eat.

Being in the Soviet Union was a shock to Gitele’s Communist faith. “For the first time, I saw what it was really like. Marx taught that social conditions shape consciousness. That’s true, but it's not all there is to it: there’s also reality, the situation in the world, the things one sees and the people one speaks to. In 1937, with the first great slaughters, when Zinoviev, Kamenev, and the others were shot as traitors, I believed and said that they were indeed traitors to Communism. But when I got to the Soviet Union, I began talking to some of the people who had managed to escape the purges. . . Wherever I go, I talk to people, and I try to find out as much as I can. Very quickly, I lost—not my illusions, but Irealized there was more to the situation than described in Marx‘s ideology. Nowadays, what remains in my head out of all that Marxist theory I studied so diligently? Seven years Iwas in the Soviet Union, and four months into my stay I was completely depressed; I couldn’t do a thing. I found out what was going on—I went to some of those meetings with my husband. “Finally, after the war ended, we were expatriated back to Poland. l remember, there were six hundred Jews in that little Central Asian town—so many had died over the years—and there were seventy people in the railroad car, and everybody wanted to be together with me and my two brothers. There we were on the train, we whom everybody looked up to, and all of a sudden I burst out crying. My brother asked me what was wrong. “I said to him, ‘Look at those men, standing by the wall of the railroad car, facing east, saying the evening prayers. They still have something! They‘re still able to pray to God, to ask him to help them rebuild their lives. What do I have leftP—I’m just a wanderer.’ 1 had given my parents so much agony, and my mother died of a heart attack, aged only 56, when the Germans came looking for her. Ihad refused for years to share my parents’ Jewishness; I had refused to sit at the table with them on Sabbath or Jewish holidays, insisting that re— ligion blackened the brains of the proletariat. My father had pleaded with me, ‘Gitele, why don’t you ever pick up the Bible and look into it? Why do you only look at those Marxist books?’ “One of my brothers—this one was a Bundist—said to me, ‘Gitele, don‘t give up. You’re not irrevocably lost. Once you were in Poalei Tsion; that‘s a socialist organization, but it’s devoted to the Jewish people. Now, the people needs to be rebuilt. That’s something you can devote yourself to!‘ “We arrived back in Lublin. Out of some forty-odd thousand Jews, forty had survived in the city itself. Others began coming back from the surrounding towns and villages. Leybl Lerer, who had been a Bundist trade—union leader in Lublin before the war, gave a speech saying that we should try to re-create a Jewish communal life. My brother Meir, the younger one, who‘s also a Poalei Tsionist, took trips into the surrounding countryside and gathered children who had been hidden with Polish Gentiles. I started looking for some sort of Poalei-

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Polish Jews in Paris

Tsion organization, but there was hardly anything at that time. Leybl Lerer himself left Lublin for Paris two months later. My oldest brother went to Palestine; he was killed in an auto accident during the War for Independence. While I was in Lublin, I met my present husband. He had a brother-in-law in Paris,

and that‘s why we came here.” That these last three stories took place in Eastern Europe, and are told by people who emigrated to France only after the war, surely does not mean that they are external to the history of the mostly prewar emigration. For such experiences helped shaped the attitude toward the Jewish community and toward global politics that the refugees were to bring with them. Unless Sofia, whom we met at a landsmansbaft meeting, told her story purely for our benefit (since we spoke to her in Yiddish rather than Polish), it is apparent that her wartime experiences left her more eager to associate with Yiddish-speaking Jewish organizations, rather than with Polish—speaking non-Jews. On the other hand, the recollection of so many encounters with helpful non—Jews probably helps sustain Mme. Orlow’s faith in Communist universalism, while so many of her former comrades have suffered disillusionment. Wherever they lived at the outbreak of World War II, all of these people soon enough became “displaced persons.” Thousands ofJews, immigrant and nativeborn, fled into the southern, unoccupied zone of France during the early years of the war. This was perhaps the most common form of survival, for even though Vichy cooperated enthusiastically with German deportation plans, and the Germans directly controlled the south as well after 1943, they were unable to scour the countryside efficiently enough to find every Jew who had somehow established herself there. The complexity of relations with fellow Jews and various categories of non— Jews during the war is exemplified in several anecdotes recounted to me by Szulim Brycman. Shortly after the Nazi capture of Paris, Brycman and his brother managed to get to the city of Pan, in southwestern France. A group of relatively well-to-do Alsatian Jewish refugees were already established there, and he managed to find a sewing machine and go to work for one of them. Although there was an established Jewish relief agency as well, he avoided registering. He cites the subsequent forced dispersion throughout the surrounding countryside of those who had registered as evidence of his prudence in not doing so. Eventually, Brycman became part of the Zionist resistance network that was set up in cooperation with the Fédération, which had meanwhile moved its headquarters to Lyon. He was sent to Grenoble, where he and his wife found lodging in a nearby village. He and his wife placed their son in a convent. “II sem un beau petit prém: (He’ll make a fine little ptiest),” he remembers the nun saying as she welcomed his son. He remembers his son’s reply, as well: “Je serai un chef de gare (I’m going to be a station-master)!” Some time later, Brycman received a message that the Mother Superior

Maybe There Is a God

6]

wanted to see him. Although the trip was dangerous, he got on his bicycle and went to see her. She explained that his son was an intelligent child, and she asked his permission to make him a Catholic. “I answered that since he was still a minor, I had no right to determine the child‘s religion. When he’s old enough, he can decide for himself. Meanwhile, since he was born a Jew, let him

remain a Jew. “She expressed her disappointment: ‘I don’t want to force anyone; but you know, for bringing souls into the fold we earn ourselves a place in Paradise.’ “I told her that if she wanted, I would send a messenger the next day to pick up my son and remove him from the convent. She said they would keep my son there anyway, and he remained safely in the convent until the Liberation." By the time Brycman arrived in the southern city of Grenoble, in 1943, the rural police were already part of the Resistance. He and his wife were thus once warned of an imminent raid, and they managed to flee into the hills in time to avoid being caught. I asked Brycman directly what the villagers had thought of him as a Jew: “We didn’t hide the fact that we were Jewish. But they didn’t seem to believe it. They’d never seen Jews before, and, after all, we didn‘t have horns. They probably thought we were Spanish.” Brycman’s entire account of survival in the south is extremely matter-of-fact. He does not insist that he avoided registration with the Jewish aid group in Pau because of pride, or because of prescience. The story of the nun’s desire to convert his son is not told as a moral dilemma between Jewish integrity and his child’s physical safety. Rather his response was consistent for a man who had been a loyal, enlightened, internationalist Jew in the 1930s. Likewise, there is no romanticization of the peasants. In his view their ignorance, more likely than their humaneness, kept him and his wife from being molested as Jews. Some sympathetic non—Jewish contacts, some subterfuge, and some good fortune enter into the accounts of most who survived in the north as well. One evening at the end of our stay in Paris, we had dinner at the home of three sisters who grew up in Menilmontant near Belleville, daughters of a couple who had arrived in Paris shortly before the First World War. The eldest, Simone Dykmann,speaks excellent English, and we had suggested her as an interviewee for a National Public Radio program on the Jews of Paris. Since we had originally been introduced to them as friends rather than “informants," we had never asked the Dykmanns how they had survived the war, but after listening to the tape of the program, Simone told us the following story. She, her sisters and parents were all French citizens and were therefore not among the earliest targets of random deportation. They were allowed to work, although they were not allowed to deal with the public. Their father, a tailor, had closed up the display windows of his shop, and went to work for a nonJewish tailor. Someone must have denounced him: In February 1944, two policemen came to arrest him at his shop. The non-Jewish shopkeeper next door, who happened to witness the scene, protested that Max Dykmann had never

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broken any rules, that there policemen consulted with each other and called their superior, who replied: “I don’t want to heat about it. The order to arrest him came from the Germans.” Simone came downstairs from the apartment while this was going on, and her father managed to wave her away. The three sisters found different places to hide. But they never found out who had denounced their father. Obviously the denunciation had been sent to the Germans, and, furthermore, it was in the name “D. Max,” the name on the shop window, rather than “Max Dykmann." Simone suspects an old friend with whom she had had a falling-out. What I wonder is how such a denunciation leaves these three women—who are so deeply French and yet so proudly Jewish—feeling about living in France. It seems important that most of the cases of solidarity (such as Mme. Rodgold’s story) involved face-to-face relations, whereas the denunciations were anonymous. As far as Ican tell, it is also true that each tale of adventitious betrayal can be matched with a tale of disinterested self—sacrifice. Survivors were marked in different ways by their experience. Some of the “souvenirs” are obvious and physical. A poor man whom we met on Rosh Hashanah took out his false palate at dinner to show us how he had been mutilated: He had fought with the Maquis guerrillas of the Resistance, been captured by the collaborationist police and tortured. Yet the loss of his parents seemed to mark him even more deeply, as he says with a sigh: “Things would have been different for me if my parents were alive.” Forty years later, he is still an orphan. Though Walter Benjamin—one Jew in France who did not survive—wrote that it is everyday “courage, humor, cunning and fortitude” that are the greatest heritage of the oppressed (Benjamin 1969:255), individual heroism has its place in the legacies of the Jewish and French Resistance. Obtaining recognition for their deeds was of vital importance to many Jewish survivors, part of their reassertion of their right to live in France as free French citizens. Beinish Davidow, another man whose wartime suffering left evident physical marks, is unusual in his devotion to the memory not only ofJewish heroism but of suffering as well. The first time Imet him he asked whether I had seen him on television the previous July, when he wore his concentration camp uniform at a program commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the roundup at the Vélodrome d’Hiver. When Ilater interviewed him at his home, he told me about an episode which he characterized as “very interesting”: “This is howIsaved several young men. It was automatic! I saw them shooting my comrades, I opened the door and they came in.” Then he read to me the following affidavit, written by one of those comrades, now living in America: was no reason to arrest him. The two

I, the undersigned Morris Kornberg, certify the accuracy of the following dec— laration. . . . On April 27, 1945, it was suddenly announced to us, a convoy of 3,000 political deportees [that the Germans had surrendered and we were free]. We set off across the fields, but unfortunately, the announcement was false, and we were forced to return to the railroad car from which we had just ex-

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ited. . . . Precisely our group, comprising some thirty persons, were tracked down by the machine-guns of the savage S. S., and several of us had been mortally wounded. Suddenly, a door opened; we rushed inside, and thus remained alive. . . . Beinish Davidow’s act of bravery permitted more than twenty comrades to escape the bullets fired by the Boches. . . .

After telling me this and other stories, showing me the memorial book for his town of Noworadomsk, and describing his time of despair on his return to Paris until he eventually found some companionship in the Jewish People’s Chorus and then met his Algerian-born second wife, Mr. Davidow turned to me: “What do you think—is it worth writing this all down? Do you think people would be interested?” He is still not quite sure what he is to do with his

memories. Leon Alberstein is another of the few thousand Jewish deportees from France who returned alive. His memory is reflected in a painting that stands on the wall of his apartment, on a boulevard between Bastille and République. It is an everyday concentration camp scene in Dachau. On the left are two barracks, numbered (if I remember correctly) 15 and 27; in the foreground, a figure wearing an S. S. uniform, with the features of the face left vague; several figures in prisoners’ uniforms scattered on the yard behind him; and in the background, a Crematorium. Strokes of red are mixed in with the yellow of the yard. “That’s to show the ground, which was stained red with blood. That‘s a picture of Dachau, of the block where I was a prisoner. I kept this painting stored away for years, but now . . . ” Alberstein not only grew up in a shtetl, he was also raised in a strict Orthodox home and studied with religious instructors until his mid-teens. Although he is no longer observant, he says that he has retained from his father’s heritage ahaua, a pious love for humanity and the world. His view of the world today is shaped by his childhood, along with the skepticism born of his wartime experience on “a different planet, where everything was materialism" (cf. Rousset 1947).

“I have to tell you: Our entire life is a coincidence. I had a gun pointed at the back of my head once. I was caught in a part of the camp where prisoners weren’t allowed. An S.S. man saw me, ordered me to turn around and face the wall, pointed his gun and said, ‘Let me hear you beg.’ “I replied to him, ‘Wie Sie wollen’—do what you want to. I don’t know to this day what made him put his rifle down. A French doctor who helped me after the war asked me once how it was that I had survived. I replied, ‘Miracles do happen. And maybe there is a God.’ But I still live with the fear of those four years.” Alberstein’s account of the liberation of the camp also contains bitter ironies. In April 1945, the Germans had moved Alberstein and others from Dachau to a camp at Allach, between Dachau and Munich. There were antiaircraft installations there, and the Allies mistakenly bombed a ward full of sick people, killing three hundred. By 10:00 a.m. on April 30, there were no Germans left

Polish Jews in Paris

3‘

5‘: camp. and flags of all nations which the prisoners belonged had been .:;-—.-\merican.Jewish, Greek, and so forth. Soon a detachment of American xidx‘rs .lrriwd. Among them was a Jew from Brooklyn, to whom Alberstein svke in Yiddish. “He was from Brooklyn, and the first thing he did, after mug the piles of skeletons, was to hand me paper and pencil and tell me to “Tire down everything that I had seen there.” The Americans showered the camp with chocolate and canned meat, and many people died. “I told them to be careful, to start slowly, but people just got-get! themselves. . . . “ Ostensibly because of the risk of epidemics, the liberated prisoners weren‘t allowed out of the camps. Alberstein and a fellow prisoner named Wasserman, a landsman of Alberstein’s from Paris, decided to escape. They did so one night, followed by shots from the guards. “It was a bitter night. and a heavy rain was pouring. We slept in a hayloft. In the morning I went up to the peasant’s door and demanded something to eat. He claimed there wasn’t anything. Ipointed to the two fat cows in his barn and demanded, ‘And they don‘t give any milk,Isuppose?’ Then he gave us a proper breakfast.” “Eventually we got to Constanz, where we spent fifteen days recuperating. Then. dirough a relief agency, we were given first-class train tickets back to Paris. We couldn't sit down on the soft seats, after four years of lying on the hard gound: instead we took turns lying on the floor of the car. Even today I have a hard time sitting down. Four years leave their mark.” (Alberstein doesn’t sit still; he moves with precipitation, as though he had perpetually just remembered something. ; “The train pulled in at the Gare de Lyon. I remember there was a sad old woman there, who was waiting for her children but knew already that they probably wouldn’t come back.Iasked her if there were a few Jews left in Paris, and she replied, ‘Yes, there are a few Jews left in Paris.’ Iknew by then that I wouldn’t find my family . . . "I returned to my old apartment, on the Boulevard Beaumarchais, and rang the doorbell. A woman in her early twenties came to the door. I said to her: ‘I am the former tenant.’ “She replied: ‘I don’t know you, mister.’ “To which I said, ‘Yes, but the apartment belongs to me.’ ” Alberstein lived with a friend who had an apartment next door for several weeks, living on money given him by the manufacturer Bidermann, for whom he had worked during the war. Eventually, with the help of the policeman husband of a woman who had worked for him before the war, with a key to the back door of the apartment which the concierge had given him, and bearing a legal notice that he had the right to repossess the apartment, he moved back in on August 21,1945. Yet he could not regain his family, nor a great deal of his own emotional capacity, which he had lost during the war. “When I came out of the camp, I couldn’t laugh or cry for ten years. Ididn’t want to go to funerals, and I didn’t want to go to weddings. I'd listen to the Communists making speeches, and I’d tr

x‘:

to

Maybe There Is a God

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say, ‘Leave me alone, let me go my own way, maybe I’ll be able work it for myself.‘ One day I saw an old woman with a pony cart full of old clothes. The pony collapsed in the street, and soon a sympathetic crowd had gathered, caressing it and trying to help it stand up. Ithought to myself, ‘What hypocrites! These same people didn’t think of bringing a glass of water to the children crowded into the Vél d‘I-Iiv." Alberstein thus reported, almost forty years later, his fierce rejection of conventional pity and all forms of collective participation in the aftermath of the war. By identifying as hypocrisy the discrepancy between people’s humane response to the everyday troubles of living beings around them, and their failure to risk personal danger to help a persecuted minority in a time of crisis, AIberstein maintained a sense of the distinctive quality of his personal suffering and the loss of his immediate family. Thus, he avoided trivialization of his experience, at the same time avoiding the unbearable threat of allowing his heart to break every time he was in the company of others expressing hope or to

out

sorrow. Yet on a pragmatic level, Alberstein and others were able to renew prewar contacts in their effort to become reestablished in Paris; his turning to a policeman is a remarkable example of this. The notorious role of the French police

in the effort to deport Jews is clear and has recently been given much publicity (Paxton and Marrus 1981; Klarsfeld 1983; du Plessix Gray 1983). Many stories I heard, however, mention police as having informally helped Jews after the war. Max Elbaum, an elderly retired businessman and Zionist activist who lives in the Marais, told me about a girl who had been placed with a non-Jewish concierge during the war. Her parents were both killed; after the war, the concierge kept the girl doing menial work, frightening her by saying that Hitler was going to return. Elbaum went to talk to a police officer about the situation. The policeman said: ”Do you still have your French army uniform? Put it on, go with three or four of your buddies, take the girl back, and I won’t say a

word.”

Max Elbaum used his army uniform to remind a petty concierge that, rather than coming on his mission as a hunted Jew, Elbaum was coming with the authority of the French state behind him. Beinish Davidow wears his concen« tration-camp uniform at commemorative ceremonies every year to remind children and the French of the suffering that was once permitted. And Eliezer Lokiec’s son Paul, who was still less than ten years old at the time, relates with a tone of discomfirure his wondering at the appearance of a relative who had just arrived in Paris after being liberated from a concentration camp: "I asked my father why he was wearing his pajamas." Children could be forgiven for not having understood. The incredulity of American relatives, however, was an insult that several immigrants complained to me about bitterly. I responded to one man’s description of working on the cleanup crew organized by the Nazis after the Warsaw Ghetto revolt by saying, “It's hard for us to imagine.” I was referring to my postwar generation, but he

Polish Jews in Paris

66

in a different way: Indeed, he said, the American Jews interpreted hadn‘t suffered the way those in Europe had. Perhaps it was because I am American that l was told stories such as the following: By Bolek Sharfstein, about a friend whose unclc had come to visit from America in 1953, and stayed for two weeks. The friend told his uncle about the ghettos and the concentration camps, and on the way to the airport asked his uncle whether he believed what he had been told. “The uncle replied, ‘I don‘t believe a word of it.’ " — By the last Polish Jewish baker remaining in Belleville, who always threw a few extra bagels into our bag: “I wrote to an uncle in America. He wrote back, asking how much a dollar was worth in France. I said, ‘A dollar is a dollar,’ and then be mailed me two. I sent them back.” The same man told us another uncle had sent him enough packages with various goods for him to sell and sun'ive. By a woman we met at the Israel Independence Day celebration of the Radom Society, who summed up her feelings about living in a post—Holocaust world in a few breathless paragraphs: “Sit down, I love young people. You speak some Yiddish? You’re from Israel? America? That’s wonderful. You didn’t live through what we lived through. Not just because you’re too young— all the Jews from America were spared what we lived through. My husband was a prisoner of war with the Germans for five years. I was in the concentration camp for five years. Believe me, there’s a saying in Polish, ‘the body is closer than the shirt.’ If you didn’t live through it, you can’t understand what it was. “1945, I got to France. I had lost my parents and my two sisters. I had one aunt surviving, in America. Iwrote and asked her to send me a nightgown. sent back such rags. . . . Iwrote to her, ‘Listen, I’m from Warsaw, I’m a big City girl. I just got out of the camp, it’s true, but I can’t wear these tags. ” “She wrote back, ‘You‘re a pretty girl, why don’t you get married?’ Ihad the Joint [the American Joint Distribution Committee] send her a letter, asking her if she’d guarantee their support of me. They told me she wasn’t willing to support me. “Another friend of mine wrote to a relative in America, telling her about the camps and the ghettos and the slaughters. Her relative wrote back, ‘Listen, we suffered too. All through the war we had to eat tinned meat.’ They didn’t understand, because they didn’t feel it themselves. “Now I’ve got plenty of clothes, more than I need, and nice stuff too. Who am I going to give my extra clothes away to? The Jews don’t need it, they make it themselves. The French have all the clothes they need. The Poles need it, but Iwouldn’t dream of sending my clothes to the people who killed the Jews. “Sure it’s important that young people know about the past, about the H01ocaust. Young Israelis go to Germany, and they come back saying, ‘The Getmans are so polite, so nice.’ Do you know what the word nekome means?— revenge! I wish a volcano would come like the one that exploded in Italy, to come and flow all over Germany, to consume all the Germans in the fire, just my comment

—

——

She

Maybe There Is a God

67

like the Jews were burned in fire. They talk about reparations, but what good is their money? “This one up at the podium, the one with the black hair, you see him arguing with my husband? Whenever there’s a meeting, he and my husband argue. He’s a Communist. How could a Jew be a Communist, after what Stalin did? The Jewish Communists are bad people, criminals. And he’s proud of it! He says, ‘I’m a Stalinist. Stalin saved my life.’ “How old are you? Imagine, that‘s just how old I was when I got out of the camp. Now look at me . . . that’s how time passes!”

V GETTING BY

The monologue of the woman we

met at

the Radom Society meeting focused

great events and controversies of the European Jews. Only in passing on the she mention the rebuilding of everyday life: “The Jews make clothing.”

did

This reinforces the impression that these people see the history that they have witnessed as ending with the end of the Second World War: the rest is just going on with life. As if to prove the point by a written citation, one immigrant who entrusted me with a copy of his just—completed autobiography ended his account with the Liberation in 1944. This may have something to do with the postwar integration of the surviving immigrants. It was much easier for the immigrants to become naturalized after the war than it had been before. Michel Roblin (1948) estimated that of the Jews of Belleville, whereas 75 percent had been non-naturalized before the war, only 14 percent remained so a few years after the war’s end. Nicole Benoit-Lapierre (1984), in analyzing life stories of Jewish immigrants who came to Paris from the Polish industrial city of Plock, has also noticed the disappearance of dramatic first-person narrative in descriptions of postwar life. The entire period is often reduced to phrases such as “We got by as best we could," or “We went back to work and here we are.” She sees this failure of narrative as a symptom of the immigrant generation’s inability to relate the present to the earlier part of its life, on the other side of the generational abyss. The breakdown of the work of homo narrens (Myerhoff 1978:34—39), who everywhere tries to cast his life as a story with a unified plot, was strained to the limit by the catastrophe. One means of recuperating from the wartime assault on personal integrity was precisely to focus on the “banal” reinforcements of everyday family and work life, and this sometimes entailed the forceful repression of unassimilable memories. Documents from the immediate postwar period reflect this urge on a communal level. One example is a book called Tsuisbn Pletsl un Ayfel—Turem (Between Le Marais and the Eiffel Tower) by a certain A. A. Liberman, published in 1951 with the help of the cultural department of the Joint Distribution Committee in France. A collection of pieces which probably appeared originally in a newspaper, the book is remarkable precisely because the topics dealt with are so ordinary: a terrible heat wave one summer, Jews at the racetrack, a visit 68

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Yiddish writers on vacation in the woods of Fontainebleau. It is evidence of an effort just after the war to establish a normal life, among Frenchmen, filled

to

with newspaper-feuilleton ephemera. It probably also had a large audience of people who were just coming out of the displaced persons camps and, as often as not, were passing through France on their way to settle somewhere else. The sense of normalcy apparently reflected in these occasional pieces may thus be evidence of an attempt to induce a feeling of security, more than a reflection of that feeling.1 Refugees in France moved on for many reasons throughout the 19505. One major cause was fear of a new war—either between the two Germanies, or between the Soviet Union and the United States. The one dramatic piece in Tsw's/m Pletsl un Ayfel—Turem deals with a violent demonstration against German rearmament in which Jewish immigrant organiza— tions participated. The librarian of the Bibliotheque Medem, the main Yiddish library in Paris, run by the Bund, mentioned this fear as the cause of the departure of three hundred readers during the fifties. He may have exaggerated, since criticism of both the United States and the Soviet Union is consistent with the Bund’s Second International social democracy. Many among this generation had been guided by ideology at the beginning of the war. Especially for those in Poland, attitudes toward Communism affected the decision whether or not to flee to the Soviet Union.Z Their experiences during the war disillusioned some and confirmed the faith of others. The Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 caused uneasiness but did not shake the faith ofJewish Communists. As Adam Rayski, a leader of the Jewish Communists in France at the time and now a Parisian Jewish communal leader, has recently written: The idea according to which the war between Nazi Germany and the democratic powers was nothing but a war among imperialists quickly took hold of us without out immediately realizing all the implications of that formula. “The imperialist war” always elicited from the Communist molded by the Party the automatic reflex: “It’s not our war.” (1982:36) 1. I am not implying a conspiracy on the part of Yiddish journalists. But if I am correct, then this little book seems to be a dramatically situated symptom of what Jean Baudrillard calls “the precession of simulacra"—a process by which, he claims, manufactured images of reality ("maps") have come to take precedence over the real “territory whose shreds are slowly rotting, across the map" (1983:2). As a global condition, Baudrillard‘s thesis is doubtless overstated. Yet it seems a fit diagnosis of that part of the world which represses its imperialist and genocidal past and present. while promoting an economistic image of “the common good.“ It is no contradiction that those recently threatened by genocide would participate enthusiastically in this new, dehistoricized version of the everyday, and it is certainly revealing that this particular effort was sponsored by an American organization. See the “Postscript" below. 2. Moshe Zalcman recently published, at his own expense, a biographical pamphlet on the prewar Lublin Bund leader and city councilwoman Bela Shapiro (Zalcnian 1983). He explained to Elissa and me that one of his reasons for doing so was that most Bundist activists had feared for their lives should they go to the Soviet Union. Since, he told us, proportionately fewer of them survived the war than among either the Labor Zionists or the Communists, it was necessary to commemorate the Bundist heritage. I have not confirmed his observation on the proportion of victims from various parties.

Polish Jews in Paris

70

Nevertheless, Those militants who found themselves in contact with neighbors or workmates did not fail to show their difficulty and embarrassment when they attempted to justify the behavior of the Communists in the face of the German-Soviet pact. Their hearts weren't in it. (ibid.)

Yet doubts raised in the 19305 about the compatibility of Communist and

Jewish interests were overshadowed by the later history of the war.

What happened during World War II had a critical effect on the reconstruction of political life after the Nazis were defeated. For the Jewish people as a whole, the great drama of the postwar years is undoubtedly the establishment of the State of Israel. For the East European Jews of Paris, however, this was complicated by their massive support for the Soviet Union and the Communist Party in the immediate postwar years, followed by gradual disillusionment and a partial replacement of that faith by uncompromising support of the State of Israel. Although the Communist movement had been strong in the thirties (the Naye Presse was the only Yiddish daily entirely composed and edited in Paris during those years), the Communists gained even more sympathy and credibility during the war. First of all, whatever suffering Jews experienced in the Soviet Union during the war—Gitele Edelstein’s account shows that exposure to Soviet realities shocked and horrified many Jewish refugees—Stalin was credited with giving refuge to, and thus saving the lives of, some 200,000 Polish Jews. Furthermore, the Soviet people had suffered immensely, and, unlike the French, had stopped the German invasion at a horrific cost in lives. The major reason for the Communists’ postwar credibility and moral capital, however, was that the Jewish Communists had galvanized the Jewish resistance in France—albeit not until the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union (A. Wieviorka 1986:64—77; Cukier et 31. 19872153).3 In 1943, sparked by the Soviet defense at Stalingrad, the unification of the general French resistance in the Comité National de la Resistance, and a new wave of arrests in the now-occupied southern zone at the headquarters or organizations such as the Fédération which existed “legally” under the Vichy laws, the leaders of the Jewish Communist resistance organizations had founded the Union des Juifs pour la Re’sistance et l’Entraide. (According to one account, the Union was founded without the participation of the Fédération and other non-Communist organizations because at a previous meeting there had been disagreement over whether to advise the Jewish population to register with the police as demanded [Ravine

I970:185—193].)4 Leftist sympathizers among Polish Jews in Paris naturally looked east,

not

3. On the tecuperaton of the reputation of the Communists among the labor movement in general during the war, see Ehrmann 1947:263. 4. Schrager, whom Ravine cites as one of the Federation representatives at that meetingi appatently does not mention It in his own memoir (1979). '

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only to the heroic Soviet Union but to Poland itself, where “Communism“ had finally come to power. In the first years after the war, while nationalist and rightist gangs were still attacking Jews in smaller Polish communities, the Communist authorities appeared to the remaining Polish Jews as guarantors of their safety. It even appeared as though there would be some sort of autonomous Jewish cultural and social life there, and official organizations were set up toward that end (Smolar 1982). Communist popularity was also at a peak among the French population as a whole in the postwar years. Janet Flanner reported in the New Yorker in 1947 on the “quasidominance” of the French Communist Party in Parliament at the beginning of the Fourth Republic. As with the Jews, this continued support and sympathy for the Soviet Union were combined through the early 19505 with fears of a new war and of a rearmed Germany: “For the French as a whole, the. . . . problem is Germany—not Russia, as it is for the Americans” (Flanner 1977:220).

The Naye Presse was the leading Parisian Yiddish voice as the community through the painful process of reconstruction. Furthermore, the Jewish Communists regained much of the role within the Jewish community that they had lost with the fall of the Popular Front and the closing of the Jewish Section. Moncef Sharfstein recalls the words of the immigrant lawyer and playwright Haim Sloves on returning to Paris from the provinces at the end of the war: “An eternal bond of blood has been forged between Jews and Communism." According to Henri Bulawko, who is today a leader of the Conseil Represéntatif des Israélites de France, the Communists participated in the formation of that new umbrella organization in 1944. Yet their cooperation with nonCommunist organizations could not long survive the end of the emergency conditions of war; by 1949 they had withdrawn from the C.R.I.F. As had been the case with the closing of the Jewish Section a decade earlier, the overall Party leadership made a decision to limit the autonomy of the Union des Juifs pour la Résistance et l’Entraide, which had continued as the Jewish Communist or-

went

ganization.5

5. Although I visited the offices of the U.J.R.E. several rims and attended cultural functions there, and various individuals in the organization were friendly and even forthcoming, Iwas unable have remained Communist. Lutz Niethammer met with a similar resistance among older German leftistsz“ . . . with these local working class functionaries, many of them Communists, we . . . faced almost impenetrable barriers [in life~history interviews]. . . . it quickly emerged that the political discontinuities since that time [the thirties and early forties) are by no means a special privilege of the privileged" (1982:25). These blocks in communication frustrate anthropologists almost as much as historians. Yet they are themselves subject to analysis. As Priska Degras suggests, we do well to “attempt to discern beneath the silences not the contents of the secret, but the profound and imperious necessity which it signifies"(1982:64). In the present case it seems clear that—partly because of the way I introduced myself—Jewish Communist leaders associated me with the majority Yiddish community and assumed Iwould hunt for inconsistencies and compromises in their ideology and history. It is also possible that I was not persistent or assertive enough. Both Maurice Rajsfus (1985) and Annette Wieviorka (1986) were successful where I failed. The general point about silences, however, is borne out in Wieviorka's text. She points out (at pp. 64—65) the convenient disappearance of the to interview any of the leaders who

Polish Jews in Paris

72 Thus,

at

tht‘ height of their popularity within the immigrant community, the

Jewish Communists were stymied, first of all by factors internal to France. For at least one Party member, it was tancc groups in the aftermath of

the immoral behavior of Communist Resis~ the Liberation that led to disenchantment. Shocked by the casual shootings and humiliations of “collaborationists,“ Marcel Szapiro protested to the Party’s Central Committee, for which he received the equivalent of a dishonorable discharge from the Maquis. Although he con— tinued to work with the Communists for several years, Szapiro never again carried a party card. Meanwhile the dream ofJewish reconstruction in a new Communist Poland began to fade. Tens of thousands of Polish Jews, many of them recently repa— triated from the Soviet Union, left the country during the political thaw of 1956—1957 (Checinski 1982:130). Just as in France, the United States, and Palestine—everywhere in the world where there was a significant group of Jewish Communists—the ultimate crisis would come a decade later. In the late 19605 in Poland, a campaign born of a deadly mix of anti-Semitism, the power politics of Soviet domination, and repression connected to Soviet support of the Arabs during the Six-Day War led to the forced departure of most of the remainingJews (ibid.:244—246). The manipulation and encouragement of antiSemitism in Poland by the Soviets at that time caught the surviving remnant of the Jewish community utterly unawarcs. It seemed totally incompatible with the past record of the Communist movement, especially in Poland. Until virtually the end of the fifties, anti—Semitism had been discounted out of hand, both by Communists and intellectuals ofJewish descent, as an alien, imported distortion of socialist ideals, inconsistent with Commtr nist—and leftwing—doctrine. (ibid.:256)

In the long run, therefore, Middle Eastern and East European postwar politics, rather than French, were the catalysts for the “defection” of the bulk of the Yiddish community away from support for the Naye Presse. Moncef

Sharf-

stein began his personal account of that long and painful process by reading me a poem by the murdered Soviet Yiddish writer Perets Markish. The poem 5 first verse translates roughly: “Now, when my vision turns back onto myself/ my eyes are torn open and I see with every limb / that my heart has dropped, like a mirror on a stone / and with a sound of shattering splintered Into bits. . . " (Markish 1964). After reading the poem, Sharfstein commented: “Only a Jewish poet who has lived through the disillusionment of Communism and come to see himselfas aJew again could have written it." Like an epigraph, the poem set the tone for his entire account.

Jewish Communist archives for the period from the beginning of the war until the Nazi attack on

the Soviet Union in l94l—a period when, it has been claimed, the French Communists refrained lrom calling for adive anti~Nazi resistance because of the Hitler-Stalin pact.

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The first rumors about the repression of Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union began in 1948—1949. As they grew, people like Sharfstein gave speeches saying, “We have to believe that socialism cannot be anti—Semitic.” During the Doctors’ Trial in 1953, in which a mostly jewish group of doctors were accused of plotting to assassinate Stalin, a protest meeting was held at the Salle de la Mutualité in Paris; a group of jewish Communists physically disrupted the meeting. In 1956, however, with Khrushchev’s revelations at the 20th Party Congress, the truth about Soviet Yiddish culture could no longer be ignored. Thus, a period of bitter struggles and splits began among the Parisian Yiddish Communists (as among jewish Communists everywhere). One result of this struggle was the breaking away of several “national" landsmanshafzn, associated with the Federation rather than the Farband, such as those comprising [andslayt from Siedlic, Minsk-Mazowieck, and Lublin. Many members of the Farband—affiliated Warsaw society joined the older, mostly native-born members of the Federation’s Warsaw Iandsmanshaft. Although Sharfstein remained in the society he and his family had helped found—and which even today contains a high proportion of Communist members—he, too, finally began to act on his doubts. I-Ie protested within the party against “the repression of the Hebrew alphabet. I went to the Central Committee with my party card. I told them, ‘My mother reads the Yiddish newspaper every day. Here in Paris there are perhaps five or six thousand Jews who speak Yiddish [definitely a low figure—].B.], and there’s still a daily newspaper. In the last Soviet census, half a million people claimed jewish nationality. So why is there no Yiddish publication in the Soviet Union?’ " Thus over a period of years, Sharfstein grew away from the Communists. But for him as for so many others, it wasn’t until 1967 that the politics of the SixDay War—in which the Soviet Union clearly supported the Arab states against Israel—forced Sharfstein and many others to make a clear choice between Israel and the Soviet Union, and at the same time offered them a way to do so without betraying their Communist loyalties entirely. The Israeli Communist Party had split, with one side forming an essentially pro-Soviet group known as Rakach, and the others following Dr. Moshe Sneh into a “nationalist” wing called Maki. Moncef and Zelda Sharfstein made a trip to Israel and met with Dr. Sneh; on their return to France, they and many others subscribed to Maki’s journal. Although Sneh died shortly afterwards, and Maki soon collapsed, its existence must have been critical in enabling the bulk of the Farband’s leadership and most of its member societies to break away from the Naye Presse without collapsing. The dissidents were unable to convince the editors of the Naye Presse to depart from the Party line and support Maki. Yet the existence in Israel of a group maintaining a “genetic” connection to Communism, and remaining to the “left“ of all the Zionists, certainly helped heal the split con— sciousness of the Jewish Communists in Paris. Even today Sharfstein refers to himself as being “pro-Israel,” rather than calling himself a Zionist. After the breakup of Maki, many of its members joined various left groups, notably the socialist-Zionist Mapam; the echo of this process in Paris is still

74

Polish Jews in Paris

evident today with the vitality of the Yiddish-speaking “Friends of Mapam," which is acknowledged by its officers as being made up almost entirely of exCommunists. But even for those who have not explicitly identified as Zionists, there is a belief in the necessary solidarity of all sectors of theJewish community behind Israel. Thus the once-dissident Farband has now reached the point where amalgamation with the Fédération seems desirable to many leaders on both sides. Discussions toward this end have been going on for years, but difficulties remain. For Moncef Sharfstein, it is of vital importance that along with its “pro-Israel” position the Farband retain progressive, socialist principles; for many on the Federation side, it is still difficult to forgive what they see as the Farband’s heritage of divisive sectarianism. One of those ex—Communists who has become a fiery, outspoken Zionist is Olek Najgeborn. Since he first met me, he had made it clear that he wanted a chance to talk to me about the need of the Jewish people to have a homeland, and to have the opportunity to become “a people like any other people.” He is disappointed in the Farband, chiefly because he sees its conversion as halfhearted. “They remained negative critics, maybe like Dubcek. What can you do with that? You need to have a positive ideology, something you can work with—" and, he continues, Zionism was the obvious alternative, especially after Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War. I asked Olek what Zionism meant to him. His reply reflected the Leninist idea that each nation must be based in a territory of its own, and was blended with standard Zionist argu» ments:

“It means believing that a Jewish national existence can only be based on a that, you can’t have Jewish national culture, not Jewish national state. Without univer— to

even if all the children go Jewish schools from kindergarten through sity. You need to have a culture minister, someone who can pass decrees, someone who can see who the gifted children are in the various fields and help them along in those fields.6 People say Chagall’s a Jewish artist. It’s true, he comes from Vitebsk, and all his themes are based on Vitebsk. But the style is borrowed, he‘s an impressionist. That’s a style that comes from Germany.” . I countered that Israel had hardly come up with a genuine art style of its own. “Do you think it happens overnight? It took hundreds of years for that new style to develop in Germany. And the Jews in Israel come from seventy different countries. Maybe the immigrant from Morocco doesn’t have a cultural heritage in Israel, but his great-grandson will. Every year the Jewish National 6. Naigeborn's claims are also backed up by a respected contemporary social theorist: “A culture can and now often does will itself into existence without the benefit not only of a dynasty, but equally of a state; but in this situation, when devoid of a political shell, it will then inevitably strive to bring such a state into being, and to redraw political boundaries so as to ensure that a state does exist, which alone can protect the educational and cultural superstructure without which a modern, literate culture cannot survive. No culture is now without its national theatre, national museum, and national university; and these in turn will not be safe until there is an independent Ministry of the Interior to protect them. They constitute, as does an independent rate of inflation, the tokens of sovereignty” (Gellner 1987:17).

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Fund publishes an art calendar, with twelve paintings by thirteen-year-old lsraeli children. They do paintings of things like the shiploads of refugees that were turned back by the British. Maybe an Israeli style will develop out of that." He also argued from the viewpoint of military culture: “A country Wins wars because of its national attributes. Israel’s now got the third or fourth greatest army in the world. You can’t win three, four wars in a row Without the national character to ensure victory . . . even if the last war may not have been necessary." The old loyalties have not disappeared. Some sixteen landsmarishafm published announcements in the Naye Presse congratulating Israel on its thirtyfifth anniversary. That same issue contained an article which, while extremely critical, clearly acknowledged Israel’s right to exist, as does the Soviet Union. The Warsaw Society continues to meet at the headquarters of the Union des Juifs pour la Resistance et l’Entraide on the rue de Paradis, a few blocks closer to the Gare de l’Est than the current headquarters of the Farband. As Zelda Sharfstein explained to me, the Farband’s hall is too small for their society, and the Communist members simply wouldn‘t come to a meeting held at the Fedération. The memory of other powerful experiences still brings erstwhile comrades together on certain occasions. The only time I saw Miriam Silverstein of the

Farband-affiliated Lublin Society at the rue de Paradis was for a meeting of the Amicale des Anciens Déportés Juifs de France. Although it was held as a memorial meeting, quite typically most of the speakers discussed the current recrudescence of anti-Semitism as well. One of the former deportees who spoke insisted that the spread of anti—Semitism held true for every country, under every regime, including the socialist countries under the lead of the Soviet Union, where anti-Semitic literature is recommended reading. At this the woman seated behind me shouted, “Lies! Lies!” As he continued, she muttered to her neighbor, “I’d like to ask him who killed the Jews—Stalin or Hitler? And him, he was saved by the Soviets! Listen to him now.” For some, the greatest enemy remains Fascism, and the Soviet Union is still hallowed as the immediate savior of hundreds of thousands of Jews and the primary opponent of Hitler’s attempt to conquer the world. Much as the Israeli Labor Party’s nearly three decades of insistence that Diaspora Jews were not to criticize the Israeli government resulted in a habitual support of any Israeli government, so the decades of defense of the home of the Revolution leave some proclaiming—at least in public—a vision of the Soviet Union as the self—sacrificing herald of a new and brighter world, and an ingrained forgivenesss of its failings, should they be acknowledged at all. I heard a more elaborate defense of Communist loyalty from Naomi and Menashe Gorelick, members of the Warsaw Society. Naomi spoke of the turn toward Zionist identification as “a step backward" on the part of the Jewish majority. “I’ll tell you what my connection to Israel is. I have a sister-in-law who has lived in Israel since 1952. The first years there were very hard for her and her husband. My husband sent them money so that they could buy an

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Polish Jews in Paris

apartment. When we went to visit them, we were so proud: Here were trees planted, factories and roads built by Jewish hands. But these people [the majority of the immigrants] more or less hid their Jewishness until the Jews had a country, an army, and weapons—then, suddenly they were very proud to be Jewish. They're happy to send a few francs to Israel, and let Jewish boys go out and fight wars. Their love for Israel is a lot of noise.“ Menashe continued, in a tone less hostile than disappointed. “When they talk about China, there’s a political discussion. But when it comes to Israel, there‘s no politics—it‘s just a question of unlimited support, and they accept whatever they’re told. They can’t see that there are two peoples struggling for one piece of land, and that there won’t be peace until they sit down and divide it up between themselves. . . . There are very few of us who are still interested in politics in general, who want to participate in the affairs of the world at large. Some of the younger people are still interested in politics, but in my generation, the majority have given up.“ Menashe was complaining about the current turn toward uncompromising and exclusive identification with Israel and the Jewish people. That trend is shaped and limited by the immigrants’ political history. I think it would be mistaken to call it a “rediscovery of religion” late in life, for (with the complex exception of funeral rites, as described below) very rarely does it involve any reassumption of daily practice. The shift is much more in ideological content, rather than in ritual, social life, or patterns of thought. The fundamental continuity of the leftist experience is epitomized by the answer Isaak Opatowski gave me when I asked how the Radom Society had managed to remain intact upon breaking away from the Communist circle: “We had been trained in Party discipline; we knew how to keep an organization together.”7 Yet together with this continuity there is an aspect of repentant return in this renewed focus on Jewish interests. The Holocaust, the establishment of the State of Israel with Soviet support, and the Soviet abandonment of Israel form the most basic constellation of events influencing the community’s ideological response. The Hitler-Stalin pact and the destruction of the Jews might have weakened the immigrants’ belief that Communist universalism was the solution to specific Jewish ills; but the official compatibility of support for the Soviet Union and support for Israel, combined with fears of a reunited and rearmed Germany, meant that “anti-Fascism” remained a viable organizing slogan for the immigrants through the 19505.

7. Compare the testimony of the Italian Catholic writer Ignazio Silone: “The truth is this: the day I left the Communist Party was a very sad one for me, it was like a day of deep mourning, the mourning for my lost youth. And I come from a district where mourning is worn longer than elsewhere. It is not easy to free oneself from an experience as intense as that of the underground organization of the Communist Party. Something of it remains and leaves a mark on the character which lasts all one's life. One can, in fact, notice how recognizable the ex-Communists are. They constitute a category apart, like ex-priests and ex-regular officers. The number of ex-Communists is legion today. ‘The final struggle,’ I said jokingly to Togliatti recently, ‘will be between the Communists and the ex-Communists’ " (19502113).

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The individual doubts and organizational fissures which had been accumulating along with awareness of Soviet anti-Semitism prepared the ground for the final break with the Naye Presse—which occurred only when it became apparent to most of the immigrants that Communism was incompatible with the support of Israel. At that time, too, the immigrants were aging, and beginning to seek models of continuity to replace Communism. By casting their identification with Israel in rationalist political terms, they were able to reclaim their membership in a historical collectivity to which they increasingly desired to belong, without abandoning their original adolescent rebellion against reli— gious “obscurantism,” or the particular adaptation of French mores they had gradually acquired since emigrating. This choice, made in the confident years after 1967, was adhered to only at the cost of hard-line rigidity during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

Part 2

Pieces of the Mirror Abi me zet zikh! As long as we see each other! —Yiddish proverb

PIECES OF THE MIRROR

These chapters describe various aspects of the immigrants’ secular Jewish identity. Secular Jewish culture was and is created in a post-Enlightenment world, by those who are unwilling or unable to pass as non-Jews, who need to see themselves as “modern” in belief and behavior, and who have been stripped or divested themselves of traditional religious ways. These traditional patterns of daily life included dietary laws, limits to interaction with non-Jews and between the sexes, regular prayer and study. They did not meet all of the Jews’ social needs perfectly. Yet they provided a framework in which Jewish “identity” was not a matter of explicit social concern. The Polish Jews of Paris today lack not only that shared pattern of everyday life, but the shared form of livelihood and the daily neighborhood interaction which once served as an adequate substitute. Hence, in order to see themselves as a community, they must constantly resynthesize a distinct identity. The set of contradictory and sometimes complementary self-images that the immigrants maintain constitutes both their problem and their resource in this cultural work. Their shared origin and their language are those of Polish Jews, yet their commitment to Israel and to Jewish continuity dictates that they seek bridges between themselves and the new majority of French Jews who stem from North Africa. On certain public occasions, they must choose whether to use Yiddish, their greatest cultural resource, or French, the prestige language they have struggled to acquire; these languages are, generally speaking, mutually exclusive, and do not admit the kind of cross-fertilization so evident in the English of New York Jews. As secularist supporters of Israel, the Jewish immigrants in France must emphasize Jewish pride and uniqueness, while avoiding chauvinism. Perhaps most profoundly, they must reconcile being children of a generation as different in experience and atti— tude as they are from their children, with the need to maintain and perceive some kind of continuity. All these associations also represent conflicts between the urge to define the group exclusively and the urge to feel part of more inclusive groups, such as the French people or the international working class. Whether expressed as choices of ethnolinguistic, political, or generational self-definition, these conflicts in turn evidence a fundamental similarity berween these secular Jews and Jews in all times and places. As Henri Atlan writes, since specific Jewish 81

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identity is rooted precisely in the universalizing mission of Judaism, every generation must steer a course between “narrow nationalism and an interna~ tionalism which dissolves the group” (1979:253). Meeting this demand day by day is what makes a Jew. Yet the immigrants’ dilemmas—including the collapse of the future; the difficulty of telling dramatic first—person narratives about the postwar pc< riod (except those detailing ideological disillusionment); the sense that a gen~ eration has neither achieved its goals nor adequately passed on its dreams; the impossibility of finding a secure ideological commitment, and the persis— tent feeling that one should be committed are not only Jewish problems, but French problems as well. The issues dealt with in the next chapters are not cultural as opposed to historical problems. They are, rather, symptoms of how hard Europeans find it today to tell themselves stories about themselves. My aim in this part of the book is to show that, while their idiom has grown even more distinctive, the immigrants are as much part of the world’s story today as they were when they were younger.

VI REPORTS OF THE WAR IN LEBANON

The autumn of 1982 witnessed a crisis among French Jews. Most of them had welcomed the election of Francois Mitterrand in place of the former head of state, Valery Giscard d'Estaing—either because they held Socialist sympathies, or because they believed Mitterrand would be more sympathetic toward Israel than Giscard had been. The latter conviction was confirmed when Mitterrand became the first French head of state to pay an official visit to Israel. Throughout 1982, however, the Israeli government had come under increasing criticism in the French press both for the initial decision to enter Lebanon, and then for its alleged brutal treatment of the civilian population there. Within the organized Jewish community, this criticism was seen as representing not only an anti-Israeli bias, but increasingly an anti-Jewish bias as well. The ter— rorist attack against Jo Goldenberg’s Jewish restaurant in Le Marais—a symbol of Jewish ethnicity located at the traditional center of French Jewish life—was further seen as having been fostered by this anti-Jewish climate. Former premier Pierre Mendés-France publicly stated that the press had contributed to the atmosphere which made such an attack possible. Since he was known for his judiciousness and tact as a French Jewish statesman, his remarks helped legitimize the defensive mood of the community. Finally, since the restaurant attack came a few short weeks before the High Holy Days, and thus close to the second anniversary of the Yom Kippur bombing at the synagogue on the rue Copernic, it increased fears of a new wave of High Holy Day bomb— ings. Though no such attacks came in Paris (as they did in Brussels and Rome), the association of the holiday with politics and menace was inescapable. At the conclusion of the Yom Kippur fast at the famous synagogue on the rue Pavée— usually a time of relief and conviviality—a young man working as a security guard ran back and forth in front of the synagogue urging the crowd to disperse by shouting, “There’s a Palestinian demonstration at the Bastille!" The still-potent memory of the Nazi occupation, a backdrop to every moment 83

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of the immigrants‘ postwar lives, was thus heightened by current incidents and by a new memory of violence associated with Yom Kippur.l The focus on the Middle East intensified as the social calendar of tlie Yiddishspeaking community resumed after the long summer break. Virtually every public meeting centered around an expose on “The War in Lebanon and the Current Situation in Israel." The most dramatic response was a closing of ranks along the spectrum from right-wing Zionists to the more socialist-leaning people who described themselves as “supporters of Israel." The former energetically defended the policies and the morality of the Israeli government and army. The latter emphasized the irrational anti»Israeli bias of virtually every nation in the world; the danger of Palestinian terrorism not only to Israel and Jews, but to all the Western nations; and the need for Jewish solidarity with Israel, whatever its current government might be. Elissa and I were confused and distressed by what we saw as the narrowmindedness of this response, even before the massacres at Sabra and Shetila. I had had no time to develop a balance between the conflicting demands of ethnographic empathy and my need for moral autonomy as a Jew. I had no choice but to be discreet and record what I was hearing. Nor did I appreciate the potential insights to be gained from stepping into a situation where the im migrant community was at its most defensive and exposed. The first speech we heard on the subject was held on September 10th at the headquarters of the Federation. It was given by Leon Leneman, a journalist for the Zionist Yiddish daily Undzer Vort and the Paris correspondent for the Jewish Daily Forward of New York. Leneman apparently was never a Communist nor a member of Left Poalei Zion. Although his professionalism as a journalist was respected, he outraged members of the community several times during the year by implicitly attacking their leftist careers. His remarks, while extreme, afforded me a benchmark to measure public and individual responses among the various sectors of the community. Leneman asserted that he had always argued it was wrong to see all nonJews as anti-Semites; now, seeing how the world had reacted to the war, he had changed his mind. The entire French press, along with Francois Mitterrand and the Socialist Party, had grown hostile toward Israel. Scandalous comparisons between [the Palestinians in] Beirut and [the Jews in] the Warsaw Ghetto had been made. It was clear now that there is no difference between being anti-Begin, anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, or anti-Semitic: any one of these stances implies the others. Leneman expressed disappointment that the Socialists, whom “we” had

Lebanon

1. The survivors’ reactions to manifestations of anti—Semitism may be compared to the apprehensions suffered by members of other communities in the wake of disaster. When Kai Erikson interviewed survivors of the Buffalo Creek flood, one man told him: ”I have the feeling that every time it comes a storm it‘s a natural thing for it to flood. Now that's just my feeling, and I can't get away from it, can't help it. Seems like every time it rains I get that old dirty feelingI that it‘s just a natural thing for it to become another flood” (1976:143).

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elected, had taken Communists into their government. He saw this as part of the “Communization” of French society, particularly in the mass media, which was being taken over by a combination of young people with no historical or journalistic experience, and experienced Communist professionals. He continued (I place in quotes my summary of his remarks): “Since all of the terrorist attacks—both those directed against Jews and those directed against general targets in the West—have come from Beirut, the Western governments should appreciate the service being rendered them by the Israelis in cleaning out the PLO. The Israeli army should have entered Beirut directly, without bombing first, but did not do so because it was a Jewish army and therefore wanted to avoid civilian casualties. “These events have clearly set the Jews—everywhere—in a ‘we’ and ‘they’ situation. What is normal and accepted for all other peoples is not permitted to the Jews. It is time for Jews to turn to themselves. Jews are identified with Israel everywhere. Israel’s image is our own. The most dangerous enemies of the Jewish people [here he was talking about the role of the journalists—JR] were raised in homes where Yiddish was spoken.” Leneman expressed feelings shared by many, though some of his points were to be explicitly denied by other speakers in the coming weeks. The argument that any criticism of Begin, Israel, or Zionism is rooted in anti—Semitism, indefensible as a gross generalization, is lent credibility by the long anti-Jewish tradition of using the appellation “Zionist” as a code for “Jew,” and by the use of both classic anti-Semitic stereotypes and comparisons between Nazi Germany and Israel. Leneman’s equation seemed to delegitimize criticism of Israel by French Jewish intellectuals, and to prevent such criticism within the Yiddish community. It both responded to and contributed to the immigrants’ sense of identification with Israel, and their concomitant isolation from both the nonJewish French population and many younger French-born Jews. The other speech we heard in the week before the Sabra and Shatila massacres was held at the headquarters of the Farband. It was given by Isaak Opatowski of the Radom Society. He represented the opposite end of the acceptable range of attitudes in this period: a rationalistic analysis in the style of “historical materialism," which presented justifications of Israel’s actions and refrained from overt criticism of its elected government. Opatowski’s talk differed from Leneman‘s not only in its objectivist, geopolitical tone but in several particular assertions. He argued against the tendency to separate the Jewish community from the non-Jewish French. He expressed sympathy for Arab suffering. He argued for the views of what was then an opposition party in Israel—not in regard to a current action of the government in power, but in regard to a step it might have taken in the future. Yet Opatowski and Leneman clearly agreed on certain fundamentals: Israel’s actions were defensive in nature, were to be supported, and had been unfairly denounced by those applying a double standard. Leftists of Jewish origin who owe their allegiance to the Communist Party rather than the Jewish people had placed themselves “outside the camp” and were to be regarded as having re—

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nounced their Jewishness. The absence of peace in the Middle East was the fault of manipulative Arab leaders, and only they could remove the impasse. Two days after Opatowski’s talk, Rosh Hashanah came. Elissa and I attended the “official," government-supported Consistorial synagogue on the rue de Notre Dame de Nazareth, in the heart of the Parisian garment and textile district. The young security volunteers from the militant Federation des Juifs de France warned us not to congregate directly in front of the synagogue and frisked congregants as they entered and left. Since neither skullcaps nor prayerbooks are provided, as they are in many American synagogues, I loaned my yarmulke to a disheveled man who had none of his own. Eventually we invited him to supper, and when we walked him home to his one-room apartment afterwards, he insisted we watch his new color television. French television has three channels. Our host switched past static-filled images of a ballet and an old movie and stopped at the evening news. The three headlines were the massacre at Sabra and Shetila; a terrorist attack against a synagogue in Brussels; and, to add grotesque incongruity to the horror, the funeral of Princess Grace. The screen was filled with image after image of shattered bodies, murdered children lying in rubble. Elissa couldn’t watch; we wanted to leave, but he insisted we stay. “You see what they do to their own people?” he said. “And then they always try to blame it on the Jews!” In the midst of these events, the secular and Jewish calendars reasserted themselves. The French social year was starting and the Jewish New Year approaching. It was the time Jews traditionally visit the graves of the dead. The mass memorial ceremony at Bagneux held by the East European immigrants the first real opportunity for the representatives of the immigrant community to present their response to the massacre. I had been wondering and how the massacres would be referred to publicly within the community. Miriam Silverstein spoke on behalf of the Farband. Then Henri Bulawko, who immigrated as a child, was active as a young man in the Resistance, and was respected both within the immigrant community and in general Jewish organizations, spoke in French on behalf of the Conseil Représentatlf des Israelites de France. Next Mordechai Lerman, secretary general of the Fedération, spoke again in Yiddish. All expressed outrage over the massacres, and insisted on the need to find who was responsible. Each, also, decried the way other nations were using the massacre as a way to put pressure on Israel; and Silverstein and Lerman further emphasized the need to continue giving money to Israel, especially when that country was at war. They maintained a consrstent policy while acknowledging the claims of general morality. In the weeks that followed, other representatives of various political tendencies developed their own defenses of Israel. On October 5, the Fédération was honored to host an address by the Israeli ambassador, Meir Rosen, given in French, attended by an overflow crowd, and cosponsored by the Farband and the B’nai B’rith. (It was the only time Iever saw tight security, including armed policemen and youngsters from the Federation des Juifs de France, at a Fédétation event.) On our way in, we saw Mme. Silverstein and complimented her

offered whether French

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on her balanced comments at Bagneux. Her response was consistent: “We wanted to express our outrage over the slaughter, but one still has to stand fast

by Israel." The president of the Federation, a native-born, retired professor with an imposing nineteenth—century type beard, posed several questions to the ambassador, including: Why had the Israeli army entered Lebanon? Why had they entered Beirut? And how were the massacres to be explained? The ambassador, a member of Begin’s party, replied to the first of these that the PLO, installed in Lebanon, had not ceased bombarding northern Israeli towns. The image of children spending their lives in bunkers (which had also been used by Opatowski when he argued that the Lebanese invasion had been “defensive”) could not be allowed to come true; Jewish children should not have to live in fear. As to the second question, Rosen replied that any government would have acted to clear out the threat of the P.L.O. “state within a state," to smash the capital of world terrorism, and, in so doing, to help assure the independence of Lebanon. Rosen finally claimed that as soon as the Israelis had found out about the massacres, they had entered the camps to restore order. Why, he demanded, was it the Israelis, rather than the Lebanese who had committed the massacres, who were condemned, and why had the world been so silent when the P.L.O. had killed thousands of Lebanese Christians, or when Hussein had slaughtered Palestinians? Rosen’s answers enunciated what was to be believed if “Jewish loyalty” were the only criterion. Perhaps out of respect for Rosen‘s position, all except one of his questioners refrained from posing difficult or embarrassing issues. Rosen’s one challenger relied on the massive protest in Tel Aviv as justification for his own criticism. As the meeting broke up, however, it appeared Rosen was getting mixed reviews: Mme. Silverstein grudgingly allowed that he was “a good defender,” while one man complained that the ambassador had avoided direct answers. The demonstration in Tel Aviv had been sponsored by Peace Now (an independent organization, but fairly close to the Labor Party). It was a focus of debate at the talk given by Itzhak Warshawski, the world secretary of the General Zionists, who are affiliated with Begin’s Likud Party. At the time, Warshawski was also a professor of Yiddish in Paris and the head of the Committee for Yiddish, which controls most of the funds available for Yiddish cultural activities in France. His rhetorical style is a distinctive combination of allusions to his own political sagacity and connections, and to Jewish values and symbols he shares with his audience. He insisted that the duty of every Jew is to stand behind the duly-elected government of Israel: “The protests in Israel were based solely on jealousy of the government— and that is why they were given so much publicity in the world press. The demonstration had nothing to do with Jewish morals, but everything to do with Labor’s desire for power. All the polls say that if elections were held now, Begin would win. The people of Israel know what’s best for themselves. Don’t get me wrong—I’m as far from Herut as I am from . . . being Japanese! Since Labor

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knows they can’t win through elections, they resort to the blood libel. It‘s an open secret that all Western governments pressured Jewish institutions to call for an inquiry. The Conseil Représentatif des Israelites de France [of which he was a member—J.B.] is split as never before. “If the police wanted to find the terrorists responsible for the Goldenberg‘s bombing, they would. During the pogrom in Kielce [Poland, in 1946—].B.], the police did nothing until Berman, a big shot from the Communist Party in Warsaw, came by airplane, ripped off the police captain’s epaulettes, and sent four cops outside to shoot in the air. That ended the pogrom. “On a train heading east to Berlin after the war, I met a Soviet officer whose chest was covered with medals (my grandfather used to say that all that wasn‘t worth a single page of the Talmud committed to memory). I asked him why, if he had been assigned to the West, didn’t he simply defect and stay there? He replied that he knew he’d be better off in the West, ‘but you know what rodina means.’ Rodina, moledetf homeland—we Jews have to have that, too. We have to be unified behind the State. “On balance, the results of the war in Lebanon were positive. Peace has been assured in the Galilee. Soviet military technology has been discredited. Lebanon has been given a chance at freedom.” Gitele Edelstein stood up to demand passionately: Why was Warshawski so bitter against those who had demonstrated the force of the Jewish soul, of Jewish morality—those who had said the Israeli army shouldn’t have stood by without doing anything? _ Warshawski’s reply implicitly acknowledged a measure of Israeli responsrnot out this stain, just as Begin‘s Arab village wipe bility: “Generations will [Deir Yassin, whose residents were massacred during the War for Independence—J.B.] will not be forgotten. But the protest was dangerously overdone, and gave material to the anti-Semites.” In all these discussions, the focus was the good of Israel. Even those who were critical of Israel’s shared responsibility for the massacre were careful to cite the protest within that country as justification of their own assertions, and to conclude by declaring their own redoubled loyalty to Israel. Yet these were people who had witnessed an attempt to exterminate the Jews in their own 2. Moledet literally means “birthplace." Warshawski’s use of the term here was acutely ideological, since he was speaking to a group who had never lived in Israel, let alone been born there: For an eloquent analysis of the position of moledet as a concept in Israeli socrety, see Benvenisti 1986. On the naturalistic, “cyclical time" orientation of Zionism as a state ideology, see Doleve» Gandelman‘s discussion of birthday celebrations in Israeli kindergartens: “In a song written by the poet Alterman, sung during the birthday, the fatherland is as exceptional and unique as is the birthday among the other days of the year. A refrain of the song reads thus: ‘Among all the days of the year / One only is the day of birth [yam huledet] / Among all the lands in the world / One only is the fatherland [moledet]. / ’ Thus, through the huledetlmolede! rhyming, there takes place an assimilation between the child and the land." (1987:271) The glorification of the native-born Israeli analyzed by Doleve-Gandelman was accompanied by the ideal of the monolingual Hebrew national culture (Goldenberg 1977; Deshen and Shokeid 1974), which further strains the immigrants’ effort to see Israel as their home.

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lifetime. They were still living on the ground where that attempt took place; they saw from day to day the commemorative plaques on buildings from which deportations had begun. They feared and saw new currents of anti-Semitic

violence and propaganda. They perceived the larger society’s judgment of Israel as unduly harsh, as evidenced by the repeated claim that “No other country would be condemned for doing what Israel did.” Their loyalty was to Israel‘s well—being, and, as they saw it, their fate rested on Israel’s strength. These spokesmen intended to provide the immigrants with reasons'to believe that their ideology was moral, logical, and consistent with Jewish history.They employed various allusions to fulfill this obligation. Warshawski’s reference to the blood libel evoked a chain of unfounded accusations that Jews committed ritual murder of Christian children, stretching from the Middle Ages to the Mendel Beilis trial in the Ukraine in 1913; by identifying Labor’s protests with the groundless hatred of Christians against Jews, Warshawski implied that the opposition party itself was suspected of anti-Semitism. His iteration in three different languages of the word for ‘homeland’ served to underscore the belief collectively (if somewhat tentatively) adopted by this community, that they could place their hope only in a land of their own such as other peoples have, and that this land was Israel. Opatowski’s evocation of children living in bunkers reflected events in the Galilee, including the intermittent shelling of kibbutzim and the taking of schoolchildren as hostages in the town of Maalot. Yet many journalists and

opposition politicians in Israel argued that at the time “Operation Peace in the Galilee" was undertaken, no shots had been fired for over a year. If, as Iwould argue, Opatowski as well as his audience accepted the Israeli government’s explanation more readily than was warranted, perhaps it was easier for him to see the danger in the Galilee because he had lived through a time when so many Jewish children lived in bunkers. The sense of being hunted is not shaken easily. When the journalist Skornik of Undzer Vort addressed the Lodz Society’s annual business meeting, he went further, drawing the analogy between the Nazi war against the Jews and the Arab struggle against Israel, openly and without reservation. Skornik also compared the ubiquitousness of “Arab terrorism“ with Nazi plans for world dominance, concluding that Israel had done the world a service in disabling the P.L.O. (Rosen also claimed that the Israelis had “smashed the capital of world terrorism") On the one hand, Skornik argued that the world was satisfied, but he, along with all the other speakers, complained that a double standard had been applied against Israel. The appeals to the history of Jewish martyrdom, culminating in the Holocaust, and to the unfathomable order of the world by which Jews are invariably judged unfairly would not always have been effective within this community. Invocation of such themes is not a simple carryover of the rhetoric of Jewish martyrdom into the 19805.3 Communism explicitly rejected the idea that the

3. David Roskies has provided a masterful

account

of the transformation of this tradition in

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Jews were eternally destined to be a suffering people apart, arguing that the abolition of class society would bring about the abolition of anti-Semitism as well. Zionism was also a program which aimed to make the Jews a normal people who would be judged as every nation is judged. Yet the traditional images of gratuitous persecution of Jews have been reappropriated as an explanation

of Israel‘s failure to achieve peace with its neighbors, and in this crisis they proved quite effective. “Unquestionable truths exist in secular ideologies which are as sacred in that sense as the tenets of any religion,” claim Sally Moore and Barbara Myerhoff (1977:3), but in fact these secular tenets may often be less than perfectly stable. For the immigrants, the tenets had been undercut by events and needed reinforcement. Invoking the traditional Jewish view of history was a creative reappropriation; but perhaps even more so, it indicated the failure of the rival ideology of progress to which the immigrants gave most of their lives.

Not all of the Yiddish speakers in Paris have embraced Zionism, are readers of Undzer Vort, or adhere to either the Fédération or the Farband. At the end of October, I made my first contacts with the group that has remained loyal to the Naye Presse. I had happened to pick up that week’s issue of the Naye Presse, and I saw that there was to be a meeting of “The Amicale of Y.A.S.K." Only months later did I discover that those initials stand for “Yidishe arbeter sport klub”—the Jewish Workers’ Sports Club. At the time, I thought I had finally discovered a landsmansbaft that had remained loyal to the Party, and I was determined to investigate. The featured speaker was one of Paris’s most accomplished Yiddish poets, Dora Teitlboym. Although the topic of her lecture was ostensibly “cultural,” it constituted a remarkable statement of a continuing faith in universal social redemption. After she spoke, I introduced myself to her. As we walked back to the Métro at the Gare de l’Est together, she shared her views on Israel. Having spent the past month and a half accommodating myself to the views of Farband and Federation speakers, I was both relieved and somewhat threatened by her outspoken bitterness at Begin’s government. When she asked me for my opinion, I began cautiously: “While Idon’t agree thatJews outside Israel don’t have the right to criticize . . . ” “Of course they do!” she interrupted, and resumed her own discourse, eventually returning to the theme of what she regarded as Israel’s proxy war on behalf of the Americans. Reminding me that she had visited the concentration camps just after the war’s end, she said with a poet’s fervor: “I hate it when Jewish boys are killed! To me a Jewish boy is a god!" She also believes that the

the midst of loss of faith and accelerated violence against Jews in the past century. He argues that “of all Jewish traditions, the response to catastrophe remains the most viable, coherent, and commented" (19849).

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Israeli government’s present policy is increasing anti-Semitism everywhere. Every year before this one, she said, when she returned with her husband to their home in the Paris suburb of Nugent from their six-month stay in Israel, her

doorstep was covered with flowers, and neighbors had come by immediately to say how much they had missed her, to invite her and her husband to dinner. This year there were no flowers, only pained and embarrassed questions: “ ‘How could you have done it? How could you have done what the Nazis did?’ ” The other dissenting Yiddish voices Iheard that fall also came from the group around the Naye Presse. The Orlows from the Warsaw Society, for instance, took the massacres as further confirmation of their refusal to believe in God: “How could any God have allowed the Holocaust to take place?” Once, they said, they believed in the human god Stalin, but that too is finished. Now they believe in people.They cited my work as an example: even though they're simple folk, I have to talk to them to write history. They live where they live (they are among the few Polish Jews Imet who have remained in the older, poor buildings in Belleville), and though there’s only one other Jew in the building, it’s important for them to have some contact with their neighbors—now mostly Af< ricans, Arabs, Slavs, and Orientals. Since the Lebanon war began, they told me, it had gotten a little harder for them to get along with their Arab neighbors. The husband told me that when the Union des Juifs pour la Resistance et I’Entraide, the organization which publishes the Naye Presse, sent out a letter denouncing the massacres at Sabra and Shetila, they had shown it to two young Arabs in the building, to prove to them that not all Jews supported the war. Mme. Orlow told me that when she had seen the pictures of Palestinian women running with children in their arms, she had thought ofJewish mothers in World War II: “A mother is a mother, no matter who she is. People talk about ‘the Jewish mother,’ but that’s not the essential thing. Black, brown, white, or yellow, a mother is a mother.” Meanwhile, I had attended the annual memorial meeting of the Lublin Society. Moshe Zalcman, a former Communist, current Mapam activist, and cosecretary of the Lublin Iandsmansbaft with Mme. Silverstein, spoke briefly about the war, referring to the Israeli campaign by the official Israeli govern— ment designation “Peace in the Galilee.” He spoke with particular grief about the latest Israeli war dead, victims of an explosion in Tyre. He used the phrase “frishe Izorbonos”—fresh victims—to describe them. It is a phrase one encounters frequently in accounts of Holocaust atrocities. Thus Zalcman con» firmed the association of Israeli war dead with Holocaust victims,4 and 4. And with the entire tradition of Jewish martyrology. This association is documented by the existence of thousands of memorial books devoted to those fallen in Israel‘s wars (Roskies 1984:9— 10, 247), and by the frequency in memorial books for European Jewish communities of sections devoted to Israeli war dead belonging to families from the home town. (My thanks to Jack Ku— gelmass for this observation.)

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further—in consonance with all the public reactions detailed above—suggested the continuation of the Holocaust, making Israel seem a sort of huge Jewish ghetto. It wasn‘t until January, when the European representative of Mapam spoke in Paris, that I heard outspoken, official public criticism of the Lebanese in— vasion from within the “national" Yiddish camp. In a question—and—answer session, one member of the audience asserted that “everybody” agreed that the 40—kilometer entry into Lebanon had been justified, but the bombing of Beirut was “terrible." The Mapam representative’s response was unequivocal: “Either you misunderstood me, or you weren’t listening. Mapam opposed this war from the beginning. We believe that Israel cannot afford to be involved in a war that is not absolutely vital to its survival, and we cannot afford to begin a war that we may lose. The only solution is political.” I was relieved finally to hear this statement. I was still troubled by the discrepancy between what I had heard in the fall and what I was beginning to hear now—it seemed to confirm what I perceived as the isolated, defensive posture of the Parisian Yiddish community in relation both to France and to Israel. It was left to Elissa, however, to have the courage to confront Moshe Zalcman in private with the apparent shift in attitude. Zalcman had various responses: Most of these speakers, he said (all of the leading activists, with the exception of Warshawski and Lerman of the Federation), are ex-Communists; as far as they once were to the left, they have shifted to the right. He disavowed the line that Opatowski had taken at the Farband in October, when Opatowski had argued that the Lebanese campaign was “defensive” on Israel’s part. He regretted that Mapam’s influence is very weak in Paris, “because people generally follow the principle of being more patriotic toward Israel the further they are from Israel." When I asked him why he had used the phrase “Peace in the Galilee” at the Lublin memorial meeting, he replied that that was the accepted name of the war, and that indeed, the Galilee needed peace—but the war in Lebanon wasn’t the way to bring it. It is a testimony to their political maturity that the Yiddish organizations were not more deeply shaken by the war in Lebanon, for whatever justifications were provided, whatever strategic and moral arguments advanced, the war was an embarrassment for almost everyone. Few within the Yiddish community had longstanding loyalties to Begin’s party and ideology. While many ex-Communists had come to accept the notion that any Israeli government had to be supported by Jews in the Diaspora, they had accepted that discipline when Israel had 3 Labor government, at least nominally closer to their own political principles. . As Zalcman’s disavowal of Opatowski’s line showed, not everybody could swallow the attempts to rationalize what they must have personally thought to be a political and military mistake. When they thought they could express their doubts without seeming disloyal to Israel or giving moral support to the “enemies of the Jewish people,” they did so—but only then! Most of those who

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had never been Communists were long-time Labor Zionists, and while the demonstration in Tel Aviv had been tremendously heartening to them (both as an expression of Labor’s popularity and as an expression of Israeli moral sentiment), they, too, did not feel entitled to the same independent expressions of opposition. Beyond this political strain, the immigrants were disappointed to see the French press turn so sharply against Israel. They had recently helped elect a government which, for the first time, they expected to be sympathetic to Israel—and since they did not feel free to question Israel‘s morality, they could not judge the legitimacy of a French government’s differing policies toward Israel in response to Israel’s different acts. They were genuinely frightened by the easy and often scurrilous parallels drawn between the Israelis and the Nazis, and saw these parallels being used to justify the recrudescense of anti-Semitism, in a vicious historical irony. To varying extents, they also felt simply ashamed at the needless suffering that had been ordered, caused, or tolerated by fellow Jews. They must have felt torn, but they did not allow their group to be torn apart.

VII

DEJEUNER SOLENNEL There are certain aspects of the activity of the Iandsmanshaftn whose superficial forms remain stubbornly constant, despite changes in the community or in the larger world. One of these is the memorial ceremony, or yizkor, which is discussed below in the chapter on mourning. Another is the annual ball held by each landsmanshaft and by any benevolent society that is still vital enough to organize such an elaborate social function. Whereas the yizlzor of the Parisian immigrants is a contemporary modification of an ancient Jewish tradition, the ball is an ethnic community’s version of a very secular social rite. The purpose of the balls has changed somewhat over the years. Once they were an occasion for young, single immigrants to meet for the first time. Now, they offer old friends—many of them widows and widowers—a chance to meet and reminisce. In some cases, it is a chance that comes just once each year. Moshe Zalcman’s wife, Pauline, an invalid since her husband was taken away from her and sent to a Soviet labor camp in the 19305 while she was pregnant with their son, managed to come to the Lublin Society’s ball in December—and danced with Elissa. And Beinish Davidow, the honorary president of the Noworadomsker Society, told me one day that the society’s annual ball had been held the pre— vious Sunday. He had called one member couple, of which the husband is physically ill and the wife is psychologically disturbed, to find out whether they were planning to attend. They hadn’t been, but Davidow said, “Why don’t you come? What else are you going to do, sit around waiting to die?” He concluded with satisfaction that they had finally come after all. Like a synagogue beadle— Tevye the shames—gathering men for a prayer quorum, he had strengthened the group and at the same time reinforced these isolated people‘s sense of belonging. Most of the balls are announced several times in the social column of Undzer Von. Since the balls are the major annual event of the landsmanshaftn, their scheduling constitutes a statement about the relative importance of different annual cycles. Their timing represents an attempt to integrate the Jewish and the secular calendars. Nearly all are held in December; commemoration of Hanukkah is explicitly associated, but the fact that December is the season for secular festivities seems to be a more important factor in determining the timing. 94

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Hanukkah is a minor though festive holiday in traditional Judaism, and little of what goes on at the December balls relates directly to the holiday. Here, as with the commemoration of the August 12, 1952 slaughter of the leaders of Soviet Yiddish culture, which the immigrants hold in October after the long summer vacation (described below in the chapter on mourning), and as with the political talks held at the Federation on Saturday afternoon, the French element wins out. On the other hand, it is worth noting that the Warsaw Society, which didn’t reserve a December date at their favorite catering hall in time, decided to wait until February and have a Purim ball instead. The first ball I attended, however, was in November. It was held by Les Amis Israélites de I’Onzieme Arrondissement, one of the immigrant neighborhood associations established according to an alternative principle of organization to the landsmansbaftn. I felt more out of place as a young person than I had at any other event, and was quite unprepared for the sort of event it turned out to be. The affair was held at a formal banquet hall called Picadilly, one flight up at 16, Avenue de Wagram, two blocks from the Arc de Triomphe. Despite its British name, the hall represents the height of nineteenth—century bourgeois French elegance, with ornate murals, white plaster columns, and rich carpeting. Although I had thought to put on a decent shirt, I was wearing my everyday jeans and hiking shoes, and it wasn’t until I got upstairs to the table where people were paying the 150-franc admission that Irealized the men were all in jackets and ties, the women in festive dress. I began haltingly to explain what Iwas doing there, when one of the men sitting at the table recognized me and said reprovingly to the others, “Let him in!” They replied that they hadn’t been hindering me at all, but just wanted to know who I was. My benefactor was Olek Najgeborn, who had already spotted me at a meeting at the Federation and apparently decided Ineeded some kindly attention. Eventually Olek seated me at a table between himself and his wife, Bela. In the course of the meal, we had a chance to discuss Yiddish literature and Jewish politics. Bela explained that she was trying to sell copies of the autobiography of the recently deceased Yiddish poet Moshe Szulsztein, but it was extremely difficult—most of the immigrants, she said, just weren’t interested in Yiddish books anymore. Olek, meanwhile, began to engage me in a discussion of Zionism. He insisted that Jewish life in Poland had “hung by a thread"— that even without the Nazis, the Jews had been doomed, since they occupied outmoded, medieval economic roles and were being squeezed out of Polish society. He asked rhetorically whether Irealized that a national homeland was the only way the Jews could become a nation like any other. When I responded that I wasn’t sure the Jews should be a nation like any other, he said, to my relief, “In that case, we’ll have to have a more serious discussion than we can have here today.” Aside from the maitre d’ and perhaps one or two of the waiters, the only other people in the place under fifty were the Israeli singer and the accordionist who accompanied her. She was dressed in a lacy black top and a black skirt,

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and had blonde hair. Her songs were mostly chestnuts in Hebrew and Yiddish. The Israeli songs, such as “Haueynu shalom aleykbem” and “0d tire/a,“ emphasized welcome and hope. The Yiddish songs included “()fn pri])etsl7ila“— which recalls the warmth of the traditional heder, the Jewish child‘s first school—and “Der rebe elimele/eh.” The latter was written by the left—wing poet Moshe Nadir as a satire on Hasidism, but is now treated as an exemplar of the warmth and intimacy of traditional Hasidic life.1 She didn’t sing anything from “Fiddler on the Roof," but she did sing a few French oldies; otherwise the performance seemed identical to what one would expect at a similar affair in New York. At one point, when she was singing a sentimental Hebrew song and wanted everybody to sway back and forth with feeling, she came up to our table and picked on me, putting her hand on my shoulder and urging, “Sboklt zilzh!” (Sway!). I remained rigid. Although the event marked the organization’s fiftieth anniversary and one of the founding members was present, this affair lacked a sense of true conviviality. It seemed more of a “function” than a celebration. Apparently shared memories of having lived in the same neighborhood in Paris (most of the “Amis Israélites de l’Onzieme Arrondissement” having since moved out of Belleville) do not provide even the modicum of cohesion which common origin affords

landslayt. Sunday, December 12, the third day of Hanukkah, seemed to be the most popular date for balls that year; obviously, not all of them could be held at Picadilly. The Radom Society held its affair in a hall at the Hotel Lutetia, on the Boulevard Raspail at Metro Sevres-Babylone. Invariably, the annual balls are held in the more luxurious parts of Paris, although when the Holiday Inn on the Place de la République was known as the H6tel Moderne, many mass meetings of the Yiddish community were held there. It would be the most convenient location for landsmansbaft balls, but today it is shunned. Part of the definition of a proper féte, it seems, is to get away from the working-class neighborhoods into the “city of light” proper. The balls are intended to be as formally French as possible; if they could, the landslayt would probably hold them at Versailles.2 If the Radomer couldn’t have Picadilly, they still managed to hire the same Israeli singer who had performed at the ball of Les Amis Israélites de l’Onzieme Arrondissement. She seemed less outgoing with this crowd, although she was well received. The man sitting across from me may not have been altogether pleased with her, because at one point he leaned toward me and said, “Listen!

1. It thus functions as a “simulacrum,', in the sense in which Baudrillard uses the term (see above, chapter 5, note 1). 2. The balls, which represent the immigrants' claim to belong in the world of French bourgeois propriety, are thus the opposite of the Los Angeles “walk for solidarity.” That ceremony, focuSCd on a neighborhood which once was overwhelmingly populated by Jews, is intended to mark it as the space “in which all Jews are one" (Myerhoff and Mongulla 19862124).

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She‘s not a yiddishe!” Isaak Opatowski, seated at the same table, insisted that she was. I said that perhaps she was Sephardic, in order to continue the conversation. “No!” insisted Opatowski. “She‘s from Israel, a yiddis/Je," thus illustrating precisely the ambiguity of the term “yiddish” as used in Paris today— meaning sometimes “Jewish” as opposed to “Gentile,” and other times “East European Jewish” as opposed to North African or Mediterranean. A man whom I had met at a board meeting of the society, who had attracted me by his friendliness, his workman’s clothes, and his relative youth, came up to greet me. “It’s a faded generation!" he said wistfully as he shook his head. Indeed, the crowd didn’t look as young as it had for the Radom memorial meeting at the end of September. None of the members’ children were present, but the crowd was of a respectable size. According to Opatowski, the total attendance was 98. Meanwhile, Opatowski was shuffling his papers to prepare his speech, and supervising the proceedings in general. He asked me to write down my name on a slip of paper, from which I deduced correctly that he was planning to introduce me when he made the announcements. He informed one of the officers, Funk, who is particularly active in the Israel Bond campaign, that he. wouldn’t be permitted to go around to the tables asking for pledges (which are made in dollars), and although he did mention at one point that anyone who wished to do so could speak to the Israel Bond representative, nothing like a formal appeal was made. (At the board meeting I attended, Funk had tried to get board members to reserve a Radom table at the general Parisian Israel Bonds dinner, by promising not to make a speech, and even adding that those who attended didn’t have to make a pledge. Opatowski had added that it was important that the “Yiddishe sektor” be represented. But one man said he was having trouble with his stomach, another had a veterans’ dinner to attend the same evening, and the attempt failed.) Just before getting up to speak, Opatowski deployed a couple of committee members around the room to make sure the audience kept quiet. Decorum is almost invariably a problem at any landsmanshaft function, perhaps excepting yizkors. The usual way of dealing with it is by stern, vocal disapproval in French. At the Lublin Society or the Farband, it’s a frown and a stern “Oh la la!” from Miriam Silverstein. Perhaps Opatowski’s judicious strategy on this occasion was also a reflection of his training in the Party. Opatowski’s formal greeting of the banquet in French was followed by a round of the traditional Yiddish toast song, “Let’s all greet our honored guests”—in this case, meaning each other. After a few dance numbers, a He— brew song or two, and a Russian medley, the band took a break while Funk, wearing a black yarmulke, said the blessings and lit three candles for the upcoming third night of Hanukkah. After the main course had been served, Opatowski got up to speak again. The first thing he did was to announce, in Yiddish, “the student from YIVO in New York who is writing about the societies in Paris, and who has chosen ours as the first society to study." The

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by a surprisingly enthusiastic round of applause, and l was forced to stand up twice, Meanwhile, Opatowski was shuffling both a French speech and a Yiddish one. The reason became clear when he asked those who didn’t understand Yiddish to raise their hands and three relatively young women, all sitting together, did so. He began to say, “There are only three who don't understand Yiddish . . . " but they protested loudly: “You might make an effort so we‘ll come back!“ He continued in French, saying, “I believe everyone here understands French. . . . “3 He kept his speech brief, reviewing the history of the holiday in a few sentences, which ended with the words, “We are celebrating the 2,147th anniversary of cultural and national liberation!“ He concluded in Yiddish, stating that the contemporary Jewish agenda was once again the fight against antiSemitism, and that the question today is: What can we do to see to the con» tinuation of the Yiddish language and culture—in a word, of Yiddish/wit, Jew— ishness. Then he proposed a toast to “today‘s Maccabees," the soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces. While the music at all these balls is a combination of Jewish, French, and international favorites, the speeches almost invariably relate exclusively to Jew— ish concerns. Concerning food, the owner at Picadilly says that the place is kosher. However, the only thing Jewish about the menu there was a choice of gefilte fish as one appetizer. The food at the Radom ball at the Hotel Lutetia was neither kosher nor Jewish style: A fish mousse with semolina and vegetables was followed by roast beef au jus and potatoes au gratin, a cheese plate, and ice cream and coffee. Opatowski had been asked to give a speech about Hanukkah at the Warsaw Society’s party at the rue de Paradis headquarters, so I rode with him across the Ile St. Louis to the gray northeastern arrondissements. On the way, he complained that he had been asked to speak about Hanukkah at too many places, having also been a guest on Yossele Testyler’s Yiddish radio show a few days before. He added that he had asked not to have his name mentioned in the announcement of the Radom ball, and was clearly distressed by the decline in the number of competent speakers. He also explained to me that the three women at the Radom affair who hadn’t understood Yiddish were French—born of Turkish Jewish parents, and one of them is his sister-in—law. Some 75 people were at the rue de Paradis when I arrived with Opatowski. Although the meeting had been called for almost an hour earlier, it seemed they had been waiting for him to begin. Candles were lit here, too, but more simply than at the Radom affair: The man who lit them wore nothing on his head, said no blessing, and omitted the shames candle, the one from which the others announcement was met

3. The episode sheds light on the sociology of Yiddish. For perfectly commendable reasons of universal comprehension, the majority language is used by default. Noting this seems a healthy counterbalance against the tendency to attribute linguistic assimilation solely to either ideological inconsistency on the part of the immigrants, or to pressure from the state.

Déjeuner Solermel are lit, whose

ritual significance is

99 to protect

against the forbidden utilitarian

use of the festive lights.

President Sharfstein opened the meeting, announcing first that one woman from the society had passed away since the general assembly. He spoke very briefly about the current political situation, stating that the anti-Semites were finally crawling out of the holes they’d been hiding in since the fall of Nazism. He asked rhetorically how he could omit mention of the Syrian Jews kept in ghettos, the Jews in Argentine prisons, and the incarceration of Anatoly Shcharansky, on Hanukkah, “the festival of freedom and liberation from slavery." The use of the term “slavery" in connection with Hanukkah was surprising. In fact, it is much more appropriate to Passover, a holiday which has been adapted to the concerns and principles ofJewish secularists in the United States (Schwartz 1988). However, Passover, whether because of its great age, which may make it seem to the immigrants as tainted with myth, or because of the dietary strictures accompanying its observance, remains absent from the immigrant community’s calendar. Associating issues of the day with biblical narratives or annual Observances is a stock characteristic of traditional Jewish rhetoric, and the associations often rest upon wordplay or general moral principles. Here, where the stock of available references is drastically curtailed by both choice and history, greater liberties must be taken if the present is to be related to perennial Jewish themes. Orange juice and cake were served during the speech, along with a shot of vodka for those who wanted to make a toast. Opatowski gave a much longer speech here than he had at the Radom ball. At one point, Moncef Sharfstein intervened to quiet the crowd, saying “the speech is almost over." Opatowski was disgruntled: “If you prefer, I could stop now!" The party was perhaps the most intimate and relaxed of any Iandsmanshaft event I attended during the year, without the formality of the balls, the solemnity of the memorial services, or the officiousness of the business meetings. Bolek Sharfstein walked around with a big smile, pouring out more vodka for those who could take it, taking the microphone and singing a Hanukkah song from his childhood. Mme. Miller, a straight-backed, clear-eyed widow well into her eighties, whose renditions of songs by the Polish Jew Mordechai Gebirtig are a regular feature at Fédération events, sang to her comrades, “How do we take back the years, Moyshele, my friend?” The annual Warsaw ball was also a celebration of the society’s thirty-fifth anniversary. It was held at Picadilly on the last Sunday in February. Elissa and I were seated next to the officers’ table, which was occupied by Moncef and Zelda, Bolek and his wife, the Orlows; Szapiro, and Firer from the Farband. (When I joked with Firer, “But you’re not from Warsaw!" he said that he'd been “naturalized." I replied, “And I‘m adopted!”) At our table sat a couple aged around sixty, who had been born in France and who spoke Yiddish less than fluently; their sister; an older, heavy man; and Eliezer Lokiec. The wife mentioned that she liked coming to this sort of affair, since there weren‘t that

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of them anymore and they're pleasantly old-fashioned: “It's really the style of the older generation." President Sharfstein gave the main speech. He evoked Jewish Warsaw; and though he spoke a little longer than most people seemed to care for, his com» ments were precise and not overly sentimental. He began, as a proper afterdinner speaker. with a bit of humor. listing some of the epithets that had been applied to Warsaw Jews, such as “Warsaw crooks.“ The one-liner, “Warsaw is a beautiful city—they should only get rid of the people who live there," brought a laugh; the macabre overtones it takes on now prevented neither Sharfstein from quoting it, nor the audience from enjoying it. He spoke of Warsaw as a great economic center. drawing workers from the provinces and sending goods manufactured in its courtyards to the far comers of Poland. Although Warsaw didn‘t have an old Jewish communal tradition, he continued, it was dynamic and created its own tradition. It had a lively culture which nourished and reflected the li\es of the Jewish masses. Productions of Ansky’s Dibbulz, Perets’s Nighttime a: the Old Market, Sholem Asch‘s Martyrdom drew packed houses for hundreds of performances. Finally, Sharfstein mentioned theJewish Writers’ Society, which had held gala masked balls on Purim. It was the only reference to Purim at the whole affair, except for the bamentashn, traditional Purim cookies served for dessert. The Warsaw ball, held on Purim, was not then explicitly a Purim alebration; Eliezer Lokiec complained to me that he had offered to read aloud his retelling of the Purim story (in which, following a traditional elaboration, Queen Fsther seduces Haman to discredit him in front of King Ahasuerus), but that his offer had been refused. The sixtfish woman who had remarked on the rechercbe’ character of the Lmdgnmbaf! balls helped crystallize the puzzling impression I had of combined strangeness and familiarity. It is present in the conta'ast between the Yiddish accents and the elaborate decorations on the walls at Picadilly, and in the awkward and temporary removal of the group from the northeast section of Paris, where it concentrates its everyday life, to the surroundings of borrowed elegance. But perhaps this unique mix is most evident in the music at the balls, which hints at a pre- and postwar blending of Yiddish folk music and Western popular music. At the Lublin Society ball, Sofia and others sang Yiddish classics such as “Tum Balalaika” in Polish. There was a Yiddish love song to a tango bat, and “Q1: Sera, Sera” was sung in Yiddish as well. These songs were interspersed with “Ofn pripetsbilz,” and “La Vie en Rose,” a reminder of the romantic vision of life in Paris that helped draw the immigrants there. The halls are sometimes described on invitations as “déiermer solemrel” (formal lundieon)——the immigrant community’s performance of their own continuity and past. If the memorial servics represent an ad hoc representation of the immigrants’ multiform loss, the balls are their socially necessary complement, eioking the tapestry of warm, bright associations the immigrants have collected throughout their lifetimes. More so than the memorials, however, the balls inadequately meet the need to crate secular rituals. Though they display man}~

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an impressive range of styles and influences, their disparate elements are far

too transparent,4

and the immigrants are aware that their cultural resources are

strained to the limit by the centrifugal effects of their history. These rituals are

not likely to survive the generation which created them. The children do not attend. The Lublin Society, on the other hand, held a meeting which was more successful as an explicit Purim celebration, although it was not held until the following Sunday—perhaps because they hadn't booked the hall at the -Fe'de’ration early enough. Fifty or sixty people paid a 40—franc entry fee: several of them also paid their annual membership dues of 360 francs, receipt of which was duly stamped into their membership books. (it is significant of the landsmansbaft‘s changing nature that older membership books have spaces to mark dues paid monthly, rather than annually.) Miriam Silverstein opened the event, welcoming everyone to the party. and especially all the women named Esther Malcah—“Queen Esther.“ Since it was the day of the municipal elections, she added that she hoped everyone had fulfilled their civil right and duty by voting before coming. She mentioned the names of the members who were sick. Then she went on to current events: Thanks to the socialist government in Bolivia, with the cooperation of the leftist government in France, Klaus Barbie would finally be brought to iustice. The families of the victims, she continued, weren’t looking for revenge, but to remind the world of the history and danger of Fascism. This brought her back to Purim: In the worst times of our people‘s history, the historical novel of the Story of Esther has warmed us; as the Jewish children of Lublin loved to sax “Mordlzhe batzadilz rayt ofn ferd / un homer: barosbe lig! in drerd" iMordechai the Just rides on a horse / And Haman the Wicked lies sit feet under). President Szpiro in turn asserted that even non-observant Jens can celebrate Purim: “The only commandment is to eat and drink.” He went on in a straightforward, serious tone: While the historical truth of the Purim story has neier been proven, the great Jewish historian Dubnow writes that some attempt to murder the Jews of Persia probably took place in that period. In any case, Purim is a rich source of Yiddish folklore, and the folksy Purim plays were the first primitive beginnings of Yiddish theater. Today, we ain‘t think of Purim as iuST a story anymore; Hitler, unlike Haman, achieved his plan. In Persia now there‘s a fanatic—Khomeini—whose name is similar to that of Haman. But Jews survive because they pull together when they’re threatened. Now it‘s around Israel

4. Myerhoff eloquently details the risk taken in any creation of ritual. Following Lid-Straits. she says that even in nonliterate societies, “Odds and ends. fragments offered up by chm or the cuvironment.. .arenkenup byagroup andincorporatedmmanlcrrsedbyateoplemevflain thanselvs and their world" (1978:10). On the other hand. the disparate elements mrm mine together in a compelling way, “because when we are not mnvineed by .1 tinnl we may bemme aware of ourselves as having made them up. thence on to the walyzing realization that we have made up all our truths. ... “ (ibid_:86).

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that we have to rally—if it weren’t for Israel, Jews all over the world would be in a very different situation. Israel, he concluded, will always defend itself. The collective suicide at Masada will not be repeated. After these speeches came some twenty minutes devoted to the distribution of carnations, which various members (starting with Szpiro and Miriam) paid six francs to give to various women present. The impulse for this is clearly the custom of sending gifts, called shale/ab wanes—plates bearing fruit, candy, pastries, small coins, and the like—to neighboring households in the Jewish community on Purim. Though several people had six to eight women on their list, the same names kept coming up again and again. I got a flower for Elissa and one for Miriam, and Miriam handed me another for Elissa, “from the committee.“ When Elissa went up and said she wanted to give flowers to Moshe Zalcman’s wife, who had been announced as one of the invalid members, Mitiam gave her four, and refused to take any money for them. Thus, as soon as the Lublin meeting broke up, Elissa and I hurried over to the Medem Library, where Moshe Zalcman was presiding over a Purim celebration sponsored by the Progressive Jewish Organization—the earliest ex—Communist, “pro-Israel” group, whose sole continuing function is to raise money for a children’s home in Israel. Down the rue René Boulanger from the Medem, we passed several older people, who appeared to be coming from the library. Still other people were returning from a visit to a Purim carnival sponsored by the Lubavitch Hasidim at the Jewish Community Center on the Boulevard Poissonniere. One woman said to me jokingly in French, “Can I have a flower?” so I handed her and her friend one each, saying “It’s shalekb mones.” They were delighted; and I was too, because it was the first time ever in Paris that I had had the sense of a Yiddish—not simply Jewish—social group in public, on the street, where strangers could exchange pleasantries with each other. Inside, Zalcman was looking cheerful and even dapper, and seemed pleased that we had brought flowers. Several people asked how many had been at the Lublin party, and when we said the crowd hadn’t been very large, they didn‘t seem altogether dissatisfied. Judging from the number of people leaving, and the number of orange peels on the tables, their affair had been a success. Purim, then, was marked by the secular Yiddish community in Paris in various ways, none of them traditional. The Warsaw Society, failing to reserve their favorite hall for Hanukkah, waited until Purim but neglected the holiday itself. The Lublin Society observed the holiday, but a week late; and they modified a lovely tradition in a highly appropriate way. Also, President Szpiro had resisted the eternal temptation to make the present seem more like the past than it is: While drawing the parallel between Haman and Hitler, rather than concluding that the Jews had once again been saved, he mourned that this time the enemy had been victorious; and when he spoke of Israel, he cited the ancient martyr-heroes of Masada, only to insist that they were not to serve as a model for Israel today. The Progressive Jewish Organization, like the Lublin Society,

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was inspired by the tradition of exchanging gifts and giving charity on Purim, holding their annual charity benefit as a Purim party. The key to understanding these different activities was given to me by President Szpiro, when he told me that after the war the Lublin Society had begun to observe the “historical” Jewish holidays—Hanukkah and Purim. Since he acknowledged in his speech that the accuracy of the Book of Esther is uncertain, it is clear that by “historical” he means also, if not primarily, “nonreligious”; in fact, the Book of Esther does not mention the name of God once. For part of this community, there persists a taboo against anything that smacks ofJewish ”obscurantism.” As things stand, Hanukkah and Purim provide a fragile, yet fertile room for compromise.5 They allow the immigrants, long accustomed to living without any Jewish religious observance in their everyday lives, to reassert their connection to their ancestors on the one hand and the Jewish validity of their political beliefs on the other. Israel Independence Day in the spring is the latest “historical holiday" on the Jewish calendar. Although not many landsmanshaftn hold meetings specifically to mark the date, the Radom Society did so, and some eighty people attended. For the event, the portraits of Bundist leaders which normally adorn the front wall of the meeting hall at the Medem Library had been taken down and replaced by a portrait of David ben Gurion, a poster of Jerusalem, and an El Al travel shot. The program consisted of introductory remarks by the society’s President Fridman, another speech by Isaak Opatowski reviewing Israel‘s achievements and its prospects for peace, and a performance by the young Jewish singer Talila. President Fridman‘s remarks reinforced my impression that Jewish holidays largely served as vehicles for contemporary politics in this community, as he asserted that allJewish holidays are “religious in form and national in content.” Passover, he went on to say, is the best example of this and the greatest of all Jewish holidays, because it “celebrates the Jewish struggle for independence"; apparently the taboo against Passover is not shared by all. Since the fortieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising had just passed, he mentioned the glorious ghetto fighters, whose “spirit has gone over to the soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces”—once again establishing the Holocaust as the past experience in terms of which Israel’s present was to be understood. He concluded by exhorting the audience to increase their donations to the “Fonds Social,” the French equivalent of the Jewish Federation in the United States. Isaak Opatowski chose to begin by noting that the day the celebration was being held, May 8, was the anniversary of Hitler‘s downfall, and was being celebrated as such by “the peoples of Europe and the entire world. We are the

5. These two holidays have also been emphasized as part of the new Israeli “civil religion." In America as well, the celebration of Hanukkah has been given relative overemphasis by nonobserthe Jewish counterpart to Christmas.

vant Jews, who see it as

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generation that witnessed Hitler‘s great destruction, the generation of the ghetto uprising, and the generation of the establishment of the State of Israel." Talila did a set of mostly Hebrew songs, concluding with “Jerusalem of Cold.“ as appropriate for the occasion. She hesitated to accommodate a request for a Yiddish song: “But since it‘s Israel Independence Day, alors yiddiche. (a in pas.“ She misjudged her audience: Censorship or denigration of Yiddish is almost never an aspect of the immigrants' “pro-Israel" orientation. On the contrary, the argument is often made that Israel is the last bastion of modern

Yiddish culture. Another Independence Day celebration was sponsored jointly by the Fédér~ ation and the Farband, and was held at the Federation. Firer’s speech there reflected the easing of the political crisis of the fall, the association between the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel, and his training in Marxist analysis. He began by recalling the meeting held at the “tragically famous" Velodrome d‘Hiver to celebrate the declaration of Israeli independence. Today, he went on, was a gathering to mark both the coming unity of the Fédération and the Farband and the thirty—fifth anniversary of Israel’s existence. “The life of every individual—just like the life of a people—is dialectic and contradictory. Apparently it was necessary for so many of our people to die in order for the world to appreciate our national effort, and it was necessary that our enemy also be the enemy of great powers. For three years, the Jewish settlers had to fight against the British imperialists, and then they had a war against the Arab nations, under the leadership of Hitler’s former agent, the Mufti of Jerusalem. Today, Israel has accomplished a great deal, economically and technologically. There are negative realities in Israel, as well: fanatical chauvinists following irresponsible leaders insist on colonizing land occupied by Arab populations [Firer was referring to settlements that were not authorized by the Israeli government—J.B.]. The future of the Jewish people is unthinkable without Israel. We have trust in Israel’s people and in her democracy, but Israel faces hard times, and needs our solidarity." The great moments of ancient Jewish history, as commemorated in the “historical" holidays; the great catastrophe of the Second World War; and the successful struggle to reestablish a national homeland (within which the war of 1982 was included), thus formed a triad offering a solid associative basis for rhetoric. The task of any speaker or master of ceremonies at a festive gathering was to seize on these elements, and the opportunity offered by these special moments in the Jewish and secular calendar, to make the connections that his audience needed to hear. They needed to be reminded that they are heirs to a long and glorious past. They needed periodic public acknowledgment of their own suffering. Most of all, perhaps, they needed to be reassured that they had not betrayed their heritage, but had reinterpreted its essence and acted on it in such a way that their lives would become a part of it for the future. It remains to be seen how successful this effort can be. Historically, the best guarantee ofJewish continuity has been study and observance. The immigrants’

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recent identification with the Jewish people has not followed that path, but rather adopted a secular nationalist style from the first half of our century; it is indeed the style of “the older generation.” Very few young people come to the balls—the main event in the Iandsmanshaft calendar—and those who attend do so precisely because the event is rechercbe’. The balls and the more informal holiday celebrations draw on the several national cultures with which the immigrants have identified—East European Jewish, Polish, French, and Israeli. Yet a selection of songs in several languages, as impressive an indication of the immigrants’ varied experience as it may be, does not constitute a new and transmissible synthesis. The nostalgic tone of these events is highly appropriate for annual renewal of a sense of camaraderie, whether the kind of belonging they aim toward is that of folk community or bourgeois propriety. Nostalgia, however, is evanescent. The Yiddish culture of revolt, transformation of tradition, hope, and commemoration of martyrdom from which the immigrants also draw sustenance may serve as a more durable resource. The immigrants’ participation in that culture is the subject of the next chapter.

VIII HIGH CULTURE AND FOLKLORE

It should be apparent by now that the shared culture of secular Polish Jews in Paris is far from being a static continuation of their ancestral heritage. Loss through rejection on their own part and through being excluded, as proletarian youth, from the leisure necessary to acquire the treasures of traditional Jewish literacy left them hungry for new frames of meaning. The immigration and social upheaval they have experienced have offered such new patterns, some» times almost as a casual byproduct of their struggle to survive. In their efforts to shape and maintain a distinctive identity while participating in the progres— sive currents of their century, the immigrants have borrowed from religious Judaism, from Israeli national culture, and from French mass culture. The result cannot be equated with any of these. The synthesis is displayed impressively at Miriam Silverstein’s home. She lives in a classic Art Deco building in the Thirteenth Arrondissement: the elevator doors, multicolored smoky glass in abstract patterns; the curve and sweep of the staircase; and even her corner apartment itself (although it is hardly opulent) all suggest gracious modernity. The objects in her living room represent the things Miriam loves. There are several photos of the three children of Miriam’s niece, who is married to a doctor in Africa. On a side wall there is a small portrait of the classic Yiddish writer Mendele Moykher Sforim, and the bookcase nearby holds large-format works on modern art. The mementos under glass on the coffee table include a souvenir card from the reunion marking the thirty-fifth anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp for women at Ravensbrfick, and a tiny Polish Solidarity button rests on a side table. The sum of this catalogue is secular and political. Even more eclectic were the decorations on the walls of the apartment in which a widower named Matis Zelazo sits writing his memoirs. On the doorknob—befitting an aging and maybe arthritic man who lives alone—are several neckties, pre-tied. The walls are covered with charcoals of Sholem—Aleykhem characters; travel postcards of Yugoslavia, Turkey, and Israel; art postcards by Jewish painters including Chagall, Soutine, and Benn; a Soviet May Day poster, depicting a red banner encircling the world, with a peasant-worker type pointing out its message: “Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains”; and, like an opposite but matching bookend, a poster bearing the likenesses of sev106

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eral "Great Men of the Torah,” rabbinical authorities from the Middle Ages to

the nineteenth century.

If this man’s willingness to remember the great dream of world Communist revolution after so much disillusion is remarkable, its juxtaposition with the rabbinic model of aspiration is even more unusual. The distance most immi-

grants maintain from observant Judaism is in striking contrast to what we have come to expect of elderly immigrants in America. This distance is taken for granted even by French observers of the immigrant generation. When I mentioned it to one professor of Yiddish and American Studies, she replied: “You would hardly expect them to return to the synagogue after half a century out of it!” It is not only a history of bitter opposition, but even more so the insufficiency of warm associations in memories of childhood, that excludes religion—often so attractive to those contemplating their own impending death— as an option for these people. At political lectures and many cultural events, it seems as though the immigrants fantasize themselves as productive, patriotic, healthy Israelis; but they know that they will never be such. On several occasions, I was challenged by immigrants who wanted to know what I was doing in France or America: “For us, it’s too late; we missed our chance. But you should be in Israel!" Even the songs they sing about Israel are generally translated into Yiddish, which was decisively rejected as Israel’s national language in the middle of this century. The immigrants do consume the offerings of the French media, but these remain at home. I never heard public discussion of any television programs, though Undzer Vort daily carries the three networks’ listings. The French topics that reach the podium are either items of nostalgia from the immigrants’ youth (as discussed in the description of the annual balls), or contemporary politics. The common idiom of the immigrant community is the Yiddish language and the rich but recent culture for which it is the vessel. . For somewhat over a century, revolt and renewal have been the central themes of that culture. As the critic Dan Miron details, the first generation of East European Yiddish secular writers were drawn by the desire to communicate in the language of the masses, but had to overcome their own sense that departing from Hebrew or the great European languages to Yiddish was degrading (Miron 1973). Mendele, Sholem—Aleykhem, and Perets, the generation of Yiddish “classic writers,” were familiar with the traditional Jewish world, drawn to its intimacy and the wealth of cultural allusions available to it, but frustrated at its narrowness and convinced that it could not survive unchanged in the modern world. Their feuilletons, satires, and dramatic narratives were enormously popular and came to replace the Bible as the standard reference of a generation of Yiddish-speaking secular Jews throughout the world. In the towns and sometimes even the large cities of Poland, reading circles and library clubs were an integral part of various youth movements and a matter of vital seriousness to young people with little formal education. One woman whose father had been a teacher with enlightened views wrote in the memorial

book for her

town:

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Every Friday afternoon our house was visited by seamstresses, serving glrls, salesgirls, and also working men, tailors and shoemakers, who remembered to stop off at Avrom Hershl Melamed’s house on their way back from the bathhouse. . . . The library had a powerful influence on the readers. (Kutnik, in Kugelmass and Boyarin 19832112; cf. also Kac 1983:105—119)

In part, the reading circles, libraries, and literary evenings took the place of societies for studying the Talmud and other rabbinic literature in traditional Jewish society. The differences were not only in the subject matter, however; as the quote above makes clear, women and male proletarians were enthusiastic participants in the new groups. It is the heritage of these free—thinking, socialist and Zionist literary societies, along with the box evenings and Party—sponsored night classes described in an earlier chapter, that continues to draw immigrants in Paris to literary discussions at the Farband, Fédération, and Union halls. A comparison of the social history of literary reception in the Yiddish com— munity with that in general European bourgeois and later mass society is revealing. As described by Juergen Habermas (1962:196—200), in the course of the eighteenth century the focus of consumption and discussion of literature shifted from the intimacy of the family to reading societies. Toward the end of that century, such societies were extended from the bourgeoisie proper to shop— keepers and tradesmen; this popularization took place just about a century before the same movement among Jews in Eastern Europe. Most important, whereas for the dominant languages not only literature itself but its reception was eventually commercialized into the (once-again privatized) audience of mass-media criticism, the Yiddish literary public, weak and isolated as it is, still meets to celebrate and argue its own products. . Literary gatherings, concerts, theatrical performances, and art exhibitions promoted within the Yiddish community serve the same central functions. purpose is always to help perpetuate the group’s identity, by making possrble the re-creation of its cultural resources and drawing sustenance from them. Unfortunately, the community has grown too small, too old, and too dispersed for the products of the various media to come together and form a cultural universe expressing the unique experiences of the Polish Jews of Paris. Though the various media are “residual,” “practiced on the basis . . . of some previous social and cultural institution or formation” (Williams 1977:22), they are still “an effective element of the present” (ibid.). Their selection, juxtaposition, and creation focus on attempts to constitute group memory on one hand, and to strengthen the community behind Israel on the other. Within that historically and ideologically determined focus, the resources and problems vary greatly in the several media. As they increasingly appear motivated by the need for social cohesion rather than an integrated desire for expression, they reveal a culture breaking down into its constituent parts, without blending into a whole. Oyzer Kawka, who sang with the Jewish People’s Chorus until the Farband broke away from the Naye Presse, now performs every few weeks at the Far— band’s “People’s Club." When Isaak Opatowski gave his talk on the current ‘

The

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Middle East situation in September, the songs Kawka selected revealed several of the themes I would encounter throughout the year. The first song was a retelling of the Hasidic master Levi—Yitskhok of Berditchev’s famous “trial" of God for mistreating the Jews. Kawka introduced this by complaining, “When we came back from Auschwitz, we were accused of starting the war. The world forgot that it was we who had preached turning swords into plowshares." Kawka’s next song, called “A Lad from Yemen,” was about a meeting be tween 3 European-born “Yiddish Jew” and a Yemenite in Israel. It describes the recognition of being related, across the miles and the years, and thus expresses the new form ofJewish national identity that Kawka and so many others have embraced. That relations between European and Afro-Asian Jews in Israel and in France are far from the ideal expressed in the song underscores the fact that support of Israel is for the immigrants not just recognition of an existing state of affairs, but affirmation of an ideal beyond the interests of the individual or the local group. The last and most powerful song that Kawka performed was called “Moyde ani." The phrase, as used in this song, means two things: First, it is a reference to the prayer said by pious Jews upon arising in the morning, practically the first prayer any Jewish child learns, in which the words moyde ani mean “I give thanks” [to God]. In Yiddish, however, the term moyde implies an admis— sion or confession, and thus the line moyde ani, ikh hob shoyn fargesn means both “I have forgotten the words to the prayer” and “I confess I have forgotten.” The meaning of the song for Kawka’s generation becomes clearer in a subsequent line: “I have suffered without end / and thus my prayer has changed.” The song, then, works on several levels: It is a nostalgic reference to the prayers and the pious world of childhood; an apologia for having left that world, through invocation of the difficulty of life; and, ultimately, through incorporating these previous two meanings, perhaps the only possible replacement of the prayer, when the need for prayer is felt yet an unmediated return is impos» sible. But in order for the song to be fully effective, the listener must be competent to recognize all the meanings its words bear. Hence, the integration it represents for the immigrants cannot be transmitted to the majority of their French—born children. Later in the year Naomi Gorelick and her tall, thin, reserved colleague Felix Handwerker performed after a lecture on Sholem—Aleykhem at the rue de Paradis quarters of the U.J.R.E. The numbers that Felix performed seemed to represent pure healing, emphasizing in a nonpolitical way the sufferings of the Jewish artisan classes and the way they had found some warmth in fantasy. One song, called “A Cantor,” describes craftsmen recalling the sweetness of a cantor’s performance: The tailor says, “Oy, how he sang, just like pulling a needle through cloth,” while the smith says, “Oy, did he sing, just like hammering in a horseshoe!” While the images are consistent with the Marxist idea that material conditions determine consciousness, what comes through primarily is the love the craftsmen have for the special aesthetic pleasures available to them. The second number—really a show piece—that Felix performed was

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a dramatization of a poor man‘s dream of finding coins in his humble apartment. In the middle, there’s a dialogue between the poor man and his wife, in which each fearfully urges the other to pick the coins off the tree, until both realize that it‘s just a dream. Felix performed the entire number as though he were on the stage of a Yiddish cabaret in Warsaw. The most memorable of Naomi‘s numbers was a lullaby written by SholemAleykhem, in which a mother sings to her baby about her father who left for America so long ago, who “will soon send letters and money“ so that they can be reunited there. The song implies what the mother does not want to tell the child: She suspects she has been abandoned, and is perhaps trying to hold on to faith. It may be reading in too much to say that for Naomi Gorelick, those who went to America abandoned the Jews in Europe, although European survivors frequently express that belief. The poem certainly presents the gulf between seIf—interest and collective loyalty that has riven Jewish life in our times. Another performer, younger and Israeli, put together a review at the Fe'dération which evoked the great sentimental themes of the immigrants‘ lives. She began on an upbeat note, with the song “Am yisroel chai” (“the people of Israel lives"), sung in Yiddish. A song about a Jewish wedding by a contemporary Israeli Yiddish writer followed, and then a drippy rendition of a love poem by the New York Yiddish poet H. Leivick. Before taking a pause, she performed Mordechai Gebirtig‘s “Potato Soup with Mushrooms,” in which the child narrator explains that’s just what he wants for lunch every day. After the break, during which the piano accompanist played a bit of Chopin, the performer came out dressed as a yeshiva student and did a long, panoramic number about Sabbath in the shtetl. This, too, ended with the question of a child, who on this one day of the week gets to eat his fill: “Daddy, why can’t every day be the Sabbath?” After an intermission, she came out dressed as a tough Warsaw street character, in a grey suit and cap, and sang Gebirtig‘s song about Avreml: “I go selling at the markets, like those simple shtetl boys / I slit the pockets of rich men, and steal their dirty banknotes.” The tone of the song is defiant, and the urban bravado must find echoes in the minds of people who moved to poor city neighborhoods from the countryside as small children. But it ends pathetically, with the boy saying, “When I die, on my grave will be written: ‘Here lies the orphan Avreml, who would have been a fine man if only his father had lived.‘ " The last set was potpourri: A song proclaiming, “I will never forget my mother‘s Sabbath candles”; a young girl announcing, “Mama, I love a pilot”; and “La Vie en Rose,” the last words of which are “mon coeur qui bat.“ As the audience applauded, the performer encouraged them: “May your hearts beat thus for 120 years!“—the traditional longevity Jews wish each other. Several of the costumes and impersonations in this pastiche were unconvincing. The nostalgia was forced. Yet by touching on the myth of sbtetl warmth, the reality (which Gebirtig captured again and again in his songs) of this generation’s harsh childhood, French sentimentalism, and the love for Israel, which a tree laden with golden

don‘t

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substitutes for their destroyed homelands in their hearts, the performer obviously won her audience. The plastic arts, less obviously grounded in traditional Jewish culture than folk song, have not been ignored by the immigrant community. The painter Benn, the miniaturist David Tuchinsky, and the sculptor Michel Milberger are all connected to the Yiddish immigrant community; their work often appears in Yiddish books published in Paris, either as portraits of the authors or as illustrations. One of very few art events during the year was a group visit, sponsored by the Friends of Mapam, to an exhibition of work by Leopold Krec at the gallery of the Union des Banques de Paris on the Boulevard des Malesherbes. Though Krec is Jewish and was born in Lemberg, Galicia in 1907, he speaks no Yid— dish—an ironic mark of class distinction. At one point during the visit to his show, Yisroel Belchatowski turned to someone and asked, “Is he Polish too, Krec?" The reply came back, “He’s a Galicianer.” People from Central Poland—Lublin, Warsaw, Lodz, Radom—do not necessarily think of people from the southern province of Galicia as being Polish, even though the province was

part of interwar Poland. Discussions with the artist, who was present, nevertheless took place in Polish. (Not once during the year did I hear a negative reference to the Polish language; many lecturers throw Polish phrases in to spice

their talks, and Polish is popular at the annual balls.) Most of the pieces seemed to be female nudes. Belchatowski turned to Yehezkel Korenchandler, when both were looking at one of the nudes, and playfully warned him: “You must remember to avoid sinful looks!” Korenchandler retorted: “Why shouldn‘t I sin? And how could I possibly avoid doing so, anyway?" At one point, when the artist who guided the visit was giving an explanation of one of the pieces, Belchatowski said to me, “Er taytsht dos gut oys, ha?"— he interprets it well, nOP—thus using the verb which originally referred to word— for-word translation from the Bible into Yiddish (once called taytsh or “Ger— man"), but which has come to mean “interpret” in a completely secular, ae5< thetic sense. The picture that attracted the most attention was a painting showing several figures, one with a sort of clown’s hat, one with a saxophone, and so forth. One woman asked the guide what the painting represented. A member of the group offered, “It’s a picture of actors behind the scenes." The woman who had asked the question then guessed that it was a scene from Les Miserables. She pointed to a cook, and then to “a Purim—shpiler"—one of the folk who went from house to house on Purim, performing skits for coins, food, and drink. She thus painlessly fused two different traditions, Yiddish folk art and French bourgeois literature, quite likely prompted by one of Sholem—Aleykhem‘s most famous stories, which is about the poverty and Iiveliness of Purim-sbpiler. A third guess was even more daring: “It’s a scene from a play by Brecht.“ But there was general agreement with the guide’s Solomonic resolution: “It‘s what—

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ever you see in it. There‘s no one answer in a work of art." And then the visit was over.1 The visit to the Krec exhibit was an unusual event, providing the immigrants with an opportunity to comment on “universalist” secular culture (represented by figurative art), using metaphors from Jewish tradition. In general, while artists are respected for their contribution to the community’s cultural maturity and the immigrant Jewish artists of Montparnasse are remembered with pride (Aronson 1963), they do not personally animate the community in the way writers are expected to. Nor is group appreciation of art emphasized, as is still the case with literature, and also with the Yiddish theater.

Theater was central to Yiddish culture in the interwar years. Aside from local productions, such as those in which Adolf Rybojad starred, immigrants in Paris saw the great troupes of Poland and America on tours of Western Europe. Perhaps owing to the combination of high production costs and the need to understand Yiddish, theater seems to be the branch of Yiddish culture which has had the hardest time surviving the numerical decline of the Yiddish community. Nevertheless, Miriam Silverstein, Isaak Opatowski, and other members of the Committee for Yiddish enthusiastically promoted a revue presented by three actors from Israel, held in November at the Jewish university center known as the Centre Rachi. The performance was poor in many ways: in enthusiasm, in invention, and in execution. Titled “An Insane World,” the revue included several vaudeville sketches, one of which was very similar to “the doctor sketch" memorialized in Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys. Another featured one member of the troupe as a woman trying to sell her house and another actor as a stutterer who thinks she‘s looking for a husband. There was a medley of the same sentimental songs performed by the entertainers at the annual balls. The political numbers were the most revealing. One, called “I’m Not Normal," opened with the idea of a man who doesn’t fool around with his neighbor’s wife, gives his seat to old ladies, and so forth, and finished with the idea of a state—Israel, of course—that isn’t “normal" because it isn’t venal and selfcentered on the international scale. A second political piece was called “The Cap—Maker,” in which the performer came onstage with several hats in different styles. The first verse set the classic shtetl image of a poor artisan peddler who doesn’t manage to sell a thing. Next was the cowboy hat, representing Ronald Reagan: The punchline here was that while Reagan has the big hat, Begin has the head. Finally, an Arab keffiah: The circle holding it in place on top of the head was likened to a bagel, inside of which there’s . . . an empty hole! The

1. Compare the comments on artwork by Center elders in Myerhoff 1988. The extraordinary richness of the elders‘ comments can be attributed largely to the fact that they are responses to the elders‘ works.

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closing monologue, a cover of the great comedian Shimen Dzigan’s “Conver—

sation With the Lord of the Universe,” in which the speaker complains that the Arabs have oil and the Jews only stones (“all we ask is a little bit of peace"), sounded particularly unconvincing after knee»jerk praise of Begin and anti-Arab racism. Elissa and I left at the intermission. The next day I spoke to one of the landsmansbaft officers. He asked me what I had thought of the revue, and I replied carefully that it wasn’t the best I‘d seen. He told me I was being too kind: “It was the worst!” His continued willingness to exercise critical discretion, despite the dearth of opportunities to see performances in his native language, was striking. His open criticism was doubtless encouraged by the fact that the performers were not members of the Parisian community. A few weeks later came the annual concert of the Union des Juifs pour la Resistance et I’Enttaide. It featured a playlet performed by preteens who had attended the Union’s summer camp. This was a fable about the dominance of commercial over artistic or intellectual interests in the press, with a boy and girl in white representing a theatrical notice and its accompanying photo, gradually being pushed out of the “Arts et Spectacles” page by tough-looking sensationalist stories, brassy, aggressive ads for a “Super-Hyper-Marché” and strutting ads for pornographic movies—these last accompanied by Donna Summer singing “Love to Love You, Baby.” The political point made has some connection to the anticapitalist ideals of the Jewish left. But on the evidence presented, I wondered how these kids’ summer camp experience could have left them with any lasting sense of connection to Jewishness—or indeed, whether it was intended to. A group of actors led by the Moscow-trained director Dovid Schein and sponsored by the Committee for Yiddish gave a performance which offered some idea of what the Yiddish theater had been, and was remarkable not least because Communist and non-Communist actors performed together. It was a sampling from the classics, including a dramatization of Sholem Asch’s story “The Divorce" and part of Mendele Moykher Sforim’s tale of the wanderings of Benjamin the Third, the Jewish Don Quixote. The latter segment featured a memorable duet between the basso Leon Spiegelmann, playing the Don Quixote-like part, and Tadek Lokcinski as his Sancho, venturing forth from their shtetl to seek Jerusalem. Their feet are sore, they haven’t gotten far from their home, and already they’re hungry. These were a few moments of transcendence: over the dearth of Yiddish actors, the loss of the Jewish world that the scene referred to, and the gap between the themes of eternal, patient Jewish endurance and the Western striving for individual redemption.

Of all the arts, literature comes closest to the secularist ideal of exploring universal issues in a Jewish idiom. Literature remains the mark of a cultured individual. Several immigrants invited me to come to their homes and see their Yiddish books, sometimes no more than a dozen large volumes all told, often

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including the five volumes of the Yiddish Encyclopedia published before the war. Lectures on Yiddish literature are still a regular part of the social calendar in the Yiddish community. In October, Dora Teitlboym gave an impassioned lecture at the rue de Paradis headquarters about ltsik Manger‘s Yiddish poem cycle on biblical themes. She greeted the audience of some fifty to sixty people as “tsadilzim,” saints, because they had managed to make it despite a Metro strike, and, paraphrasing God‘s promise to Abraham concerning the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, she said that she would have come “even for only ten such tsadikim." “Someday," she added, “robots will do all the work, and there won't be any need for workers to go on strike. Then everyone will be free to realize his own true life’s work, and everyone will be a poet.” Her lecture lasted a little over an hour and a half, which, she repeatedly emphasized, was nothing compared to the lectures she gave when she had lived in America. “As soon as I see one person starting to fall asleep, I begin to make cuts.“ In fact, she was far from pedantic. She had no trouble finding appropriate places for political asides, as when she quoted ltsik Manger’s alienation upon visiting Israel: “Someday Israel will need Manger, because while dollars can build an army, they can’t build a people’s culture.“ When she referred to Manger‘s own poverty and his affection for the Jewish toiling masses, she cited again her vision of a time when no human being would have to do drudge work. Mme. Teitlboym’s lecture testified to the persistence of an alternative ideology to Israelocentrism among one segment of the Yiddish community. This ideology centers on belief in secular Yiddish culture as the authentic modern transformation of the ethic of the People of the Book, a Jewish heritage which someday the entire world will discover and be enriched by. She said as much at the end of her lecture, referring especially to Manger. She could have taken the analogy further. According to tradition, the Torah was given to Israel exclusively in return for its recognition of God; but when the Messiah comes,-all peoples will recognize the universal God. Thus it is tempting to see her vision as a secularization of traditional Messianism and of the Messianic eradication of the separation between Israel and the nations. But Dora boym is a poet. Did she merely exploit the symbolic forms of traditional Jewrsh culture, or was she recasting the essential content of Jewish beliefs through the years? Were her ideals shaped by Communism, the prophets, or both? Teitlboym mentioned a debate which had broken out among Orthodox Jews in Poland when Manger’s book was first published in the thirties, concerning his putative desecration of the memory of the biblical ancestors. She contrasted what she called the “warm, popular" tradition of agada—that part of the clas— sical rabbinic writings which consists of legend, parable, and folklore—and the

visron‘of Teitl—

2. A member of the audience who later spoke at the Federation angrily insisted that Teitlboym had twisted the meaning of Manger’s poem. In fact, Manger's Megile lider are extremely popular in Israel, in Hebrew translation.

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“cold, elitist" tradition of halakha, rabbinic law, which insists we are not to be compared to the biblical patriarchs. Manger, she said, envisaged them in the tradition of agada, which described the ancestors as typical members of the people. She did not find it necessary to dismiss the Bible as a myth, nor to oppose the progressivist precepts of Enlightenment to the traditional assumption that successive generations decline in stature. Most literary discussions focused on the Jewish value of Yiddish literature. Teitlboym’s lecture, in which she asserted the universal value of ltsik Mangers poetry, was one exception in this regard. Another was Korenchandler’s lecture on Alexandre Dumas pére to an audience at the Left Poalei Tsion club, the Foyer des Ouvriers Juifs, in which he regretted that there had not been more translations of Dumas’ work into Yiddish. Korenchandler once again shared his worldly erudition as he told the story of a little-known collaborator of Dumas’, who drafted manuscripts that Dumas edited and then published under his own name, including The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, and The Count of Monte Christo. On the way out, one man praised Korenchandler‘s knowledge: “We’ve been here in Paris a long time, but not many Jews are knowledgeable. A lot of Jews talk, but not many know." Korenchandler, who passed away early in 1985, was indeed one of a handful of erudite lecturers and chroniclers the community still possessed. I met two of the most productive Parisian Yiddish writers, Benjamin Schlewin and Moshe Szulsztein in 1980, approximately one year before both died. Fittingly, Schlewin’s last book contains a memoir of his childhood as a refugee during World War I, while Szulsztein’s posthumous last work is an autobiography. Both include pages chronicling the author’s publication history, which are remarkably similar. Schlewin published seventeen books in Yiddish, one (the translation Les juifs de Belleville) in French, one in Hebrew. The first was published in Warsaw, in 1933; one in Wroclaw, Poland, in 1950; another in Warsaw, in 1956; and one in Tel Aviv, in 1972. All the rest were published in Paris. Szulsztein published eighteen books, all in Yiddish; the first two were published in Lublin and Warsaw (1934, 1936), then the rest all in Paris, except for another in Warsaw (1954) and one in Tel Aviv (1968). Thus, the “migrations” of these authors’ works reflect the authors’ migrations and changing loyalties: from P0land to France before the war, with contributions to the chimerical “recon~ struction” of Jewish life in Poland after the war, to a new association with Israel, yet with the focus on the Parisian Yiddish community remaining throughout. In Yiddish publishing, the connection between writer, printer, and seller is generally quite intimate, since no book is really published for profit. Schlewin set the type for his own book, and read the galleys while lying in a hospital bed; the book appeared at the end of the period of secondary mourning for him, thirty days after his death. Szulsztein, too, died shortly after a visit to his printer, and virtually his last concern, as Miriam Silverstein recalls, was to see the book published. Szulsztein’s book, publication of which was entrusted to a committee, including his wife and officers of the Lublin Society and of the

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including the five volumes of the Yiddish Encyclopedia published before the war. Lectures on Yiddish literature are still a regular part of the social calendar in the Yiddish community. In October. Dora Teitlboym gave an impassioned lecture at the rue de I’a radis headquarters about ltsik Manger‘s Yiddish poem cycle on biblical themes. She greeted the audience of some fifty to sixty people as “tsadileim,” saints, because they had managed to make it despite a Métro strike, and, paraphrasing God’s promise to Abraham concerning the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, she said that she would have come “even for only ten such tsadikim.” “Someday," she added, “robots will do all the work, and there won’t be any need for workers to go on strike. Then everyone will be free to realize his own true life’s work, and everyone will be a poet.” Her lecture lasted a little over an hour and a half, which, she repeatedly emphasized, was nothing compared to the lectures she gave when she had lived in America. “As soon as I see one person starting to fall asleep, I begin to make cuts." In fact, she was far from pedantic. She had no trouble finding appropriate places for political asides, as when she quoted ltsik Manger’s alienation upon visiting Israel: “Someday Israel will need Manger, because while dollars can build an army, they can’t build a people’s culture.”l When she referred to Manger’s own poverty and his affection for the Jewish toiling masses, she cited again her vision of a time when no human being would have to do drudge work. Mme. Teitlboym's lecture testified to the persistence of an alternative ideology to Israelocentrism among one segment of the Yiddish community. This ideology centers on belief in secular Yiddish Culture as the authentic modern transformation of the ethic of the People of the Book, a Jewish heritage which someday the entire world will discover and be enriched by. She said as much at the end of her lecture, referring especially to Manger. She could have taken the analogy further. According to tradition, the Torah was given to Israel exclu» sively in return for its recognition of God; but when the Messiah comes,-all peoples will recognize the universal God. Thus it is tempting to see her yiston as a secularization of traditional Messianism and of the Messianic eradication of the separation between Israel and the nations. But Dora boym is a poet. Did she merely exploit the symbolic forms of traditional Jewrsh culture, or was she recasting the essential content of Jewish beliefs through the years? Were her ideals shaped by Communism, the prophets, or both? Teitlboym mentioned a debate which had broken out among Orthodox Jews in Poland when Manget‘s book was first published in the thirties, concerning his putative desecration of the memory of the biblical ancestors. She contrasted what she called the “warm, popular” tradition of agada—that part of the clas— sical rabbinic writings which consists of legend, parable, and folklore—and the

visron‘of Teitl-

2. A member of the audience who later spoke at the Federation angrily insisted that Teitlboym had twisted the meaning of Mangcr’s poem. In fact, Manger‘s Megile lider are extremely popular in Israel, in Hebrew translation.

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“cold, elitist" tradition of halakha, rabbinic law, which insists we are not to be compared to the biblical patriarchs. Manger, she said, envisaged them in the tradition of agadu, which described the ancestors as typical members of the people. She did not find it necessary to dismiss the Bible as a myth, nor to oppose the progressivist precepts of Enlightenment to the traditional assumption that successive generations decline in stature. Most literary discussions focused on the Jewish value of Yiddish literature. Teitlboym’s lecture, in which she asserted the universal value of ltsik Manger‘s poetry, was one exception in this regard. Another was Korenchandler’s lecture on Alexandre Dumas pére to an audience at the Left Poalei Tsion club, the Foyer des Ouvriers Juifs, in which he regretted that there had not been more translations of Dumas’ work into Yiddish. Korenchandler once again shared his worldly erudition as he told the story of a little-known collaborator of Dumas’, who drafted manuscripts that Dumas edited and then published under his own name, including The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, and The Count of Monte Christo. On the way out, one man praised Korenchandler’s knowledge: “We’ve been here in Paris a long time, but not many Jews are knowledgeable. A lot of Jews talk, but not many know.” Korenchandler, who passed away early in 1985, was indeed one of a handful of erudite lecturers and chroniclers the community still possessed. I met two of the most productive Parisian Yiddish writers, Benjamin Schlewin and Moshe Szulsztein in 1980, approximately one year before both died. Fittingly, Schle— win’s last book contains a memoir of his childhood as a refugee during World War I, while Szulsztein’s posthumous last work is an autobiography. Both include pages chronicling the author’s publication history, which are remarkably similar. Schlewin published seventeen books in Yiddish, one (the translation Les juifs de Belleville) in French, one in Hebrew. The first was published in Warsaw, in 1933; one in Wroclaw, Poland, in 1950; another in Warsaw, in 1956; and one in Tel Aviv, in 1972. All the rest were published in Paris. Szulsztein published eighteen books, all in Yiddish; the first two were published in Lublin and Warsaw (1934, 1936), then the rest all in Paris, except for another in Warsaw (1954) and one in Tel Aviv (1968). Thus, the “migrations" of these authors’ works reflect the authors’ migrations and changing loyalties: from P0land to France before the war, with contributions to the chimerical “reconstruction” of Jewish life in Poland after the war, to a new association with Israel, yet with the focus on the Parisian Yiddish community remaining

throughout. In Yiddish publishing, the connection between writer, printer, and seller is generally quite intimate, since no book is really published for profit. Schlewin set the type for his own book, and read the galleys while lying in a hospital bed; the book appeared at the end of the period of secondary mourning for him, thirty days after his death. Szulsztein, too, died shortly after a visit to his printer, and virtually his last concern, as Miriam Silverstein recalls, was to see the book published. Szulsztein’s book, publication of which was entrusted to a committee, including his wife and officers of the Lublin Society and of the

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Committee for Yiddish, was the cause of a dispute, with some members arguing that it should be printed in Israel, where costs could be kept down and distribution improved, and others—including Mme. Szulsztein—insisting that it be published in Paris, like the rest of Szulsztein's books. Mme. Chana Wajnberg, a mild, white-haired lady, specializes in selling books. primarily at the Federation. With drawn and pleading eyes, a hopeful smile, she confronts each person coming into the hall. She was pleased when I bought Szulsztein‘s memoir from her, and when I bought Lili Berger's novel, Unfinished Pages. The latter is a fictionalization of the diaries of Bundist leader Esther Frumkin, who died in Stalin's camps. The official celebration of this book’s publication had been delayed because of Berger’s illness. When the celebration eventually was held, Mme. Wainberg and Mme. Berger both seemed disappointed when I said I wouldn‘t buy a copy of the book because I had already done so. Likewise, Mme. Wajnberg was persistent when I told her I wouldn't buy a copy of a book by an author visiting from New York, since I could obtain it when I went home: “But he’s here tonight, he’ll autograph it for you." Mme. Wainberg does not hesitate to use guilt as a sales tactiC. But once I overheard her complaining how hard it was to sell books for others: “Let them do it themselves for a change.“ It obviously was difficult; Olek and Bela Najgeborn, who brought several copies of Szulsztein’s book to the Onziéme Arron— dissement club ball, had little success. And one man present at the memorial meeting of the Lublin Society, in refusing to buy the same book, implicitly refuted the scholar’s elegant theories about the power of memory: “What do I care what happened in Kurow fifty years ago?" On one writer’s worktable I saw evidence of a tactic well known to authors of Jewish religious tracts: a list of names and addresses, titled “To send books and ask for money.” There is a gap between the public honor and financial support given to surviving Yiddish writers, and the unwillingness of most of the potential au— dience to buy, let alone read through, Yiddish books. A visiting lecturer from New York angered many members of a Fédération audience by suggesting that too many prizes had been established to honor too few new Yiddish books, and that the money would be better spent on support of students writing dissertations on Yiddish writers. Since people like Gitele Edelstein and her husband Yidl establish such prizes in memory of their loved ones, their anger at such criticism is understandable. The problem of a literature increasingly without readers is a valid one, and it is significant that it took an outsider to ac— knowledge it in public. The problem was embarrassingly evident at an event held to celebrate the publication, by the Committee for Yiddish, of a Yiddish-French dictionary_ The star and most successful speaker was the Chief Rabbi of France, Rene’ Sirat who spoke in a quiet and intimate French. In fact, he spoke as a non-Yiddishist, mentioning on two occasions “Yiddish, Judaeo-Spanish, and JUdaCO-Arabjc’i as three Jewish languages, implying their equal value and dignity. He SPOke of his “Judaeo-Arab” uncle, who had lived on the rue des Rosiers in Le Marais

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and who had been deported by the Nazis, Finally, he stated explicitly that the suppression of Diaspora Jewish languages In the process of establishing Hebrew as the national language of Israel had been unnecessary and dangerous, concluding that the heritage of the Diaspora was essential to the continued vitality of the people. The effectiveness of Rabbi Sirat‘s speech came from both its eloquence and its message. It stressed the fact that in Israel and in France—two countries where a monoculturalist, nationalist model has been adopted—Yiddish and other minority languages still could serve as the source of “new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationship“ (Williams 1977: 123). Rabbi Sirat showed that differences can enrich, rather than threaten the whole. The other speakers were less to the point and less successful. Apparently the organizers of the event had invited them to lend prestige to the evening, rather than because of their involvement with Yiddish scholarship. Rather than a resource and achievement for the community’s use, the dictionary was treated as an opportunity for sterile self-congratulation. There should have been someone on the podium who was just beginning to learn Yiddish, who could have spoken about using the new dictionary as a learning tool. It was a dreary celebration, symptomatic of a failure of cultural transmission that threatens to undermine the commitment to Yiddish on the part of both immigrants and their Frenchborn descendants. That the “Yiddish revival” is not an unambiguous success does not mean that the problematics of Yiddish are irrelevant to general cultural dynamics. Yiddish has not become “obsolete” in any march of progress. In a curious way, the Yiddish that still is taught, written, read, spoken, and sung remains more vital, closer to the “tattered shreds of reality” than much literature produced in the great world languages. And, while the explosion of secular Yiddish culture in the decades before World War I was simultaneous with the flowering of High Modernism, the dilemmas of those bearing that culture now are matched by a larger crisis of meaning in artistic production: marks the typical situation of the contemporary artist in the West, it might What be said, is . . . the closure of horizons: without an appropriable past, or imaginable future, in an interminably

recurrent present. (P.

Anderson 1988:329)

For the immigrant generation, however, Yiddish culture remains a tree of life. When I went out to the suburb of St. Brise to visit the 88—year-old Yekhiel Grynszpan, he pointed disconsolately to the empty suburban streets. In Paris, he said, one can go out alone, “but here . . . ” He went on to explain that before, there had been a group of old men—of whom he had been the only Jew—who had met in front of the town hall and passed the time together. Of an original Seven or nine, only he and one other remained. He had made a written note to himself to quote a poem to me which expressed how he felt. The poem is by the Soviet Yiddish poet Moshe Kulbak. The first line begins, “My generation

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is sickening away . . . " and goes on to describe the increasing solitude which is made all the more clear by the names of absent friends in the narrator's address book. I had come to dispel Grynszpan‘s solitude, but only for a few hours, and he wanted to return the favor by sharing what he could that would be of value to me. Day in, day out, aside from a weekly meeting with his old friend and landsman Kaplan, it is the likes of Kulbak's poem that accompany Grynszpan now.

IX LEADERS AND INTELLECTUALS

Leaders need followers; intellectuals need an audience. The shrinking of the realm of Jewish politics and Yiddish cultural life has led both to sharpened jealousies and to a narrowing of debate. After the talk on Yiddish literature in which the lecturer suggested stipends for students, the journalist Leneman stood up to make a few comments. He criticized those amateurs who, having written memoirs of the Holocaust years, now considered themselves writers. Unlike those who have devoted their lives to the craft of writing, he asserted, the former are in reality mere “gravestone—cutters,” whose books are published only because they have the money to print them themselves. Leneman’s bitterness may be comprehensible, but it is a luxury the community can hardly afford, since the leadership and the “masses" are less and less each year. Firer of the Farband, stressing to me that not all of the immigrant Jewish organizations had been Iandsmansbaftn, reminisced about the Jewish Communists‘ prewar network of cultural clubs, trade union groups, and neigh— borhood organizations. Coming back to the present, he acknowledged that the entire organization had declined, and along with the numbers, the quality of activists had as well. Yekhiel Grynszpan summed up the situation regretfully: “There’s no politics in the landsmanshaftn anymore." The “poverty of conflict“ in the Parisian Yiddish community—its muted quality and its gossipy rather than ideological emphasis—bespeaks the crisis of a community which requires intellectuals and artists to help shape values and define the group, but which can neither support these people adequately nor permit them to relate to the group as a loyal opposition. One of the first things the sculptor Michel Milberger told me when we became acquainted in the spring was that he had spent a good deal of time in New York, liked the city, and could have been wealthy if he had stayed there. I responded that many Parisians, such as Yisroel Belchatowski, had found they couldn’t stay in New York because everyone there is obsessed with chasing dollars. Milberger assured me that was no longer the case in New York, that there were already some batlonim among the Jews there. The Yiddish word batlan can simply mean “idler,” or it can refer to someone who is free to devote himself to higher things—traditionally, study of the rabbinic texts. Milberger was speaking of people who have the desire and can afford the luxury of spend119

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ing their time on creative or preservative pursuits which may not enrich the indifidual but do enrich the community. In effect, Milbcrger was saying that such barlonim are essential to a healthy and mature community. A rather different image of the intellectual was manifested at the ceremony where the Max Tsukcrman Award, given each year to a Zionist community adivist who is also a journalist, was presented to Mordechai Lerman of the Federation. The president of the Federation briefly reviewed Lerman‘s career: heder. gymnasium, and Hashomer Hatmir activism in Lublin, emigration to Paris in 193I to study chemistry and commerce, repatriation to Poland to marry (his wife is a graduate of Warsaw University and a lawyer), and return to Paris in 1947, where he has been active in the Left Poalei Tsion. Then Warshawski, speaking on behalf of the Committee for Yiddish, picked up the thread, citing Lerman‘s identity as a proletarian, a man of the people, and a Jewish intellectual. Lerman, he continued, had fought for Yiddish when it was unpopular to do so among Zionists; and although he‘s a socialist, his socialism is Jewish style, undogmatic—Lerman is a Jew first. Finally, editor Cypel of Undzer Vort said that some writers just sit home and write their books; this is not enough. A writer and intellectual has a communal responsibility to build and to help rebuild that which was destroyed. A set of communal values were made explicit here. The Yiddish community, ready to recognize talent and dedication, does not wish to see itself as divided into classes. In Lerman, the speakers identified the qualities they expect from their leaders today: They should be Zionist, appreciate Yiddish, the working class, be educated and active, and be socialist; but their soctalism not conflict with their Jewish loyalty. Citing Lerman’s proletarian roots rein— obtain forced his connection to the community and the sophistication one without leaving the community. This is an important point especially Jewish workers‘ movement has had to contend with worker-intellectuals destre to associate with the dominant culture, once the movement has helped educate

stem from must

can

strice the

them.1

.

'

“actrvrst‘

.

,

It was quite fitting that the roles of “journalist” and were linked in this manner, since the Yiddish press in Paris, like the French, 15 the standard— bearer and bellwether of party politics. Significant of the gradual but steady rapprochement of the Farband and the Fédération was the presence (this year for the first time, according to Olek Najgeborn) of Farband representatives at the annual organizational meeting of fund-raisers for Undzer Vort. Their presence occasioned references to the Naye Presse which were not unfavorable: Szpiro of the Lublin Society, comparing the 140,000 francs which had been the Naye Presse, collected for Undzer Vort to the 200,000 already collected said, as he pledged 4,000 francs: “In that regard, we could take a lesson from

for

to

1. Cf. Mendelsohn 1970 for a discussion of the “workers’ opposition” to the decision agitate in Yiddish among Jewish workers in the Russian Empire, taken by mostly bourgeois Bundist leaders at the turn of the century.

Leaders and Intellectuals

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them." It was yet another reference the virtue of Communist nrzam/armnal discipline. While the two newspapers are not unaware of each other (I saw a copy of Undzer Vor! on the desk of Paul Mayer, one of the editors of the Nay: Purse . they do remain sectarian. The Communist paper dutifully prints lung essays explaining the strategy and policy of the French Communist Party. The Zionist paper reinforced its ideology with a sharp attack on French Jewish intellectuals who, inspired by the Bund and the Jewish historian Simon Dubnow, promote Jewish cultural autonomy in the Diaspora. The differing ideologies show up in more subtle ways also, as in designations of the Palestine Liberation Organization. In the Nuye Presse, the initials used represent “Palestiner Bafrayungs Organizatsye," the movement‘s name in Yiddish. In Undzer Vort, on the other hand, the initials used are the Hebrewalphabet equivalent of “O.L.P.," from the French “Organisation de Liberation Palestinienne." In refusing to translate the organization‘s name, the editors of Undzer Vort imply that it has no legitimate place in Jewish life. One slip which I noticed in Undzer Var! shed some light on the editors‘ political prejudices, and also on my own. In mid-April, 1983, it was revealed that the French government had had regular intelligence contacts with a high P.L.O. official named Abu Iyad. In carrying the news, Undzer Vort mistakenly printed the name of Abu Nidal, the Palestinian dissident and assassin. I pointed out the error to the journalist Skurnik, who dismissed it: “That should be the worst!” I insisted they should print a correction, but he told me they didn't have the strength. The next day, a correction did in fact appear in Undzer V071. I also noticed that a few days previously, Le Monde had made an even more gross error, referring in a headline to the “failure of the Israeli-Jordanian negotiations," rather than to the Palestinian-Jordanian negotiations. My bitterness about Skurnik’s casual reaction to my complaint had to do with the fact that he was one journalist to whom I had access. In some sense, I had come to see Undzer \bn‘ as my word as well, and I held the paper to the standards I would set for myself. Aside from ideology, and social and funeral announcements, the press gives little insight into the life of its readers, reinforcing the impression that, for this community, Jewish life is organizational and scheduled, rather than individual and quotidian. More insight into daily life was promised by a modest satirical periodical, Parizer Shpilkes (Parisian Pins), published for several years after the war; but when I went to the Medem Library to look for back issues, the librarian, Mr. Vaisbrot, said that it hadn’t been something worth saving: “That editor wanted to be the town fool!” Eventually, I obtained a few copies of Parizer Shpilkes. One of its regular columns was called “A Conversation Between Getsl from the Pletsl and Velvl from Belvl.” This brief phrase represents a complex bit of local folklore: Getsl and Velvl are typical names for Polish Jewish males. The Pletsl is the Yiddish name for Le Marais, the oldest Jewish neighborhood in Paris. Help] is probably an accurate transcription of the new immigrants‘ pronunciation of “Belleville," to

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the second great Polish Jewish immigrant neighborhood. The internal rhyme associating typical names with neighborhoods, and the establishment of hu~ morous social distinctions within the immigrant community, are rare examples in print of the immigrants’ creative attempt to belong in their new home;Z it is symptomatic of the community’s insecurity that it appeared in a marginal satirical journal. Vaisbrot’s reaction also became clear: The Bund, sponsors of the Medem Library, had been one of the paper’s favorite targets. But why should Vaisbrot have seen a defunct satire as such a continuing threat that he wouldn’t keep it in his library? His reaction was one symptom of the dead weight of so many old disputes and disillusionments. The absence of the “Parisian Pins” from the Medem Library‘s shelves notwithstanding, many relics of those old debates remain in the stacks, as I discovered one afternoon when searching for items that might have strayed out of numerical order. I saw there the dead ends of Yiddish literature—translations of Lenin and brochures extolling the virtues of the mosbav. Yet there must be something that can be learned from “dead” books as well as “living" ones. Books that happen to flip open while being dusted sometimes have ironic jokes to tell, as did the pamphlet I found against “terrorism”—obviously a reference to Zionist guerrilla groups during the War for Independence—put out by the Israeli Labor Federation in 1948. Anthropologists stake their work on the claim that humanity’s heritage of living culture helps us all to maintain some consensus, some sort of shared, makeshift lifeworld. Yet it is valid to ask, as Enlightenment and radical thinkers have done, in what ways dead ideas contribute to the blank spots in our lives. In the Parisian Yiddish community, it is difficult to distinguish between dead ideas, which are repeated out of thoughtless rhetorical habit, and expressions which capture, albeit imperfectly, a community’s need for shared and articulated attitudes. Communities too must constantly re-create themselves in the narrow cultural space that, as Vincent Crapanzano writes in a slightly different context, “oscillates between reification and resistance to reification" (1977:70). In a community which has suffered as many dislocations as this one has, and whose identity is so centered on a changing political situation, it is close to impossible to maintain a self-image independent of external circum— stances which remains compelling to the members of the group. Occasional efforts to promote continuity reveal the accumulated inertia of the postwar decades. In January of 1983, there was a meeting of the Central Committee of the Fédération, consisting of the presidents of its forty member societies. Although Lerman, as secretary general of the Federation, explained that such meetings were to be held every six months, he admitted that this was

2. The “Conversation" column was thus an example of “a style of argument we might want call complementary place . . [involving] a sense . . . not of the localization of the human condition but of the necessary role of each place in its fulfillment of the human condition and, in the end, the impossibility of defining the human condition without taking into account the contribution of every place" (Fernandez 1988: 32—33).

to

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years, fondly citing the cohesion the first Central Committee meeting in between the societies and the Federation in the early years. The record of that meeting also contains frequent and ambivalent references to the new North African community. Mr. Jefroykin, current president of the Fédération, noted that just as the Polish Jews had replenished the older French Jewish community, so the latest immigrants were bringing new life. He praised them, first for having children, and second for seeing that their children follow their parents’ way. Warshawski, on the other hand, argued that the North Africans were “not yet ready to lead" the French Jewish community, and that it was necessary to bring in several young people to the Federation’s Central Committee “by force,” or the Yiddishe selztor, the Jewish community of East European origin, would be lost in France. Even if it would be possible to “draft” competent young Jewish intellectuals to positions of power within the institutions of the immigrant community, it is unclear what there would be for them to perpetuate (other than the caueaux, which are discussed below). The efforts of leaders of the Federation and the Farband to unite the two organizations have run into a surprising degree of resistance. This is based more on suspicion (on the part of Federation members who question the extent to which Farband activists have actually distanced themselves from Communism) and resentment (on the part of Farband mem— bers put off by Fédération suspicions) than by current political differences. On both sides there may be fear of a loss of identity. That the “dual organization" of the immigrant community may have an insurmountable inertia is suggested by Georg Simmel’s remark that “where enough similarities continue to make confusions and blurred borderlines possible, points of difference need an emphasis not justified by the issue but only by that danger of confusion” (quoted two

in Coser1956:68). The period of great public debates does appear to be over. The various organizations have reached a working internal consensus, and lack the energy to continue trying to convert each other. It is rare to see two sides of any significant issue tolerated together in public. This does not mean that everyone in the immigrant community has settled into an inflexible organizational identity, however. There are a number of intellectuals—scholars, translators, retired professionals—who are connected to the community but not particularly identified with any of its organizations. Like intellectuals everywhere, they “strive with a passionate sincerity to rid themselves of the cliches associated with status incumbency and role-playing" (Turner 1969: 128). Some are privately contemptuous of the immigrant “mass,“ whom they regard as having left Poland because they were misfits there. As bearers of a synthesis of worldly, popular, and Jewish culture, however, they are central to the community’s self-image. Nearly all these intellectuals come from backgrounds that are in some way distinctive. Menachem Kurland, for example, is an atypical member of the Parisian Yiddish community in several respects. First, he is not Polish-born, but rather from Shavl in Lithuania, and he still speaks a Lithuanian Yiddish that

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him apart from immigrants. On his mother‘s side he belongs to the famous rabbinical family of Soloveitchik. He left Eastern Europe not as a worker, but to study in Berlin, and he is as comfortable in Russian as he is in Yiddish. Today, he collaborates on the prestigious Yiddish journal (iola'cnc Keyt, published in Israel. His major work is a substantial anthology of French poetry in Yiddish translation; in 1982 he was well along in work on a second volume. The living room of the apartment in a new building near Belleville that Kurland shares with his wife Brayne (:1 Warsaw native) is lined with the sort of library that testifies to a lifetime of engagement with many different cultures, the native being proudly retained and the acquired being eagerly received. Kurland seems to have realized the unique potential of Yiddish as a meeting place of modern European cultures. Having retained the habit of openness toward new voices, it is not surprising that he and Brayne are more involved with young people than are most Yiddish writers and scholars. The first time the Kurlands invited us to dinner, the other guests were two members of the Association pour l‘Enseignement et la Diffusion de la Culture Yiddish, the younger Yiddishists’ organization. We traded children’s counting rhymes: our “Eeny—meeny-minymo”; the French “Pic et pic et cologram”; but Kurland clearly topped us, with a four-line rhyme that shifted among Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, and Lithuanian. Kurland and I spoke on the Metro one evening, coming home from a commemoration of the martyred Soviet Yiddish writers. He took issue with the position of one of the speakers, who had claimed that these writers’ primary commitment was to the Jewish people. “There’s no denying the fact that several of those writers were committed Communists,” he argued, explaining that the real tension was between a thoroughgoing commitment to internationalism and a genuine commitment to Jewish peoplehood. The latter he defines as a sense of kinship with Jews through time and space (including fidelity to what he calls the “moral structures” of the Jewish textual tradition, not merely reference to its symbolic or metaphoric content), along with a sense of connection (however it may be defined) to the Land of Israel. By working with younger people interested in Yiddish, Kurland fulfills the ancient injunction to pass on the Torah “from generation to generation." Unfortunately, he is almost alone among the older Yiddishists not only in actively cooperating with the new group but even in recognizing that it exists. Several immigrants flatly denied my assertion that there are many young students of Yiddish in Paris. To them, Yiddish is mame-Ioslm, the mother tongue, and it can never be really Yiddish when spoken with a trace of an ‘American, French, or Israeli accent. Kurland, perhaps, remembers his own successful efforts to learn more languages than he was born to, and thus views the younger people‘s efforts with a less jaundiced eye. Although we happened to meet the Kurlands in New York shortly before coming to Paris, we probably would have become friendly with them in any case, given their enthusiasm for young Yiddish-speakers. By contrast, I had to pursue a man who caught my attention by his acerbic comments, spoken in a sets

most

Leaders and Intellectuals

1 2;

Lithuanian accent even more

pronounced than Kurland's, follow-ing one of the innumerable lectures on “the current situation in Lebanon." After the talk, a group stood around rehashing the Israeli entanglement. One veteran of Left Poalei Tsion, an old friend of Szulim Brycman, asserted that the whole misadventure had been based on a fantasy. A politician has to know how to foretell situations, but Begin and crew had merely hoped to produce security through military victory. Abramowicz, the “Lithuanian," cited a French proverb: "(low uemer c'est préuenir" [to govern is to foresee]. When we walked out of the room together, he embellished his comments on the Lebanese mess With a quotation from the Talmud: “When a fool throws a stone into a field, ten Wise men can’t pull it out." As if to display before me his truculent skepticism, he continued by saying that the Jews, the smartest people in the world, are nevertheless silly enough to believe in the Messiah. Now, he says, they‘ve made a Messiah out of the Israeli army, and turned Ariel Sharon into an idol. Abramowicz explained to me that he had learned a fair bit of Torah, as the son of Reb Itsele of Volozhin, who was preparing to become the rabbi of that great Lithuanian yeshiva town before the family emigrated to Paris. Now Abramowicz is quite far from religious in his beliefs, having long since concluded that God is man’s most wonderful invention. Although before his retirement he spent many years as an agronomist with the Jewish Colonization Association, he now spends little time with the organized Jewish community, partly because his wife is not Jewish. He told me that she comes from a bitterly antireligious family. Her father was a Republican schoolteacher: “It was war against religion in her house!” He remains devoted to the Jewish people, however: although he doesn’t fast on Yom Kippur, he won’t go into a restaurant lest he offend other Jews. This represents an intriguing reversal of the nineteenth-century Jewish Enlightenment recommendation to be “a man in the street and a Jew at home.” Abramowicz’s concern with public Jewish identi~ fication rather than private Jewish observance appears to contradict the expectations of French society—namely, that a person‘s beliefs are his own affair, but his behavior in public should conform to French mores. Abramowicz and I spent a good half—hour on the sidewalk of the Place de la République, with crowds of immigrants and working-class housewives hurrying past us. Both of us were anxious: I, because he was feeding me so much dialogue that I couldn’t possibly record or remember all of it; he, I presume, because he had so much to tell me but didn't want to appear as an idle babbler. As he explained later to me and Elissa, he maintains fiercely the discipline of constant analysis that he learned in the Lithuanian yeshiva world of his youth, because it helps him to remain young. His iconoclasm, which he traces over and over again to his intellectual Jewish background, is an essential part of a perspective which affords him interest in and opinions on everything he comes in contact with. “In my father’s house,” he told me, “two things were considered absolutely forbidden: America and Hasidism." He doesn’t think much of the immigrants to America, or of immigrants in general. He has relatives in Russia, who, he says, have fit into the society there quite well. He insists that Russia isn‘t as

126

Polish Jews in Paris

different from America as it is made out to be. When he said that, I must have looked incredulous, because he retortcd: "Oh, you think because you can vote, it‘s different?" Not that he romanticizcs the Russians. The one time they had a government that cared about their welfare, he says, was under Kerensky, and that could not possibly have endured, because the people couldn't accustom themselves so quickly to democracy. “The Jews are silly enough to believe that the Messiah is going to come. But at least they're willing to wait for him! The Russians keep changing Messiabs, one after the other." I mentioned my disappointment at not hearing more serious public discussions at meetings of the immigrant societies. Abramowicz retorted, “They come because they don't have anything better to do. They’re already standing with one foot in the world to come. They want to get to know each other before they meet on the other side!“ He analyzed what he sees as the pettiness of the societies: “The Jews were used to being organized in small-town communities. When they got to the big cities, there was a lot of pressure, and they didn‘t know how to handle it. It became every man for himself; they don‘t know how to be genuinely, wholeheartedly sociable. They formed societies, and what do they do?—they bury each other! The young people aren’t interested in it; they go away from sensible Jewishness, and mostly they go to the extremes—they become Communists or Lubavitchers.” While his denigration of the immigrant organizations is exaggerated in some ways (as will be seen below, their burial provisions derive from ancient Jewish communal patterns and fulfill vital needs of the community), Abramowicz’s pride in his Lithuanian anti—Hasidic intellectual background is not a mere idiosyncracy. My non»native Yiddish, which resembles the Lithuanian dialect more than the Polish Yiddish of most immigrants, received numerous compliments from the immigrants, who identify it as the language of the most cultured segment of East European Jewish society. The perception of the Polish immigrants, nearly all from Hasidic backgrounds (albeit some a generation or two removed) that they received a poorer education than their Lithuanian counterparts was expressed in various ways. One very old man from Warsaw complained to me of his childhood teachers who had taught him to double the final letter in the Yiddish word gott (God), in ignorant imitation of German orthography. Later the ex-Communist lawyer and playwright Henri Sloves responded to my question why so many of the immigrants had gone from being doctrinaire Communists to being equally doctrinaire Zionists by referring to them as “Hasidim sboyte"—literally pious fools, well-meaning but intellectually lazy people who need a cause they can believe in without question.3

3. Serge Moscovici claims that “blind faith” is a universal aspect of mass socialist movements: “It is of course precisely as religions that the various socialist visions exalt and raise the oppressed masses. Their actions imply the ‘madness of faith' that Zola spoke of in Gemritiril. They all have

their dogmas, their sacred texts that command obedience and their heroes reminiscent of the saints" (1985:354).

Baudrillard points out, somewhat more pointedly, that Marxism shares with both Christianity

Leaders and I ntellectuals

127

The prestige of Lithuanian Jews is rooted in their competing but interrelated traditions of analytic Talmud study and of Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment. Though many of the great nineteenth-century Lithuanian rabbis bitterly opposed the teaching of secular subjects (Surasky 1982), the revered anti-Hasidic Rabbi Elijah of Vilna‘s recognition of the value of science as a complement to Torah study helped prepare the ground for a passionate and eventually antitraditionalist movement to study the natural and non-Jewish worlds (Stanislawsky 1983). In breaking away from Orthodoxy, many East European Jews adopted secularism as a new, all-encompassing faith. Abramowicz, on the other hand, while breaking free of tradition, has clearly carried over the constant dialectical questioning of Talmud study into a critical role vis-a-vis the Jewish community. When he does appear at Jewish events, his comments are clearly welcomed and enjoyed, for he is able to formulate criticisms that others cannot express without placing themselves beyond the camp. By exploiting the force of the bon mot, the sharp or surprisingly apt formulation or quotation. he is able to identify and thus ease contradictions which must lead others to question their own good faith. The examples of Kurland and Abramowicz suggest that the intellectual stands out in this community as someone who, through a lifetime of mental discipline, has been unusually successful at shaping a complex but integrated personality that reflects both the uniqueness of his experience and his shared fate as part of the Jewish community. Poor education has combined with historical dislocation to rob most of the immigrants of the chance to accomplish this to a comparable extent. [t is not a quality, however, that any individual either possesses or lacks completely. Furthermore, the challenge of combining individuation and identification continues to face the immigrant community as a collective vis-a-vis the French, the world Jewish people, their ancestors, and their descendants. There are many forms the discipline can take. Perhaps the most unusual, for a Polish Jew in Paris, is that of continued Torah study. The elderly scholar Dovid Malki, son of the rabbinical judge of the great city of Lodz, has continued along this proud and rather lonely path. When we spoke on the phone, Malki gave me directions to his house, using the intonations of Talmud study: “First you follow this street to the left, and that brings you into this street, which is shaped like the Hebrew letter daled;

and Judaism “an asymptotic fulfillment, a deferred due date, indefinitely put off. which, under the sign of a historical reality principle (the objective socialization of society achieved by capital; the dialectical process of maturation of the ‘objective' conditions of the revolution), confirms the transcendence of an ascetic communism, a communism of sublimation and hope" (1975:161). Compare, further, Gershom Scholem‘s claim that “in Judaism the Messianic idea has compelled a life Iii/ed in deferment, in which nothing can be done definitively, nothing can he irrevocably accomplished" (1971:35). But with this, curiously enough, we are coming close toward the decentering and open-endedness of postmodernism. Perhaps one of the qualities of postmodernism is the way we simultaneously unmask and embrace the groundless faith which sustained both our immediate and our distant ancestors.

a l_(\

l‘olisli Jews

Ill

l’aris

different from America as it is made out to be. When he said llmt, I must have because he rctortcd: “Oh, you think because you can volt. it‘s different?" Not that he romanticizes the Russians. The one time they hail a government that cared about their welfare. he says, was under Ken-risky, and that could not possibly have endured, because the people couldn‘t accustom themselves so quickly to democracy. “The Jews are silly enough to believe that the Messiah is going to conic. But at least they‘re willing to wait for him! The Russians keep changing Mcssiahs. one after the other." I mentioned my disappointment at not hearing more serious public discussions at meetings of the immigrant societies. Abramowicz retortcd, “They come because they don‘t have anything better to do. They‘re already standing with one foot in the world to come. They want to get to know each other before they meet on the other side!" He analyzed what he sees as the pettiness of the societies: “The Jews were used to being organized in small-town communities. When they got to the big cities, there was a lot of pressure, and they didn't know how to handle it. It became every man for himself; they don’t know how to be genuinely, wholeheartedly sociable. They formed societies, and what do they dOP—they bury each other! The young people aren’t interested in it; they go away from sensible Jewishness, and mostly they go to the extremes—they become Communists or Lubavitchers.” While his denigration of the immigrant organizations is exaggerated in some ways (as will be seen below, their burial provisions derive from ancient Jewish communal patterns and fulfill vital needs of the community), Abramowicz’s pride in his Lithuanian anti-Hasidic intellectual background is not a mere idiosyncracy. My non-native Yiddish, which resembles the Lithuanian dialect more than the Polish Yiddish of most immigrants, received numerous compliments from the immigrants, who identify it as the language of the most cultured segment of East European Jewish society. The perception of the Polish immigrants, nearly all from Hasidic backgrounds (albeit some a generation or two removed) that they received a poorer education than their Lithuanian counterparts was expressed in various ways. One very old man from Warsaw complained to me of his childhood teachers who had taught him to double the final letter in the Yiddish word gott (God), in ignorant imitation of German orthography. Later the ex-Communist lawyer and playwright Henri Sloves responded to my question why so many of the immigrants had gone from being doctrinaire Communists to being equally doctrinaire Zionists by referring to them as “Hasidim shoyte”—literally pious fools, well-meaning but intellectually lazy people who need a cause they can believe in without question.j

lookedincredulous.

3. Serge Moscovici claims that “blind faith” is a universal aspect of mass socialist movements: “lt is of course precisely as religions that the various socialist visions exalt and raise the oppressed masses. Their actions imply the ‘madness of faith’ that Zola spoke of in Gemzinal. They all have theirdogmas, their sacred texts that command obedience and their heroes reminiscent of the saints"

(1935:354).

Baudrillard points out, somewhat more pointedly, that Marxism shares with both Chrisrianity

Leaders and Intellecllmls

l 27

The prestige of Lithuanian Jews is rooted in their competing but interrelated traditions of analytic Talmud study and of Haskalah, the JeWIsh enlightenment. Though many of the great nineteenth-century Lithuanian rabbis bitterly opposed the teaching of secular subjects (Surasky 1982), the revered anti-Hasidic Rabbi Elijah of Vilna‘s recognition of the value of science as a Lllmplcment tn Torah study helped prepare the ground for a passionate and eventually antitraditionalist movement to study the natural and non-Jewish worlds (Stanislawsky 1983). In breaking away from Orthodoxy, many East European Jews adopted secularism as a new, all—encompassing faith. Abramowicz, on the other hand, while breaking free of tradition, has clearly carried over the constant dialectical questioning of Talmud study into a critical role vis-a-vis the Jewrsh community. When he does appear at Jewish events, his comments are clearly welcomed and enjoyed, for he is able to formulate criticisms that others cannot express without placing themselves beyond the camp. By exploiting the force of the hon mot, the sharp or surprisingly apt formulation or quotation, he is able to identify and thus ease contradictions which must lead others to question their own good faith. The examples of Kurland and Abramowicz suggest that the intellectual stands out in this community as someone who, through a lifetime of mental discipline, has been unusually successful at shaping a complex but integrated personality that reflects both the uniqueness of his experience and his shared fate as part of the Jewish community. Poor education has combined with historical dislocation to rob most of the immigrants of the chance to accomplish this to a comparable extent. [t is not a quality, however, that any individual either possesses or lacks completely. Furthermore, the challenge of combining individuation and identification continues to face the immigrant community as a collective vis-a-vis the French, the world Jewish people, their ancestors, and their descendants. There are many forms the discipline can take. Perhaps the most unusual, for a Polish Jew in Paris, is that of continued Torah study. The elderly scholar Dovid Malki, son of the rabbinical judge of the great city of Lodz, has continued along this proud and rather lonely path. When we spoke on the phone, Malki gave me directions to his house, using the intonations of Talmud study: “First you follow this street to the left, and that brings you into this street, which is shaped like the Hebrew letter daled;

and Judaism “an asymptotic fulfillment, a deferred due date, indefinitely put off, which, under the sign of a historical reality principle (the objective socialization of society achieved by capital; the dialectical process of maturation of the ‘objective‘ conditions of the revolution), confirms the transcendence of an ascetic communism, a communism of sublimation and hope“ (1975:161). Compare, further, Gershom Scholem‘s claim that “in Judaism the Messianic idea has compelled a life lived in deferment, in which nothing can be done definitively, nothing can be irrevocably accomplished'I (1971:35). But with this, curiously enough, we are coming close toward the decenv tcring and open-endcdness of postmodernism. Perhaps one of the qualities of postmodernism is the way we simultaneously unmask and embrace the groundless faith which sustained both our immediate and our distant ancestors.

I’olish Iews in Paris

llll

number 17." As I followed these directions a few days later, reflecting that for Malki the physical world seems a derivative representation of the lit, erary world, I discovered that he lives in a dreary section of the Thirteenth Arrondissement, consisting mostly of vacant lots and new, massive apartment buildings. Walking out of that neighborhood into his book-lined study was like finding an oasis in the desert. Malki's gentle eyes, his white beard, and the lines on his face, shaped by humor, irony, and loss, all suggest the traditional Talmud scholar. Only his bare head betrays his distance from the Orthodox community. Malki responded to my remark about the “oasis," saying that he hardly goes out anymore, that he really lives in his library now. “Not that I have anything against I’aris! It's a wonderful city, wonderful people. But here, I live exactly as I did in Lodz. l may look like I'm in Paris; but sitting here, l can be in Paris, Israel, and Lod'l. at the same time." Unlike the vast majority of Polish Jews in Paris, Malki belongs to a traditional aristocracy which finds its place and its company among Jewish scholarly books. Yet he insists that he is not observant. Malki did not participate in the main emigration to Paris. He lchd in Israel for several years around the time of the founding of the state, but became embittered with the new bureaucracy, and, as he puts it, “left in order to remain a Zionist." He still maintains Israeli citizenship, as much out of allegiance to the past as to the presentjewish community. He feels alienated from the latter, believing that there is no one who really shares his world of learning. In fact, there are yeshivas filled with Talmud scholars (most of them North African) in France, but while he is extremely encouraging to any young Jew interested in the rabbinic texts, Malki seems at heart to feel that anyone living after the Holocaust is unworthy of the name “Jew." He regards himself as still in mourning, has refused for many years to buy a new suit, and mocks those who make their living out of communal commemoration. Malki's own literary efforts are aimed at popularizing the Talmud. He has published three volumes, in Yiddish with Hebrew citations, on “the personalities of the Talmud.” The stated goal and virtue of the books is to allow Yiddish readers who have never been immersed in the Talmud to attain some of his intimacy with the rabbis. On the other hand, Malki realizes that the popular audience for Yiddish is shrinking drastically: I‘m

at

This awareness is tragic to me. I have already observed several times that in my volumes I study Talmud on my own, and have the great merit to have others learn with me. Sadly, I know in advance how many youthful readers I can expect. (1983514)

Malki thus has welcomed the translation of his books into French, where they have been relatively successful. Still he is bitter about the refusal of people who could easily afford the Yiddish books to buy them. When he sees those people afterwards, he deliberately avoids noticing them. “At eighty-three, I’m allowed not to see people.” He is confident that the embarrassment these peo—

IZ‘I Leaders and Intellectual: ple suffer upon seeing him afterwards costs them much more than his book would have. Malki enjoyed telling me about his relationships with his french neighbors, which, he assured me, remain relatively superficial, because “one really has to share a person’s world to communicate with him or her." When he first moved into the building, three elderly women lived on the top floor; he made a practice of carrying their packages up for them. Some, not all, of the residents began to follow his example. Another time, he saw a woman with a young daughter; the mother was carrying heavy packages, while the daughter had nothing but a handbag. Malki slapped the daughter’s face, scolded her, took one package from the mother himself and handed the other to the daughter to carry. “A French person would never do a thing like that,” he says. “Slap someone else’s daughter? But when I do it, they respect me, because I follow my own way, always." At the bakery he’s very polite to one saleswoman, who treats him in a friendly manner, but refuses even to say “bon jour” or “merci” to a second, who is rude to him. Since she knows that he has the reputation of being extremely polite, he is confident that she suffers from knowing he is deliberately rude in response to her. Malki would probably identify his “way” with that of the rabbis among whom he dwells in his library, for one of their distinctive characteristics is their sometimes piquant individual style within a set and shared pattern of behavior. In his first volume, Malki cites a legend about Rabbi Hillel the Elder. Two men bet each other four hundred zuz to see which one can make Hillel angry. One attempts to do so by asking Hillel a series of stupid questions, but Hillel merely sits down and says,

“ ‘Go ahead and ask all your questions!’

“The man responds: ‘Are you really Hillel, whom they call “thejewish prince?” ’ “Hillel responds: ‘Yes!’ “ ‘If so,' says the man, ‘may your kind

not

multiply in Israel!‘

“Asks Hillel: ‘My child, why?’ “Answers the first: ‘Because of you, I've lost four hundred zuzl’ “Says Hillel: ‘Don't be so headstrong! Hillel is worth your losing four hundred zuz several times over, and Hillel won’t become angry!’ ” (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Shabbat, folio 31, side I; quoted in Malki 1969:138—140)

Malki’s comment on this legend is revealing: Awareness of one’s own personal human value is no contradiction to modesty. On the contrary: The more one is aware of his true worth, the better one knows himself—the more significant is his modesty. (ibid.:143)

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Paris

Malki characterizes people who, in his view, don‘t study the Torah for its own sake as people who sit in Paris and read a book written in Babylonia 1,600 years ago. For him. the rabbis of the Talmud live again as he studies. “Eternal lite." I said. quoting the title of a story by Sholem-Aleykhem. Malki qualified the idea: It's not that the rabbis or the authors of the other Jewish books in his library are really aware in some way that their books are being read. Rather— he explained the concept by recourse to a biblical verse, which he wrote down for me on the paper he refused to let me take notes on—"Ro'e olamo beltbayav," he sees his world in his lifetime, that is, when they have finished their works and see them go out into the world, scholars know that they will leave

a lasting memory. Aesthete, skeptic, and scholar, all three of these men remain vigorously in the present; they have built their world on the sure foundation of language. Language, it would seem. is not a faith or a possession, but a resource which will not abandon them. It cannot be realized in solitude. Thus Kurland looks for young people to speak Yiddish to, Abramowicz attends meetings of the Yiddish community despite his intellectual frustration with it, and Dovid Malki mourns how few are left to read his work. Menachem Kurland wrote for the Naye Presse for many years. Others told me that when he and other leading writers broke with the Communist—oriented organizations, they provided impetus to the “rank-and-file” of the Iandsmanshafm, who eventually followed them. Yet, instead of writing for Undzer Vort, Kurland has devoted the past several years to his translation of French poetry into Yiddish. Abramowicz, whose professional career was spent as an agricul— tural specialist for the jewish Colonization Association, occasionally comes to political meetings but avoids an activist role in immigrant organizations. Dovid Malki, who once spent time in a Russian prison for his Zionist activities, is even more remote from organizational life; only recently did he join the Lodz Society, for the funeral benefits. Others, of course, remain more involved. I heard Lili Berger address the Friends of Mapam on the legacy of Simon Dubnow, and Dora Teitlboym speak about ltsik Manger. Mordechai Lerman, a chemical engineer by profession, is extremely active both in the Labor Zionist organization and as secretary general of the Fédération. Yet they seem mostly to stand watch over a definition of the community the struggle for which has left the immigrants as a group intellectually exhausted. There will be no more splits, no movements or controversies among the Polish Jews of Paris.

X MOURNING

The immigrant community is thrice bereft. First, it is an aged population, and its ranks are constantly thinning. Second, the immigrants have lost their homes, afar. by abandoning them and then helplessly observing their destruction Finally, there is the genocide, through which they lost an entire humangunlverse. The immigrants’ memorial rituals show that though death is universal Its meaning is socially shaped and subject to change. Burial on French ground and according to French law has forced them to develop a new blend of traditional Jewish and local practices. And the shared loss of families, communities, and, in a sense, an entire nation, demands both new and traditional forms of commemoration.

from

When Elissa and I entered the hall at the Medem Library in September for the annual memorial service of the Radom Society, the scene seemed almost festive. There was a crowd of at least eighty men and women, ranging in age from about fifty to eighty. Almost all of them were dressed quite fashionably"; the women seemed to have had their hair done for the occasion. Since it was the first time people had seen each other after the summer vacation, there was a lively exchange of kisses and gossip. We heard an equal mix of French and Yiddish. At the front of the room stood a table bearing a microphone and two candelabra, each set with three white candles. After half an hour of socializing, Cantor Lewin, a man of perhaps fifty with a large, square black beard and a serious, kind face who officiated for the evening, came in wearing a black robe, white tallith, and large black yarmulke. The room quieted down. The men all covered their heads, some with the oldfashioned fedoras they wear every day, some with touristy kippor from Israel, and some with handkerchiefs. Six women were called up one by one to light candles in memory of the six million dead, placing kerchiefs on their heads just before doing so. After the candles were lit the lights were turned out, and Cantor Lewin recited the prayer El mole rakbamim, which invokes God‘s mercy on the soul of the deceased individual. Unlike the kaddisb, the memorial prayer recited daily for the first year after the death of an immediate family member and annually on the anniversary of the death thereafter, the El mole mklmmim mentions both 131

,

l1-

.

POiI'ah jews

. in

Paris

the name of the dead person and the fact of death. Here the included a reference to “all the jewish martyrs from Radom and the surrounding area" who had been “killed by the Nazis at Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Trebliiika." He also evoked the Israeli soldiers who had been killed in all wars, including the war in Lebanon, and thus assimilated yet another group into the long tradition ofJewish martyrology. The juxtaposition 0fthe all-too-contemporary names of concentration camps with the seemingly timeless melody of jewish commemoration moved me deeply. As the cantor sang by the light of the candles representing the six million dead, I felt comforted in their presence; I knew that l was transitory, but I was not afraid. For a few moments, a sense of continuity with our ancestors—the granting to them of a measure of immortality, something critical to our own lives as well—had been achieved.l Several months later, we had dinner at the home of Michel Luksenberg, son of a woman we had met at the Radom Society ball. He had brought several of his mother's old 78-rpm records to play for us. After a Yiddish love samba, and a tango whose lyrics celebrated the beauty of sabras (native—born Israelis), came a scratchy recording of El mole rakhamim. I recognized it as the prototype for the version that Cantor Lewin had sung, including the reference to the martyrs of “Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Treblinka”—these camps and no others were named—“murdered at the hands of the Nazis.” (I later discovered that the same recording is played every day at the museum of the Auschwitz concentration camp.) What I had taken to be an ad hoc innovation on the part of Cantor Lewin was actually part of the postwar effort to shape appropriate rituals of mourning. These needed to express continuity with Jewish tradition, but they could not ignore the enormous difference in the quality of bereavement in the aftermath of the Nazi genocide. For the Parisian community, the diffiby culty was compounded by prior alienation from traditional rituals. same token, the immigrants were experienced at adapting the memories their childhood to the exigencies of their new situation and the dictates of their new cantor

'Yet the of

theme Lefort cites Tocquevi:le ace remained' rooted families

in depth. Claude 1. Robert Lifton’s The Broken Connection (1983) explores the 5 (1982) also discusses why such moments are so rare in our generations, and to Democracy in America suggest that earlier generations that _in the same p centuries for probably experienced this sense of continuity as a given: “ ‘[When] remained In the same situation and often in the same place . . . each generation was, so to speak, contemporary with the others‘ " (p. 173). . [k h i e Walter Benjamin (1969) early on offered a suggestion why even modern immigrants might need to maintain and develop rituals. Rather than merely providinga functiona

secularists individual collective

t

eseI

to social solidarity, ritual enables the experience which constitutes the be linked to the shared tradition which constitutes the group: “Where there is experience in the strict sense of the contents past certain past. The the word, of individual combine with material of the rituals with their ceremonies, their festivals . . . kept producing the amalgamation of these two elements of memory over and over again"(pp.159—160). Thus, even though we associate a prevalence of ritual with ‘‘traditional" societies, we continue to seek collective representations that will incorporate rather Ihan deny our personal experience. (both in tune and This is no more true than in the face of death, when the question of continuity between the person and the group) appears in essence.

Mourning

1 3;

beliefs. Through participation at Iandsmansba/I memorial services, funerals, and commemorations sponsored by the entire Yiddish community at various times during the year, the immigrants comfort each other and reiterate the fact of their immense loss. Their obligations to the dead are fulfilled while the continued existence of their community in this world is affirmed. In some of these ceremonies, commemoration of the dead is reinforced by physical reminders of the history of suffering. The immigrants, in effect, $qu fered the decimation of two communities: those they had been born into, and those which they had helped create. In May I attended the annual pilgrimage to the towns of Pithiviers and Beaune—la—Rolonde, where thousands of immi— grant Jewish men were interned after the first mass roundup on May 14, 194]. The day-long trip was sponsored by the Federation des Anciens Déportés Juifs, which has its office at the rue de Paradis headquarters of the Jewish Communists. As far as I could tell, it was the only event all year at which Communists and their “ex’s” participated together; Firer and Oyzer Kawka were on the bus, and Miriam Silverstein remarked that she was greeting her ertswhile comrades. The early hour was made more dreary by the halfhearted rain which accompanied us most of the way to our first stop at Pithiviers. Miriam, perhaps influenced by the presence of her former comrades, complained as we waited on the sidewalk for everyone to arrive, “There’s always one person in any collective who won’t pay attention to discipline.” One woman whom I had met at the rue de Paradis a few days previously greeted me warmly and asked my name. She was effusive about the name Boyarin, telling me that it was Russian and that she herself was a “Russifiante.” I had to wonder exactly what she meant by that term: the young Parisians who study Yiddish are called “Yiddishisants,” and the term seemed to have an ideological coloring. In the context of Eastern Europe—and particularly Vilna, where this woman was born, a city which was coveted by Lithuanians, Poles, and Russians in the first half of this century—the remark implied a cultural and social orientation toward Russia. She turned out to be the wife of David Gold, the unofficial chronicler of the Jewish Communists in France. Mme. Gold is an energetic woman, with brownish-gray hair and a thin face with precise features. There is something studied about her effusiveness, and later in the day Ilearned just how careful she was: I approached Mme. Gold, explained that Iwas studying the Polish Jewish community in Paris, and asked to interview her. She refused, saying, “I don’t have much to do with the Polish Jewish community.” Her unwillingness to be identified with a community defined as Jewish was ideologically based and not simply an excuse. Her defensiveness toward my work underscored how exceptional is the power of this pilgrimage to bring together the Communists with their erstwhile comrades. After driving through fairly plain countryside for perhaps an hour and a half, we arrived at a small square in a residential part of the town of Pithiviers. A war memorial, dedicated to the men of the town “morts pour la France," stood in the square. Nearby stood waiting a red—uniformed band of young people, along with a few policemen, directing traffic; the police chief and the mayor;

132

Polish Jews in Paris

the name of the dead person and the fact of death. Here the cantor included a reference to “all the Jewish martyrs from Radom and the surrounding area" who had been “killed by the Nazis at Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Treblinka." He also evoked the Israeli soldiers who had been killed in all wars, including the war in Lebanon, and thus assimilated yet another group into the long tradition of Jewish martyrology. The juxtaposition of the all—too-contemporary names of concentration camps with the seemingly timeless melody of Jewish commemoration moved me deeply. As the cantor sang by the light of the candles representing the six million dead, I felt comforted in their presence; I knew that I was transitory, but I was not afraid. For a few moments, a sense of continuity with our ancestors——fhe granting to them of a measure of immortality, something critical to our own lives as well—had been achieved.' Several months later, we had dinner at the home of Michel Luksenberg, 50“ of a woman we had met at the Radom Society ball. He had brought several 0 his mother’s old 78—rpm records to play for us. After a Yiddish love and a tango whose lyrics celebrated the beauty of sabras (native-born Israelis), came a scratchy recording of El mole rakhamim. I recognized it as the prototype for the version that Cantor Lewin had sung, including the reference to the martyrs of “Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Treblinka”—these camps and no 0[ ers were named—“murdered at the hands of the Nazis." (I later that the same recording is played every day at the museum of the AusChW“Z concentration camp.) What I had taken to be an ad hoc innovation on the part of Cantor Lewin was actually part of the postwar effort to shape apprOPrr'mc rituals of mourning. These needed to express continuity with Jewish tradition. but they could not ignore the enormous difference in the quality of berezlvel'llc']t in the aftermath of the Nazi genocide. For the Parisian community, the diff“ culty was compounded by prior alienation from traditional rituals. Yet by same token, the immigrants were experienced at adapting the memories of the” childhood to the exigencies of their new situation and the dictates of their new

sambav

‘

discover.ed

the

1. Robert Lifton's The Broken Connection (1983) explores the theme in depth. ClaudL' Leforl (1982) also discusses why such moments are so rare in our generations. and cites TocqticVIllL‘ 5 Democracy in America to suggest that earlier generations that remained “routed“ in the saint

Pli‘F‘"

probably experienced this sense of continuity as a given: “ ‘[When] families remained for centurlt'fi in the same situation and often in the same place . . . each generation was, so to speak, contemporary with the others" “ (p. I73). Walter Benjamin (1969) early on offered a suggestion why even modern secularists like tht‘sc immigrants might need to maintain and develop rituals. Rather than merely providing a functional social solidarity, ritual enables the experience which constitutes the individual to be linked to_ the shared tradition which constitutes the group: “Where there is experience in the strict sense of the word. certain contents of the individual past combine with material of the collective past. The rituals with their ceremonies, their festivals. . . kept producing the amalgamation of these two elements of memory over and over again"(pp.lS9-160). Thus, even though we associate a prevalence of ritual with "traditional" societies. we continue to seek cullective representations that will incorporate rather than deny our personal experience. This is no more true than in the face of death, when the question of continuity (both in tiinc and between the person and the group) appears in essence.

133

Mourning

beliefs. Through participation landsmanshaft memorial services, funerals, and commemorations sponsored by the entire Yiddish community at various times during the year, the immigrants comfort each other and reiterate the fact of their immense loss. Their obligations to the dead are fulfilled while the continued existence of their community in this world is affirmed. In some of these ceremonies, commemoration of the dead is reinforced by physical reminders of the history of suffering. The immigrants, in effect, suffered the decimation of two communities: those they had been born into, and those which they had helped create. In May I attended the annual pilgrimage to the towns of Pithiviers and Beaune-la—Rolonde, where thousands of immigrant Jewish men were interned after the first mass roundup on May 14, 1941. The day-long trip was sponsored by the Federation des Anciens Déportés Juifs, which has its office at the rue de Paradis headquarters of the Jewish Commu— nists. As far as I could tell, it was the only event all year at which Communists at

and their “ex’s” participated together; Firer and Oyzer Kawka were on the bus, and Miriam Silverstein remarked that she was greeting her ertswhile comrades. The early hour was made more dreary by the halfhearted rain which accompanied us most of the way to our first stop at Pithiviers. Miriam, perhaps influenced by the presence of her former comrades, complained as we waited on the sidewalk for everyone to arrive, “There’s always one person in any collective who won’t pay attention to discipline." One woman whom I had met at the rue de Paradis a few days previously greeted me warmly and asked my name. She was effusive about the name Boyarin, telling me that it was Russian and that she herself was a “Russifiante.” I had to wonder exactly what she meant by that term: the young Parisians who study Yiddish are called “Yiddishisants,” and the term seemed to have an ideological coloring. In the context of Eastern Europe—and particularly Vilna, where this woman was born, a city which was coveted by Lithuanians, Poles, and Russians in the first half of this century—the remark implied a cultural and social orientation toward Russia. She turned out to be the wife of David Gold, the unofficial chronicler of the Jewish Communists in France. Mme. Gold is an energetic woman, with brownish-gray hair and a thin face with precise features. There is something studied about her effusiveness, and later in the day I learned just how careful she was: I approached Mme. Gold, explained that l was studying the Polish Jewish community in Paris, and asked to interview her. She refused, saying, “I don‘t have much to do with the Polish Jewish com» munity." Her unwillingness to be identified with a community defined as Jewish was ideologically based and not simply an excuse. Her defensiveness toward my work underscored how exceptional is the power of this pilgrimage to bring together the Communists with their erstwhile comrades. After driving through fairly plain countryside for perhaps an hour and a half, we arrived at a small square in a residential part of the town of Pithiviers. A war memorial, dedicated to the men of the town “morts pour la France,“ stood in the square. Nearby stood waiting a red—uniformed band of young people, along with a few policemen, directing traffic; the police chief and the mayor;

Polish Jews in Paris

134

an officer of the deportees‘ organization; and a sprinkling of townspeople, not more than twenty. Though the ceremony was delayed for a bit in anticipation of the arrival of a group of schoolchildren, it soon began without them. Representatives of the

local chapter of the French Former Prisoners of War and of the Jewish Depor~ stood on either side of the monument, bearing tricolored banners. The banner of Serge Klarsfeld‘s organization, the Fils et Filles de Déportés Juifs de France, however, was done in blue lettering on a white background, and in— cluded a Star of David; the bit of tricolor ribbon at the top of the staff seemed almost like a concession. Next to these, wearing the striped jacket of a concentration-camp prisoner over his dark suit, stood Beinish Davidow—just as he had told me he’d dressed at the commemoration of the Velodrome d’Hiver. The brief ceremony consisted of a fanfare by the band, followed by lowering the banners, and a brief speech by Mr. Kamioner of the deportees‘ federation (whose certificate of internment at Beaune is reproduced in one of David Gold’s books) addressed to “M. le Maire, M. le Préfet, et toutes les petsonnalités ici auiourd‘hui" and recalling the bleak history of the town’s internment camp, where both Jews and French non-Jews had been held. Then the procession started off down the road, with the band in the lead playing a solid march, toward the memorial at the site of the camp itself. I approached the memorial in town closely before following the crowd. In the center had been added, apparently as an afterthought, a small inscription to the “Israelites” who had been interned at Pithiviers and deported thence. A woman standing next to me said, “ ‘Morts pour la France!’ Not one of the Jews at Pithiviers died for France! They died because they were Jews. Let me tell you—I just got back from Israel, and I attended memorial services there. Not only is life better for a Jew in Israel, but even death is more respected there.“ The group straggled for perhaps a kilometer through the outskirts of the town, next to the railroad yards and past a factory. Old women and a few younger people looked at us from their houses. Several townspeople—among them a few middle-aged men dressed in small-town business clothes—joined the procession along the way, while others just looked on quizzically. Then we turned onto a street called the rue de l‘Ancien Camp, stopping in front of a large granite stone with perhaps a hundred names engraved in gold letters. The plaque also bears the inscription:

tees

N‘oublions jamais en ce lieu le 14 Mai 1941 l‘occupant Hitlerien interna plusieurs MILLIERS de JUIFS. Déportés en Allemagne presque tous y trouvetent la mort.

followed by the Yiddish words Izoved zeyer ondenlz (Honor to their memory). Next to the memorial a microphone had been set up, and the volume of the loudspeakers allowed the proceedings to reach the nearby houses. Just as the ceremony was to begin, the crowd of fifty was augmented by the arrival of young schoolteachers shepherding a class of nine— or ten-year-olds.

Mourning

135

Here Kamioner gave a more substantial speech, remarkable in its insistence on the personal culpability of Maréchal Pétain. Kamioner asserted that Petain had been constrained neither by the Germans nor by the situation to intern the Jewish immigrants, and had failed in his soldierly duty to the French people in doing so. He told how he and his comrades had reported in good faith to the prefecture of the Thirteenth Arrondissement for what had been announced as a simple control of their papers. Kamioner did not try to hide his vivid sense of shame and betrayal at his manipulation by the prestigious and authoritative

French state.

Next Kamioner announced that we would hear “the prayer for the dead, and the Partisan’s song.” Beinish Davidow, standing nearby in his striped jacket, took out a portable cassette recorder, which he held near his waist, and played the recording of El mole rakhamim that we had heard at Michel Luksenberg‘s house and that had served Cantor Lewin as a model. I wondered what the townspeople present thought while this strange, sad melody was being played. When the Pattisan’s song came on, it was my turn to be surprised, because the French “Chant des Partisans” rather than the Yiddish “Zog nit keynmol" was played. A man of about fifty, wearing a plaid shirt, came out of the garage attached to the first house next to the memorial (the site of the camp has been replaced with homes) and saluted, standing at attention while the French song was played. When it was over, I saw him dab at his eyes. Then it was the children’s turn. Their teacher had taught them the new French translation of the song of the Jewish internees at Pithiviers. Though she led them at the microphone, the children didn’t sing very strongly; not until Oyzer Kawka came over to help them out did the words come through clearly. The chorus of the song refers to “the world which blossoms anew when the month of May returns,” blending a bitterly ironic reference to the time of the original internment, with unqualified hope that liberation will come. (On the bus later on, Naomi Gorelick related to Beinish Davidow's daughter Charlotte that the lyrics had been written by the Communist poet Cendorf, and the music by a Bundist. For her, this was exemplary of the solidarity in the camp.) We drove on through country roads to Beaune-la-Rolonde, where the procession began at the Mairie (the town hall). In his speech here as at Pithiviers, Kamioner stressed the sympathy of the town’s residents during the internment. Apparently, the mayor of Beaune had arranged for a delivery of food to the internees. There were also a doctor, a woman officer of the Red Cross, and the nurses at the local hospital, who helped the internees throughout. During the course of the day, several people mentioned the behavior of the townspeople to me, citing offers of false papers and other forms of aid. Naomi Gorelick told me about one former internee who, vvhile he was still able to come on the annual pilgrimage, had always visited the family in Beaune who had sheltered his wife when she came to be near him. After the ceremony, we wound back to the town square, past the Mairie, and through a narrow and very old street to the town cemetery. Here, it had been announced, we were going to visit the grave of some Jewish children who

136

Polish Jews in Paris

had died at the camp during an epidemic. However, no one remembered where the stone was. Finally it was found, in a front corner: a flat stone with absolutely no iconographic embellishment. Nearby, against the wall, stood another stone marking the grave of an adult Jew. The inscription on it mentioned all the victims of the kontsentmtsye lagers (concentration camps)—the phrases in Yid< dish being incorporated into the Hebrew text. Next, we headed back into Pithiviers, where the bus driver was guided outside of town to a school building outside a village called Vieil Pithiviers. The assem— bly hall of the school was set with chairs, and in front was an exhibition on the camp that had been prepared by the schoolteacher who had brought her class that morning, Mme. Schockel. The exhibition included sections on the social organization of the internees, photographs of the theater group in the camp, and the progress of the Nazi party and of anti—Semitic legislation in France. The man who accompanied Mme. Gold looked carefully at a photo— graph of internees arriving at the camp. Finally he said, disappointed, “I thought it was me, but it can‘t be me. The guy in the center is wearing an overcoat, and I didn’t wear an overcoat the day we were brought to the camp.” We were asked to take seats, along with some 150 townspeople in attendance. Mme. Schockel reviewed the history of the camp, after which Kamioner took the microphone, presumably to thank her. As it turned out, he had a few points to add on the subject of Maréchal Pétain. “This man,” he began, and then continued: “No! I can’t call him a man. This creature . . . ” at which he was interrupted by someone at the podium whispering into his ear. After a few moments, Kamioner replied that he would either say what he had intended to say, or nothing at all. There was no visible reaction from the audience, but there was certainly tension in the room. Though Kamioner actually said nothing else about Pétain, while he spoke Mme. Schockel stood facing the audience with a look of near-defiance, as though it were her civic responsibility to see that he spoke freely. After the ceremony, she stood by our bus and greeted everyone getting back on. I congratulated her for being responsible for the only occasion Ihad seen on which the immigrant Jewish community and the native non—Jewrsh community had come together. The itinerary and structure of the pilgrimage encompasse d both contradic— ts of tions, which were usually kept in the background, and unique momen resolution. First, there was the interaction of immigrantJews and native This permitted immigrants like Naomi Gorelick and the spokesman Kamioner the opportunity to reiterate the many kindnesses of the people of Beaune and Pithiviers toward the Jews in the camps. It also provoked Kamioner to recall the shame of the French military and bureaucracy—a reminder that the war still raises grave problems for the immigrants, as they try to be both Jewish and

French.

French.Z

2. The pilgrimage, as a memorial to the dead and an assertion of the continued presence of the living, bears comparison to a protest parade held by Jewish senior citizens down the boardwalk In

Mourning

l '37

Second, there was the reunion of former comrades now bitterly opposed to each others’ politics. On the bus back to Paris, Naomi Gorelick and ()y'mr Kawka sang a duet by Mordechai Gebirtig together; memories of shared suffering gave way to shared treasures. The day had allowed these immigrants, victims and enemies of Fascism, to reveal and partially heal the wounds of history. At the Parisian municipal cemetery in the suburb of Bagneux, the influence of French society on the immigrants is evident in a more subtle and perhaps more pervasive way. Burial provisions, as described earlier, are the central function of Iandsmanshaftn, and the presence of a cemetery was the sine qua non of an official, corporate Jewish community in Eastern Europe, as Szulim Brycman told me when we first met at Bagneux: “Where there are no dead, there is no living community.” According to Jewish law, those cemeteries had to have fences, in order to mark them as holy ground. At Bagneux, although there are distinct Jewish divisions, they are not fenced in but merely marked by roads and walkways. The walls running the length of the entire huge cemetery separate the living from the dead, but do not distinguish among the latter. The rituals and conditions of burial in the French context are as radically different from those in the shtetl as the experience of the immigrants is from that of their grandparents. Close state control of cemeteries was instituted as part of the centralization consequent to the French Revolution (Ariés 1982:492). This was both an integral part and a symbol of the attack on local and religious particularism; in France as elsewhere, “the location and inclu< siveness of the cemetery reflects changes in the character and autonomy of the local community” (Bloch and Party 1982:34, citing Harris’s work on the Andean Laymin). In addition, the relative constraint or choice regarding the proper disposal of the deceased reflects the various distinctions societies make between public and private concerns. Thus, even in as relatively small an American Jewish community as Lincoln, Nebraska, there are two Jewish cemeteries, one used by Conservative and Orthodox Jews, the other by Reform Jews (Gradwohl and Gradwohl 1988). This kind of mortuary freedom is unknown in France, where the new situation demanded several departures from Jewish law and custom. Thus, for example, there is a law still in force in France which became popular in various West European states during the nineteenth century, requiring a three-day wait-

Venice, California. Those who participated in the parade mourned the accidental killing or one at their number—by a cyclist who claimed he “didn‘t see her"—and insisted on their right to use that space (Myerhoff 1987). Myerhoff‘s analysis of the parade as a “definitional ceremony“ is lent added drama by the short interval between the new ritual and the tragedy that sparked it. .ind by her report that as a result of the protest a section of the boardwalk was declared a sale rune tor senior citizens. In the French case. it was not a question of competing for everyday use at particular places, but of making sure those places remained tied to certain memories, both for Jewish inimigrants and their descendants as well as for the townspeople. The determination 0t Mme. Schockel, at least, proved that the pilgrimage was successful in this strugle against oblivion.

136

Polish Jews in Paris

had died at the camp during an epidemic. However, no one remembered where the stone was. Finally it was found, in a front corner: a flat stone with absolutely no iconographic embellishment. Nearby, against the wall, stood another stone marking the grave of an adult Jew. The inscription on it mentioned all the victims of the Izontscnrmtsye lagers (concentration camps)—the phrases in Yiddish being incorporated into the Hebrew text. Next, we headed back into Pithiviers. where the bus driver was guided outside of town to a school building outside a village called Vieil Pithiviers. The assembly hall of the school was set with chairs, and in front was an exhibition on the camp that had been prepared by the schoolteacher who had brought her class that morning, Mme. Schockel. The exhibition included sections on the social organization of the internees, photographs of the theater group in the camp, and the progress of the Nazi party and of anti-Semitic legislation in France. The man who accompanied Mme. Gold looked carefully at a photograph of internees arriving at the camp. Finally he said, disappointed, “I thought it was me, but it can't be me. The guy in the center is wearing an overcoat, and I didn't wear an overcoat the day we were brought to the camp." We were asked to take seats, along with some 150 townspeople in attendance. Mme. Schockel reviewed the history of the camp, after which Kamioner took the microphone, presumably to thank her. As it turned out, he had a few points to add on the subject of Maréchal Petain. “This man,” he began, and then continued: “No! I can’t call him a man. This creature . . . ” at which he was interrupted by someone at the podium whispering into his ear. After a few moments, Kamioner replied that he would either say what he had intended to say, or nothing at all. There was no visible reaction from the audience, but there was certainly tension in the room. Though Kamioner actually said nothing else about Pétain, while he spoke Mme. Schockel stood facing the audience with a look of nearvdefiance, as though it were her civic responsibility to see that he spoke freely. After the ceremony, she stood by our bus and greeted everyone getting back on. I congratulated her for being responsible for the only occasion Ihad seen on which the immigrantJewish community and the native non-Jewish community had come together. The itinerary and structure of the pilgrimage encompassed both contradictions, which were usually kept in the background, and unique moments of resolution. First, there was the interaction of immigrantJews and native French. This permitted immigrants like Naomi Gorelick and the spokesman Kamioner the opportunity to reiterate the many kindnesses of the people of Beaune and Pithiviers toward the Jews in the camps. It also provoked Kamioner to recall the shame of the French military and bureaucracy—a reminder that the war still raises grave problems for the immigrants, as they try to be both Jewish and

French.Z

2. The pilgrimage, as a memorial to the dead and an assertion of the continued presence of the living, bears comparison to a protest parade held by Jewish senior citizens down the boardwalk in

Mourning

137

Second, there was the reunion of former comrades now bitterly opposed to each others' politics. On the bus back to Paris, Naomi Gorelick and Oyzer Kawka sang a duet by Mordechai Gebirtig together; memories of shared suffering gave way to shared treasures. The day had allowed these immigrants. victims and enemies of Fascism, to reveal and partially heal the wounds of history. At the Parisian municipal cemetery in the suburb of Bagneux, the influence of French society on the immigrants is evident in a more subtle and perhaps more pervasive way. Burial provisions, as described earlier, are the central function of Iamismanshaftn, and the presence of a cemetery was the sme qua non of an official, corporate Jewish community in Eastern Europe, as Szulim Brycman told me when we first met at Bagneux: “Where there are no dead, there is no living community.” According to Jewish law, those cemeteries had to have fences, in order to mark them as holy ground. At Bagneux, although there are distinct Jewish divisions, they are not fenced in but merely marked by roads and walkways. The walls running the length of the entire huge cemetery separate the living from the dead, but do not distinguish among the latter. The rituals and conditions of burial in the French context are as radically different from those in the shtetl as the experience of the immigrants is from that of their grandparents. Close state control of cemeteries was instinited as part of the centralization consequent to the French Revolution (Aries 1982:492). This was both an integral part and a symbol of the attack on local and religious particularism; in France as elsewhere, “the location and inclusiveness of the cemetery reflects changes in the character and autonomy of the local community" (Bloch and Parry 1982234, citing Harris‘s work on the Andean Laymin). In addition, the relative constraint or choice regarding the proper disposal of the deceased reflects the various distinctions societies make between public and private concerns. Thus, even in as relatively small an American Jewish community as Lincoln, Nebraska, there are two Jewish cemeteries, one used by Conservative and Orthodox Jews, the other by Reform Jews (Gradwohl and Gradwohl 1988). This kind of mortuary freedom is unknown in France, where the new situation demanded several departures from Jewish law and custom. Thus, for example, there is a law still in force in France which became popular in various West European states during the nineteenth century, requiring a three-day waitVenice, California. Those who participated in the parade mourned the .icddental killing of one of their number—by a cyclist who claimed he “didn’t see her"-—and insisted on their right to use that space (Myerhoff1987). Myerhoff‘s analysis of the parade as a “definitional ceremony" is lent added drama by the short interval between the new ritual and the tragedy IhJI sparked it, and by her report that as a result of the protest a section of the boardwalk was declared a safe zone for senior citizens. In the French case, it was not a question of competing for everyday use of particular places, but of making sure those places remained tied to certain memories, both for Jewish immigrants and their descendants as well as for the townspeople. The determination of Mme. Schockel, at least, proved that the pilgrimage was successful in this struggle against oblivion.

I Hi

l’iihsh J1‘W‘.llll‘.lll'.

primil livlorr lHIHJl; this unitriiilu is the lewish phltllll' of liiiryiiig Wlllllll twenti- lniii hours iil Ll(‘.llll. All l'rt‘llLl] (l’llll'lrt’lt'fi .Ill‘ linll‘l' by iiiiitiiiip,i| gm-eriiim-ntx, and dim lilL'l hm. several tonscipii-iiu-s; the most obvious of thwI\ that triiit'it'iies iit’tiipy relatively small iiri-iis in or (lose to ttiii's, t.||i'.ll|)( btiii.tl pliits iii plan-s like Paris to he inordinately ('xpt‘llsIVl', :iiid t'iitoiiraging, by lllt‘ll' proximity, relatively frequent Visits to the ('Cllll‘ll'l’y. Also, most griivcs .‘ll‘l‘ not lH‘lLl in perpetuity, but rather are contrintml for through ‘I‘char lenses. After 99 years, lht' l('.lst's may be rt‘lll’Wt'tl by the ”Hill!“ iii-rs' descendants, but it is not certain that they will in l.’l(l be renewed. 'Ilir iiniiiigrtiiits seem to have fully accepted this clear contravention of Jewish lziw, whith forbids disruption of graves, no matter how old. When I asked ()pn» towski about it, he Justified the practice by rL-inarking ihiil ”even in lsrzicl, the Jewish National Hind does not sell land outright, but rather grants 99-year leases," In Israel, however, biiriiil plots are permanent. According to Roger Wiirga, director of one of the largest Jewish funeral homes in Paris, Orthodox French Jews gent-rally solve .such problems by arranging for burial in Israel. Despite these changes, the immigrants are aware of the power that death, both that of those near to them and their own in contemplation, has in reinforcing thcir identity as Jews. This awareness was exemplified by a story told me by one immigrant businessman, about a woman from his town who had remained in Poland and married a Gentile after the war: "Imagine, her father had been the town cantor, and then after the war she went and married a Gentile. I lost contact with her entire family until a few years ago, when the daughter entered my shop with her husband. They had been traveling, and just got off a train at the Care dc I’Est. I asked what I could show her, where she wanted to go in Paris, and she told me she wanted to do some slmpping. When I asked if she‘d like to visit a synagogue, she broke down, crying: ‘How could i dare enter a synagogue, after having desecratchudaism for nearly forty years!’ We were talking in Yiddish, and I asked her how she remembered the language after so many years. She told me that the gravestone of one of her grandmothers was still intact at the cemetery. She was in the habit of going and talking to her grandmother there in Yiddish, and, somehow, she always expected an answcr." More immediately, the social importance of the cemetery is attested by the annual general memorial meeting held there every year on the Sunday between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, which is the largest annual demonstration of the immigrant community. The High Holiday season is a traditional time for Jews everywhere to visit the graves of their families and to request the intercession of those who are in Heaven on behalf of the living, whose fate is about to be sealed for the coming year. The sheer presence of so many East European Jewish immigrants in the cemetery at the same time suggests that the ceremony focuses on the effort to reinforce the life of their community. The assembly of several hundred Yiddish speakers is utilized for the presentation of political speeches, and joint sponsorship of the ceremony by the Fédération and the ing

Mourning

Farband

has, for the past several years, been the moat ‘/l’.|l')l','

l zign

l‘)

of their

rapprochement. Before the mass meeting, the officers of each [ant/amanshu/t go to one of the several Jewish funeral homes on the street that borders the cemetery, where the banners of the societies are kept. It is the only time of the year that many of these banners, generally triangular-bottomed maroon rectangles Wlll'l the wcicty's name and year of establishment in gold letters, are broughtout. formerly they were used at any funeral or memorial for an individual, but they are hea w and not many members have the strength to carry them around the large cemetery. For this day, however, they continue to recall and hence represent the entire membership of each society, past and present. While the speeches are being pronounced, and the Izaddisb and El male mkhamim are being sung by the cantor, all the banners are held in close ranks at the side of the podium. Thus, there is representation on three levels: the individuals who attend as the “mass"; the standardbcarcrs of the Iam/smanshafm and other constituent organizations, which afford an impression of structure, ramification, and permanence; and those on the podium, who articulate the public, activist stance of the community as a whole. However, this is only the first part of the annual visit to Bagneux. When it is concluded, the various societies become the operative units, as the members of each group follow their banner to the several caveaux, or common graves, they may own in the different jewish sections of the cemetery. At the ceremony in 1982, Elissa and I followed a small group from the Praga Society to their cat/eau. When the long list of names had finally been read out, the elderly President Rybojad exclaimed: “May the list be identical next year!" And after the Izaddisb had been said, he began an impassioned, impromptu speech, in accented French. As understood by myself and by Elissa, whose comprehension of French was better than mine at that time, the gist of it was this: “I’ve heard what people say—they don‘t know where the society’s money goes, and they think we’re using it to live on. First of all, the money is spent on these stones, which are expensive to buy and maintain; and they are heylik, comme on dit cbez nous. Second, you should know that we have donated 2,000,000 [old] francs for the soldiers wounded in Lebanon. We’re just a few old people, we make tea and cake when we have a meeting; and if you came to meetings you’d know what we spend our money on. Anyway, the main thing isn‘t the money, but that people should come to meetings." As the group began to move on to the next stone, Elissa said to me, “If you have a little Chutzpah, you could go up to him and tell him that you were moved by what he said.” I did so; he took a second to react, perhaps because he wouldn't expect a young person to speak Yiddish. When he did read, it was with embarrassing warmth: “You wear a Jewish beard—that‘s a holy thing!" And he planted a solid, wet kiss on my forehead, “from all of us." He kissed Elissa, too. The caueau is holy as well, but that it is also a highly pragmatic means of

Polish jews in Paris

I40

dealing with the overcrowding and overpricing of burial plots is the most strik-

American observer. A standard Cal/Ban of a hole wide enough to hold two coffins—with perhaps a foot of them—and deep enough to hold sixteen, one on top of the other, space With a thin layer of dirt between them.‘ Each (at/earl is topped by a horizontal of stone, with a vertical headstone containing the names of those buried msrde, the name of the society the caveau belongs to, and various other symbols such as a Jewish star or the two tablets of the Law. A full caveau contains thirty coffins—by law, two must be left available in case of epidemic. As a society's caueaux are filled, it may purchase new ones, often in quite different parts of the same or another cemetery. The association in death caused by the caveau arrangement gives rise to particular emotional and social considerations. One woman, whose father is an immigrant from Plock and whose mother is the daughter of pre—World War I immigrants, died at the age of forty. Her father had wanted to bury her at the Plock cat/earl in Bagneux, so that she would be with the rest of the family when her parents‘ time came. There wasn’t any room, however, and so her father faced a choice between burial in the nearby caveau of another society, or at the Plock caueau at Pantin, on the other side of Paris. He made the latter choice, and then regretted doing so. The mother, in any case, was upset at the whole idea of her family being buried in a caueau: “What, we’re going to be buried in pauper‘s graves?"4 Yet beyond such cases, the caveaux powerfully reinforce the communal character of mourning. Like the handful of soil from the Land of Israel which pious Jews have long had placed in their graves, the group stone stands in some ways as a remnant of the old town cemetery. As the group stops at each of its caveaux, and all the names are read out loud, those present whose loved ones are buried inside are reminded that they are not alone in their loss. Particularly for those who have no living family, the circle of Iandslayt and comrades permits the expression of grief which complete solitude might inhibit. The sense of community is further reinforced at those caveaux bearing the names of townspeople killed in the Holocaust, who had previously lived either in France or in Poland, but who are not buried in the caveaux. Though Irecognized the central importance of funerals and burial privileges to the place of Iandsmanshaftn in the immigrant community long before Icame, I was hesitant to attend for fear of imposing on the bereaved families. Fortunately, a veteran anthropologist in Paris scolded me for my reticence, insisting II'Ig

aspect of immigrant burials to an

conststs

between

slab

3. According to Aries, the French Parliament in 1763 “retained the age-old principle of piling the bodies several layers deep, despite the objections of doctors and priests" (1982:484). 4. Caveaux are not a necessary precondition for controversy over proximity in burial. In the United States, landsmanshufm have typically purchased secrions of cemeteries, in which individuals and families have rights to particular plots. The president of my synagogue on the Lower East Side recalls being dragged to meetings of his father's society as a child, and how dull they were: “It was mostly people shouting, ‘Don‘t bury me next to this one! Don't bury me next to that one!‘ "

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attend funerals, and that my attendance would be regarded as a that I minim/7, a worthy deed. I started carefully, attending first not a funeral, but rather an azkore, the annual memorial service for a past officer of the Kielce Society, who had died several years before. I found out about the ceremony the way any reader of Undzer Von could have, through a black-bordered announcement. Since the three-day waiting period between death and burial is observed, there is time to place such announcements for funerals as well. The Kielce Society is relatively small and the memorial service is more intimate than a funeral, but for funerals and functions of larger societies, a bus is often provided for the mourners. A fairly typical funeral announcement reads thus: must

The Society “Friends of Radom" announces with pain and sorrow the loss of our landsmanlze CHANA BRANDWAYN, née SZTAJNBOK, wife of our long. time active member jacques Brandwayn, may his memory be for a blesstng, and expresses deepest sympathy to . . . the entire family. All members and friends are invited to come pay last respects at the funeral which will be held today . . . at the Bagneux Cemetery, where we will meet by the main gate. A bus will be available at 1:45 p.m., in front of the former Hotel Moderne on the Place de la République.

When I started attending funerals, I found out that the bus trips to the cemefrom the Holiday Inn—the “former H6tel Moderne"—were a good way to fall into relaxed, informative conversations with immigrants. On such occasions, everyone is comforted by reminiscence; on both formal and informal planes, “in many funeral rituals signs of life and continuity eclipse representations of death and separation" (Huntington and Metcalf 1979:21). I have already written of Motl Singer and Leon Alberstein, whom I met in this fashion. But I took the Métro to the Porte d’Orléans by myself when I went to the Kielce memorial, and then a bus through the suburb of Montrouge which finally left me off near the cemetery. It was a fine morning, and several men speaking Yiddish stood in front of the cafe' across from the cemetery gate. I asked if they were from the Kielce Society, at which they led me inside to introduce me to the group I was looking for. The café was full of both Iandslayt and family groups, relaxing and waiting for latecomers before going into the cemetery. Fortunately, one of the two men from the society recognized me from a meeting at the Federation; otherwise I might have felt more awkward, since they were apparently the only nonfamily members who had come. The older of the two, named Shtern, declared, “As long as my feet serve me, as long as I’m alive, I’ll come to the cemetery on a comrade’s yortsayt, the anniversary of his death." His friend Weisbrot responded: “The main thing is, your feet should serve you on the way back from the cemetery!” A half hour after the time of the ceremony as announced in the newspaper, we headed across the street. We had to continue waiting for some time, however, tery

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rabbi who officiate had because the arrived. Shtcrn re. marked, “Anybody can say a psalm and an El mole rakhamim,“ to which \Yeisbrot replied: “Well, she can afford to pay the rabbi.“ I offered a bit of-ethnographer‘s common wisdom: “It‘s natural for them to want a bit of ceremony; it‘s for the living.“ Shtem elaborated, “Of course it‘s for the living. The cantor has to earn a few francs. So does the taxi driver. 50 does the fellow who stands at the cemetery with his hand out—you‘ve got to give him something!" My social analysis here focused on the mourners, while Shtern‘s focused on those who make their living from the rituals of burial. Shtem and Weisbrot recognized a printer of their acquaintance, who was waiting for another group and who intrigued me since his age seemed to fall between that of most of the immigrants and that of most of their children, Talking with him, I managed to miss getting into one of the cars that were heading off to Doctor Urbaytel's grave for the ceremony. Rather than giving up, I followed the cars, jogging lightheartedly through the cemetery; the grave turned out to be in a more expansive, new jewish section at the far end, which seemed to consist entirely of individual or family graves, rather than caueaux. I arrived just as the ceremony was ending. As the fifteen or twenty people present were filing out and saying their goodbyes, one woman called to her husband several times before getting his attention: “Yosi! Yosi! What about Yom-Tov?" Together they went to the nearby grave of a certain Haim Yom-Tov, who died in 1973. Placing pebbles on the tomb in observance of Jewish tradition, the husband kept saying, “Ah, Yom-Tov, Yom-Tov,” as if thinking of a longlost friend in a faraway land. As they walked away, he clapped his hand to his cheek and said, “I knew I had a friend here!” I was encouraged by this initial attempt, and decided to try to attend the next announced funeral. It turned out to be that of a member of the Minsk-Maze— wieck Society, and just to be sure I would be welcome, I called the president the night before. His wife, whom I had noticed at a meeting of the Farband when she announced that their society solved the problem of continuity by automatically signing up every child as a member, replied “Of course you can come! Why do you think you need to ask permission?" Arriving at the Place de la République,Igot on the 25-seat bus and sat down next to an elderly man who turned out to be Motl Singer. Unlike some immigrants who seemed shy around me, or others who showed enthusiasm over a young American Jew who spoke Yiddish, Singer chatted with me as though I were a member of his generation and community—though he might have al— lowed someone of his age to talk more. Singer belongs to the older of the two Warsaw societies, which is affiliated with the Federation. He told me that he had been brought into the society in 1927 by his father-in-law. The man whose funeral was being held, a certain Kuperhant, had been a neighbor of his; they used to see each other regularly in one of the cafés around République. cantor or

was to

not

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At the entrance to the cemetery, we stood waiting in the bus for the funeral procession. Singer told me a few jokes to pass the time. He asked the man in front of us “fun uanen i7 shtamt," where he's from. “Ilzb bin fun ayzn," I am made of iron, replied the man, not divulging his origins. “He’s a Galician, that's why he doesn‘t want to say where he’s from." whis— pered Singer. “Two men are sitting in a dentist‘s office. One asks the other, ‘Where are you from?‘ The second says, ‘l’m a Galician.’ The first man is surprised: ‘Oh, excuse me, I thought you were Jewish!‘ " The funeral procession began to arrive. Singer said it would be large, because Kuperhant had had eight children and seventeen grandchildren. “First class!” he added, looking at the black hearse with gold trim. Then, in a more serious tone: “You know, this is making the Germans rich! Sure, every time a Jew dies, that’s one less reparations check they have to pay.” As he finished telling me the old joke about the Romanian prostitute in Israel, people were getting back onto the bus to drive to the gravesite. One old woman saw me laughing and said, “That’s how it is—one comes to the cemetery and laughs. That’s how all of life is." I couldn’t tell whether she was scolding or being philosophical, but I felt abashed. We drove into the cemetery, Singer asking whether it was my first funeral. When we got out of the bus, a man with gray hair, a formal black coat, and a derby hat was asking the family to come forward; I presumed that he was from the funeral home. A gendarme stood nearby overseeing the proceedings, as dictated by French law, and a few gravediggers stood off to one side. The cantor, whom Singer later told me is a Romanian immigrant, was dressed in the old-fashioned black and white robes of a minister of the Consistoire Central des Israelites de France. Chanting the El mole ralzbamim, he mentioned the society among the mourners. Then he gave a short eulogy in French, which included platitudes about the man’s noble character and wishes for his benevolent teception in Heaven, but also details of his biography: Kuperhant had come to Paris in 1929, and sent for his wife and children when he was sure he could support them. When the war came, he had been separated from his family, some of whom made it to Switzerland, but he remained in contact with them, doing everything he could to ensure their well-being and also working to aid other Jewish children. Then the woman with whom I had spoken on the phone spoke a few words on behalf of the society. She addressed herself to the family, in French, assuring them that their father had been an active member of the society. She referred also to his efforts to save Jewish lives during World War II: “We call that Resistance, because struggling for one’s own life and the lives of others consti< tuted resistance against the Nazis." She added that she hoped the children would follow their father’s example and help assure the continuation of the society. This woman, in effect, charged the descendants of the deceased, on behalf not only of the landsmanshaft but also of Society writ large, to see to it that

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their father‘s had been "a ‘good‘ death." Such a death “not only promises a rebirth for the individual but also a renewal of the world of the living" (Bloch and Party I982:16).‘ But such an affirmative transition is immensely difficult when the departing and the arriving generations do not share the same cultural universe. The children are basically separate from the landsmansba/t social group and do not need its funeral benefits. Whether and to what extent they can or will inherit its collective memory is a different question. The anthropologist Jack Goody has claimed that there is a critical difference between the passing on of material wealth and the transmission of culture: while the latter process “inevitably creates some friction, nobody loses by the actual business of giving" (1962:275). Yet this assumes that, one way or another, the culture is passed on. Sometimes, however, the parents and the children fail to recognize each other in themselves. The parents may not see their children as legitimate heirs, while the children may not recognize that the heritage has value. Hence cultural transmission may be blocked altogether. This problem, and the complex efforts of the generations to communicate while they have the opportunity, will be discussed in the next chapter. After the speeches, six men who did not belong to the immediate family were called to carry the coffin to the caveau. According to Jewish law the family of the deceased are barred from certain essential functions such as this. The communal character of the loss is thereby reinforced. On the other hand, if there are any sons, they are required to say the Izaddish. When that was finished, the mourners, starting with the family, began passing in front of the grave one by one. I saw an attendant standing stiffly nearby, and heard the clink of coins. When my turn came, I saw that he was standing with a box of dirt and a small shovel; one corner of the box was boarded off, and people were placing a few francs into it as a tip for him, as they picked up a small spadeful of dirt and threw it in. I looked into the caveau as I did so. It was lined with concrete, and, unlike many others, was wide enough for one column of coffins. I could not see the bottom, and did not hear the dirt strike it. Kuperhant‘s must have been the first grave in this new caveau, and, looking up at the stone, 1 saw that there were indeed no names engraved on it yet. Kuperhant's funeral was thus the first of many meetings the Minsk-Mazowiecker would hold at this site. The last funeral I attended took place on a beautiful day in early May. Part of the reason I decided to go was that I had never been to the cemetery at Pantin, the other municipal cemetery where landsmanslaaftn have caveaux. Al5. Rosaldo (1988) argues that ethnographers are biased toward generalized descriptions of highly ritualized “good deaths." I, too, emphasize the invention of ritual here (see above, note 1). I was not close enough to any of those who died during my fieldwork to share in the survivors’ bereavement, as opposed to the deceased‘s funerals. But I trust I have been sensitive throughout this book to the provisional and contingent nature of such rituals, and also to individuals' struggles to find meaning despite loss of home, family. and community. For an ethnography of a Jewish “community of mourners" that is decidedly not written in the static “ethnographic present,” sec Kugelmass 1986. See also Lyotard‘s discussion of “the beautiful death” in the context of the (attempted) Nazi extermination of the Jews (1988:97—106).

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I45

though I arrived at République before the scheduled time for the bus to depart, it was full when I got there, and the driver flatly refused to take any more

passengers. Another man, fairly short, with a small round head, wearing a worker's cap with a brim, also had arrived too late to get a seat and stood outside trying to decide what to do. We started talking. He suggested that we take the Métto, but was reluctant to do so until I said it was a direct ride from République to the Porte de Pantin. As we went down into the Métro, I found out that his name was Alberstein, and that although he was from Zelechow rather than Krasznik, the town whose society was holding the funeral, he had known the deceased personally. 0n the Métro, he continued speaking French, even though we had had a few lively exchanges in Yiddish, and he had lavishly praised my Yiddish—particularly after I had made it clear that I hadn’t learned the language from my parents. He apologized for asking me to repeat things, explaining that he was deaf, and pointing to his left wrist, which bears his tattoo from Auschwitz. Alberstein assured me that if] were to interview him, I could learn a lot. He cited his library of substantial volumes in Yiddish, including memorial books, the twelve-volume Yiddish Encyclopedia, an album of photographs of Jewish cemeteries in Poland by the journalist Solomon Gostynsky, and Chil Aronson's big book about Jewish artists in Montmartre (1963); but, he added, it was also important for me to go to the living source, as an example of which he offered himself. One can study economics, politics, or any analytical aspect of society, he commented—but there also have to be studies of the whole of people‘s lives. Sometimes one has to look at the entire tree, not just the individual branches. We got out at the end of the line in the working-class suburb of Pantin. Although I insisted I knew how to get to the cemetery by foot—l had brought my Plan de Paris along—Alberstein asked a young woman for directions. We walked (Alberstein trotting a little, because he was convinced we would be late for the funeral) past factories, over a canal, and under a highway overpass. Reaching the main gate, we asked the gendarme on duty, a friendly young black man with abundant, bushy hair, where the Tenenworcel funeral was, and he replied, “C’est un Israelite?” Alberstein took out the Yiddish paper to show him the name; the gendarme made a phone call, and then directed us to Division 29.

We continued walking, past the alleys where the flowering trees were already showering their blossoms in the wind. “Look, the trees are doing their job, everything is coming alive, it’s spring," he remarked as we hurried along, anxious to spot the funeral cars. As we went he remarked, almost casually: “Ten months ago I suffered a terrible tragedy. I had a four-month-old grandson who died. He swallowed his pacifier. By the time he was found, he was already cold. That took away my desire to live altogether; since then I don’t have any enthusrasm."

When we arrived at Division 29, we saw a funeral breaking up. Alberstein recognized immediately that it wasn’t the one we were looking for. He made inquiries, found out that a funeral had already come and gone, and decided

I46

Polish Jews in Paris

that we had missed ours. I, however, saw gravediggers near a cat/can and found out from them that they were still waiting for the Krasznik funeral party to arrive. Alberstein, relieved that he had not missed the funeral, clapped me on the hack and exclaimed, "Bravo les Americains!" The gravediggers were killing time by standing around the cat/mu, peering in and trying to figure out how many places remained. The senior of the three figured that the pit was nearly 17 meters deep. Then the foreman gave me a detailed explanation of the cemetery setup. He said that although non-Jews frequently have caueaux. they're almost invariably for families, rather than soaenes. On the other hand, he added, in smaller, more rural communes there are often burial societies that people pay dues to and that take care of the funerals—rather like the [abet/re kedisbe in the shtell, Ithought. Where he comes from, in Haute»Correze, the graveyards are permanent; when one fills up, another one is established. In Paris, at the end of a grave’s lease the family has the option of renewing. If they don‘t, the grave may be taken away when the space is needed. He also told me that paupers‘ graves still exist, at the Parisian cemetery of Thiais. There the coffins are laid out in a long trench. If the family later wants to move the coffin to another site, they have to reimburse the municipality for the cost of the original funeral. Reflecting on this impermanence, he concluded, “C‘cst pas tres morale . . . ” Eventually a cortege of cars arrived, trailed by the gray bus. There was a total of perhaps 75 people. Unlike other funerals and memorials I had been to, there were no teenage boys in casual clothes. The wife and two daughters of the deceased were in black as usual, and a number of the women wept softly. Roger Warga, director of one of the most famous Jewish funeral homes in Paris, came in person to run the proceedings. He seemed about fifty years old, decent and sincere. Before the ceremony he went around distributing black yarmulkes to those men who didn‘t have their own. Then he asked for six men to come and carry the coffin the few feet from the hearse onto a table set in the road and covered with a gray cloth: “C‘est un mitsuab.” Someone motioned to me, so I was one of the pallbearers for this stretch. I noticed that the other men who carried the coffin touched it with their fingertips and then kissed their fingers, as one does when the Torah scroll is taken out at the synagogue. The president of the society spoke very briefly, kissing the coffin itself and addressing the deceased: “Dear Yankl! I didn’t want to believe it when my son called and told me that you had died. We are losing a dear comrade, father, husband, and grandfather. I worked with him for forty years in the society. He always expressed his opinions straightforwardly, and whether they were right or wrong, we always found a way to work together. We won’t forget you for a long time. It’s hard for me to say more now, because I’m too distraught." He concluded with a plea for the living to be held together by the memory of the dead, rather than be prematurely separated by death: “Dear wife Simone, please don’t estrange yourself from the society. Many times widows stop coming to the society, out of shame of being alone. Simone, please continue to be with

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us, and we will honor Yankl's memory together. May the earth hr: easy for him.

Honor to his memory.” As the crowd filed past to throw a few small shovels of (lirt onto the: coffin, I noticed the president comforting one of the daughters, and Alberstein pulled me aside. Actually, he bumped me in the arm to get my attention—unlike most of the immigrants, he belies all the ideas of Parisian formality. “The air here is nice and fresh,” he quipped, “but the accommodations are really the pits.” Alberstein asked me if it were still the custom, as it had been earlier in America according to him, to have funerals on Sundays so that people could attend on their day off from work. I had never heard of this, and assured him it was no longer the case, adding that we didn‘t wait three days for burial. He thought it better to wait, rather than burying the body while it was “still warm," but his brother-in-law, standing nearby, agreed with me that it was best to bury right away in accordance with Jewish law, “as was done in Poland and is done in Israel today." Yet when I shook Alberstein‘s hand before leaving, he said that it is customary not to shake hands at the cemetery, because among Jews a handshake is a sign of joy. Before leaving, I noticed the three gravediggers counting out their tips in little piles of coins on one of the caueaux of the organization L’Humanité de l’Onziéme Arrondissement. It was lovely, like a scene out of Hamlet. In October, I had attended a very different sort of memorial ceremony: the commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of the liquidation of nearly all the leading Soviet Yiddish writers, on August 12, 1952. There were at least two sensible reasons for the delay between the anniversary and its commemoration: first, the main speaker, who is the director of the ex-Communist Yiddish cultural organization in the United States, which corresponds in some ways to the Farband, was on a European tour in the fall; and second, almost no one would have attended in August, since anyone who can leaves Paris for the entire month. Yet the delay seemed to point up a particular weakness of such secular Jewish “rituals,” hinted at by the term “secular” itself. These anniversaries are eager to accommodate themselves, insufficiently rooted in perennial rhythms. Not only are they recent, but they seem unable to transcend their connection to the generation who witnessed the events that gave rise to them. Ancient Jewish commemorations, such as the Ninth of Av, the day on which the walls of Jerusalem are said to have been breached, have a historical reference that is reinforced by their annual observance on particular dates through the Jewish generations. More recent events, which are certainly present in the hearts and minds of the generation that lived through them, have not yet found their place among the repeatedly-present experiences which Jews in all times and places are understood to share (cf. Weinreich 1980; Yerushalmi 1982). It was practical to hold this commemoration in October, because no one would have remained in Paris for it in August. Furthermore, it is unlikely that the small groups of vacationing Jews would have organized their own commemorations. The im-

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migrants’ failure insist on the observance of the actual date, however, may result in their descendants' being unable to perceive the liquidation of Soviet Yiddish culture as their loss; the ritual will not be held, and they will not have a form in which to express and renew their grief. The meeting was called for 8:30 in the evening, at the Jewish students‘ center called the Centre Rachi. I arrived early and was immediately seated next to the Kurlands; then, when Vera Moses of the young Yiddishists‘ organization ar— rived, next to her and the Kurlands; and finally, when Menachem Kurland was called to the podium, between Mrs. Kurland and the playwright-lawyeractivist Haim Sloves. Eventually the audience grew to some two hundred people, which Mrs. Kurland considered too small a group. The meeting got under way shortly after 9:00. Leon Leneman was the first speaker, and as I already had come to expect, his remarks were sharp and controversial. Rather than offering a eulogy, he resumed what must be an ongoing polemic against the gullibility of the Jewish community outside the Soviet Union, which was so slow to realize and to act on the news of Soviet anti-Semitism. Part of his bitterness stems from his own memories of incarceration in a Soviet prison camp and the world‘s apparent unconcern, which he experienced as a betrayal when he was finally released: “Until then, I and everyone in the Soviet camps had believed that if the world knew about our situation, something would be done about it." Then, when he was repatriated to Poland, he tried to convince anyone who would listen that they should leave Poland—and this, he adds bitterly, at a time when the American Joint Distribution Committee was sending money for Jewish collectives in Poland. Leneman posed a rhetorical question: Could the eventual liquidation of the Jewish writers have been prevented by a unified protest from the entire Jewish Communist world in 1949, when the news first came out that Jewish figures were in prison? He raised such a possibility precisely to remind those cx-Communists with whom he was sharing the podium that there had been too much Jewish participation in the destruction of Yiddish culture. Leneman, who clearly sees himself as free of the old sin of denying Communist anti-Semitism, is also unwilling to participate in the only reconciliation possible for those who can no longer delude themselves: namely, to admit their wrong, while protesting their good faith and insisting that they were duped. Leneman offended almost everyone in the room when he asserted that it would be wrong to sanctify all the writers who had been killed by referring to them as “martyrs." Those who had been committed Communists, who had written odes of praise to Stalin and informed the Soviet secret police of the activities and beliefs of their fellows, did not die for the sake of the Jewish people—the secular equivalent of dying for the sake of sanctification of God‘s to

name.

Leneman’s remarks were especially cutting given the presence of the widow of the poet Perets Markish on the dais. Warshawski, who was presiding over the evening, took the trouble to insist that all the assassinated writers had indeed

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been martyrs, before introducing her as the next speaker. Mrs. Markish presented a series of slides: Markish in the early 19205, beautiful and bohemian, confident, unlike the tortured look of Moyshe Leib Halpern or the gentle in-

tellectual look of Moyshe Kulbak, contemporaries and fellows of Markish; photographs of Markish with various writers, teachers, and artists of the Soviet Yiddish world; and finally, Markish reading a poem dedicated to the great Yiddish dramaturge Solomon Mikhoels, at an evening marking the end of the traditional thirty—day period of mourning for Mikhoels. When Esther Markish finished speaking, Yoysef Kerler, a Soviet Yiddish poet now living in Israel, began his talk by passionately asserting against Leneman that the murdered writers “were all martyrs, according to the criteria for determining martyrdom set down by Maimonides and by our rabbis of blessed memory." He took particular exception to Leneman’s criticism of an aged 50viet-Yiddish writer for publishing a paean to Aaron Vergelis, the conformist editor of the official Soviet Yiddish monthly Soyetish Heymland, insisting: “I knew him [the writer whom Leneman had criticized]. He had a deeply Jewish heart. He sang beautiful melodies from the cantorial liturgy at his home. He received and distributed Hebrew and Yiddish books, including religious and Zionist texts. He was terribly afraid of the internment camps. Vergelis knew this, and exploited him even further . . . ” As he finished, Kerler was virtually

weeping. The effect of the evening was both powerful and unsatisfying. Several traditional Jewish authorities and symbols had been invoked: the fact that the mourning for Mikhoels had followed the prescribed sequence; the candle on the podium in the photograph of Markish reading at the Mikhoels memorial, recalling the candles Jews light on the anniversaries of a loved one's death; Kerler‘s invocation of rabbinic authority against those who would deny the Soviet writers the status of martyrs. These were made even more forceful by the radically secularist context in which they were employed. Yet one critical element of any successful ritual—the impression of continuity—was lacking. Vera and I were the only young people present. She refused to comment afterward, insisting there was nothing to which she could compare it. I was moved mostly by the photographs Esther Markish showed, and by Yoysef Kerler‘s personal grief. I did not feel myself more connected as a Jew to the anguish of Soviet Yiddish culture. The problems that Leneman raised in his unkind way were real ones. Invocation of the ancient Jewish term for martyrdom, which conveys the idea of holiness at the same time, is insufficient to forge even a broken link back into “the golden chain of tradition." This is especially so when the commitment of the victims to the perpetuation of that tradition is open to question. It would be too facile and too much of a loss simply to refuse this dilemma, by rejecting the Soviet Yiddish writers’ claim on Jewish memory: they represent too much richness and hope. Perhaps the creation of a successful ritual must wait for a generation which can acknowledge the contradictions without needing polemics. Not all mourning and commemoration is public, of course, but I received

150

Polish Jews in Paris

only occasional glimpses of the private patterns that supplement or replace the yorrsayi. the annual observance of the death of a family member: a photograph of a gentle cousin on the wall of Gitele Edelstein's living room; a memorial book for a Jewish community placed on a high shelf. Occasional vignettes also suggested that a sense of being cut off from one’s ancestors complicates mourning. At dusk on a December evening I went out to the last Ashkenazic delicatessen in Belleville to buy kasha for supper. Business was slow, and Leon the proprietor walked me out the door of his shop. He mentioned a cousin of his who had once lived in Brooklyn but with whom he had since lost contact. The cousin, a rabbi, had come to Paris before the war, and drummed up a congregation among the second-hand dealers at the flea market at the Porte St. Antoine. Two brothers of his, his father, and his great—grandfather had been rabbis as well. The grandfather had composed a genealogy, tracing his family back to the union of King Solomon and one of his wives. “All rabbis," Leon adds. “And Hitler wiped it all out." In addition to these elusive memories, there are more physical memories, stone plaques that Jews and other Parisians pass by daily. One such is on a building on the Ile St. Louis; it is dedicated “to the memory of the 112 inhabitants, including 40 children, of this building who were deported in 1942." There are similar plaques in Le Marais, notably on the wall of the school on the rue des Hopitaliers St. Gervais. Related to them are those other plaques, spread around the city, saying “Here fell. . . on [a date, usually in August, 1944], during the struggle for the liberation of Paris." The plaques are more than stone, the dead are more than ghosts: through these reminders, the victims and heroes are granted some form of continued existence in the life of the city. Their place in living memory is manifested by the occasional placement of cut flowers or tricolor ribbons on the plaques. Since the Bible, memory has been both an injunction and a blessing, oblivion a sin and a curse. Perhaps this helps explain why one of the Jewish names for the cemetery is beys—Izhayim, the house of life. It is true that the dead buried there are said to be granted eternal life. But that reward is dependent on commemoration on the part of surviving loved ones—traditionally, through reci~ tation of the kaddish. There is yet another sense in which the cemetery is a source of vitality: the earthly reward for the observance of the commandment to honor one’s father and mother is said to be precisely long life. The annual ceremony at Bagneux; the memorial services held by the landsmanshaftn; the maintenance ofJewish burial practices, albeit in a revised form, by people who have otherwise become totally estranged from Jewish ritual; the improvised memorials for martyred Jewish “heretics” which integrate traditional symbols of mourning and loss: All stem from the centrality of remem— brance. If some of these ceremonies still seem improvised, inadequate, or too contingent on practical considerations, that is a measure of the immense disruption through which the immigrants attempt to maintain continuity and follow a discernible path from the past toward the future. Myerhoff speaks of her Center elders as representing the “little tradition” of

Mourning

15 1

Jewish folk and secular culture versus the “great tradition“ of rabbinic literature and Orthodoxy. My claim, however, is that the immigrants, like the Center elders, are trying to reconcile the ideal of a single, perennial Jewish tradition with a situation radically different from all the contexts in which Judaism was lived before our century. As the theologian Gerhard von Rad writes, even in the biblical period “each generation had. . . first to become Israel" (1962:271). In this respect, the French Jewish critic Alex Derczansky‘s objections against separating Judaism—the lived experience ofJews—from “Hebraism”—an abstract set of insights into text and world, history and divinity, and so forth— are well founded (Meschonnic et al. 1988). That distinction lends itself to a situation where the more Jews cling to their specificity the more they are marginalized, and the more Jewish ideas are detached from Jewish experience the more they are idealized. This paradox may be analogous to the situation of contemporary Greeks, who, as Herzfeld claims in a classic move of ethnographic rhetoric, “may be unique in the degree to which the country as a whole has been forced to play the contrasted roles of Ur-Europa and humiliated oriental vassal at the same time” (1987:19). In such cases, it is the task of anthropologists to insist on the link between the abstract and the everyday, the ideal image and the debased image, “eternal life” and French mortuary regulations. In this way the situation of groups like contemporary Jews and Greeks can be made to reveal much about those more comfortably in the center, who are more easily able to project the image of untroubled continuity. This is powerfully evident in regard to the immigrants’ relations with their own ancestors and descendants. Because of the immense, sudden and violent nature of the immigrants’ loss, commemoration in their community is at once hypercommunalized and insufficiently grounded in precise memories of departed individuals. Yet commemoration requires filiation. Now it is up to the immigrants’ descendants, not Polish Jews but French, to discover the resources which will enable them to realize their individuality as they establish a new community.

XI CHILDREN AND OTHER STRANGERS

My fieldwork journal is framed by two reminders of the importance of language in defining the immigrant situation. A week after our arrival, we visited the Bagneux cemetery for the first time: the Bund was having its own memorial ceremony. On the way from the bus to the main gate, we fell into conversation with a man from Warsaw. He asked where I had learned Yiddish. When I told him I studied the language in college, he said, “So it’s true! There really are students who learn Yiddish properly in American universities. I thought it was just a nice story made up by the Yiddish press." At his further questioning, I confessed that Elissa and I don’t speak Yiddish to each other at home. He admitted that he doesn‘t, either; his wife is an Algerian Jew, and they converse in French: “At home, I‘m a gay, too." His ironic use of the Yiddish term usually translated as “Gentile“ was a comment on his own contradictory situation: A secularist, defining his Jewishness as cultural rather than religious, he had nevertheless married someone to whom he was tied by religion and not culture. As a result, he and his wife were forced to communicate in a “gentile” language that hid both of their distinct Jewish cultures. Almost a year later we spoke to a woman from Vilna who had lived in Paris for five years after the war. She recalled: “When I came to Paris, my seven— year-old cousin noticed that I didn’t know French. She decided to show me how to use the faucet and tie my shoes—if I didn’t know French, I probably didn‘t know anything.” A brave beginning: Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end of fieldwork, two covers of the Book which contains everything the reader needs to know. In fact this chapter is altogether awkward. It is by necessity the most uneven and obviously incomplete chapter in the book. It belongs neither in the section on “the work of the past” nor the section “pieces of the mirror.” It cannot be left out. The awkwardness of this chapter is roughly analogous to the mutually contradictory cultural demands which the immigrants have had to satisfy. Divorced from everyday ritual observance as they are, Yiddish culture is the essence of 152

Children and Other Strangers

l 53

Jewishness to them. As immigrants in France, their acceptance by their neigh-

bors is contingent on fluency in the French language and all the accompanying subtleties that make up the density of everyday French culture. When President Szpiro of the Lublin Society wanted to explain why the immigrants had felt the need to band together, linguistic barriers were the first thing that came to his mind: ”There was the problem of language . . . and other problems." As if to reinforce the continuing validity of this observation, when I interviewed the French-born president of the Federation-oriented society, he insisted that were his group to contemplate merging with the Farband Warsaw group, the fact that the former held its meetings in French and the latter in Yiddish would be a greater barrier than any remaining political differences. The immigrants' loyalty to Yiddish and their general ignorance of Hebrew also handicap their connections to the rest of the Jewish people. Israel in particular is a highly problematic surrogate for the sense of belonging to the Yiddish-speaking masses or to the world proletariat that once helped sustain the immigrants. TheJewish state does serve as a powerful new legitimation. Miriam Silverstein showed this at the world gathering of Lublin émigrés in Tel Aviv in April 1983, asking her landslayz to “make Israel your heir.” She was asking that they leave money to Israel in their wills, and symbolically suggesting that the émigrés could achieve a measure of continuity by connecting themselves to Israel in this fashion. The immigrants sense that their time for actively participating in this great Jewish national movement has passed. Several of them, immediately upon meeting me, said, “Why are you here, rather than in Israel? For us it’s too late, but you‘re still young and could help out there." To help mediate the immigrants‘ relation to France, Israel, and the rest of the Jewish people, the Yiddish speakers can refer to others who may be better connected in these areas but who also maintain connections to the immigrant community. Among these are immigrants who have been unusually successful in business, such as Claude Kelman, a member of the board of the C.R.I.F. and a spokesman for the French garment industry. Miriam Silverstein, watching Kelman being interviewed on the midday news about fashions for pregnant women, said with calm satisfaction, “Oh, we know him." Others in this cate— gory are cited for helping fellow Polish Jews practically. One immigrant told me that the clothing manufacturer Bidermann, for whom he had worked in the thirties, had helped him get set up again after the war. When Iexpressed interest in meeting Bidermann, the man responded, “You might be able to. But don‘t try speaking Yiddish to him.“ The Jewish intellectuals who have become masters of French are also im-

also

portant to the immigrants. Elie Wiesel in particular has helped articulate the

grounds for renewed selflrespect. When he lectures on the Holocaust or the Talmud at the Centre Rachi (the Jewish students’ center), the hall is filled to capacity—mostly with young people, but there is a sprinkling of the elderly among them. The young intellectual star Alain Finkielkraut, who has written books about the confusion of Jewish identity in his own generation (1980), the perverse anti-Semitism of certain strains of the European left (1982), and the

I’olish Jews in Paris

154

media demonilation of Israel during the Lebanon war ( l 983), is likewise looked mediator among the immigrants, their children, the larger French Jewish population and the French body intellectual. The actuality of the boundaries which require such mediation is illustrated by the rigorous distinction between appropriate situations for speaking French and for speaking Yiddish. I first noticed this while walking with Srulim Iiryc» man down the Boulevard de Sebastopol on a sunny day in March. He was interested in my portable Sony cassette recorder, and we window-shopped at the electronics stores on the avenue. As always, we conversed in Yiddish, but whenever anyone we didn‘t know was in earshot, Brycman switched into French. On another occasion, Elissa and I went with Menachem and Brayne Kurland to an academic conference on the reception of the news of the Warsaw Ghetto revolt by the French Resistance. It was held at the Senate Building in the Jardin de Luxembourg, and as we entered, we were speaking Yiddish. To get to the room where the conference was held, we had to go down several flights of old stone steps, without any railings. When we got to the last flight of steps, Kurland was ahead of me. He slipped and tried to catch himself, but lost his balance again because there was nothing to catch hold of. He ended up tumbling head first, falling some eight steps altogether, and breaking his right wrist. There were guards present, and we quickly got him into a chair. His face pale from the pain, Kurland repeated over and over, “Oh, ca fait mall” The discipline of switching languages held even through this crisis. The need for such discipline suggests the narrowness of the space available for ethnic expression in France. The Polish and other East European Jewish immigrants who arrived toward the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth presented a social challenge to the assimilationist movement of native French Jewry (Hyman 1979). That movement sprang from the granting of full civil rights to Jews as individual citizens by Napoleon’s government at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Count Mole, bearing Napoleon’s instructions to the epoch-making Assembly of Jewish Notables in the summer of 1806, declared that to as a

The wish of His Majesty is, that you should be Frenchmen; it remains with you to accept the proffered title, without forgetting that, to prove unworthy of it, would be renouncing it altogether (Quoted in Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz 1980:] 14).

For their part, the Jewish notables replied by asserting that The love of the country is in the heart ofJews a sentiment so natural, so powerful, and so consonant to their religious opinions, that a French Jew considers himself in England as among strangers, although he may be among Jews; and the case is the same with English Jews in France (ibid.:119).

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Furthermore, Napoleon had established a central body for the administration ofJewish religious services and rituals, known as the Consistoire Central. During the nineteenth century, the Consistoire struggled for a monopoly over appointment of rabbis, organization of worship, and burial arrangements, against the profuse mutual aid societies, many of which had been founded by Alsatian immigrants more Orthodox than the Consistoire officials (Albert 1977). This policy of Consistoire dominance determined the official native reaction to the mass migration from Eastern Europe as well. The immigrants, therefore, went against a century of native lsmélite efforts to be and become fully French by insisting upon their “ethnicity as an openly acknowledged element of Jewish identity” (Hyman 1979:63). Even though children are not maintaining the landsmanshafm, a significant minority persrsts in emphasizing cultural particularism. The rest of this chapter will focus on the various kinds of identity that minority is engaged in constructing. The range of available strategies is different from those employed by contemporary-North American Jews, and the contradictions to be overcome differ accordingly. The religious options are quite limited in France. The Conservative Jew15h movement is nonexistent, and the Liberal movement which corresponds to American Reform Judaism is quite small. Furthermore, as described above, most Jewish religious life in France is under the control of the Consistoire. these reasons, French Jews have attempted nothing comparable to Perhaps the hat/um movement, with its highly problematic attempt to blend religious motifs with gender egalitarianism and political progressivlsm (Prell 1987, 1988). Most American Jews who have any formal affiliation are members of Conservative or Reform congregations, in which the search for a secure yet creative identity remains as elusive as in France:

their

for American

traditional

[Members of a suburban American synagogue] were unable to interpret their

heritage so that it made sense in their “American" life and, as a result, Jewrshincreasingly turned to background as a historical tradition. Yet,

they

theirJewish philosophically, these Jews were not truly comfortable with this fit and insisted that the school teach about Jewish life according to an imagined context that

was

in

fact neither

true to

their own lives nor

to

their children‘s. (Schoem

1988:112; cf. also Boyarin1988:57—58)

By contrast to the United States, the main strategy for the new French Jewish generation’s “re-imagination” of Jewish life is the organization of formal, vol— untary associations. These include the Sephardic cultural organization Vidas Largas; the recently-formed association of Jewish students of the Grandes Ecoles, members of which participate in a weekly Talmud study group; and the Cercle Gaston Crémieux, which is more involved in working for Jewish and other minority cultural rights in a political context than in preserving particular memories (see Marienstras 1975). Language remains a central issue to these organizations, whether their members are attempting to become adept in the

156

Jewish scholarly

Polish Jews

In

Paris

tradition, to synthesize politics and identity, or simply to hecomc conversant in the idiom of their grandparents. Some of the immigrants, even among those who arrived before World War ll, have never become fluent in French. Most, however, have a sufficient command of the language that they need not feel acutely aware of themselves as “foreigners" in everyday contexts. Their children, for the sake of whose future many of them made special efforts to speak French at home also, are certainly articulate native speakers of French. There is, of course, a cost involved. Those of the children who now want to be competent in Jewish culture know little more of their parents‘ heritage than their parents knew of French culture upon their arrival. Though the existence of such a group and their recent organization into the Association pour l‘Enseignement et la Diffusion de la Culture Yiddish (A.E.D.C.Y.) are encouraging signs of continuity, the nature of that continuity remains extremely problematic. The renunciation of communication in Yiddish during earlier years, either by parents desiring their children’s integration or by children too young to value what was different from what they learned in school, caused a break that requires immense imagination to repair today. The difficulty is epitomized by the dilemma of one member of A.E.D.C.Y. whom we met in October. Born just before the war, he was separated from his parents, and was adopted by relatives at the war’s end. He remembers that they spoke to him in Yiddish, but he is unable to speak the language now. Although he had attended a three-day intensive course in September, he found it impossible even to repeat words that were pronounced for him. When we left the meeting with this man, Elissa and I wished everyone, “Zayt gezzmt!”—be well. Much as we repeated the phrase to him, our companion could not pronounce a closer imitation than Zaynt gezunt. Others of his generation were more fortunate in this respect; they were either born a few years earlier, or survived together with their parents. In 1982—83, when A.E.D.C.Y.‘s educational program was still quite new, most of the advanced students were middle—aged women who learned Yiddish as children from their parents. Most of them, however, had never learned to read the language. They are impatient with attempts to teach them grammar, and uncomfortable with the academic Standard Yiddish dialect. They are the native French speakers of Yiddish, and, as such, are an important link. They are incapable of serving as adequate, authentic culture—bearers, however. Their childhood training in Yiddish was domestic and restricted, and is itself a barrier to their acquiring the intellectual and pedagogic skills which the teaching of Yiddish requires today. It is significant that the A.E.D.C.Y. classes are held at the Medem Library. The Bund, through its consistent emphasis on Yiddish culture as a value in itself, and perhaps also because it has never been tainted by association with state power, is the only political group in the Yiddish community to have raised a number of literate Yiddish speakers in its middle generation. The Federation, for its part, sponsors the Centre Israel Jefroykin, whose activities include art exhibits, concerts, political discussions and the like, in addition to Yiddish

Children and Other Strangers

l S7

classes. Yet the historical origins of the landsmanshafln which make up the Federation are so specific that they can hardly recruit new members from among the participants at the Centre Jefroykin, Some of the most committed younger Yiddishists are trying to raise a new generation of native Yiddish speakers, by insisting on speaking the language to their children. This, too, is problematic in several ways, one of which is that the parents again fail to communicate with the children in their own native language. Then, too, children need peers to learn a language, and there is certainly no community of Yiddishists with small children in Paris. Of the two such families I know, one is religious and the other secularist; even if the children were the same age, it would be difficult for them to spend much time together. Yet these children will, I imagine, grow up speaking a new, rich, and fascinating Yiddish, whose accents and grammar will be quite idiosyncratic. The majority of the young people who attend A.E.D.C.Y. classes, however, are in their twenties and have had little training either in speaking or reading Yiddish. Makowski, the literary editor of Undzer Vort, questions how involved they can become in Yiddish, starting so late: “It’s true, there are students learning Yiddish in the universities, here and in America. But someone who only learns the Hebrew alphabet at twenty-five isn’t going to become a Yiddish writer." Makowski is not unsympathetic, only skeptical. Less involved or sophisticated immigrants evinced their generation‘s perception of the break in continuity more plainly, flatly denying my assertions that there are young people in Paris who speak Yiddish. Vera Moses of A.E.D.C.Y., Hungarian-born but not a native speaker of Yid— dish, was acutely aware of the gap as well. She was preoccupied with the problem of raising the cultural level of the A.E.D.C.Y. enthusiasts—among other reasons, because the preponderance of enthusiasm over knowledge among the younger generation exacerbates the difficulty they have in communicating with the older Yiddishists. She hoped that I could serve as a bridge, and asked whether I knew anyone in the established Yiddish circles who would be inter— ested in cooperating with A.E.D.C.Y. Before A.E.D.C.Y. had been formed, she and Yitshok Niborski, the young man from Argentina who directs the organization’s educational program, had held a meeting with the directors of the Committee for Yiddish to see what could be done for the young people. But she complains that the directors of the Committee really couldn’t understand the young people’s need for substantive Yiddish cultural programs. Vera believes that a profound pessimism inhibits the older generation. She also sees their “obsession with the Holocaust" as an obstacle, citing the last paragraph of Warshawski’s introduction to the new Yiddish-French dictionary, which mentions the desire to perpetuate Yiddish culture, but ends with a memorial glance back toward the world destroyed by the Nazis. Her frustration with both the immigrants and the younger generation is based on a perception that their attachment to Yiddish stems from ideology rather than knowledge. In fact, the young students at A.E.D.C.Y. need to be taught rudiments of East European Judaism before they can hope to understand the

158

Polish

Jews in

Paris

Yiddish classics. Their affection for Yiddish is a nostalgic perspective on a time when working-class Jews were leftists. Yet the internationalist Yiddish culture these Jewish workers supported and helped create entailed a revolt against the traditional world in which they had been steeped as children. The guiding motivation for an organization like A.E.D.C.Y. is the desire for a particular identity which will likewise afford a universal connection. Can this still be grounded in a cultural universe—secular Yiddishism—which has been largely rejected from within and then eradicated from without? One possible key to this problem‘s analysis, if not its solution, may lie in Dominique Schnapper’s observation that the current reapprehcnsion of Jewish culture and observance is not “traditional" (1983), echoed by Kenneth Avruch’s suggestion that we “should speak. not of modernity but of modernizing; not of tradition but of traditionalizing“ (198 1 :206). The culture which was imbibed with our great-grandmothers‘ milk by our grandparents comes to us through the mediation of books. Thus the differing attitudes toward the same culture are not only a matter of generation, but of origins. Young people interested in Yiddish occasionally complained to me of the mundane, tired character of cultural activities sponsored by the immigrant organizations, while older people sometimes expressed amazement that I had learned Yiddish so well in school. To them it is a language that can only really be learned properly as a child in the home. The difference in situation between those who have lost a world and those who have discovered a world was summed up sharply by Dovid Malki. The first time we spoke on the telephone, he guessed from my Yiddish that I was from Lithuanian Jewish stock. I told him that was because I had learned the Standard Yiddish developed by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, which before World War II was located in Vilna, the center of what Yiddish speakers call Lite, or historic Lithuania. He responded, “Learning Yiddish at YIVO is like. . . wait a minute, I have to ask my friend what that word is. . . . ” After a moment, during which I overheard the words, “When a child . . . ” he came back to the telephone and concluded, “Learning Yiddish at YIVO is like growing up in an incubator!" Indeed, both sides suffer from an inadequacy of cultural resources. The immigrants as a group received neither a complete traditional Jewish education nor a sufficiently sophisticated secular education to allow them to integrate precisely what they could use from their Jewish background. Furthermore, the false steps made by the children increase their elders’ wariness. Elissa and I were parties to a demonstration of this drama of missed cues on Rosh Hashanah, just after we arrived in Paris. She was eager to observe the custom of tashlelzh, in which Jews go to the nearest body of flowing water on the first day of Rosh Hashanah and empty crumbs from their pockets—a symbolic cleansing of sin. We went to the nearby Canal St. Martin, expecting to see other Jews doing the same thing, but we were the only ones to have come for tashleleh. It wasn't until the next day—when we did see Jews going to perform the ceremony—

Children and Other Strangers

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that we found out that it is performed on the second day of Rosh Hashanah whenever the first day falls on the Sabbath. Meanwhile, we had time before afternoon services, so we decided to look for Jews on the benches alongside the Boulevard Jules Ferry. We stopped across from a bench containing two separate pairs of elderly ladies. A photograph, if I had taken one, would have suggested a more exaggerated and stereotyped difference in style between natives and immigrants than is really typical. The two on the left, speaking French, had silvery-gray hair and wore muted, striped dresses, while the two on the right, speaking Yiddish, wore floral dresses and had hair dyed pale red and pale blond. Elissa decided to ask them where people went to perform tasblelzh in the neighborhood, and I let her approach them alone. She addressed them in Yiddish, but I could see she was having trouble communicating, so I walked over too. The problem wasn’t with Elissa’s Yid» dish, however; these two women simply didn‘t know what tashlelzh was. Finally one recalled the term, with a slightly different pronunciation: “Oh, teshlelzh! I saw that once! But nobody does that now!"—as if we were referring to some bizarre primitive rite. keep up the conversation, I explained that I had come to study Jewish history. “Ekh! It’s foolishness!” Both of them told us that they had lost their husbands and children during the war: “You’ve heard of Hitler?" One, deciding that we were Orthodox, decided that we should go to the Lubavitcher Hasidim (although she didn’t remember that name), who would give us money. Many of the immigrants’ children have become interested in Orthodox observance, and Lubavitch has indeed been a prime mover in this regard.l One of of Jo Goldenberg, the owner of the nonkosher delicatessen in Le Marais was the target of a terrorist attack in 1982, has become a Lubavitcher Hastd. When I was invited to a modest dinner at his home, his mother was present. She was clearly comfortable with his Orthodoxy, but gently chided of the extreme regulations of kasbrut that are idiosyncratic to the Lubavttcher Hasidim and serve primarily to distinguish them from other Orthodox Jews. all parents adapt to their children’s new-found Jewish observance as easrly. Sometimes it works as a real barrier between generations. One woman from Vilna whom I interviewed, Mme. Parmentier, came from a family that was apparently both religious and modestly wealthy. She mentioned this in connection with a figurine on her sideboard, of a Jew with a traditional fur hat and holding a Torah, which had been given her by her daughter. She went

‘To

thesons which

some

Not

1. Lubavitch Hasidism was establishedby one of the original eighteenth-century followers of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of the modern Hasidic movement. Representing the more scholarly Lithuanian style in the movement, the Lubavircher Rebes militantly struggled with both opponents of Hasidism and Tsarist authorities. TodayI the Lubavitch movement does outreach work to Jews from all backgrounds all over the world, involving them in Jewish learning and observance in general, and Lubavitch Hasidism in particular.

lbO

Polish

Jews In

Paris

on: “Once in Strasbourg we were passing a religious store and my daughter said to me, ‘I want you to buy me a Torah.” I refused to do it.“ I replied to Mme. Parmentier, “A Torah costs a great deal," thinking back

to my synagogue on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which would certainly have to close its doors if any more of its Torahs were stolen. Then Mme. Parmentier told me that her family in Vilna had possessed a Torah scroll of its own. Mme. Parmentier’s path led from that family background to a youthful involvement with the Marxist—Zionist organization Hashomer Hatzair. But when she came to Paris and started working, she saw the terrible conditions of the workers, and “gave up that bourgeois romanticism.” She met her non-Jewish husband-to-be while she was singing in the Jewish People's Chorus and he was singing in the “general" People's Chorus. Apparently, it wasn’t always a smooth relationship: they fought a lot the first years, since their political views differed. “Yes," smiled M. Parmentier in agreement, “I was an anarchist—I was to the left of the leftists." M. Parmentier worked as a technician in a physics laboratory, and after the war the family followed his job to Strasbourg from Paris. The religious distinctions still prevailing there between Catholics, Protestants, and Jews complicated Mme. Parmentier‘s relationship with her children: “Before the war, I hadn’t missed my home in Vilna a great deal. After the war ended, I felt a great emptiness inside myself. People accused me of being an ‘assimilationist,’ of trying to lose my Jewishness. But I taught my children Jewish culture: I sang Yiddish songs to them, I bought them Dubnow’s History of the jewisb People, I even read them stories of Perets. I just didn’t want them to have a religion. One day my little son came home asking what our religion was. I explained that we didn’t believe in religion, but he insisted we had to have one, because there were regular periods for religious instruction, and you had to be inscribed as Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish. “1 had even more trouble with my daughter. Somehow she got very interested in the Jewish religion. She gave me all kinds of heartaches. She wanted me to start keeping kosher, but that I just wouldn’t do. Once we went on a vacation to Switzerland. We’d go into a restaurant, and she’d ask how the food was prepared. If she found out it had been made with meat, she refused to eat it. She stayed this way until she started going out with a boy whose mother had converted and whose father was a very devout Christian. The boy himself was a pious Christian. He gave her a big Jewish star for her birthday. I knew it wouldn’t work out . . . ” Mme. Parmentier’s story, if unusual, is illustrative: While she wants her children to know there is richness in their Jewish background, their interest in religious Jewish identity is a disappointment to her. Even people much more explicitly committed to Jewish nationalism, who would be heartbroken were their children to marry non-Jews, explain their use of religious symbols functionally, as means to an educational end rather than as fulfillments of com—

Children and Other Strangers

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mandments in their own right. Gitele Edelstein cited her mother‘s teachings as the source of the wisdom by which she raised her children in France: “My mother told me, ‘When you plant a seedling, don‘t wait too long to place a stick nearby to train it to grow straight; otherwise, it can remain crooked for-

ever.’ I‘ve always spoken Yiddish to my children. I always lit candles on Friday night. Maybe if I were in Israel I wouldn‘t have to light candles. But here, since the street is gentile, I wanted to show them that the home is Jewish.” In some ways, Gitele‘s is the perfect compromise for this generation. The Yiddish language is their most distinctive cultural marker and the richest legacy they could possibly give to their descendants. Gitele also realized that in order for her children to retain a warm association with Jewishness, she would have to give them symbols and actions to perform at set times. She stopped short of attempting to impose on her children the everyday strictures of Jewish observance, which she rebelled against in her own childhood. There are problems with Gitele’s approach as well, however. It has not been an easy balance to maintain in the politically charged Parisian Jewish world. Many of the immigrant parents who believed ideologically in the need to transmit the Jewish language were just as passionately opposed to any semblance of observance. Moreover, some young Jewish intellectuals complain that they don’t want “to do it just because my mother did it." They expect to be able to rationalize any custom they are expected to inherit. In earlier years this usually resulted in a drawing away from any manifestation of everyday Judaism. Now a significant minority of the children and grandchildren of immigrants are drawn precisely to the tradition of religious observance, reconstructed and invested with a regenerated stock of symbolic interpretation by the Lubavitch movement.

Alstory by Benjamin Schlewin from the mid-19605 foreshadows this trend. It is set in the Parisian suburb of Brunoy, which has for years been a Jewish summer colony, similar in that respect to Lakewood, New Jersey. Like Lake> wood, this town which once contained hotels and bungalow colonies now boasts as its main Jewish presence an Orthodox yeshiva. Schlewin’s story places the “Wladek Home,” a former summer camp named after an American Bundist leader, next to the quarters of the Lubavitcher Hasidim, “from Russia." Schlewin depicts the hopeless yearning of a youth who attends the summer camp, Jacques, for a Lubavitch girl named Reyzl. When Jacques sees the girl across the iron gate separating the two estates, his call is an echo of one of Mordechai Gebirtig’s most beloved songs: “Reyzl, lzum nor”—come, Rey-Ll. Gebirtig’s song is actually called “Reyzele,” and its tag line is “Reyzl. lztim, hum, hum" (full text in Mlotek 1987). It depicts a young man declaring his willingness to give up carefree whistling (which his girlfriend‘s mother says is good only for “them," the non-Jews) and be pious and respectable in order to win his prospective in—Iaws' affection. Schlewin‘s story thus comes full circle: The heyday of secularism is past, the Orthodox have maintained their separate world, and unlike the young man in Gebirtig’s song, Jacques's background is

Polish

lhl

Jews in

Paris

different for him to be able to conform and thus keep his Reyzl‘s love. The wise. graying director of the children’s home reflects on the hopelessness of Jacques‘ love: too

On the other hand—what did we give them, our children, that we should expect them to understand it? The ones over there—they have a god, an ironfast faith in a higher moral, that‘s why they have the power to accomplish the impossible. While wc—wc still occupy ourselves with mighty words, phrases to which time itself has given the lie. It seems one must he stubborn and have great faith. (Schlewin 1974:36)

It is almost twenty years since Schlewin wrote his story, and the Lubavitch community is hardly the insular world he depicts. Were the scene to take place today, someone would probably invite Jacques in to visit and try to impart to him the wisdom and beauty of Jewish observance. Most of the young people who are drawn to Lubavitch, however, are children of immigrants from North Africa. As one gentleman I met explained in a tone of philosophical resignation, “My son-in-law is a Moroccan Jew. He’s a fine young man, but unfortunately he was infected by the epidemic and became a Lubavitcher. Anyway, he’s learned Yiddish, and we manage to communicate.” The claim that his son—in-Iaw has learned Yiddish is credible, because Yiddish Still has a high prestige among all Lubavitcher Hasidim as the language of advanced learning and that used by the Rebe, their spiritual guide, in his broad-

discourses. In general, however, because their own Jewishness is so tied up the specifics of East European Jewish culture and their particular political history, the immigrants do not see North African Jews as fellow members of an everyday French Jewish community. Nor is this situation an aberration in French history: Even at the time of the French Revolution, “French Jewry” of two quite distinct groups—the southern French Sephardim and the Alsatian Ashkenazim—who differed greatly in terms of language, class, observance, secular involvement, and acceptance by non-Jews. The idea of Jewish unity on the scale of the nation-state dates only to sometime in the nineteenth century. The term “community," even as neutrally used by social researchers, often bears a specifically American connotation of “people joining together to create societies according to principles they jointly produce” (Varenne 1986:212). Clearly both terms in the name, Communauté Nouuelle, of the magazine produced by the Fonds Social Juif Unifié (itself modeled on the United Jewish Appeal) are derived from American concepts. This semantic borrowing is even more striking since, conventionally, “the French word communaute’ cannot be used in most of the contexts where ‘community’ is appropriate in America“ cast

with

Jewish conSISted

(ibid.:214). While United States Jewish history is marked by successive waves'ofethnically distinct Jewish immigration, the process by which older groups lose their distinction and coherence while newer groups become predominant has been much

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less pained in America than in France. Since the North Africans and their dc. scendants now constitute roughly two-thirds of the French JeWish population, the landslayt's awareness of the persistent cultural gap is sometimes defensive The Yiddish-speaking immigrants may be envious of the rapid integration of these newer arrivals: The wealthier French-educated North African Jews, many of them French citizens, came to France when they were compelled to leave their homes in the 19505 and 19605, while their poorer and less educated neighbors and relatives generally went to Israel. They received much more aid from

the extant French Jewish organizations than the Polish immigrants had before World War II, but suffered some of the same social denigration as the non— ]ewish pieds noirs; the term “sbuartse fis,“ a calque of pied: noirs, is still quite common in Parisian Yiddish. To an extent, the gap persists among some children of East European immigrants who identify more with the ancestral culture than with either Israel or the Jewish religion. Thus, a curious projection was manifested by the fortyish producer of a Yiddishist radio program when she explained to me why the program was mostly done in French. She said it wouldn’t have an audience in Yiddish, because the older Yiddish speakers in Paris don‘t listen to the program; there are only a few hundred students of Yiddish in Paris; and “the Sephardim don’t like the sound of the language." Now, I am familiar from my childhood with the idea that Yiddish is not only a bastard language but has a coarse and grating sound; and it is only in the past few years that younger Jews in America as well as France have been recuperating from that delusion. Though North descended Jews may still share a prejudice against Yiddish, it seems likely that this woman imputed to the “Sephardim"—a group who are like her as Jews, and unlike her as non-Ashkenazic—the remnants she herself still drags along of insecurity about her own cultural baggage. At the same time, the growing dominance of the North Africans in Jewish organizations is implicitly noted, if somewhat regretted. Opatowski, Cortimunal trying to gather a group to attend an annual Israel Bond dinner, insisted that “the Yiddisbe selztor must be represented." Here again, since in Yiddish the “Yiddish“ refers both to Jewishness in general and to the Yiddish speaklng cultural sphere in particular, the use of it to specify a group as opposed to the North Africans discreetly hinted at an anxious call for the “real Jews" to stand up and be counted. The East European immigrants do share in the newfound confidence and assertiveness brought by the sheer numbers of the new North African community and by that group’s preexisting competence in French culture. At the same time, the older immigrant activists sense that some— thing has been taken from them—something that would not exist but for the new migration. The everyday relation between the older and newer immigrants just after the migration of the North African Jews was echoed by one man whom I met in the suburb of Boulogne. I had gone to help an Orthodox friend put up a suklzab, a booth for the holiday of Sukkot, outside his syngagogue, and as we worked we conversed in Yiddish. The third man working with us was not from an East

African

word

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Polish Jews in Paris

European background and clearly did not understand Yiddish, but at one point, as an expression of his goodwill, he offered the phrase “Abi arbeil"—as long as there‘s work. Many of the newer immigrants found their first employment in Paris working forJewish clothing and textile manufacturers and wholesalers. The phrase reflects the uncertainty and seasonality which make that a difficult living for employer and worker alike. The rapid success of the North Africans, both within the Jewish community and in French professional and academic circles, was capped by the recent appointment of René Sirat as the first “Sephardi” chief rabbi of France. As reflected in the speech he gave at the celebration of the Yiddish-French dictionary, his understanding and respect for the different cultural backgrounds of FrenchJews bode well for a progressive and healthy integration. But the Yiddish community could not resist an ironic comment on his appointment, which coincided roughly with another item of religious news. Jean-Marie Lustiger, a child of Polish Jewish immigrants who had lost his parents during World War II, survived under the care of French Catholics, converted and entered the priesthood, had recently been appointed Archbishop of Paris. “Oh, well,” temporized the joke that made the rounds of the Yiddish café tables, “the Sephardim can have the Chief Rabbi. We have the Archbishop!" The barriers defining and limiting the East European Jewish immigrant community are, of course, not only between themselves and other Jews but between them and the non-Jewish French as well. The cultural difficulties of all immigrant groups are exacerbated in France by the exclusiveness of its monocultural ideal, which contrasts with the tradition of political tolerance of refugees (Cf. Paxton and Marrus 1981, discussed above). This was expressed to Elissa and me in a perfectly naive and sympathetic way by a young non—Jewish French teacher, who remarked that “the American Jews are better assimilated than the Jewish immigrants in France." The notion of assimilation as a good caught us by surprise; but how different is it really from the liberal American idea of

“integration"? In part, of course, it was precisely this combination of political liberalism and cultural “light” that shaped the immigrants’ image of Paris and drew them to “the capital of the nineteenth century” (Benjamin 1978). For Mme. Rodgold, arriving in Paris around 1930, the first impression of the city was of “freedom.” The strict separation of realms for using French and Yiddish, detailed above, testifies to the immigrants’ acceptance of French language and manners as appropriate in the public sphere, as does their pride in their children’s and grandchildren’s mastery of French culture. One young woman we know, a history teacher in a lycée, has studied Yiddish and done research on the work of her grandfather, a Yiddish journalist. She told us in an ironic tone that when she interviewed one of her grandfather’s surviving acquaintances, he commented that her grandfather would have been proud to hear how she speaks French!

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necessarily mean that the immigrants have come to think of themselves as “French." The situation was summed up in Yiddish by a man I know on the Lower East Side who lived in Paris for several years after the war: “Vern a frantsoyz iz shuer“——lt is hard to become French. No matter how long he or she may live and work in France, no one who is not born there is guaranteed of ever obtaining French citizenship. The verdict applies both to legal and to cultural status, and it is felt most keenly by those who arrived after World War II. Yossele Testyler, the man who told me of his encounter with a woman from his town who spoke Yiddish at her grandmother‘s grave, gestured toward the racks of coats in his shop as we talked. He has no particular love of what he makes and sells. He has no particular love of France, either. When he returned to France in 1960 from Israel—where he had gone after being forced out of France in the late 19405, unable to obtain permanent residency—he had believed it possible for him to be both a Frenchman and a Jew. But, he says, he was shocked back to “reality” by de Gaulle’s anti-Semitic references in 1966 to “this people that wants to control the world." He resents the fact that he, who provides work for fifteen people, in addition to paying taxes to help support those who don’t work (one begins to understand the connotations of the word “patron”), is not accepted as a Frenchman. He says he has accepted the truth that even Jews whose families have been in France for many generations are not fully accepted as French; that he himself will always be a Jew and never He doubts that the situation will change in the coming generaThis does

not

aFrenchman.

tions.

This impression was confirmed in a conversation I had in March with a man who had arrived in 1938. He asked how long I had been in Paris, and when I told him, he exclaimed, “Six months! You're a real Parisian!" When I replied that it seemed to me I could spend my entire life in Paris and never be a real Parisian, he agreed: “I‘m here forty-five years already, and I‘m not altogether French—I’m not even halfway French. In Israel, I feel at home." Despite Testyler’s disclaimer, business is one of the areas in which the immigrants are best integrated into French society. As Szulim Brycman and I window-shopped on the Boulevard de Sebastopol, he wondered at the way the electronics industry has taken off: “So many people out of work, and yet they're selling millions of these things. It’s a new industry altogether." Passing a bookstore and a shoe store, he continued: “And the basic, traditional industries become less and less important every year. The government says we should buy—if we buy, the world will have a future, and otherwise the world is lost. France exports big items, but meanwhile we import so many of these small things that our debt is huge." I commented that rich, industrialized countries will obviously have deficits, when the poor countries they sell to don't even have the money to pay their debts, let alone buy more. Brycman responded, “My father used to interpret verses from the Bible. He took, for example, the verse ‘a poor man is considered as a dead man.’ What does this mean? After

Polish Jews in Paris

the

all. a poor

man is still alive. The comparison, my father said, comes from the fact that lust as you can't make any demands of a dead man, you can‘t demand anything from a poor man, either." Even within their own milieu, the immigrants have assumed a measure of the French formalism and reserve with which they once reproached the native French "Israelites." This seemed to compound the difficulty my inexperience caused me when I first tried to arrange interviews: even though I spoke Yiddish, still I was a foreigner.

If the immigrants no longer expect to become fully “French," their children have been remarkably successful in doing so, despite Testyler’s doubts. Now, the immigrants often regret not having been more insistent that their children learn Yiddish; seeing their French offspring, they wish the children might have turned out a little more Jewish as well. It‘s not clear, however, that they could have had it both ways. It was not a question of emphasizing an ethnic identity versus the lack of specific identity which some Americans wistfully paraphrase as “not really knowing what they are.“ On the contrary, the specific ideology of being French as the best way to be universally human is a tradition quite powerfully inculcated by the French school system. That this Republican Frenchness was an “invented tradition,” for which primary education served as “the secular equivalent of a Church"(Hobsbawm1983:271), hardly lessened its power. . . until recently. Now, some of the children who study Yiddish express their own resentment at having been “cheated” of their heritage. They forget the immense pressure their parents were under to abandon that heritage. Perhaps this is why, in searching for their “own” cultural distinctiveness, they look right through and past their parents to an imagined world of political idealism and cultural warmth in Eastern Europe. There are, of course, links between the Jewish identity of the immigrants and the cultural profile of many of their children. This is true, to varying extents, for those whose children observeJewish law, those whose children are interested in Yiddish culture, and especially those whose children now live in Israel. In such cases, while the children certainly are preserving and extending the heri— tage of the Jewish people, the boundaries of their associations are no longer those of the immigrant group. Even while rejecting Jewish law, the immigrants never had to choose whether or not to be identifiably Jewish. A proper answer to the question of what in the children’s Jewishness is taken directly from their parents and what borrowed or invented elsewhere belongs to a full ethnography of the children (for a partial answer see Friedlander 1990). Let it suffice here to reiterate the dif— ference between a chosen identity and a fated identity. The former bears a risk of superficiality corresponding to the latter’s risk of ethnocentric nonreflection. As one young French Jewish critic cautioned, Is there not a danger, for certain young people today, of not considering Judaism anything more than an ideological outlet after the failure of the ideologies

as

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which may have once inspired them? This is the opposite of Indium; in mike play on words, it is the “idology” of an esthetic attachment in that ’Jil‘IILl] the rigor ofJewish thought may represent. . . . (Chouraqui 1982;

a

Let us remove the aspect of judgment embodied in this quote; a conscIoUsly chosen identity still represents genuine involvement, and we cannot know now what its outcome will be. This observation is applicable to the relations between the young Yiddishisants (the term implies a tendency, rather than a destgnation and the immigrants. Even those among the children who study Yiddish rarely join landsmanshaftn, for example, partly because they do not share the deep association with a particular home town. Yet children are generally the immigrant family’s chief source of pride and connection to the future. The [andsmanshaft structure, designed to meet the needs of a particular generation, effectively excludes the children, and thus incidentally provides a measure of social independence for the elderly immigrants. This is, of course, contrary to their explicit ideology of cultural continuity—but it may help explain the “in» ability” of the landsmanshafm to change in ways that would attract more young people. The meaning of this generational independence was expressed by Gitele Edelstein, when she addressed a world gathering of Lublin émigrés in Tel Aviv. Referring to her recent operation, she asserted: “Although I just got out of the hospital, I didn’t ask permission of my doctors, my husband, or my children before coming here. I knew I had to be with my landslayt." At other times, ambivalence is expressed about the very partial continuity that the immigrants have been able to establish with their children, sometimes along with awareness that this difficulty stems in part from the immigrants' revolt against their own parents. When I spent a day working with Miriam Silverstein at her apartment, and praised the rich lunch she provided, she made light of it: “In Lublin, the yeshiva students used to ‘eat days,’ being provided with meals at the home of a different family each day of the week. Now there are so few young students among us. . . . “ Mme. Silverstein's sentimental reference to “eating days" was revealing. This communal provision for young scholars was at best an awkward arrangement for those who experienced the humiliation, uncertainty, and generally poor nourishment involved (see Sher 1983). Her regret at the absence of young people, the immediate cause of her reference to the past, suggested a related nostalgia for the interdependence of young and old which bound her generation to their parents, even in rebellion (cf. Hareven 1976:210—211). Now, however, it is unclear whether the distance of young people is felt more keenly by those, like Miriam, who are actively involved in the social and cultural life of their own group—and who thus have a greater stake in the preservation of cultural identity—or by those who keep more to themselves, and might be expected to have more invested in the respect and understanding of their own children and grandchildren. The distinction between family and group focus is not only the result of the contradictory attachments of any immigrant group. It is also part of an intererhnic and international shift in attitudes toward and of older people from “a

168

Polish Jews in Paris

loosely defined category of persons . . . identifying most closely with their own families . . . to a group with common experience and needs" (Siinic 1978a: l2). This growth in the group consciousness of the elderly is in part a counterbalance to the lost interdependence of young and old. The shared identity of the ethnic group inevitably suffers when there is competition between generational and family orientation. Whereas jcwishness could have bridged families and generations together in an everyday community, in fact only funerals do. The French~born children’s and grandchildren‘s search for jewish knowledge and identity is an implicit attempt to overcome this loss of cohesion. In a standard ethnography of an isolated group, it would be proper to detail the process of transmission and apprehension of lifeways between generations, what has been focused on as “the developmental cycle in family groups”: In all human societies, the workshop, so to speak, of social reproduction is the domestic group. It is this group which must remain in operation over a stretch of time long enough to rear offspring to the stage of physical and social reproductivity if a society is to maintain itself. This is a cyclical process. The domestic group goes through a cycle of development analogous to the growth cycle of a living organism. The group as a unit retains the same form, but its members, and the activities which unite them, go through a regular sequence of changes during the cycle which culminates in the dissolution of the original unit and its replacement by one or more units of the same kind. (Fortes 195822)

The use of the word “cycle” and the sense of the entire passage imply a relative stability, a fundamental continuity overriding the changes that any group experiences. The claim that “all human societies” demonstrate a pattern of growth, decline, and replacement analogous to single organisms might be looked at askance if submitted today, given the close interpenetration of anthropology and history. By denying the continuity of change, the passage from Fortes displays a nostalgia for the “simple certainties of the primitive"— a nostalgia which actually entails both symbolic exploitation of those people deemed primitive and a hidden affirmation of the “progress” which permits us to speak as commentators on “all human societies” (see Taussig 1987). In fact, of course, neither “cycle” nor “direction" refer to innate aspects of life. Both are basic metaphors scholars and others in many cultures live by (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), and as such, they simultaneously add meaning to and con— fuse our lives. For the Yiddish immigrant community in Paris, the fact that loyalties to family and group can conflict implies that the “cycle,” such as it was, has been fundamentally disrupted. A distinction made by scholars between “historical” and “anthropological” definitions of generation is useful here. The anthropological definition refers to childhood, parenthood, and grandparenthood. The historical definition refers to groups born at roughly the same time, whose

stable

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lives are played out within the context of distinct and nonrecurring external

events.2

Following the historical definition, the immigrants are “the children of

World War 1"; their children in turn are “children of World War II" (see R0senblatt 1983). Put this way, the problems that both of these generations have had in receiving their cultural heritage become much clearer. Both are, in real ways, generations without grandparents. The immigrants, as described in chapter two above, suffered disruption of their home communities and often forced migration with their parents to the cities in the teens and early twenties of this

century, thus being torn out of the “domestic cycle" young. When they came to Paris, most came as single young people and left their parents behind; hence,

their children never knew their own grandparents. Social distinctions between the immigrants and their children also create a gap, of course. When Elissa and I spoke about this problem with Moshe Zalcman, his views suggested that a “pure” domestic cycle had never existed, at least not among the Jews. “No generation understands its own children," he said flatly. Then he cited the portion from the prophet Malachi read each year on the Sabbath before Passover as evidence that the situation hadn’t changed. “From the days of your fathers ye have turned aside," complains the prophet, before returning to a promise that demonstrates the eternal ideal of the undisturbed cycle: “And a book of remembrance was written before Him / For them that feared the Lord . . . /And I will spare them, as a man spareth / His own son that serveth him” (Malachi 3:7, 16—17). Moshe Zalcman obviously inherited enough from his parents to be able to cite the prophetic text, but for him, the disruption is the essential thing: “I didn’t understand my mother‘s religiosity, and my son doesn’t understand me. If the father‘s a tailor and the son’s a tailor, maybe they’ll see things the same way. But if the father’s a tailor and the son is an engineer. . . When I lived with my family in Soviet Georgia, Iworked with another tailor, an Armenian. He said to me: ‘You made a mistake sending your son off to the university, Moshe. I’m having my three sons trained as artisans; they‘ll come and have a drink with me at the end of the day. But your son—what will he have to say to you?’ “But that's the way it is. The desire for patents to see their children rise higher, go further, is as natural as being human." The gap is not total, of course. There are living connections, many of which

2. Researchers of family history use the more precise term “cohort" rather than “generation“ in this context (Elder 1977). However, they often define cohorts on the basis of changes which seem vastly less drastic than those experienced by twentieth-century Polish Jewish immigrants in Paris. Thus Hareven, writing of working-class New Englandets, writes that “Family and industrial adaptation processes were not merely parallel but interrelated as part of a personal and historical continuum“ (1982:370, emphasis mine). In the present case, it seems more proper to speak of personal and historical disruption. This is not to deny that, for example, World War ll was experienced differently by a twenty-year-old, newly