Public Enemies (18 page)

No. It was first and foremost an effect of the war. It was a direct, explicit reaction of horror at the worst things that war led to. And it was an attitude, almost a resolution, that was not too far off that of Heinrich Heine’s character who exclaims, “What? Judaism? Don’t talk to me about it, Doctor! I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy! Insults and snubs—that’s all it will get you. It’s not a religion, it’s a misfortune.” It was decided internally as well as externally, in secret as in public, that this Judaism thing was a most unfortunate matter that brought all the world’s problems in its wake and that we had to do everything we could to escape from this time.

I know this is a caricature.

I also know that my parents would not have liked to hear me put it like this.

But that was the spirit in which they returned to the world in 1945.

That was why we didn’t respect the Sabbath or any other religious feast in our house.

That was why until I was twenty-five or thirty years old, I never under any circumstances entered a synagogue.

That was why, until I was that age, I had no idea about the contents—I won’t say of the Talmud, but even of the Bible. I can’t begin to describe my father’s astonishment, his astonishment and dejection, when at the age of thirty I published
Le Testament de Dieu
, which was intended to be a book about the glory, the grandeur, the philosophical content of biblical literature.

What? he seemed to say. All that work, all that effort to break with the past, all that culture, those exams, the École Normale Supérieure like Pompidou, the
aggrégation
^*
like Sartre, the forging of a young Frenchman nourished by the best disciplines and the world’s best books, just to fall back, at the end (and worse—if only it was at the end—but no, this was the beginning!). His cherished son had barely had his first French hit with
La Barbarie
[
Barbarism with a Human Face
] before falling into this mishmash of superstition and archaism. All that in order to return to the hut in Mascara—how distressing, what a pity.

I’ve written books that were more scandalous.

In
Le Diable en tête
, I painted a portrait of the father that might have offended him.

But no.

What shocked him was
Le Testament de Dieu
. It’s the only one of my texts about which he—who was always one of my very first readers—never said a word to me.

As if it constituted a major and, even more so, an incomprehensible transgression in terms of the cultural redeployment program, which was basically the family project.

What I’ve just said applies to him, my father.

But it also applied, in the same way, to my mother.

In fact, her reaction had a type of innocence that made it almost more spectacular.

I remember the day—in fact, it was the day before the publication of
Testament de Dieu
, when Jean-Edern Hallier tried to sabotage the book by publishing an article explaining that my mother was not Jewish, so that by definition I was not either, and that this collection of pages, announced with a
blaze of publicity as the return of the prodigal son to the fold, was therefore a sham.

Where did he find that story?

What could he have read to give him that harebrained idea about my pretty mother, the daughter of a practicing Jew, who was himself the son and I believe also the grandson of an actual rabbi and connected on the other side, through his mother, with a valiant quartet, my uncles who were humble fishermen of Béni Saf, as attached to the “Tradition” as they were to that stretch of sea, which for their entire lives constituted their horizon. They were four brothers. Their names were Moïse, Hyamine, Maclouf, and Messaoud. I can still see them from when we spent the ends of our summer holidays there, seated in the café in rue Karl Marx, which made up the ground floor of the family home and where they went, dressed in black, wearing their hats to drink their weekly anisette at the end of the Sabbath. I can assure you that for those four there was no doubt as to the ancient origin, the solidity and pride of their identity.

In short, I’ve never understood where that silly idea came from.

And given the really vicious nature of the man in question, I cannot rule out the possibility that he simply concocted this fable with the sole aim of doing me harm.

The funny thing about this story is, first of all, the proportions this rumor took on. (The great rabbi Sitruk,
^*
who had recently been elected, thought there was cause for concern and thus gave it an unexpected echo.) And then, there was my mother’s own reaction. I decided to tell my mother, once the matter began to find its way into the community press, which she certainly didn’t read, but then, you never know …

I did so tactfully.

I took a lot of precautions before describing the nature of the offense.

In the same breath I swore that the insult would not go unavenged and that I would not rest until I got Hallier to retract his slander. (Which I had, in fact, already done by calling him out at Lipp’s, asking him to follow me down the road, and when he refused, knocking him over at his table beside the cash register, in a scandal that was pretty badly viewed and for which I was barred from Lipp’s until years later, when Mr. Cazes
^*
died.)

I kept on like this until, from a cute face she pulled and the slightly too jaunty way she said it wasn’t such a disaster and that I’d do better to focus on the book’s publication, I understood that in what was now her world, in this value system in which a Stendhal, a Jules Romains,
^†
or a Roger Martin du Gard
^‡
were worth a thousand prophets like Isaiah, it was not such a disaster to have one’s Judaism denied. Or rather, at that moment I understood that part of her, an undoubtedly secret part, unconfessed and perhaps even unbeknownst to her, was in some sense delighted …

So, to say the least, there was very little trace of Judaism.

An opaque, unreadable trace, whose code you would need to be a Champollion
^**
of the soul to decipher—that was my situation.

At home I hardly got the type of education that predisposes you to “belief” and “faith” … that’s the first fact.

And outside of the home?

Did this methodical amnesia mean that exposure to Christianity might lead a Jewish child in the 1950s into I don’t know what temptation or substitute allegiance?

Perhaps, yes.

In fact, this has happened.

France is less of a secular country than it is said to be. It’s not so easy when you’re raised in ignorance to resist the seduction of a Christianity that has become like the air you breathe, air that, as it had to, occupied the entire void. There was Pascal, the beautiful paintings in the museums, that music by Bach and others too, of which Cioran
^*
said that God owed everything to it: the cathedrals, the names of villages, the monuments of the national novel, virtues and sins, this “inner France,” this “national novel.” You can turn them around in as many directions as you like, but they are and will remain fundamentally Christian in essence.

And I still remember my consternation and despair as a child on the day before school broke up for the Christmas holidays, when, on the pavement in front of school, I was caught up in a joyful conversation about the presents each of us was expecting to get. Crazy with excitement, I mentioned the Teppaz pickup truck I had asked for and saw my best friend, my real best friend (he’s still there, he exists, he’s a brilliant Parisian banker—I see him from time to time and strangely enough I’ve never mentioned that scene to him or indeed to anyone else), stare at me, wide-eyed and meaning no harm, and heard him exclaim, “How can you be getting a present? It’s not possible! You’re Jewish! Jews don’t celebrate Christmas.
How could you be getting a present on Christmas Eve?” And all our classmates, seeing my crestfallen air, burst out laughing. Fifty years later, the cruelty of their laughter rings in my ears still; that laughter, which relegated me to the pathetic, imaginary Christmas that was the inevitable lot of those families who decided that from Christmas to Easter and Easter to Trinity they would go all the way, go to the most absurd lengths, in playing this game of inner France.

But at the same time, it wasn’t quite that either.

The situation was more paradoxical than this anecdote might suggest.

What made things complicated, devilishly complicated, was that my parents were
also
proud and that this desire to break, to have nothing to do with the “Covenant” of old, this systematic shedding of their Judaism, their way of saying “poor fellow” about a traditional Jew, lost in his superstitions, or their blank incomprehension when confronted with the “return” announced by
Testament de Dieu
, strangely enough went hand in hand in their case with a stony contempt for anyone they included in the universally damning category of “shameful Jews.”

Who were these shameful Jews?

They were Jews who lowered their voice at table when they spoke the word
Jewish
.

They were Jews who had changed their names during the Resistance and kept their new names after the war.

There was a pharmacist, a cousin of Jacques Derrida, whom I mentioned in
Comédie
and who tried to be stylish with his overstarched white shirts, his sons in the Polo Club, and his overemphatic way of saying “Madame Baroness” to one of our neighbors.

They were families in which you had to have your first dinner jacket at the age of fifteen.

They were those Jews who were so well brought up that they would never say or do anything that could possibly lead their friends into the bad taste of making an anti-Semitic remark.

And even in
our
family there was one character who was the archetype of all that, the real symptom of the illness, a sort of living proof or living stigma of the recurrence, the omnipresence of that Jewish shame. His case would be mentioned indirectly and with a heavy helping of innuendo. He was my father’s older brother, Armand Lévy.

Poor Uncle Armand!

I don’t know how true it was, but my father said that during the 1930s he was a soldier in the Croix-de-Feu.
^*

He blamed him for having inveigled his way into it, during the war, in a village in the Cannes hinterland, instead of fighting against the Nazis, as he himself had done.

At the Liberation he had married a blonde with milky-white skin, Paule de X, who was his entry ticket to the France of grand old names. He forced us, his nephews, to speak to her using the formal “vous” form. She wasn’t particularly beautiful or especially interesting. And my father always insinuated that Armand had chosen her only in order to join his surname to hers and, like the pharmacist, to make himself more stylish.

Since misfortunes never come singly and since his melancholic wife never, as he put it, “gave him any children,” there was a sort of tacit understanding that he would take my brother and me out some Sundays. He took us to places like the Cercle interallié,
^†
the Polo Club, the Bois de Boulogne, at
the mere mention of which my father would give a smile in which his commiseration and disdain clearly also mingled with a certain concern at the idea of the “bad influence” this “shameful Jew” would have on his two sons …

If I praised the stained-glass windows in the Cathedral of Chartres after a school trip, this had to be Armand’s influence.

If I merely expressed the desire, instead of studying, to attend a “surprise party” at the house of a friend with a handle to his name, that was Armand’s influence too.

When I wanted to join the scouts (which was a great dream of mine when I was between, say, six and eight years old), that was also because the same accursed Armand, the former member of the Croix-de-Feu, the husband of Aunt Paule, had put it into my head. In order to get it out, enormous efforts had to be mobilized (setting up a private group of scouts in the village in Seine-et-Oise, where we spent the weekends and school holidays, which was reserved for my cousins, my brother, and me, but was in every way modeled on the official groups, with uniforms, pennants, tents in the garden, animal nicknames, suitable scarves, a flag, and walking in single file to buy bread in the village each morning).

Later on, he certainly never said a word about what he thought he could guess from the type of women I was attracted to and of whom I would say, in all modesty, that I liked them to resemble me as little as possible. We never spoke of essential things, so how much less likely were we to talk about that! But I’m convinced that part of him could only have seen this extension, admittedly somewhat extreme, of Lévi-Strauss’s theory of the incest prohibition as the ultimate effect of Uncle Armand’s influence.

In short, there was no more Christian influence than Jewish.

Christianity was even more disapproved of than Judaism.

This was not so much a contradictory but a double injunction, which, to say the least, didn’t leave any choice.

It left absolutely no room, as you can see, for this religious questioning, this “grace,” which, alas, have eluded me as much as they have you.

Let me recall my years at the École Normale.

I’m not even thinking about the Jewish students, who were all or almost all atheist universalists, militants in small left-wing groups and in particular in the working-class left.

But when I remember my fellow students, who were called the Talas (in the École’s jargon, this meant the ones who went to mass), I can still see this small group, made up, among others, of the philosophers Jean-Luc Marion, Rémi Brague, and Jean-Robert Armogathe (who became the diocesan curate of Paris, and writes the great editorial on the liturgical significance of the Easter feasts every year in
Le Figaro
), it’s quite clear that I reacted to those boys who took literally the evidence of God’s existence, not only according to Bach but according to St. Anselm and St. Bonaventure—and that I would react today—with the same stubborn incredulity, the same hardened positivism, as you did to your Jean-Robert, that boy from Villeparisis whose father was a general in the Salvation Army.