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Jewish Memories Jewish Memories http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft7q2nb5c1;chun... Preferred Citation: Valensi, Lucette, and Nathan Wachtel. Jewish Memories. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1991 1991. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft7q2nb5c1/ Jewish Memories Lucette Valensi and Nathan Wachtel UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford © 1991 The Regents of the University of California Preferred Citation: Valensi, Lucette, and Nathan Wachtel. Jewish Memories. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1991 1991. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft7q2nb5c1/ LISTEN . At the end of the 1970s, the authors undertook to interview and collect the life stories of Jews living in France but born in other distant lands. "Your history is important," we told them. "The society you belonged to no longer exists. It passed away without leaving any archives and you were witness to an eventful period. Tell us about it." In the following pages we will hear these voices. They come to us from Paris and its suburbs, from Strasbourg or Clermont-Ferrand. These are the voices of average, ordinary people. One woman was a seamstress, another a cleaning lady, several simply spent their lives taking care of their families. There were businessmen—one was also a poet and art collector—and physicians, a bookkeeper, a watchmaker, some leatherworkers, and several tailors. Some were rich people who frequented casinos and spas, well-read people who spoke like books, and some were poor people who never learned how to read. These voices come from far away, [1] for all these people spent their childhood, their youth, and sometimes most of their adult life thousands of miles away, in such cities as Alexandria in Egypt, Casablanca in Morocco, Kalisz in Poland, or Berlin in Germany. Two thirds of the people we interviewed were born between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of World War I; most of the remaining were born in the inter- [1] Philippe Joutard, Ces voix qui viennent du passé (Paris: Hachette, 1983). ― 2 ― war period. All are Jewish, each in his or her own way, and for that reason, had to leave their homeland. The fifty or so biographies reported in this book do not form a statistical sample of the Jewish population living in France. More than five hundred thousand people of various conditions constitute the Jewish community in France today. They come from communities that were in turn diverse and counted several million people before the second war. Needless to say, it would have been impossible to provide any statistical sample of such a population. Nor do these fifty or so biographies constitute all the narrative we recorded. For when the time came to write down the stories we were told, a kind of dialogue emerged between characters who 1 of 157 28/09/2010 2:01 AM Jewish Memories http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft7q2nb5c1;chun... had never met one another. Without knowing it, our interlocutors broached subjects that another had raised, they responded to one another, and echoed one another. All we had to do was to orchestrate that chorus, giving up a number of biographies we had collected, and cutting large fragments of those we retained. While not statistically representative, these individual fates are nonetheless typical. Each person made choices in his/her life within a set of social and historical constraints. Each one, retracing his/her past, used the words, the tones and shades of the culture he (or she) belonged to. Each of them, speaking of him (her)self, spoke of "us" and "ours." This might be partially because of the way in which we framed our initial questions. The stories we were told speak of experiences that remained engraved in memory, but not of all memorable experiences. If we had called their attention to other aspects of their lives—love, work, this or that revolution in Europe or in the Near East—other memories would have emerged and would have woven different narratives. From the start, our question put memory at the junction of individual and collective destiny. Yet when Suzanne T., a woman born in Algeria, wrote her life story by herself, without being interviewed orally, she evoked the same sequences of the larger history and the same crucial moments of her existence as other women whom we interrogated. Similarly, a group of women questioned about family practices in ― 3 ― Algeria in the past, and in France today, referred to the same episodes in their own lives. Thus individual memory made itself multiple, as if each protagonist was posted as a sentinel receiving the passwords of former generations and transmitting them to those who follow. [2] When we started collecting these life stories, we thought we would thereby take part in the shaping of a collective memory and would also play the part of the sentinel transmitting the passwords. Indeed, the French version of the book followed paths similar to those of the wandering people it presents, and became itself part of shared memories. Passing from hand to hand, it provoked unexpected reunions between individuals and between generations. We must tell the story of one of these unlikely encounters. In the course of scholarly and friendly exchanges with our Polish colleagues—then part of the opposition movement and working under very adverse conditions—we gave a copy of our book to a prominent historian in Warsaw, who in turn loaned it to one of his colleagues, Anna Z. She then discovered with astonishment that one of the characters in the book, Charles H., was born in Nysko, the shtetl where her own parents had lived. Born after the war, Anna Z. was the daughter of one of the last survivors of this shtetl, a place she had known only in her earliest childhood. When she returned to the village after her parents' death, not a single Jew remained, and nobody could tell her what Nysko had been like in the old days. Yet here it was in the pages of a small book. A few months later, Anna Z. had an opportunity to come to Paris for a brief visit on a study grant. She came to us and asked, hesitantly, if she could meet Charles H. She did indeed meet him on the very next day. And this is how, on a winter day in 1988, Charles and Anna spent hours together, with tears in their eyes, evoking the village they had known. What seemed so unusual in their meeting—so Charles H. later told us—was that they owed it to a book; that without it, they would have missed each other and what each of them gave the other. What they shared in common [2] We borrow this metaphor from Walter Benjamin, Mythe et violence, trans. Maurice de Gandillac (Paris, 1971), p. 98. ― 4 ― was the memory of the place, of its landscape, even though they had known it at different times. Charles was born in that shtetl forty years before Anna. He had left in 1928, without ever meeting Anna's parents. Yet they both remembered the river that had carried Charles's grandfather's wooden rafts, the same wooden rafts Anna had contemplated as a child. What Charles brought to Anna was a past she had lost, and the memory of all the generations of Jews the shtetl had known until the Shoah interrupted their flow. For years, Anna tried to recall the time when the shtetl was full of Jews but was met with a silent absence of memory. She found it again in Paris—guided by a few lines of a small book—in the memories, the pictures, the words and emotions of a man who had left so many years before. Her trip to Paris had turned into a journey into the past. The narratives that follow present both fragments of an oral history of the period their narrators lived through and fragments of an ethnology of their communities. Yet these fragments have been selected according to a logic that is neither that of the historian nor of the ethnologist. In studying a particular period, the professional historian is no longer the chronicler of his prince, his church, or his nation. Today, addressing a specific issue, the historian locates and organizes facts in such a way as to answer the questions he has raised. His goal is to understand and to make things intelligible. The ethnologist, for his part, observes and orders social practices that 2 of 157 28/09/2010 2:01 AM Jewish Memories http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft7q2nb5c1;chun... make sense for the society that produces them, since culture, a symbolic construct of collective experience, is a major condition of the existence and reproduction of any social unit. What distinguishes their approach from that of people who recall their past is that both the historian and the ethnologist aspire more or less explicitly to thoroughness and objectivity. Situated outside the game they observe, they seek to seize it from as many angles as possible. Perceiving themselves as above the game, they believe they can see it better even than the players—although they rely on them to supply the material of their intellectual construct. To remember, however, requires a personal involvement in the drama. I is the necessary subject of the action, the one who maintains and cultivates the sense of the past. His sub- ― 5 ― jective narrative is nourished on emotions, unlike the rational construct of the professional scholar. Certainly, like the construct of the historian or the ethnologist, his is a narrative, that is, a fiction, and not the direct and immediate transcription of the lived experience.
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