Nicole Eizner was known to the readers of Plurielles. She had published an article there in 2004 on the questionings of Jewish identity, deliberately rooting that identity—her identity—in the diasporic, nomadic lands of Eastern Europe, where her family came from, and then in France, where the Eizner family had found an anchorage. A republican anchorage. An anchorage whose wound, never healed, had its origin in the deportation of her parents in 1943. Nicole was a hidden child.
A researcher at the CNRS, Nicole Eizner was a sociologist of the French countryside. In 1976 she had the chance to visit the village of Praszka, in Poland, from which part of her family came. The fashion for the quest for roots was then emerging, but this journey had no effect on her. She came back rather disappointed, always preferring the space of the imagination, of the mind, to that of stones.
Nicole had antennae, intuitions, presentiments; she used them to do her work as a sociologist, but also to look at the world, at people. She was often “the first to…”. One of the first, certainly, to want to revive a certain yiddishkeit in Paris, when no one at the time dared to. As early as 1977 she organized the Days of Yiddish Culture, held at the Pompidou Centre. It was one of the very first events of its kind.
She was among those who fiercely fought the first negationist demonstrations that had spread through academic circles and that she had watched unfold, astonished, around her.
She began to praise the reading of crime novels—before everyone else.
In 1982 she became passionate about the Estates General of Agriculture: at the time it was a new form of consultation, of direct democracy; it appealed to her.
Nicole was very faithful in friendship, and solidly embedded in several circles. When one of her friends was going through a difficult time, Nicole, of her own accord, would set about looking for a solution, helping. Opening up a friend’s house in Brittany for the summer holidays, phoning around so that people would go and listen to a particular musician, bringing people together around her round table on the rue Monge, talking with her friends’ children…
Nicole dressed as she pleased, said what she pleased, loved whom and how she pleased. And yet this atypical figure proudly wore the Legion of Honour that the minister Véronique Néiertz presented to her in 1992, and which she dedicated, in an intense surge of emotion, to her father Itzhok Eizner, who died at Auschwitz.
We miss her.