For many readers, Romain Gary remains essentially associated with the image of a brilliant hoax that turned an aging writer into a brand-new author, sprung as if from nothing, son of his own works, inventor of a new language—jubilant and transgressive—the Ajarian tongue.
For others, he remains tied to a sublime maternal image, exalted, all-powerful, celebrated in La Promesse de l’aube (Promise at Dawn), whose voice, beyond death, keeps ringing in her son’s ears: “My son will be a French ambassador, a knight of the Legion of Honor, a great dramatic author, Ibsen, Gabriele d’Annunzio”1 and, addressing him in a tone just as peremptory: “You will be Victor Hugo!”2
A pronouncement that would prove performative, and that bespeaks the force of a bond between a mother and her son, reaching all the way to osmosis and possession. For it is a maternal word that inhabits and passes through the son. And behind the resolutely comic dimension of certain episodes, it is indeed phenomena of possession or of ventriloquism that seem to be described to us—or rather signified—such as the sequence that unfolds at a table of French officers at the start of the Second World War.
I believe it was truly my mother’s voice that had seized hold of mine, because as I went on speaking I was myself astounded by the astonishing number of clichés pouring out of me and the things I could say without feeling the least bit embarrassed ….. I even believe my voice changed and that a strong Russian accent could clearly be heard as my mother invoked the immortal homeland.3
Alongside this imperious and voluble visitor of the self4, in Romain Gary’s life and work, what of the father? A seemingly naive question to which, until a few years ago, a rereading of the texts and interviews would have allowed a fairly easy—perhaps somewhat offhand—answer: an almost nonexistent figure, little evoked and, if one may say so, little frequented, an uncertain father. For who is Romain Gary’s true father: Leonid Kacew, a Jewish merchant of Wilno, or Ivan Mosjoukine, a White Russian and star of silent cinema whose resemblance to Gary was so striking that he kept a photograph of him permanently on his desk? The doubt is induced by Gary himself through elliptical but repeated bits of information. Thus in La nuit sera calme (The Night Will Be Calm): “Before my birth, my mother had married a Russian Jew named Leonid Kacew who divorced her some time after my birth”5 And a little further on: “At no point did my mother tell me that Mosjoukine was my father, and yet I saw this man very often at our hotel.”6
To be sure, one can recognize in this scenario the traces of that reverie on origins that Freud termed the family romance. And if one refers to the categories defined by Marthe Robert, Romain Gary seems to prefer, over the total uncertainty of the foundling, the semi-certainties of the bastard. Nina mater certissima. Moreover, one could hardly be surprised that, as a counterpoint to a mother whom he speaks and who speaks him7, he should have chosen an imaginary father who was mute (at least on screen8).
To this distancing from the paternal authority one would have to add a strange declaration of recognition/disavowal that takes place in La promesse de l’aube, the book that celebrates the mother. There Gary recounts having received, shortly after the publication of Les Racines du ciel (The Roots of Heaven), a letter informing him of the circumstances of his father’s death: “He had not died at all in the gas chamber as I had been told. He had died of fear on the way to his execution, a few steps from the entrance.” And Gary then writes: “The man who died in this way was a stranger to me, but on that day he became my father, forever.”9 An episode that allows Gary to refuse an organic filiation with Leonid Kacew, while affirming with him a freely chosen filiation (in fact, to disown him while seeming to claim him). This faithfully renders Gary’s reluctance toward any relation of belonging that is not freely consented to: “Free France is the only community to which I fully belonged,” he affirms in La nuit sera calme.
Yet this deeply ambivalent recognition of paternity also seems to settle a grievance with a father who abandoned them both, his mother and himself, to start another family with a much younger woman—a father he calls a stranger, of whom he makes a man who dies of fear. That is to say, the prefiguration of the touching but de-idealized antiheroes who people the novels signed Ajar.
It conveys a deep ambivalence toward this Jewish father and toward the Jewish identity that this father embodies and is supposed to transmit (which is not the case with Nina, wholly projected toward a future she prophesies—so much so that Pierre Bayard coins, with respect to her, the term parental romance10).
It is not a matter, for Romain Gary, of seeking the traces of the father, as do a great many contemporary writers who thereby express their need to “reweave, by the thread of writing, a transmission gone wanting and wounded”11. It seems rather to be a matter of covering over his own tracks without, however, entirely obliterating them—of entering and leaving this filiation, in full freedom.
This could explain the absence of the father, or the doubt cast upon filiation, in the narratives presented as autobiographical and, at the same time, the presence and the multiple incarnations of this paternal figure in the work. To which one would have to add a nebula of fathers adopted or dreamed as such: Monsieur Hamil, Doctor Katz “well known to all the Jews and Arabs of the Rue Bisson for his Christian charity12”, Monsieur Tsures, great signer of petitions, Monsieur Salomon, king of ready-to-wear.
The father is on the side of the past, of inheritance, of the law—on the side, too, of a humiliated and mortal identity.
Now Gary refuses any assignment of identity. He muddies the trails by multiplying them, declaring himself Jewish, Russian, Catholic, and Tartar. He multiplies names and pseudonyms: Roman Kacew, Romain Gary, Fosco Sinibaldi, Shatan Bogat, Emile Ajar. As for the relation to the law, most of his characters are on bad terms with authority and with the civil register. They often live under a false identity. One would have to cite Lady L, whose real name is Annette Boudin, Isidore Lefkowitz who spends the war in a German uniform under the name Francis Dupré, Julie Espinoza, the heroic madam turned into the very aristocratic Countess Esterhazy13, old Vanderputte14 who changes identity for fear of reprisals in the aftermath of the Liberation, or again the suitcase in which Madame Rosa piles up a collection of forged papers. And sometimes even, like Madame Lola, a transvestite “who had been a boxing champion in Senegal15”, they are in open struggle with the laws of nature.
He himself multiplies hoaxes, deceptions, transgressions of every kind, including and above all at the level of language. For the Ajar tongue is, in a certain way, a counter-language16, not through the disarticulation of syntax but through a systematic recourse to the cliché that imperils common sense. If the cliché is indeed the spokesman of a society, of its conventions, of its consensus17, then to flush it out, to defuse its reassuring effect and strip it of all logical meaning, is also to show oneself recalcitrant toward the values and the certainties of belonging that the cliché conveys—through the most intimate and the most irreducible of subversions, that of language.
Yet Gary takes on a historical, cultural, memorial inheritance whose transmission he secures according to modalities all his own. He seems to project himself into one of his characters, Mauro Zaga, the prodigal son, who affirms a form of fidelity to the heritage of the tribe of the Enchanters even though he has nonetheless “rejected the very name of the family”18.
Education européenne, Doctor Twardowski, or the sublime father
The first page of Romain Gary’s first novel, Education européenne (A European Education)19, opens with the image of a father and his son digging a hole in the forest, near Sucharki, in Poland. They have fashioned a kryjówka, an underground hideout where the son can take refuge until the end of the war. It is Doctor Twardowski and his son Janek, fourteen years old.
The hole was three meters deep, four meters wide. In a corner they had thrown a mattress and blankets, ten sacks of potatoes weighing fifty kilos each were piled along the earthen walls…
Thus, from the very first pages of the narrative, we encounter a figure of an attentive and protective father, who is also a fine figure of a doctor and a Polish fighter. The young hero, Janek, will always be introduced and accepted into the partisan groups with whom he will live until the end of the war as the son of Doctor Twardowski. He will always be introduced by this presenting phrase that recurs throughout the novel like a leitmotif and that elicits, each time, a moment of respectful silence. Thus the first novel of Romain Gary, who was abandoned by his father, stages a young hero literally accompanied by paternal solicitude, protection, and aura.
Symmetrically, in this first work, the figure of the mother is absent. Or, more precisely, there is no textual space that sets the young Janek and his mother in contiguity. She is evoked in the first pages, but only through the recommendation transmitted by the father’s word: think of your mother, or, a little further on, do as your mother taught you. The mother is also present on another scene, that of the villa of the Counts Pulacki transformed into a brothel by the Germans20, the first occurrence of a link between motherhood and prostitution that will return with infinite variations in Gary’s work as well as in Ajar’s. Janek never once tries to see his mother again, even though, despite the danger, he leaves the forest to carry messages to Wilno and even goes there sometimes to listen to music. At one point in the narrative we learn that this mother is well, with no further detail21. Surprisingly, at the end of the novel, Janek as well as the reader or the narrator have quite simply forgotten her. There will be no further mention of the mother, and no one will trouble to say what became of her. Here again, beyond a rather cavalier treatment of the conventions of the novel, when one knows the umbilical bond that links Gary to Nina Kacew, the absence is notable. It seems that there is, in the work, a will to rebalance the parental figures at the level of writing—of distancing and of bringing close.
In Romain Gary’s next novel, Le grand vestiaire (The Company of Men)22, we find again, in a context no longer Polish but French, the same family scheme that will moreover be repeated in other works23. Young Luc Martin has grown up alone with his father in the absence of his mother, who died when he was six. Luc’s father is a schoolmaster, and his school is in a small village. He took part in the Resistance and, like Doctor Twardowski, was killed as a hero. So here again it is an ideal father, endowed with a coefficient of Frenchness as strong as Doctor Twardowski’s superlative Polishness.
Luc Martin, like Janek, finds himself orphaned at fourteen. The book opens, moreover, in the cemetery where the father has been buried. And in the novel two contradictory and complementary discourses alternate. The lament of the orphan abandoned by a father who has carried off the key to the world and given him no password to the world of adults, a father who died without leaving him any inheritance: “my father, why had he gone? why had he left me empty-handed?”24 A lament confirmed much later by this declaration in Pseudo: “If I am devoured by such a need for an Author, it is because I am the son of a man who left me my whole life in a state of lack.”
But there is also expressed the rejection and the derision of paternal and adult figures (the dudules) and the cynical denial of adolescents who claim to need no father, nor parents in general. Léonce, another adolescent character in the novel, claims he does not even know what a father is for: “never had a father, me, don’t know what it is, none the worse for it, anyway what’s the use of one?”25 An assertion that, in La nuit sera calme, Romain Gary seems to take up on his own account, declaring to François Bondy, the supposed interlocutor of this fictional dialogue: “I had no father and that didn’t break my leg either”26
Fathers, sons, the violence of the real
Yet there are to be read in Education européenne many other realities than the idealized notations of a Polonophile coming-of-age novel.
Taking shape behind the good Doctor Twardowski, this first book speaks of the violence of the struggle that pits, in the Garian universe, fathers against sons, the impossibility of a dialogue, the violence that turns them against one another—a theme that recurs with an impressive force of repetition and that finds a form of justification in the historical circumstances of the work. Thus Tadek Chmura, a young student-resister who stays in the forest with the partisans despite the tuberculosis gnawing at him, and his father, who collaborates with the Germans, are in a relation of hatred so implacable that the student will ask that the place of his grave not be marked, so that his father not find it. Old Krylenko and his son form another rather extraordinary pair of its kind, where the son, a victorious Russian general, hero of the Battle of Stalingrad, is endlessly insulted and even beaten by his father, who neither will nor can acknowledge his worth. The relations of the partisan Czerw and his father, the cobbler of Wilno, present them walled in silence; finally those of the old German, Augustus Schröder, maker of musical automatons, with his son, a young Nazi who despises him for his humanist values, complete this panorama. For if repetitions in Gary are a constant of the writing, they modulate across several scales. There are the motifs, the themes, sometimes the fragments of sentences that are repeated from one work to another. But there are also, as is the case here, the serial repetitions and variations where the same scheme—relational, for example—is repeated from one character to another, within the same novel, underscoring structures that prove fundamental27.
How one father can conceal another
If, however, we return to Education européenne, matrix of the work, one may wonder why a Polish boy who is only fourteen and who, evidently, at the start of the narrative is not a partisan, should remain hidden until the end of the war in a hole, in the middle of a Polish forest. A detail that may lead one to suppose (but in a manner so implicit that the detail goes unnoticed) that Janek is Jewish, and that this is what compels him, in order to survive, to hide until the end of the war, like thousands of other Jewish boys of the same period.
The motif of the hiding place, and in particular of the underground hideout, is thus very present from Education européenne onward and is very strongly linked to a Jewish identity—must one say hidden, or that compels one to hide, or that compels one to hide the Jewish child within oneself?
The works signed Gary, like those signed Ajar, are strewn with hiding places, cellars, holes where the characters shelter while awaiting better times, to reassure themselves, or often quite simply to survive28.
The reader thus discovers the hideout where Janek takes refuge, then the dark cellar choked with stones and refuse where Moniek lives, a little Jewish violinist persecuted by Polish hooligans who have nicknamed him Wunderkind. Then again the dark underground passage, beneath a disused powder magazine, where the Jewish partisans who live in the forest go to say their Friday-night prayer.
Likewise, in L’angoisse du roi Salomon (King Solomon), there is the cellar on the Champs-Élysées where the latter spent four years of war, in the dark, without seeing the light of day. There is also the cellar in Berlin where Karl Loewy is hidden by Aryan friends who administer his property, and where he dies because his humanist friends forgot to warn him that the war was over29. In La danse de Gengis Cohn (The Dance of Genghis Cohn), the holes covered over by the forest of Geist are mass pits dug by the victims before they were shot, and they are very explicitly called the Jewish holes. In La vie devant soi (The Life Before Us), the cellar of Madame Rosa in Belleville, which she also calls her Jewish hole, is the place where she takes refuge, to recover something of an identity, and then to die30.
Before these images of hiding places, cellars, and underground refuges of identity, so easily (too easily?) interpretable, one cannot help thinking of Albert Cohen, who shares so many traits in common with Gary, and of the underground passages of the château of Saint-Germain where Solal31 has secretly installed his kinfolk come from Cephalonia. They lead there an underground life, and make themselves known through prayers and strange songs that Aude de Maussane, Solal’s wife, hears in the night. One thinks too of the cellar in Berlin where Solal meets the dwarf Rachel, incarnation of Jewish memory and misfortune. Yet, whereas in Albert Cohen the underground dwelling seems to be the place of a collective, clandestine, almost Marrano life, in Romain Gary the Jewish hole is an individual refuge, often the place of a survival (and sometimes of a death).
A troubling detail. Among the groups of partisans sheltering in the forest, there are Jewish partisans: Kaminski, a former cab driver of Wilno, or again Sioma Kapelusznik who, precisely (as his name indicates to Yiddish speakers), is a maker of caps. And then there is a certain Yankel Cukier.
There was Cukier, the Jewish butcher of Sweciany. He was a pious chasyd, built like a fairground wrestler. On Friday evenings he went to pray with other Jews sheltering in the forest on the ruins of the old destroyed powder magazine at Antokol. Every evening he threw over his head the tales of black and white silk, beat his breast, wept. The others watched him in silence, with respect.32
Beyond this highly idealized and very ecumenical vision of relations between Jews and Poles during the war, let us pause at the character of Yankel Cukier.
We recall that the author adopted the name Gary de Kacew, then the name Gary, abandoning the family name of his father, Kacew. Now Kacew in Yiddish means butcher. And whoever has read Romain Gary le caméléon (Romain Gary the Chameleon), the biography devoted to Gary by Myriam Anissimov33, knows that the family of Gary’s mother came from Sweciany, where he himself spent a few years.
Thus the Jewish butcher of Swieciany, Yankel Cukier, is there, in the midst of the unfolding of the fiction, like an autobiographical and paternal trace, in echo and translation of the name Kacew. A little later in the novel, the same Cukier will subject little Moniek Stern, whom Janek has taken in among the forest partisans, to a close interrogation. Amid a flood of other questions about his family, his kin, and his parents’ profession, he asks him whether he is related to the furrier Stern who had his shop on the Niemiecka, one of the great streets of Wilno. That is to say, precisely, the street where the fur shop of Romain’s father, Leonid Kacew, was located—Leonid Kacew who, we know from Myriam Anissimov, attended the Tohorat Hakodesh synagogue, of which he was one of the administrators34.
Signs, traces, clues, concerted encryptings that suggest that in Education européenne there would be, on the one hand, an ideal figure of the father, that of Doctor Twardowski, who will attack single-handedly, with a submachine gun, the Germans who are holding a group of Polish women—among them his wife—in the château of the Counts Pulacki, reenacting, all by himself, the charge of the Polish cavalry, saber drawn, against the German armored vehicles. And then, alongside, encrypted in the text, there would be Leonid Kacew, linked to Yiddish, to prayer, to the Polish Judaism that was decimated. A paternal figure at once present and doubly hidden.
La danse de Gengis Cohn, or who speaks within whom?
But it is no doubt in La danse de Gengis Cohn35 that the evocation of the father takes its most troubling form.
A Jewish victim of the genocide, Gengis Cohn (whose name conjoins the identity of a destroying conqueror and the identity of a victim) has found an “impregnable” hiding place. He inhabits the body of the Nazi who murdered him. The victim has become a Dibbouk: a soul that, in the Jewish tradition, has not mourned its own death, that demands recognition of the wrong done to it, and that speaks through the voice of the body in which it has found refuge. Gary thus pays homage to a murdered culture by borrowing the form of one of its highest masterpieces36, but he develops this situation with a scathing drollery.
He describes Gengis Cohn inflicting on his murderer a persecuting presence, forcing him to speak Yiddish, to eat kosher, to cook tcholent, tsymes, guefiltefish37 (thanks to Aunt Sarah’s Jewish cookbook). He forces him to sing El Maleh Rahamim38 (el molorakhmin, Gary writes, transcribing the term in the purest Ashkenazi accent). He also makes him sing Yiddishe Mamma and recite the kaddish.
Between two jokes, Gengis Cohn presents himself bearing the stigmata of his ordeal, livid and his hair standing on end with horror, like that of Harpo Marx, he says, the moment his host claims to forget the past.
I must say I make a rather good showing. I wear a very long black coat, over my striped pajamas, and on the coat, on the heart side, the regulation yellow star. I am, I know it, very pale—one may be brave, but with the SS submachine guns trained on you and the command Feuer!, it still does something to you—and I am covered with plaster from head to foot, coat, nose, hair, and all.39
It is no longer a matter of demanding justice, for the crime is beyond all reparation. It is a matter of not letting oblivion settle in. Gengis Cohn is therefore a sort of memory (a living one, if one may say so), a memory at once internal and external, sustaining a continuous dialogue with his murderer and projected toward the outside. He saunters about and flirts under the eyes of the Nazi Schatz, who is the only one who sees him40.
But Gengis Cohn is above all a voice, a voice that never stops talking, commenting, provoking. It is a voice that inscribes in the text a language, Yiddish, the language of Jewish humor. And the narrator multiplies witz and jokes; he boasts of his hohme. He was, moreover, a professional comedian. He makes the Nazi Schatz pronounce locutions belonging to the spoken language. Tfou tfou, Tsures, Arahmounes, Gvalt! exclaims Schatz, to the point that he ends up buying a dictionary in order to understand himself.
Luba Jurgenson recalls that the term skaz was summoned by the Russian Formalists to designate a specific form of narration. This form, she tells us, is characterized “by its subversive dimension, by its capacity to stage the writer’s inner conflict, by splitting the instance of enunciation,” and by the fact “that it allows the introduction into the narration of an oral speech attributed not to a particular character but to a human group easily recognizable by its manner of speaking”41.
Yiddish is indeed the language of a human group easily recognizable, but it is the language of a dead community, and it is truly the voice of the dead that resounds in it, as Myriam Anissimov writes.
Gewalt! finally, there are no words to signify this hopeless cry of the Jew facing his own death, there are none. It is a word that belongs to us as our own. It is the cry of the Jew falling with his parents, his wife, and his children into the hole they had dug themselves. Gewalt! the word that crossed the closed lips of a whole people in the time of the massacre. Gewalt!42
Gary’s text is organized like a séance in which Gengis Cohn recounts the horrible circumstances of his execution: the fear, the cries of children, the terrified families, the corpses left in heaps, which he left in order to inhabit Schatz, letting appear, behind the joke, visions of an otherwise unbearable horror.
I pull the soundtrack trick on him. Instead of simply standing there, in silence before him with my Jewish star and my plaster-covered face, I make noise. I make him hear voices. It is above all to the voices of the mothers that he is most sensitive.
Gary describes, through the mouth of Gengis Cohn, the massacres perpetrated by the Einsatzgruppen, long before these came to be called the Shoah by bullets. And Gengis Cohn recounts them in the first person, improbably realizing that reflection of Primo Levi who, in Les Naufragés et les Rescapés (The Drowned and the Saved), wrote that it would fall not to the survivors to bear witness to the horror but rather to the engulfed.
It is an improbable narration of attested events, for, not being a witness-survivor, Romain Gary signifies, through the impossible identity of his narrator from beyond the grave, that he does not usurp this first-person speech of the witness.
Behind the terrorist humor of the work, one perceives the clamor of six million dibbouks, and the reader is confronted with a double phenomenon of possession. Gary describes Schatz the torturer harboring a Jewish dibbouk in spite of himself, but he himself, Gary, willingly gives asylum to this voice that bears witness and that passes through him—by which he wills himself to be traversed—so that testimony may be borne to the crime perpetrated. He thus expresses his fidelity to a persecuted group whose destiny he never ceases, from his first work to his last, to recall and to evoke.
But if the voice of Gengis Cohn resounds as a collective voice, the voice of the murdered Jewish people, it is also possible to hear it as an individual voice, the voice of the murdered father.
Myriam Anissimov’s biography devoted to Romain Gary, and in particular the remarkable investigative work conducted in the opening chapters, prompt one to reread, in a new light, the relation between father and son but also, and in particular, this strange, powerful, and disturbing work.
Myriam Anissimov was able to recover the circumstances of the death of Frida, the second wife of Leonid Kacew, of Pavel, Romain’s half-brother, and of Valentina, his half-sister. Transferred to the camp of Klooga, they were burned alive on pyres erected by the Nazis at the moment of the Red Army’s advance43.
She can also affirm that Leonid Kacew did not die in a camp, nor in a gas chamber, nor on the way to one, but that he was shot, probably in the pits of Ponary, during the final liquidation of the ghetto on September 24, 194344. This gives a particularly funereal and precise resonance to one of Gengis Cohn’s jokes: “We stay there, the two of us, listening, as a Yiddish poet wrote, to the long sobs of the violins of autumn—autumn 1943, to be precise”45.
Gary describes with a ferocious irony the scene of the shooting.
There were about forty of us in the hole we had dug, and there were naturally mothers with their children. So I make him listen (this is Sachs) with a gripping realism—in matters of art I am for realism—to the cries of the Jewish mothers a second before the bursts of submachine-gun fire.46
Myriam Anissimov found, in the drafts of Pseudo, pages that were not published, in which the writer evokes the death of his loved ones in terms that are almost word for word those of Gengis Cohn.
There were about forty of them—men, women, children—at the bottom of the hole we had made them dig, and they were waiting. They did not think of defending themselves. The women were screaming, of course, and trying to shield their little ones with their bodies.47
As is often the case with Gary, it is a few seemingly minute details—omissions, traces, clues—that allow one to confirm troubling proximities. Thus, in Education européenne, the reader had noted, alongside Yankel Cukier (the first encrypting of the figure of the father), the presence of Sioma Kapelusznik, the cap merchant who leads a hilarious Friday-night prayer in the old abandoned powder magazine.
The latter is present just as fleetingly in La danse de Gengis Cohn.
I had asked my grave-neighbor, Sioma Kapelusznik, what he thought of it. I had turned toward him and asked him whether he could give me a good definition of culture, so that I might be sure of not dying for nothing.48
Sioma thus finds himself beside Gengis at the edge of the pit at the moment of the massacre, as he found himself beside Yankel Cukier in the first novel, confirming by his presence the links between the two characters.
And at the same time, Sioma’s answer to Gengis Cohn’s question, his definition of culture, doubtless allows one to grasp the depth of the wound that the Shoah represents for Romain Gary, a wound that is also a wound to Europe, to its humanist beliefs, and that nothing can heal.
Culture is when mothers holding their children in their arms are spared having to dig their graves before being shot.49
In memoriam
In Gary’s work, then in Ajar’s, autobiographical details and writing strategies multiply, trails and false trails, that gesture, that say without saying, but that never cease to repeat, in encrypting and rumination, his fidelity to a memory, to a lost language, to a historical destiny.
There are strange coincidences; it is one of them that a writer whose half-brother and half-sister were burned alive should have chosen as a pseudonym, certainly in all unknowing, Gary! burn! and a little later Ajar, ember, inscribing his work in a universe of fire, of embers and of ashes.
Unavowable or unavowed secrets, sufferings impossible to put into words, mourning, melancholy, phenomena of incorporation that turn the descendants into dwellings for their dead—the theoretical texts of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok50 on the maladies of mourning could illuminate many aspects of the Garian work, without in any way claiming to reduce it to them. For alongside a maternal figure so often evoked, there is the anonymized, funereal, secret, but just as haunting presence of this paternal figure. To the silence of the mute Russian and Tartar actor there succeeded, in La danse de Gengis Cohn, an inexhaustible, unappeasable voice.
A final remark: the relation to the father and to Judaism does not have as its sole source the pain and the cruelty of History. Gary, heir to a long memory, pays homage to an irreducible humor that is the strength of the weak and their fundamental password; he depicts the Jewish people as a people standing firm, century after century, against adversity, a people in struggle against the real. He thus draws a very strong articulation among the figure of the Jew, that of the writer, and that of the enchanter, and he evokes it with a particular insistence to the sound of what he calls the Jewish violins.
Notes
This is the announcement she makes to the tenants of no. 16 of the Grande Pohulanka, whom she calls dirty little bourgeois bedbugs. La promesse de l’aube, Gallimard, coll. Folio, 1960, p. 52.↩︎
“It is perhaps better to say right away, for the clarity of this account, that I am today Consul General of France, Companion of the Liberation, officer of the Legion of Honor, and that if I have become neither Ibsen nor d’Annunzio, it is not for want of having tried. And let there be no mistake: I dress in London. I detest the English cut, but I have no choice.” La promesse de l’aube, coll. Folio, p. 52.↩︎
Ibid., p. 296.↩︎
In reference to the essay by Alain de Mijolla, Les visiteurs du moi (The Visitors of the Self), Les Belles Lettres, 1981.↩︎
La nuit sera calme, Gallimard, coll. Folio, p. 197.↩︎
Ibid., p. 198.↩︎
The expression is Pierre Bayard’s.↩︎
Ivan Mosjoukine’s career was, moreover, ruined by the advent of sound cinema.↩︎
Romain Gary, La promesse de l’aube, op. cit., p. 107.↩︎
Pierre Bayard, Il était deux fois Romain Gary (There Were Two Times Romain Gary), PUF, 1990.↩︎
Claude Burgelin, “Le sujet et l’Histoire,” Cahiers de la Villa Gillet no. 6, March 1998.↩︎
Emile Ajar, La vie devant soi, Mercure de France, Collection Mille Pages, p. 252.↩︎
These are two characters from the last novel: Les cerfs-volants (The Kites), Gallimard, 1980.↩︎
Le grand vestiaire, Gallimard, 1949.↩︎
La vie devant soi, op. cit., p. 238.↩︎
The expression is Régine Robin’s and it concerns the poetry of Paul Celan.↩︎
Ruth Amossy and Elisheva Rosen, Le discours du cliché (The Discourse of the Cliché), Editions Sedes, 1982, p. 7.↩︎
Les Enchanteurs (The Enchanters), Gallimard, coll. Folio, p. 39.↩︎
Romain Gary, Education Européenne, Calmann-Levy 1945. We will refer to the Gallimard edition, coll. Folio.↩︎
This is the operation called “the wolf of the woods,” during which the German soldiers take Polish women hostage and use them as prostitutes. This prompts the partisans to leave the forest, to rush to their rescue, and to get themselves killed.↩︎
“The Zborowski brothers had once given him news of his mother: she was alive, she was a little unwell, friends were taking care of her, there was no need to worry.” Education européenne, op. cit., p. 38.↩︎
Romain Gary, Le grand vestiaire, Gallimard, 1952.↩︎
This scheme will be found again in Les Enchanteurs, where young Fosco Zaga, whose mother died at the moment of his birth, is raised by a loving father near the forest of Lavrovo. And finally in Les Cerfs-volants, where Ludo Fleury is raised not by his father but by his uncle, the old cracked postman of la Motte.↩︎
Le grand vestiaire, op. cit., p. 83 and 84.↩︎
Ibid., p. 49.↩︎
La nuit sera calme, op. cit., p. 15.↩︎
This structure of hostility between father and son is found in part in Les Enchanteurs, in particular in the rivalry between father and son over Térésina, the father’s second wife, or in La vie devant soi, with the almost parricidal relation between Momo and his father Yossef Kadir.↩︎
Claude Nachin, in a chapter devoted to Romain Gary, is the first to have perceived the link between the Garian hiding place, life, and death. The hole where Janek spent the war is also the place where his son was born. But at the end of the novel, Janek strangely specifies that the hole is filled in as befits a grave. The trunk in which Lady L locks her lover to shelter him from the police likewise turns out to be a grave, for she will not reopen it until half a century later. Claude Nachin, Le deuil d’amour (The Mourning of Love), Editions universitaires, 1989.↩︎
“Un humaniste” in Les oiseaux vont mourir au Pérou (Birds in Peru), Gallimard, 1962.↩︎
I take the liberty of referring to two articles where these themes are treated at greater length: Anny Dayan Rosenman, “Les cachettes de Romain Gary,” in Confrontations psychiatriques no. 48, “Tourments d’écrivains. Passion de lecteurs,” 2008. Anny Dayan Rosenman, “Des cerfs-volants jaunes en forme d’étoile ou la judéité paradoxale de Romain Gary,” in Les Temps modernes no. 568, November 1993.↩︎
Albert Cohen, Solal, Gallimard, 1930.↩︎
Education européenne, p. 39.↩︎
Myriam Anissimov, Romain Gary, le caméléon, Denoël, 2004.↩︎
Ibid., p. 39.↩︎
La danse de Gengis Cohn, Gallimard, 1967.↩︎
Le Dibbouk by S. An-sky, first performed in 1920 in Warsaw.↩︎
Ibid., p. 30.↩︎
Prayer for the dead.↩︎
La danse de Gengis Cohn, op. cit., p. 17.↩︎
In the play between Gengis Cohn, Schatz, and the psychiatrist or the author who perhaps harbors them both, we find again the attempt to visualize the elements of a psyche.↩︎
Luba Jurgenson, Création et tyrannie (Creation and Tyranny), Editions Sulliver, 2009. Her study concerns the writing strategies of a number of Russian writers in the face of censorship, but she uses the term skaz with respect to this work of Romain Gary.↩︎
Myriam Anissimov, La soie et les cendres (Silk and Ashes), Payot, 1989, p. 16.↩︎
Myriam Anissimov, op. cit., p. 60. She cites her sources: National Archive of Estonia. Archivist: Elle Allkivi.↩︎
Ibid., p. 60.↩︎
La danse de Gengis Cohn, op. cit., p. 128.↩︎
Ibid., p. 62.↩︎
Manuscript of Pseudo, first titled Pseudo Pseudo, IMEC scattered leaves (no. 13). One may note that the identity of the group represented by the “we” changes from one text to another, designating sometimes the victims, sometimes the executioners, and confirming the strange reversibility of these two positions throughout the Garian work.↩︎
La danse de Gengis Cohn, op. cit., p. 61.↩︎
Ibid., p. 62.↩︎
Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, L’écorce et le noyau (The Shell and the Kernel), Flammarion, 1987.↩︎