From Philip Roth to Woody Allen, Jewish mothers have often been evoked — evoked to the point of caricature, to the point of becoming a stereotype that fuels Jewish and non-Jewish jokes alike. Far less attention has been paid to Jewish fathers, to their particularities, their contradictions.
We know how late the Jews entered into secular life, and how many identity crises the Enlightenment provoked among them — which also accounts for the weight and pervasiveness of religious tradition even among secular Jews. In the texts of the religious tradition, of which we are the cultural heirs whether believers or not, father figures are at once pervasive, mythic, and richly varied: Adam, father of Cain and Abel; the Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; but also, at the far end of biblical time, Job, the figure of a bereaved fatherhood.
Each of these fathers is often a complex character. Thus Abraham is the father of Isaac, but also the father of Ishmael, and he behaves very differently toward his two sons. The same is true of Isaac, granting his blessing to Jacob to the detriment of Esau, or of Jacob himself, favoring Joseph at his brothers’ expense and thereby arousing their jealousy.
Jewish fathers, like the Jewish people itself, are inscribed within History — a long history of a minority that, even if it has not been solely a vale of tears, has nonetheless been, in large part, a history of persecutions, migrations, expulsions, massacres endured. And this cannot but have had consequences for the figure of the Jewish father, for the constitution of an anxious fatherhood, shot through with dread of what tomorrow may bring, with anguish at the unforeseen, with the guilt born of the impossibility of protecting one’s child in the situations of violence so often encountered.
At once pervasive and hidden, tutelary or contested, a figure of identification as much as an object of revolt — this figure, if it allows generational inscription and the transmission of an identity at once personal and collective, also inspires fear and submission; it is the ambivalent figure par excellence, an object of love and of hatred. But in the twentieth century the father is increasingly an absent character, whom the writer attempts to recover, to reconstruct.
This issue of Plurielles opens with three deeply personal contributions. One by Jean-Claude Grumberg, who evokes the way the death of his father in the Shoah and his childhood grief radically altered his life and lie at the source of his work as a writer. Likewise, the evocations of the fathers of Jean-Charles Szurek and Michel Grojnowski — communist militants and Republican fighters in the Spanish Civil War or members of the Resistance in France, with the disappointments that followed — show how deeply these destinies marked the lives of both men. These three testimonies bring us, through the sons’ voices, into the dramas and tragedies of the twentieth century.
Literature too explores this place of the father lost, untraceable, reinvented, transformed, recovered in writing. We may read the texts of Carole Ksiazenicer-Matheron, Anny Dayan Rosenman, Pierre Pachet and Daniel Oppenheim, devoted respectively to Paul Auster and Patrick Modiano, to Romain Gary, to Bruno Schulz, and to the works of Elie Wiesel and Imre Kertész.
In our own society, what becomes of the father in Jewish families that adopt a child? Sophie Nizard attempts to answer this question by way of a psychosociological inquiry.
How did Sigmund Freud, the founding father of psychoanalysis, play his own role as father within his family? This is the question Sylvie Sésé-Léger sets out to answer.
What role did Freud assign to the father in the birth of our civilization? Hélène Gluckman-Oppenheim introduces us to the Freudian theory of the “murder of the father”: the killing of the primal father by the horde of sons, followed by expiatory rites and religious cults whose object is to relieve a guilt that founds human civilization.
Jewish society — at least in its traditional form — is marked, like others, by the recurrent question of the transmission of identity, of belonging, and of filiation. It is from this perspective that Mireille Hadas-Lebel examines the sources and historical origin of the matrilineality that has prevailed for eighteen hundred years within the Jewish religion.
Reaching back, in a fiction, to our origins, Théo Klein — a secular Jew yet rooted in traditional Jewish culture — conducts an imaginary conversation with our ancestor Isaac concerning his father, the Patriarch Abraham.
Finally, Chantal Steinberg’s review of Boualem Sansal’s fine and courageous novel Le village de l’Allemand (The German Mujahid) shows the extent to which this, too, is a story of a father.
Still in the literary realm, an attention is paid here to a major postwar Jewish woman writer, forgotten by many — Anna Langfus, whose life and work are presented to us by Jean-Yves Potel.
Beyond our dossier, this issue of Plurielles presents more political texts.
The essay by Samuel Ghiles Meilhac, which discusses his work on the management of the memory of Auschwitz within the activity of the CRIF. The study by Philippe Velilla on Barack Obama, the Jews and Israel, which sheds light on the changes underway concerning the place of the Jews in American politics.
Finally, an exchange on the current state — but also the sources — of the longest conflict of the century, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which brought together, at a round table I chaired, Elie Barnavi, Denis Charbit and Ilan Greilsammer.
Happy reading!
I. R.