An interview with Jean-Claude Grumberg: on Mon père. Inventaire

…to earn a living, that one writes to express oneself and to express one’s pain or, perhaps, one’s joy, one’s utopia or one’s desire. This is where mourning my father returns me, unconsciously, to the loss of the father — a loss I in fact lived through without suffering or pain. It was a fact: my father had been deported. There had been no reflection. Besides, he was part of a whole. That is what saved the children of deportees. You hadn’t lost your father; you were one of the children of that multitude, of the six million. When there are six million, you don’t go and weep over one in particular. It took me a long time before I came to reckon that, out of six million, there had been between one million and one and a half million children. And then, I knew that my father’s father had been deported, and I knew that he was blind when he was arrested. One day, I wondered whether my father had found himself at Drancy together with his father — which was the case — but above all whether they had left in the same train. Thanks to Klarsfeld’s book,¹ I discovered that my father had left Drancy two months earlier, and that he had therefore not had to attend to his father during the journey and on arrival. And that relieved me. It is dreadful to say. I had imagined that journey with his blind father. When I now think of my grandfather alone in the cattle car, blind… All of this came crashing down on me when I myself was threatened with blindness. In that sense, I waited for things to come to me. The loss of a child returns me to another loss, and also to the image of a father… I say it in one of my books: I regarded my father as a hesitant man. I knew from my mother that he had had papers to leave for the free zone and that, at the last moment, he had lost his nerve. Later, I place him at the center of a family life — he has a blind father he cannot take with him, his mother is ill, he has a wife and two children — and he no longer knows what to do. Leaving alone is a decision he does not make. It took time for me to understand this. Fortunately, one does not understand everything at once, one does not feel everything at once.

Plurielles — You have often spoken of the image of your father as someone who did not look like a hero.

Jean-Claude Grumberg — No one valued him in the family stories. He was a gambler. In those days, being a gambler was a terrible thing. My mother told me that, had she known he was a gambler, she would never have married him. On top of that, he was Romanian! Among Jews, Romanians had a bad reputation. They were gamblers, exuberant…

Plurielles — What did you do with all these images, all these stories?

Jean-Claude Grumberg — I made plays, I wrote stories. The eight years of psychoanalysis allowed me to overcome the depression, which was deep. Analysis doesn’t pull you out of the hole, but it gives you a kind of handrail. If you cling to it, if you have the energy, you can climb out.

Plurielles — There are a great many child characters in your texts. You often speak of yourself as a child to whom you give the name “Sniveller.”

Jean-Claude Grumberg — “Sniveller” is the child who tells his life as a child but who also takes part in my life as an adult and even as an old man. There is always “Sniveller” there, alongside. I put the disagreeable things down to “Sniveller.” There are two of us to confront the stories. I have remained this sniveller, this child lost in a conflict, in a history.

Plurielles — Does one remain, all one’s life, more of a child when one has lost one’s father in such circumstances?

Jean-Claude Grumberg — Since I have lived only my own life, I don’t know how others live… It’s obvious that I have to make an effort to grasp that I’m seventy years old, that I’m a decorated old gentleman! I feel like a child with a kind of know-how and professional experience. Not in life. I don’t have the impression of possessing any know-how in family life, for instance. As a father with my daughter, I have no sense whatsoever of knowing how to go about it, of what she expects from me or what I expect from her. On the plane of emotions, I have remained very much a child, and even with my reticences… I am astonished at the world I live in; I have stayed as if back in the 1950s.

Plurielles — In one of your short stories, you identify with a little girl seated next to you on the plane, who is crying because she is traveling alone.

Jean-Claude Grumberg — At that moment — it was the effect of the analysis — I was in full regression. To console the little girl, I wanted to tell her: “I too have no mummy or daddy, and I’m not crying.” Everyone who is in analysis is returned to childhood. Gombrowicz describes this state of perpetual childhood very well. One of his heroes, in Ferdydurke, is condemned, at the age of thirty or forty, to go back to school. He is a grown man, but he is treated like a schoolboy, humiliated.

Plurielles — One has no model for being a father when one has oneself lost one’s father as a child?

Jean-Claude Grumberg — Beyond the model, I never underwent paternal authority. I don’t know how to negotiate. I could disagree with my elder brother, who was a substitute for the father throughout the war, but he was only eight. I was four. We came to blows. So I have always felt myself to be without limits, capable of saying anything to anyone in any situation. Is that the absence of the father? I could just as well have had a father who abdicated. I think this limitlessness is everywhere these days, despite the presence of fathers.

Plurielles — It is, more precisely, a matter of losing one’s father in those particular conditions, of being the child of a murdered father.

Jean-Claude Grumberg — In my latest book, Pleurnichard (Sniveller),² I raise the problem of vengeance. They killed our fathers and we did not take revenge. We didn’t know on whom to take it. It is a peculiar thing to live with a buried, unavowed desire for vengeance, with that impossibility. On top of that, we lived in the country whose police arrested our parents. For a long time I lived in a kind of conflict between the institutions and myself. Later, recognition and honors were difficult to manage. Properly speaking, I ought to have refused the Légion d’honneur. But I said to myself: “it would have pleased my mother, and no doubt my father too.” For someone who had come from Romania, to have a son who holds the Légion d’honneur… And at the same time, it’s ridiculous. We find ourselves in Gombrowiczian, shitty situations! As if, in spite of myself, I had ended up on the other side. This desire for vengeance, which in my case is today conscious, I would no longer know where to put. I take part in this life — of course we are no longer under the Occupation — but in the end… There was a historian who was against the French Revolution, against Robespierre. One day he was asked why. He answered that when he had applied to the school of painting, the model to be painted was the French Revolution. There was only one seat left in the classroom, and it happened to be behind the guillotine. “So I looked at the model through the timbers of the guillotine,” he recounted. Well, I — and I think that, like many others — we look at life through the deportation, through Vichy. We make associations ceaselessly. When someone talks to me about Giraudoux, when I’m told he is a magnificent author, I know what he wrote against me, against the Jews. I cannot rid myself of it. Someone speaks to me about Bernanos. I know that he wrote La Grande Peur des bien-pensants (The Great Fear of the Right-Thinking) and that this text is a homage to the director of La Libre Parole. I quite understand that this is not natural, that others have no obligation to be like me. But I, from the place where I stand, see through the timbers of the guillotine. And the timbers of the guillotine are two gendarmes breaking down the door, coming in, and taking away my father.

I think there is no solution to this. Those who tried to escape this history are caught up with. I know no one who experienced such a thing in childhood and who does not find himself, at some moment, as though he had an appointment with his past.

Plurielles — Out of your desire for vengeance, you have nonetheless made books, plays.

Jean-Claude Grumberg — Yes, but always with humor. One does not take revenge while laughing. Vengeance is physical. The idea of vengeance is to kill. It is the vendetta, vengeance. One can sublimate vengeance and write works. But I did not choose it; laughter is at the heart of what I write. Is it a true vengeance to make people laugh, to make them laugh with my life? It is rather a vengeance against myself. As a rule, I laugh at myself.

Plurielles — You wrote a play in which one does not laugh much, Vers toi Terre promise (Toward You, Promised Land).³

Jean-Claude Grumberg — Some laugh a great deal. But one has the right to laugh just as one has the right not to laugh. This play is about the death of a child. And that is the most unbearable thing. If there exists a hierarchy in pain, this one is the worst. My mother, unconsciously, had understood it. The dentist she used to take me to as a child had lost a daughter, and she would say: “he suffered so much during the war.” He, in her eyes, had suffered more than she had, or than we who had lost our father.

Interview conducted by Nadine Vasseur

Notes