Marc Marder is a performing musician and composer. A native of New York, he comes to France in 1977 to join the orchestra of IRCAM, then directed by Pierre Boulez. After more than thirty years of life in France, how does he perceive French Judaism? In what way is it different, in his view, from American Judaism?
Plurielles: What was your family’s relation to Judaism when you were a child in New York?
Marc Marder: My family was very observant, it belonged to the current of liberal Jews. We went to the synagogue every Friday, my mother was part of the choir. From the age of six, I attended the Talmud Torah classes at the synagogue to learn Hebrew and prepare my bar mitzvah. In summer, I went on vacation to liberal Jewish camps. Later, my older brother became a rabbi. But our house was not kosher. We lived in a very mixed neighborhood of Long Island where Jews, Protestants, and Catholics lived side by side. And then, shortly after I came to France, my parents went to live in Israel. My mother, as the consecrated expression goes, did not want to “miss the boat.” “We live,” she said, “in an era when there is a State of Israel. I don’t want to miss that in my life.” They lived there for ten years.
Plurielles: What was your first impression on arriving in France?
Marc Marder: I had the feeling of arriving in a very Catholic country, where religion was very present. Here, every day corresponds to a saint, that doesn’t exist in the United States. When I was in Boulez’s orchestra or at the Orchestre national de France, the musicians, on the day of their name day, would invite the others to have a drink. The whole country lives to the rhythm of the Christian holidays. Before, I had never heard of Pentecost or the Ascension. In America, you never hear about holidays that are outside your religion, except of course the major holidays like Easter and Christmas.
Plurielles: But in America, the newly elected President takes the oath on the Bible. That doesn’t exist in France.
Marc Marder: That’s true, but living to the rhythm of the calendar of saints seems to me much more constraining. Not so long ago, you couldn’t give children a first name outside the calendar of saints, in France.
Plurielles: What image did you have of the French Jewish world?
Marc Marder: I stayed completely outside the Jewish world here. I did not seek to integrate into any group whatsoever. It must be said that I had already moved away from that universe when I left my family at sixteen to go study at the university. Here, I didn’t even know who was Jewish. In America, it’s very easy, everyone knows who you are. In my childhood, there were only Ashkenazi Jews, you recognized them right away by their name. They were called Berg, Friedman, Stein. Here, the names meant nothing to me. There are many Sephardic Jews and that’s a world I don’t know. Many Jews have also changed their name. I understand that very well, there was such a trauma here. I remember that a friend of my wife’s did not want us to name our second daughter Rebecca because it was too Jewish. Today, I know many Jews in the world of music, of cinema, but most of them know nothing about Judaism. They don’t know the prayers, they don’t read Hebrew. They are often even very proud not to be observant, to be “against all that,” to call themselves children of Bundists, and so on. So much so that religion is not at all alive here. In New York, religion was part of Jewish cultural life. It was very much alive, you lived to its rhythm. Jewish life in its entirety was a living thing. Here, it gives me the impression of being a museum. People talk a lot about the Holocaust but life is not a life of living Judaism. Perhaps some Jews in France live as I lived in New York, but I don’t see them.
Plurielles: One of your daughters wanted to have her bat mitzvah, even though she was born in France of a Catholic mother. What did you think of that?
Marc Marder: It was very strange for me. At the same time, I was very happy. She was seeking a spiritual education, I found that very moving, very beautiful. Throughout the year she studied, we had spiritual and moral discussions, it was superb. I drove her regularly to the synagogue, which plunged me back into Hebrew, into all that culture. What took me a great deal of time was finding the right place for her. I didn’t know whether I would find in France a synagogue that seemed familiar to me, that was close to the liberal Judaism I had known in New York. I searched for a long time. Finally, I found in Pauline Bebe and her husband an equivalent of the American liberals: equality between men and women, prayers in French and in Hebrew, an openness to the world. But all that, I found for my daughter, not for myself. My own desire was no doubt not strong enough.
Plurielles: In coming to France, you were drawing closer to the place where the Shoah had happened; in America you were farther away.
Marc Marder: In America, we were of course at more of a distance. But we knew many people who had passed through the camps, who bore tattoos. A part of my family had been decimated in Hungary. So the Shoah was, despite everything, very present in my family. I saw Night and Fog when I was seven. In France, at the same period, in the early sixties, that film was censored because French police officers were shown in it. In 1961, the Eichmann trial was broadcast on American television. I did not at all have the impression of drawing closer to this history by coming to France. In 1977, no one talked about it here at all. It came little by little.
Plurielles: You composed the music for all the films of the Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh. Why this interest in the Cambodian genocide — is it a way for you to come back to the Shoah?
Marc Marder: Of course it is not unrelated. It is no more so for Rithy Panh. When he speaks or writes about me, he always recalls that a part of my family disappeared in the Shoah. Why does a New York Jew write the music for his films? Since we met, we have not left each other’s side. Because we found, through music, a common language to speak of the two genocides. He found that in me. For my part, it’s a way of expressing myself musically about this history.
Plurielles: Many American Jews perceive France as an antisemitic country. What do you think of that, you who live here?
Marc Marder: Many Americans think that France is an antisemitic country. The media broadcast this idea widely. It’s true that from time to time I hear things that bother me, little things said as if in passing, little words, expressions, far more than in America. There are things that, for an American, seem very bizarre. For example, a town called Villejuif! A “city of Jews” would be unthinkable in the United States. But to go from there to the feeling of living in an antisemitic country, no.
Plurielles: In America, there was the numerus clausus for Jews at the university, and that lasted into the 1950s. In France, except under the Vichy regime, there was never any such thing.
Marc Marder: I am too young to have known that. I know that many clubs were also forbidden to Jews, like the New York Health Club or certain golf clubs. That was also true in Hollywood. The great Jewish producers were excluded from many clubs and they had to create their own clubs. I even think that still exists. I’m sure that in certain Manhattan co-ops, Jews are still refused. They won’t say they refuse so-and-so because he’s Jewish, they’ll find other reasons. There’s nothing legal about it, of course. But in America, the moment it happens in the private sphere, you can do whatever you want.
Plurielles: Do you feel safe in France?
Marc Marder: Safe? No. But I am not only Jewish, I am also an immigrant. Even though I now have dual nationality, I will always remain a foreigner here. And that is not very comfortable. But perhaps that is very personal. To feel like a foreigner is tiring in the long run. To put it more precisely, I feel much more a foreigner than a Jew here. The problem is that today, I am also a foreigner in America. I have lived longer in France. Of course, I continue to take an interest in what’s happening over there, I vote in America. But I have become too French in my head, I have trouble today understanding the American political mentality. The fact remains that I am not a foreigner in the same way over there as here. I am not one culturally, not deep down inside me. Because it’s over there that I grew up.
Plurielles: And Jewish humor? Is it the same in France and in the United States?
Marc Marder: Yes and no. Jewish humor is funnier in the United States. It is much more ironic, much more deadpan. Above all it is much more present. Jewish humor is the humor of all of New York. Everyone in New York has Jewish humor. In France, if you tell a joke at the table there are always people who don’t get it. Over there, everyone gets it. Here, it’s considered Jewish humor; over there, it’s humor plain and simple. That’s the difference. Jewish humor has had such an influence on the mentality of the population as a whole. It’s the Jews who forged the idea of America in the minds of Americans, through films. The image of Protestant, moral America was fabricated by the Jewish producers from the beginning of the twentieth century.