Christian Boltanski, who has devoted a large part of his work to the display of photographs of “dead Swiss,” explains this choice thus: “The Swiss have no historical reason to die, and in this they are more universal. They are clean, neutral and rich. They are anti-Muslim, they want to put Polanski in prison when they ought to give him back his freedom — and yet they die all the same.1” To be sure, the thousands of photos with which Boltanski covers entire walls recall the memorials erected to the victims of the Shoah, but, by the artist’s own admission, the same work “would have been impossible with dead Jews,2” for only the detour through the individual, almost trivial death of a people without a weighty past allows the conjoined return of the collective demons, bound to the memory of historical violences, and of those individual and solitary demons bound to the fear of one’s own death.
The novel Melnitz, by Charles Lewinsky, because it speaks of Jews who are also Swiss, because it evokes at once the people most laden with memory and the country most devoid of history, has the same aptitude as Boltanski’s work to find itself outside the neuralgic point of European collective memory while being the site of its constant reminiscence. A vast historical fresco retracing the trajectory of a Swiss Jewish family over five generations, from the emancipation of the early 1870s to the Second World War — crossed as if on an island in the middle of the storm — Melnitz stages the history of the only Jewish community in Europe to have escaped both the pogroms and the extermination. The destiny of the Meijer family thus seems to renounce all catastrophic dimension to rejoin the banal tragedy of any human life: the Swiss Jews are indeed the only ones whose history ends well, or at least no worse than anyone else’s, for they do, after all, end up growing old and dying.
If the violence of history enters the narrative, it does so in the manner in which the unconscious penetrates consciousness. The Swiss Jews are inhabited by it, but most of the time they strive to ignore it, repressing into another world (“We were in Switzerland and not in Germany3”) or into another time (“We live in the twentieth century4”) the images provoked in them by the cyclical return of the memory of others’ tales. The whole novel is thus to be understood as a struggle of history and memory, of realism and the fantastic, of reason and fantasy, incarnated by the permanent confrontation of the different generations of Meijer with the specter of their common ancestor, whose name gives the novel its title. To the aspiration toward progress that animates the various characters answers the grating repetition of antisemitism, figured by the constant return of the ghost of Melnitz. This contradiction constrains the narrative to a double movement of chronology and rumination, which allows life to coexist with memory and history to continue despite the trauma. Into the interstices of this novel so solidly anchored in dates and facts thus slip phantasmal silhouettes, evanescent worlds, events of a vaguely disquieting strangeness, which make of the novelistic space the site of a return [revenance].
The history of the Meijers begins in 1871 in the little village of Endingen, the place of origin of all the Jewish families whose presence on Swiss territory goes back at least to the nineteenth century. Until 1866, Endingen was one of only two Swiss communes where Jews had the right to live and work, as peddlers or cattle dealers.
At the moment when the narrative begins, these restrictions have been lifted for barely five years. The Meijer family, like all Swiss Jewish families, enters the era of emancipation and modernity, and thus finds itself at a pivotal moment when the hopes raised by the advent of a new epoch try to efface the memory of the stigmatizations inherited from the Middle Ages. The novel opens on a double event, which symbolically reproduces this tension between past and future: the death of uncle Melnitz and the arrival in Endingen of cousin Janki.
Melnitz belongs to the old world, a world that has known persecutions, ghettos, fear, and that, were history to unfold according to the sole logic of progress, ought to come to an end with the character’s disappearance. But just as prejudices fade without truly dying out, Melnitz dies without ever quite disappearing. “After his death, he came back. Always.5” And he comes back for the first time on the last day of his own shive6, just as the family begins to emerge from its affliction to return to a daily life resolutely turned toward the future. Here as in the rest of the novel, Melnitz reappears at the precise moment when one begins to grow accustomed to his absence. Each time the Meijers manage to persuade themselves that the uncle is well and truly dead and that, with him, the heavy heritage of antisemitic violences has also vanished, the ancestor’s ghost resurges and the memory of an unlived past resurfaces.
Janki’s arrival, conversely, brings to Endingen a breath of youth and renewal. This French Jew, full of ambition and dreams of grandeur, upends the routine of the little Swiss village and, in a way, brings history into it. Indeed, although Janki did not take part in the battle of Sedan, it is through him that its first echoes penetrate the narrative. It is also after the establishment of his shop in the small town of Baden, followed by his marriage to Hannele, that the Jews of Endingen venture for the first time beyond the borders of the village so long assigned to them. From the moment the young man makes his entrance, infinite perspectives of the future seem to open to the characters, paving the way to economic expansion, embourgeoisement and the dream of integration.
The construction of the novel seems at first glance to join this forward impetus, since the order in which the narrative unfolds takes on the appearance of a chronological evolution, marked by chapters that all bear a key date of collective history as a title: 1871 is the year of the battle of Sedan; 1893, that of the Zurich socialist congress and of the first Swiss popular initiative prohibiting ritual slaughter; in 1913 the Sarajevo assassination takes place; in 1937 the refugees from Germany immigrate en masse while the far-right Frontist movement gains ground in Switzerland; and 1945 makes the brief epilogue that closes the novel coincide with the end of the Second World War.
And yet this division also underscores the deficiency of any strictly historical thought. Between these great events, the characters continue to live their lives and to evolve. From one chapter to the next, periods of more than twenty years are elided and, to know what unfolded in them, the reader can only rely on the characters’ memory. These characters, because they ceaselessly return to what has taken place, allow past events to make their return into the space allotted to narration and to fill its gaps. History then has no choice but to give way to memory, in a movement that cannot but hinder the chronological model, since the reader learns of the facts only when they have already been overtaken by the course of narrative time.
The chapter entitled “1913” opens on a Passover celebration during which the narrator, at first concentrated on the character of Arthur, who is the youngest son of Janki and Hannele, then seems to wander from one protagonist to another and from one inner universe to another, exploring the past through the family memory inscribed in each individual. The characters’ thoughts all turn around an unsaid which, were it revealed, would allow the reader to understand why François, Arthur’s brother, is absent. Yet they all repress the memory each time it tries to rise to the surface, leaving suspended the sentence that memory had begun to formulate: “It had already been seven years, since François… It had already been seven years and they still had not come to terms with it.”; “Mina, who was too pitiable because her husband and her son… Let us try not to think about it.”; “a happy family, even if François… Not to think about it.”; “If François had remained Schmoul, perhaps he would never have… The thing one must not think about.” The characters know more than the reader, and the latter, to gain knowledge of what has happened, must wait for the memory of the painful event to invade their minds to the point of being unable to be repressed any longer: “For that was it, the event over which, at that Seder table, a thunderous silence was kept: François Meijer had had himself baptized.7”
Elsewhere, when Hannele, the child taken in by Salomon when she was still a baby, finds her father again in an asylum, she relives through him the drama of her birth, which allows the reader to discover, at the same time as she does, what happened before the novel begins. Hannele’s mother died giving birth to her daughter, and the father, unable to overcome this loss, lost his reason over it. For Menahem Bär, time stopped with his wife’s death and, as in those traumatic neuroses that induce a “compulsion to repeat” in those afflicted by them8, he replays the past scene in the hope of managing to alter its course. Hannele thus finds herself a party to a scenario in which she plays the role of her own mother, at the time of her pregnancy, and glimpses the mirage of the family in which she might have grown up. But Hannele, like the reader, knows the sad outcome of the story, and when Menahem, in a reassuring gesture, assures her that “nothing will happen, to anyone,” she becomes inwardly the prophet of her own misfortune:
She is going to die, your Sarah whom you loved so much, and you will lose your reason over it. A stranger will come, a dealer in beheimes (cattle) named Salomon, he will carry off your daughter and raise her in his home. Many years later, he will write letters and set out to look for you, you will see your daughter again and you will not know it.9
Subjected to the jolts of a memory that annuls all temporal verticality, the uniform and continuous time of clocks is called into question by the derangement to which lived time subjects it. For, even more than the narrator, it is the fragile memory of the characters that guides the narrative. Menahem Bär, mired in an epoch he relives ceaselessly, Hannele grown old and afflicted with a degeneration of memory, continue to bring their stone to the edifice of narration through what, in them, makes its return. Menahem is the only one still to remember Sarah, Hannele the only one to remember Menahem, and their memory, failing as regards more recent events, thus becomes the bearer of a past forgotten by all, which it perpetually brings back into the present.
Far more than the chronology of dates and events, it is these constant flashbacks, this return [revenance] of the past lurking beneath the present, that give form to the narration. The characters are inhabited by a double memory — that of their own history and that of their common Jewish heritage — whose trace is found beneath almost every sentence. Throughout the novel, comparisons succeed one another at a rapid cadence, to the point that each movement, each word, each act appears as the repetition of a ritual or as the return of some older event, fixed in narrative memory. The rain that falls in torrents evokes the coming “of a new Noah and a new ark.10” When Salomon Meijer, the family’s elder, flies into a rage against Janki, his peremptory tone is compared to “the voice of God surging forth from the Burning Bush.11” The quarter of meat that stains with blood the canvas sack in which Pin’has has wrapped it recalls at once “the wound of a soldier who has just been amputated” and the “bandage Janki wore on the evening of his arrival.12” These multiple comparisons, which appear on almost every page, organically link the thread of the narration to the characters’ mnemonic activity. Just as they remember ceaselessly, constructing the present in the shadow of these returns, the narrative too becomes a return [revenance].
The events do not unfold as the reader discovers them, but in an already-played past, whose continuation is often anticipated by the narrator. Thus the novel resounds with voices come from the future, which recall that, from the moment there is a narrative, no present is possible, for the events recounted have already become memory. For example, when Janki proposes to Salomon to do business with him: “I should have gone on my way, Salomon said afterward. Simply gone on my way and not listened to him. Many things would have turned out otherwise.13” Or else, on the contrary, it is voices from the past that manifest themselves, raising the ghost of deceased characters. In 1913, although he has been dead for twenty years, Arthur’s grandfather returns to testify to his grandson’s awkwardness: “‘He reflects so long before each step that he ends up tripping over his own feet,’ Salomon had said one day.14” Thus the omnipresence of memory produces a narrative inhabited by ghost voices, in which the solidity of the present continually eludes the narration. At once an epoch recollected in a future the narrator anticipates and a site where events that precede it are repeated, the narrated time is never present to itself. To exist, it has no choice but to welcome the ghosts or to make itself a ghost.
In a work devoted to the Revenances de l’histoire (Returns of History), Jean-François Hamel has shown to what extent, in modern narrativities, the haunting return of specters translates a lack provoked by the disjunction of temporal representations and by the loss of traditional models of narration. According to him, “the poetics of repetition all come back to the inaugural rupture of modernity that transforms the procedures and uses, the functions and effects of the representation of historical time. The ghosts that wander in these narratives figure a world that does not know how to discharge its past nor in what manner to give body to its present.15” Lewinsky’s novel, peopled by characters who live this distension of modernity and tradition, written in a twenty-first century that, to this day, manages to reconnect the present to the past only in the memory of loss and the return of absence, likewise becomes the site of these “returns” [revenances] that come to parasitize the straight line of time.
There are ghosts of what has disappeared as there are ghosts of what has never been, and the return [revenance] carries within it all the aborted possibilities, all the stifled desires, all the unaccomplished dreams that past futures promised. Besides uncle Melnitz, who is the specter common to the whole Meijer family, each character has his own ghost, the reflection not of collective memory but of a loss that is his own. Hannele, as we have seen, carries within her a specter unknown to all the other characters and whose secret only the reader shares: that of the wholly different life she might have led beside her parents, had her mother not died in childbirth and had her father, sick with grief, not lost his reason. The one time she meets her father, he is already a ghost, although he is still alive: wrapped in a white shirt he takes for a shroud, he wanders like a lost soul through the asylum and, while affirming that he is already dead, continues to accomplish each day the ritual of his own funeral ceremony.
As if the family could be constructed only in the rupture of generations and the failure of transmission, each character lives in mourning for an absent parent, a dreamed-of family, a lost child, which inscribe as many gaping voids in the Meijer line. Thus Hannele’s father echoes the stillborn sons to whom Golda and her daughter Mimi each gave birth. Haunted by the ghost of a being who did not have the time to exist, Golda believes she sees her child come back in the figure of Janki, while Mimi finds hers again during a séance. In the course of this episode, as in all those involving the character of Melnitz, a fault opens in the realism of the historical novel, introducing a supernatural dissonance into the reasoned succession of dates and facts. The narrator in no way calls into question the authenticity of the event and, under cover of one of his characters, even goes so far as to deny from the outset any rational explanation for what he is about to recount, since he specifies that “even afterward, Hinda [Mimi’s niece] was incapable of explaining to herself what then occurred.16”
The novel then seems to construct itself in a relation to time comparable to the one Jean-François Hamel attributes to Romantic narratives. Just as these resolve the modern scission of temporalities in an “eternal return of the dead” that often allows the intrusion of the fantastic, Melnitz allows the present to exist only insofar as it makes room for the ghosts. Beyond the ghosts explicitly designated as such, the narrative invokes a host of details which, because they are repeated from one chapter to the next and from generation to generation, because they remain unchanged while the characters wither and waste away, raise a vague unease in the reader. Without truly transgressing the borders of the fantastic, they thus seem to enter the domain of the uncanny [inquiétante étrangeté], defined by Freud as “that particular variety of the frightening which goes back to the long-known, the long-familiar.17” If many inert objects acquire, in Lewinsky’s novel, a disquieting dimension, it is through this strange familiarity that makes them the witnesses of several epochs and several generations, eternally at home in a world that nonetheless does not cease to change. So with the tin pomade box, linked for Hannele to a painful episode during which, still a young girl, she had been driven out of the barber’s shop where she had come to ask for something with which to remove her eyebrows. The same box reappears twenty-two years later in the hands of her elegant son, who is in the habit of slicking his hair with pomade. While François knows nothing of his mother’s misadventures, the box is its trace, secreting a memory that cannot fail to come back to Hannele at the same time as to the reader. The lion-headed cane, which Janki sports as the sign of the imaginary leg wound he is supposed to have received at the battle of Sedan, likewise crosses the generations and enters the family’s most intimate secrets. Thus it bears the brunt of Janki’s anger when he learns the rumor that he is supposed to have gotten one of his shop-girls pregnant: “Janki struck the table with his cane so violently that the pommel came off. The lion’s head rolled, then came to rest at François’s feet, and, mocking, stuck out its tongue at him.18” The cane, the tin box, the tantalus filled with an inaccessible liquor, and many other objects that people the universe of the Meijer family seem to weigh with their mute and sarcastic presence on every attempt made by the characters to find their place in the present.
Uncle Melnitz, an awkward witness of a past one would wish gone, all the more cumbersome for being endowed with speech, likewise counts among these familiar and disquieting objects. By his very name, he appears as the living reminder of a family history which, contrary to what the borders of the novel might suggest, begins not in 1871 in Endingen, but in 1648 in Ukraine. His name, he tells Hannele’s three children, is the one given to all the descendants of Jewish women raped by Chmielnicki’s Cossacks, in the time of the pogroms he led.
Now, if we are to believe Lewinsky, “Melnitz has no business in this book” and, just as he intrudes into the characters’ lives against their will, his presence in the novel is foreign to the author’s initial intention: “When I began that book, he was there. He forced his way into this book, it was not planned.19” Omnipresent, the intruder reappears at all the key moments of the plot until he becomes its guiding thread and its principal character. It is he who gives form to narrative time, fashioning a history which, far from being the site of reason and progress, is doomed to the cyclical return of fear, violence and fantasy. To be sure, in this “clean, neutral and rich” Switzerland, nothing serious ever happens to the characters — the only ones to die from the consequences of war, pogroms or Nazism being those who venture beyond the country’s borders — but, in each generation, some incident takes it upon itself to remind them that, progressive or not, converted or not, rich or not, they will never be accepted as full members of Swiss society.
In 1871, Hannele, entering a Baden barber’s shop to ask for a blade with which “to remove hairs from the face,” hears herself answered in a voice of alarming politeness: “There, alas, we cannot be of use to you. If you were looking for one to cut your throat, we would gladly have been of service.20”
In 1893, little Arthur, going to visit the Panoptikum, a cabinet of curiosities presented at the town fair, finds himself face to face with a wax figure representing a Jew in the act of slitting the throat of a little girl; below it, a placard indicates that this is the “ritual murder of Tisza-Eszlar” and describes, as though they were proven facts, the sinister scenario imagined by the inhabitants of the Hungarian village.
The same year, Janki invites the town’s notables to a great dinner during which the imminent vote on the prohibition of ritual slaughter gives rise to an animated discussion on “cruelty to animals” and serves as a pretext for various jokes about kosher wine and “throat-slit grapes.”
In 1913, François remembers how, seven years earlier, a rich landowner by the name of Landolt had refused to sell him his land on the pretext that he was a Jew. It was then that he had converted to Catholicism, only to hear, as he returned to Landolt to conclude the deal: “It is almost a pity. But you know, dear Monsieur Meijer, a Jew, even baptized, always remains a Jew.21”
In 1937, Rachel, daughter of Hinda and granddaughter of Hannele and Janki, enters a bar frequented by Frontists to use the telephone there and, although she has no particular accent, although she dresses like any Zurich woman, they immediately identify her as Jewish, forcing her to flee. “Had she broken her neck, their joy would have been at its height.22”
It is to be noted that the image of throat-slitting, the center of the antisemitic fantasies inherited from medieval beliefs, is at the heart of most of the incidents that confront the members of the Meijer family with their own otherness. Behind the debate on ritual slaughter, behind the evocation of “throat-slit grapes,” behind the threat to cut the Jews’ throats, there subsists this same image of Tisza-Eszlar, this same fantasy of ritual murder which appears as the inverted projection of a desire for violence. If the signs of antisemitism return, unchanged, in each generation, it is because, like Melnitz’s presence, their origin is phantasmal, floating, impalpable, insidious. It rests on the memory of an imaginary event:
They never forget anything. The more absurd it is, the better they remember it. They remember that, before Passover, we slit the throats of little children and cook their blood in the dough of the matze. It never happened, but five hundred years later they are able to recount the scene as if they had seen it with their own eyes. How we lured the little boy away from his parents, by promising him gifts or else chocolate, long before chocolate existed. They know it in the smallest details. […] Forget? They forget nothing. Except, perhaps, the truth. But not the lies.23
The memory of the ritual crime, because it is impossible to combat by reason, returns ceaselessly and even goes so far as to influence the image Jews have of themselves. “Of course it is a lie,” Melnitz breathes to Arthur before the wax figure, “[…] but when the same lie is repeated endlessly, and there are always people to believe it… You will never be quite sure.24” Arthur will never be quite sure that there is not within him a bloody murderer, an evil Jew. He will never be quite sure that there does not slumber within him Dickens’s Fagin who, ever since he read Oliver Twist, appears every night in his dreams. The characters, every one of them, will never be quite sure that they are really like everyone else. Each has his obscure double, his caricature of a Jew crouched deep within himself, which he tries to silence by every means. And each time this shadow resurges, uncle Melnitz returns with it. He is there when Janki, feverish, tries to expel the evil from his body and to struggle “against the stranger lurking in his chest.25” When Hannele refuses to marry Janki, he is there again to murmur in her ear that she is the worthy heir of the women martyrs of Masada, of Worms or of Lublin. He is present when Janki holds his “goy evening,” when Rachel is roughed up by the Frontists, when François removes the “J” from his name only to see it reappear, painted in oil, on the window of his shop. He returns each time the characters are painfully recalled to their Jewishness.
Just as one does not get rid of a ghost, one does not get rid of an image built on centuries of memory of a lie. And if no progress is possible, it is because Great History, as the sarcastic forebear of the Meijers conceives it, is never anything but the eternal return of the multiple little histories which, century after century, have fixed themselves in the collective imaginary. What makes its return, then, is not the events themselves but the recollected, replayed or reinvented narrative of them. There is return [revenance] only in the places where memory and the imaginary merge and, the human universe being built on an edifice of words, one can change the world only by inventing new narrations for it. Pin’has understands this quickly when he discovers the preposterous story published in the Badener Tagblatt to prevent people from going to buy their goods in Janki’s new shop: “one is inclined to believe a good story,26” he explains to Mimi, “so, to bring people to change their minds, we must invent an even better story.27” Pin’has and Mimi, helped by Anne-Catherine, the daughter of the Endingen schoolteacher, then throw themselves into the writing of a story that is itself fabricated from whole cloth, which erects the ordinary Janki into a war hero wounded at the battle of Sedan, placing all the rest of the narrative under the sign of this event that never took place.
This initiative of the three young people, which gives the impulse to the characters’ destiny, only sets en abyme the artifice on which the novel itself rests. Lewinsky, like Pin’has, tries to tell a story that is better than that of his adversary, to vanquish by the weapons of fiction this idea still present in Switzerland that “the Jews are always different people, not real Swiss.28” The author, who before devoting himself to novelistic writing worked as a stage director and wrote sitcom scenarios, takes up in the construction of the narrative techniques borrowed from these earlier experiences. The chapters, like so many episodes of a series, generally end on a suspense meant to keep the reader’s curiosity awake. The passage from one narrative unit to another recalls the strategies by which cinematic technique links one shot to the next: thus Lewinsky ends a scene with the question “He didn’t understand, your Frenchman?”, in order to transport the reader a week later, in a passage that begins with an almost identical question, but pronounced by another character: “Does he not understand me, or does he not want to understand me?29” The protagonists themselves — Mimi in particular — perpetually stage themselves, modeling their attitude on that of characters in the novels they have read.
Everything thus happens as if the author sought to bring to light the strings of his own fiction, in order to remind us that the story related to us is never anything but the imaginary return of a past that does not exist. The narrated time, however conscientiously dated, remains a ghost time, peopled by characters who have never been, since all the beings who pass through the novel are absent from History. And yet, over the course of the narrative, their absence takes on enough weight to turn into presence, binding the reader to these ghost destinies.
Janki grows rich selling horses he does not have, the old man of the asylum rakes leaves that do not exist, Hannele grown senile asks to see the children Arthur never had, and the narrator, page after page, weaves the threads of lives that never took place. Through this series of lacks, the novel inscribes its ghosts in the double space of the vanished past and the void to come. It is inhabited by a memory of the deceased that offers to all the same horrific vision: that of the petrifaction and disappearance of the living, which predicts to each his impending death. Between the shive of Melnitz with which the narration opens and the multiplied mourning of all the ghosts of the victims of the Shoah, the reader witnesses the silent flowing of human time, the inexorable aging of the characters and the implacable tragedy of individuals who, always and everywhere, end up vanquished by time and by History.
Notes
Christian Boltanski, “J’aimerais mourir d’une mort lente,” in L’Hebdo, December 10, 2009. http://www.hebdo.ch/mourir_mort_lente_41588_.html↩︎
Christian Boltanski; Catherine Grenier, La Vie possible de Christian Boltanski, Paris, Seuil, Fiction & Cie, 2010.↩︎
Charles Lewinsky, Melnitz, trans. from the German by Léa Marcou, Paris, Grasset, 2008, p. 644.↩︎
Ibid., p. 614.↩︎
Ibid., p. 13.↩︎
A seven-day period devoted to mourning a deceased relative.↩︎
Ibid., p. 384.↩︎
Cf. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Paris, Payot, 2010.↩︎
Melnitz, op. cit., p. 253.↩︎
Ibid., p. 22.↩︎
Ibid., p. 113.↩︎
Ibid., p. 130.↩︎
Ibid., p. 50.↩︎
Ibid., p. 394.↩︎
Jean-François Hamel, Revenances de l’histoire. Répétition, narrativité, modernité (Returns of History: Repetition, Narrativity, Modernity), Paris, Minuit, Paradoxe, 2006, p. 224.↩︎
Melnitz, op. cit., p. 214.↩︎
Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny and Other Essays, Paris, Gallimard, Folio essais, 1988, p. 215.↩︎
Melnitz, op. cit., p. 305.↩︎
Charles Lewinsky, Natalie Levisalles, “Melnitz, roman suisse, roman juif,” lecture, Maison d’art et d’histoire du judaïsme, Paris, January 2009. http://www.akadem.org/sommaire/themes/liturgie/6/7/module_5962.php↩︎
Melnitz, op. cit., p. 99.↩︎
Ibid., p. 416.↩︎
Ibid., p. 642.↩︎
Ibid., p. 91.↩︎
Ibid., p. 294.↩︎
Ibid., p. 41.↩︎
Ibid., p. 100.↩︎
Ibid., p. 101.↩︎
Charles Lewinsky; Natalie Levisalles, “Melnitz, roman suisse, roman juif,” lecture, Maison d’art et d’histoire du judaïsme, Paris, January 2009. http://www.akadem.org/sommaire/themes/liturgie/6/7/module_5962.php↩︎
Melnitz, op. cit., p. 55.↩︎