What might be the effects, on the choices of the children, of the impossible return to the parents’ country of origin? The interview that follows illustrates one of its possible forms. Jean-Claude, 77, was born in France before the Second World War to Jewish parents who came from Poland. He agreed to talk with me about what “return” means to him in relation to his parents’ country of origin.
Jean-Claude (JC): The choice of the word “return” raises a number of questions, because it is a word that can have multiple entrances and exits. I’ll say things as they come to mind, how I felt the origins. Me, I was born in Paris, but my parents came from Poland. My father arrived in Paris in 1920, very early, and my mother joined him in 1925. The family came together at that point. I was the last. The first contact I had with my parents’ country of origin was the arrival in Paris of my mother’s youngest sister. She was 17; she came in ’38 to help my parents. My father had a hat-manufacturing business that adjoined the apartment, and my mother helped him. It was an arrangement that must have had to be negotiated. I was about five or six. Meeting this young aunt was truly a revelation for me. She barely spoke French. She spoke Yiddish or Polish. And so she talked about the “shtetl” she had just left, about my maternal grandfather. She told how life went on there. Those are the first memories I have.
Hélène Oppenheim (HO): And what did she tell you about?
JC: It was a family of very observant Jews. They lived poorly. My parents regularly sent a money order. She told how, on the day the postman was likely to come, my grandfather would wait at the door. It was a small town… I don’t quite know in what form it arrived… She also told that my grandfather, who had a majority of daughters, would put a sticky product on their hair before Shabbat so they wouldn’t comb it. He had a handkerchief sewn into his pocket so as not to have to carry it on Shabbat. He prepared the Kiddush wine with raisins (rojinkès).
HO: What impression did it make on you as a child to hear these accounts?
JC: It was a world I didn’t know. Even though the family told me it was backward, it fascinated me in its strangeness. My parents weren’t observant at all, only traditionalist; they kept Pesach, Kippur, and Rosh Hashanah, barely. Jews were very assimilated in France at that time. I had a very affectionate and tender relationship with this aunt who took great care of us, the children. That is the first memory I have of the land of my ancestors. There was an extensive correspondence between my aunt and her mother; she wrote a great deal to her parents and received a great deal of letters from them, and I would keep the stamps. At a certain point, there was the war, the exodus, we left Paris… And when we came back to Paris, my aunt, who kept writing to them, showed me that the stamps had changed. They were no longer marked the same. They were marked “the German government of…”. The place where they lived was part of a German protectorate. There was still some correspondence in 1940, then the mail stopped. That is the second memory I have.
HO: And when the mail stopped?
JC: We asked ourselves questions, but we had no information about what was happening in Poland. Then it was at the Liberation that we got some. During the war we were preoccupied with our own survival… We all survived… My father was the eldest brother of his family… He brought over many of his relatives from Poland… My aunt nearly got arrested several times because she was a foreigner, but she survived. My parents were naturalized French… My aunt was placed under house arrest as a foreigner… My father intervened to help her… They got her false papers made… The whole family in France survived except for some cousins who were deported, who lived across from us… It was quite brutal… There were the parents and the son who was one of my friends… and the daughter… They died at Auschwitz… When we came back after these wanderings in France, there was a lot of contact. Many people were taken in by my parents… Little by little we learned news from Poland, of the tragedy that had taken place… There was a whole mourning to be done for people I had never known… There was no one left… I had a large family in Poland… They weren’t far from Kielce, where there were later pogroms after the war… We learned of the atrocities that had been committed and, from 1947 on, that Poland under the communist regime was not always very kindly disposed toward the Jews. So a certain number came to France, and we got a lot of news at that time. There was for me a whole period of my life when whatever concerned the return toward the place of my origins was, so to speak, repressed and displaced, perhaps, into an attraction for the French countryside. Something that had to do with my origins without my putting anything else into it… I made my professional way, I became a psychiatrist, I went through analysis. For a certain time I was rather assimilated. I was among the Jews who thought that the less one spoke of the problems Jews had, the better, that in order to be accepted one ought to do what the other wanted one to do. And little by little, around the age of forty, there was May ’68, the expulsion of Cohn-Bendit from France, the Six-Day War where we had the fantasy of a new possible extermination, a few years after the rue Copernic attack, where I had the surprise of a patient canceling a session to go to the demonstration. And then in the psychoanalytic movement I was part of, on the margins of the institution, there was the creation of a seminar, “Psychoanalysis and Torah.” I realized that Jews knew the traditional texts poorly, and so I tried to improve my own knowledge. That also opened me up, and I began to read, to try to see what this Poland of my ancestors was, where the fact that there had been a Jewish history was erased. In the 1970s and ’80s, Poland was Polish; there was no Poland with a Jewish minority. Bober had, in fact, made a film about Radom. He interviewed old Poles in the main square and asked them whether there had been Jews here. They answered that there had never been any, and at the same time he projected photographs showing that the Radom market was practically a Jewish market. There was, of course, also the film Shoah. So I went on a whole journey… Then, in the 1980s, with my aunt, still under the communist regime, we took a trip to Poland, to see Auschwitz, but also the “shtetl” of our origins. So we spent twenty-four hours in Pinczow. It was quite extraordinary; it moved me deeply. There wasn’t a single Jew left in Pinczow. My aunt and I go into the village inn. My aunt says to me: “Here, before, it was run by a Jew called So-and-so; almost all the shops were run by Jews.” Hearing the name of the vanished shopkeeper and seeing the shop… And everything was like that. We went to the town hall. My aunt remembered one of her teachers from the municipal school; she remembered her name and asked whether this lady was still alive. We were sent to the local historian, who knew her well. Accompanied by this gentleman, we went to the home of this lady who was my aunt’s former teacher. She opened the door to us. She was astonished. My aunt said a few words to her in Polish, and this lady replied: “Ah, yes, I remember you, you didn’t look like a Jew.” There’s the welcome… and everyone looked at us with suspicion… they were afraid we’d reclaim something…
HO: You say you were very moved.
JC: I was very moved. My aunt showed me the house where my grandparents lived. It was a place stripped of that presence I never knew. In the absence, there was something all the same. What’s more, afterward, I questioned several people around me. My brother, very assimilated, had made a trip in 1931, before my birth, with my mother, to go back to Pinczow. He had never spoken to me about it. I asked him to tell me about that trip, what he did. There were 48 hours of train; my mother, very organized, had prepared sandwiches and drinks so they wouldn’t starve. My brother told me that my grandfather was very happy to see him, and he remembered very well the walk he took with my grandfather in the public garden, of which I showed him photographs. So that is more or less the memory of my origins.
HO: Was it after this trip that you became observant?
JC: I became observant very slowly. There was the testimony of a survivor from Pinczow. The Jews of Pinczow were gathered in the Kielce ghetto before leaving for Treblinka. He told me that the Germans amused themselves by dressing up my grandfather in his ritual garments and his tefillin, and that he tried to remain impassive. There was also intellectual work. In the 1980s, I went to the Jewish Studies department at the Sorbonne. Afterward I set about studying a bit more. The mystery of the tefillin — I didn’t know what it was. And yet I had had my bar mitzvah. I made inquiries. And then I learned to handle the tefillin, which I did not put on every day at that time. The other thing concerns my descendants. My wife (I’m divorced) was not Jewish. Under several influences, particularly that of my mother, my daughter, at the age of six, said she wanted to be Jewish. I tried to give her a Jewish education, even if it posed a problem in relation to the Orthodox milieu. But she wanted to follow the “normal” path. She chose to leave for Israel when she was seventeen. There she continued her studies, and she was with the religious Zionists. She was like a “fish in water”; she got married. They are now in France. While they were living in Israel I went there several times, and on my retirement I lived in Israel for nine years. Being in Jerusalem, I discovered that Jewish life was ultimately the reproduction, with other problems, of Jewish life in Poland. There were still in Jerusalem people who had been saved, who had known Poland and with whom one could speak Yiddish. I had a bit of the impression that, going into a community, one found oneself a little as in Poland. And I even told myself that what remains of Judaism is more in Israel (and perhaps in the United States, but I don’t know it well) than in Poland. In Poland, since the ’90s, the new generation has discovered what had been erased by the previous generation, that there had been a Jewish community in Poland that fluctuated between 10 and 20% of the population, which is enormous all the same. I have never gone back to Poland, but in reading books — for there are many at present on this subject — I had the impression that Poland was either a museum or a cemetery. It is not a place where there is life, where it is alive. If one wants it to be alive, it is perhaps a little in France, but not much, and perhaps in countries like Israel or other places, I don’t know.
HO: You say your parents were traditionalist. Had they broken with the family’s traditions?
JC: The Jews in Poland at the beginning of the twentieth century, from what I know — I don’t know whether it’s accurate — have nothing to do with what Jews are today. From what my father and my father’s friends used to say, they left Poland because there was a twofold oppression: poverty and antisemitism, and also the fact that in small communities Jewish life prevented one from doing many things. So one left, and one wanted to go to the United States. But since the Jews who were leaving didn’t have a penny, it took several stages. They stayed a little while in Germany, then, afterward, in France. And like many, my father stayed there. I believe there was an influence of socialist ideas on the community. So my parents were traditionalist, my mother more than my father. They observed the major festivals.
HO: And do you think that if you had been able to find something other than a cemetery or a museum in Poland, you would have become observant in the same way?
JC: I don’t know. I think that the observance I have is something that isn’t very orthodox. In this observance, I find the user’s manual of Judaism. There is such assimilation in France that if one wants to have contacts and be accepted in a religious community, one must at least know its ways of being. And, moreover, one ends up adopting these ways of being insofar as they resonate within oneself. One has the impression that it’s like a dried-up plant of which a few leaves manage to come back to life. Perhaps that is how something one thought entirely lost comes back to life. Perhaps it allows one to recover a bond in relation to generations. Comparing myself with my parents’ generation, I think that if my father had been alive, he would have smiled to see me return to the religious. He, like the people of his generation, had set it aside in order to survive.
HO: Do you have anything to add that seems important to you?
JC: I don’t know what tomorrow will be. There is a return of the religious; some say it brings a proximity to messianic times, perhaps. Perhaps, too, it is a moment. There is one thing secular and religious Jews have in common, and that is that they think there is something to preserve…