We open this issue of Plurielles with an article by George Packer on David Grossman, The Unconsoled — a piece that combines clarity and emotion in its approach to his life and work, in the discovery of his formative books, of the characters in his novels, and of those dearest to him: his wife and children. A personal and intellectual history, an itinerary, a set of political commitments, a family tragedy, all inseparable from the history and the landscapes of Israel in which his latest novel, To the End of the Land, unfolds.
The central theme of this issue is Figures of return: Recovering, Repairing, Reconnecting?
The Jewish experience in the modern world has often been marked by an attempt, a temptation, a hope, or a dream of return. This temptation of return is the consequence of displacements brought about by historical circumstances and collective traumas, such as the Shoah. Or else it is the result of individual choices, such as immigration to Palestine or to the United States. It is also a reaction to the recognition that the surrounding world has been transformed and become secular. Yet another facet of the desire for return is the wish to make up for the loss of a past world, whether that of childhood or that of our youth.
We spend part of our lives trying to come back, to make return. Toward where? Toward whom? “Toward the hope of new centers set down far away,” Alain Medam tells us, and, as he writes, there is therefore no “final return that would put an end to this round of perpetual returns.”
Sometimes it is a matter of recovering a place; at other times, in a more inward experience, of recovering a time — the time that has inexorably elapsed; as if we could stop our lives, or even turn back, and find again those we loved or who loved us. A dream each of us pursues without ever attaining it. Time has passed, people have vanished, or have simply gone. The place too has changed; sometimes it has disappeared entirely. Such are those towns, those neighborhoods, those ghettos or shtetls where members of our families once lived, places swept away by pogroms, by wars, by emigrations.
Other returns, or other desires for return, bear on our questioning of our identity, our Jewishness. To make return, to come back into the religious domain, is to make teshuva (from the root lashuv), toward an authenticity imagined but never reached — the authenticity we ascribe to others, the one that fills us with guilt; Rabbi Yeshaya Dalsace speaks of this in an interview with Philippe Zard. At the extreme, the “Judaism of return” as conceived and lived by the former Maoist Benny Lévy risks leading to intolerance and to confinement within an ethnocentric mental ghetto, cut off from the world, prisoner of an ahistorical Judaism that never existed. Philippe Zard offers us an illuminating critical study of this “thought of return.”
Sometimes a rebirth comes to pass, the result first of a single individual’s will and then of an entire group’s: such was the case with the rebirth of Hebrew, set in motion by Ben-Yehuda — an improbable but victorious process, which Gérard Haddad analyzes for us.
Literature is rich in those movements that awaken in the individual a desire for return: utopian visions when it comes to imagining America, nostalgic visions when the émigré imagines his return to the shtetl he came from — and this is indeed the fabric of a number of the short stories by I. J. Singer studied by Carole Ksiazenicer-Matheron. Sometimes it is rather the imagining of a world unknown and vanished, such as the one Charles Lewinsky stages in Melnitz, analyzed by Fleur Kuhn.
In the case of Edmond Fleg or André Spire, studied by Catherine Fhima, this desire may concern a return toward the identity or the culture of the group one comes from and whose heritage was not transmitted, or else a return toward the language of one’s Berber ancestors, as in the case of the Franco-Algerian writer Assia Djebar, whose trajectory Martine Leibovici analyzes.
The question of return arises on the side of the individual or collective traumas produced by the twentieth century, and in particular by the camps. Through the texts of Jorge Semprún and Boris Pahor, Daniel Oppenheim shows that the survivor struggles to find himself again within himself and to recover a world in which he scarcely has a place. Anny Dayan Rosenman, rereading Primo Levi’s narrative of return, detects in it the alternations between hope in a world of justice and the premonition of the destructive, irreparable character of the offense suffered. In The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, Daniel Mendelsohn attempts, through a long investigation, to reweave the bonds with the dead, notably with members of his family who were victims of the Shoah (Daniel Oppenheim and Hélène Oppenheim-Gluckman). Alain Kleinberger analyzes Axel Corti’s film Welcome in Vienna, and the way in which, upon his return to Vienna, his city of origin, a young Jewish-American soldier discovers the absence of its former Jewish inhabitants and the presence of Nazis cleverly reinvented.
The diversity of these modes and desires of return is illustrated by four fairly typical cases. That of the Jews who, after the liberation, left for Mandatory Palestine — and Michal Gans shows that while for some it was a reunion with the dreamed-of land, for others it was the sign that they had lost their country of origin. A second case is that of the Jews who returned to Germany, at once their country of origin and the country of their executioners, and Sandra Lustig delineates the complexity of their motives. Meanwhile Jean-Charles Szurek evokes the astonishing case of a young Jewish filmmaker, born in Israel, Yael Bartana, who decided to settle in Poland, creating there a movement of Jews for return. Finally — and this is the case of Jean-Claude, interviewed by Hélène Oppenheim-Gluckman — for some, religious practice in a sense takes the place of the impossible return to the country of origin, by recreating a bond with previous generations.
If the trauma of the Shoah engendered, after the war, a wave of name changes, some, much later, returned to their original names, as Céline Masson shows. Finally, Henri Minczeles offers a memorial return to June 6, 1945, and to September 11, 2001.
Political current events remain present in two texts. One, by Marius Schattner, describes the Israeli view of the “Arab Springs” and the social protest movement launched by Israeli civil society; the other, by Philippe Velilla, offers an analysis of Israel’s relations with the “progressive international.”
Recovering, repairing, reconnecting: we have interrogated the realities and the illusions of return.