Evelyne DORRA-BOTBOL: The meanderings of identity

two books

a) La troisième sphère (The Third Sphere), by Amos Oz (Calmann-Lévy, publisher).

Six days in the life of Fima, six days in his inner world seen through his eyes — spectating, scrutinizing eyes. His observatory? The gynecological clinic where he works as a receptionist, but also his women friends, his past, the press on which he feeds voraciously.

Six days in the flabby, overabundant skin of this fifty-four-year-old Jerusalemite who leaps from one center of interest to another, who forbids himself to act even though he knows exactly how to raise the son of his “ex” or even how to conduct the peace talks!

Through the visits of his old young man of a father, we move forward with Ephraim toward the sources…

Perhaps you will catch a glimpse… of the third sphere?

b) Les nuits de Lutèce (The Nights of Lutetia), by David SHAHAR (François Bourin, publisher)

Clinging to the skirts of “Lutetia, the beautiful gypsy woman,” we set off to visit David SHAHAR’s secret Paris, to the frenzied rhythm of a carnival farandole in which one can no longer tell good from evil…

Is Thomas Astor really Tammuz, the narrator’s childhood friend in Jerusalem?

How could Geneviève flee her austere family to follow a gypsy who was poor, ugly, illiterate, and brutal into the bargain?

Who are these “Yenishes,” gypsies whose language resembles Yiddish? Who is who?

Always to the rhythm of the festival and always laughing, we plunge into the depths of the questioning of identity.

an opera

Les contes d’Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann), music by Jacques OFFENBACH, libretto by Jules BARBIER Staged by Roman POLANSKI, at the Opéra de la Bastille

In La vie parisienne (Parisian Life), Offenbach poked fun at a society where everything is mere appearance. One had only to change costume and the bootmaker became an admiral, Gabrielle the pretty glove-maker became the grief-stricken widow of a colonel…

Renouncing one’s identity becomes far more painful in The Tales of Hoffmann, where the mechanism goes awry: the brilliant and perfect Olympia shatters at the summit of a trill that fills everyone with admiration; out of love for a Giulietta, men renounce their reflection, their shadow…

This renunciation is more painful still for Antonia, who must irremediably sing… unto death.

Everything is masterfully performed in a sumptuous and disquieting atmosphere of which Roman Polanski holds the secret: the revelation of the year, Nathalie Dessay as Olympia, as well as all the others whose reputations are already firmly established.

This work is Offenbach’s “swan song,” a work he would not have the time to finish entirely.

What had this son of a hazan [cantor] renounced? For love, for glory? Did he feel dispossessed of his identity?

It is said that while composing this opera, he was reading a biography of Mozart…

How can one not come out of this performance deeply moved!

Our readers write to us:

We have received:

1) regarding the article “L’Œil et la dent” (“The Eye and the Tooth,” No. 1):

Estelle DORRA sends us a letter from which we extract the following passages:

“First of all, as to the form:

Obsessed as I am by the numerous reports on ‘Israeli cruelties,’ I first understood that the man calmly strangled and the man murdered in prison (are they the same one?) were the doing of the Israelis. Then I thought that if that were the case, I would have had the chance to see the report on the third channel or on A.2 a good ten times over. Besides, your article meant to be balanced, impartial. So I had no grounds to incriminate the Israeli army. I was misled by the overly elliptical form and, probably, made anxious and guilty in advance.

Now as to the facts:

Why react in a special way to the fact that fanaticized people, trained to murder, are banished? (and not summarily executed, as is the case in Algeria or elsewhere) This expulsion is a blunder, given the prejudices against Israel; legally, it is perhaps a fault, but on the substance, one can find justifications.

I am told that the banished men are intellectuals, professors. In my eyes, they are far more guilty than the children they push to the front, or the young women who throw stones with a baby clinging to their hip.

I am, just like you, very unhappy to hear the Palestinian children killed by soldiers’ bullets being counted. But it is also very hard to know very young people obliged to spend three years with a weapon on their shoulder and anguish in their gut.”

Erik SCHANDO sends us a letter from which we extract the following passages:

If respect for human rights is essential, every right imposes a duty. The primordial duty not to represent a threat to the survival of the other.

Here are a few excerpts from remarks made by certain leaders of Hamas (a movement that published its charter on August 18, 1988, and whose aim is to unite with all the fighters of the jihad for the liberation of Palestine):

“We will strike at the doors of the mosques with the skulls of the Jews. We will speak the language of fire and the rifle…”

“The Jews are destined to be slaughtered by our hands. We are ready to accomplish the task incumbent upon us toward our society and to torture them, for the destiny of the Jews is to suffer abuse… Israel will exist until Islam liquidates it, as it reduced to nothing the domination of other peoples who preceded it.”

………

I consider the condemnation of Israel to be unjust and without foundation, especially when one sees the fate that these same fundamentalists inflict on their own brothers in other countries.

When one sees the passivity of the rulers of the so-called developed countries in the face of the abuses suffered by the Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina, we understand that Israel can never count on anyone but itself and on the fraternal solidarity of its entire diaspora.

And beware of the intellectual deviations that would seek to defend a humanitarian ideal — without considering the facts and the men. What seems just to us here is less so when Israel’s survival is at stake.

Here is the authors’ reply:

Dear friends,

We understand your reaction very well. It happens that the wording of our article may have lent itself to confusion: indeed, when we write, “Here it continues (the war) in the abominable gurgling of a man with his hands bound who is calmly strangled,” we are obviously referring to the Israeli policeman who was murdered by the terrorists who had kidnapped him.

Moreover, if, in the same article, we denounce the procedure of banishment against a fringe of the population, we nonetheless took care to indicate (we quote):

“It is intolerable to us to see a man murdered in his prison, even were it a military prison. (And there, it is indeed the Israeli victim that is meant). And we think, in this connection, that the media were not much moved by this murder. It must not be forgotten that these deportees are the ones who, in other countries where the Muslim religion is the state religion, are confined to the edges of the desert or even shot on sight, for the good reason that they themselves shoot down the forces of order of those countries.

But it is also intolerable to us to see the State of Israel — which we love for what it represents to us, and because it remains one of the rare democracies of that region of the globe — practice this kind of collective response to this type of crime.”

We believe we have been clear enough as to our assessment of these events, including as to our observation that the State of Israel remains a state of law preferring the democratic functioning of a tribunal, with its judgment and its verdict, to an execution of any kind. (The underlined sentences were underlined by the editorial staff of Plurielles.)

2) Regarding the review as a whole:

From Sylvie BENZAQUEN we received a letter from which we extract the following passages:

Dear friends,

I read the first issue of your very recent review with genuine interest. Thank you for having created it.

The tone of a few articles — or fragments of articles — nonetheless prompted questions in me about the spirit underlying the creation of this review, and more broadly your association.

In other words, to sum up the main criticism I would address to you — and which I will develop further on — I would find it most regrettable if your rejection of the dogmatism and mental ghettoization that you seem to think a certain part of the community displays should lead you to lapse into a somewhat moralizing, lesson-giving style, thus risking presenting secular and humanist Jews as the new Righteous who would hold the truth about the best way to think and to comport oneself as a Jew and as a human being.

I am aware of the somewhat caricatural character of what I am saying, but if I allow myself to submit it to you as such, it is because reality has already borne witness to the fact that such slippages can occur far more quickly than one would even have imagined.

That is why it seems important to me to insist on the vigilance we owe it to ourselves to have in the expression of our ideas and our thought.

—Thus I gave a strong start on reading one of the sentences preceding Albert Memmi’s article (an article which, by the way, I greatly appreciated, and whose tone and content struck me as in total contradiction with this opening sentence): “And yet he had — Galileo had saved his life by making a distressing recantation that shames us still today.”

For my part, I in no way include myself in this “us.” I was not inside Galileo’s head when he took that decision, nor in his prison.

Is it not a little easy to indulge in one’s moralizing refrain when one is a French Jew living in 1993 and not in the time of the Inquisition?

—Bebête-Dîne: bravo for the good idea you had of treating this question with humor!

But I would have expected that, at the end of the little playlet reproduced, its authors or transcribers would draw from it a few questions apt to prompt the reader to a personal reflection. It seems to me indeed that a critique becomes credible only when it invites each person to pursue a reflection. Otherwise, does it not risk being perceived as having no other purpose than to take the opposite stance to an existing current?

“The (Israeli) society issued from the people of the book, this society born at once of the dream of Theodor Herzl and of the nightmare of the Holocaust, cannot respond, etc.…”

As much as I think you are right to question the foundations of a policy that seems to you to produce inadequate responses to certain situations, so much does this quoted sentence seem to me to derive from an idealized — and in this, abusive — vision of the functioning of Israeli society.

Why this perpetual expectation of extraordinary ethical performances on the part of the Israelis? Will they then never have the right to be men and women like everyone else, with their share of bastards and their share of “decent people”? In what way does the fact that this society is “issued from the people of the book, this society born at once of the dream of Theodor Herzl and of the nightmare of the Holocaust” give it additional assets such that one would be entitled to expect the Israelis to occupy the function of guarantors of ethics at the planetary level? A constraining and tyrannical place that many Diaspora Jews seem to want to assign to it… Does one sometimes ask oneself of what internal and external necessity such an expectation bears witness?

Do you not think, moreover, that it is precisely because Israeli society is issued from the Shoah that it cannot but be caught up in the repetition of a certain violence? To suggest that the Shoah ought to have had pedagogical and pacifying virtues on this society seems to me a grave error that can only entail disproportionate demands upon the Israelis, isolating them psychologically a little more each day — which, to my mind, can only increase their violence…

Must one recall that NOTHING is taught nor transmitted by barbarism, save the repetition of violence.”

PLURIELLES

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