The fascination with the non-Jewish woman in the work of Albert Cohen

Whereas the Jewish woman appears only as caricatural and grotesque — like Rachel, the mother, a “thick larval creature,” or Léa, Mangeclous’s daughter “with short legs” — or in a phantasmatic form, a symbol of the suffering and persecuted Jewish people in the figure of the dwarf Rachel Silberstein, the non-Jewish woman occupies a fundamental place in Cohen’s work. Adrienne, Aude, Ariane: the first letter of their first name is like a door opened onto the road to the happiness and peace with oneself that Solal desperately seeks. Is she the magic talisman that will allow the exile to integrate into the non-Jewish world by revealing to him the secret rules of the unsaid, the implicit codes of life in the “civilized” world? Will she manage to make the brilliant international civil servant, apparently perfectly assimilated, forget his Cephalonian origins? Will she, at last, reconcile the two worlds to which Solal belongs, badly and too soon?

For two rigorously opposed worlds make up Cohen’s fictional universe. Wholly antinomic, they offer no common ground; there is no bridge between the two; one belongs to one or to the other, never to both at once. The first is the Jewish world of Mangeclous and his friends: burlesque, dreamy, disorderly, ineffectual, magnificent and ridiculous, flamboyant and wretched — it is the world of Solal’s childhood, that of the shores of Cephalonia, indescribable, unimaginable, incomprehensible to non-Jews. The second is the world of the Protestant Genevan bourgeoisie and of the senior officials of the international institutions: masters of their drives, creators of forms, cultivated, refined.

By his origins and by his choices, Solal partakes of both universes: “a two-headed, two-hearted monster, he is all of the Jewish nation, all of the French nation.”¹ All his life he will go back and forth between these two universes, disowning the world of his childhood to become engaged to Aude, then breaking with her to recover his family world. But these ruptures are provisional: for Solal’s contradiction lies in the fact that he feels bound in solidarity with the Jews but cannot live with them, and that he is not in solidarity with the non-Jews but cannot live without them.

Solal’s Judaism is above all social; that is, it takes the form of concrete belonging to a community. It is the sight of Mangeclous and his friends, or the encounter in a Paris street with the cohort of old traditional Jews, that brings him back to his Jewishness — not religious feeling, the belief in a God he venerates while not believing in Him, a God “that I deny all the time and that I love all the time.”² Solal’s God is his God solely because He was the God of his ancestors; if he venerates Him, it is because he feels himself party to the choice they made at Mount Sinai; his belief is more an act of fidelity toward the Jewish people than an act of faith.

At the border between these two worlds, Solal feels guilty for abandoning the Jewish world, but also for being unable to integrate completely into the non-Jewish world that welcomes him, opens its doors to him, allows him the social and professional success of which he dreams. This integration takes place through the conquest of women, seduced by Solal’s beauty and audacity. Might the non-Jewish woman be the link that would allow him to integrate into a coveted collectivity?

Things are not so simple. It is by studying the function these women occupy in Cohen’s work that one can bring out their true significance; one will see that this function evolves in relation to the evolution of Solal’s perception of his place vis-à-vis the two worlds that structure his universe.

What are the characteristics of the non-Jewish woman, as compared with the Jewish woman? First of all, she embodies absolute beauty; yet, according to Jewish tradition, a woman should be chosen above all for her qualities as a future wife and mother. For a pious Jew, beauty is a snare that turns one away from piety, and its cult leads to idolatry. This is why old Gamaliel warns his young son: “Beware of what they call Beauty.”³ Moreover, the non-Jewish woman is “natural,” in the sense that she returns man to the state of nature (which is absolutely contrary to Judaism); she is therefore capable of immodesty — “female, I shall treat you as a female,” says Solal to his conquests — whereas a Jewish woman in a wig never loses her prestige. At the same time, she is the product of centuries of civilization, of refinement, of self-mastery, and this fascinating and repugnant contrast between “the bacchante” and “the madonna” drives Solal mad. Finally, and above all, she is capable of absolute devotion to the man she loves; neither family, nor children, nor community holds her back, whereas the Jewish woman is bound to the home, to the family, and will not so easily weigh her attachment to her own against a lover.⁴ The non-Jewish woman’s submission to her lover is total; with her, Solal has the illusion of being a king, absolute master of a body, a soul, a life, a destiny — and does not see that this devotion is the expression of a profound egoism.

Adrienne is the first. Older than Solal, she forgets the young man, almost still a child, because she belongs to the world that then appears inaccessible to him — that of beauty, of culture, and of social prestige. The French flag snaps proudly in the Cephalonian sky as “the blond goddess clad in violet irony” advances toward the dazzled child. It is no accident that young Solal breaks his father’s prohibition against attending a reception held by the French consul on the very day the Jewish community of Cephalonia prays on behalf of Dreyfus, who has just been condemned to penal relegation — Dreyfus, “who is a traitor, of course,” since Solal is precisely preparing to reject his own. Adrienne is not only the sexual initiator; above all she gives him the keys to good society. She teaches him good manners, guides him in his purchases, instills in him the small details that turn an unpolished young boy into a perfect man of the world. Her role is limited to leading him to the threshold of paradise. It is up to him to play his part if he wishes to enter it for good.

That is what happens with Aude. Despite an untimely intrusion by the Valiant Ones that threatens to spoil everything, Solal succeeds in marrying Adrienne’s niece, a veritable fairy-tale princess, beautiful, in love, and… so little Jewish. “Descended from the possessors of the land,”⁵ with a “prominent brow sure of its destiny,”⁶ an antisemite without knowing it: “In short, it’s what one calls a Jew, she said with contempt.”⁷

The father-in-law, resigned to the surprising marriage, is clearer: “No ambiguity. French and French alone, and all that entails,” he enjoins his future son-in-law,⁸ and he concludes with relief, in an aside: “He doesn’t give a damn about them or about the chosen people, and will probably convert.”⁹ At this moment of Solal’s life, he is not entirely wrong to presume his son-in-law’s renunciation. For what attracts Solal, more than Aude’s beauty, is the certainty and permanence of the destiny of the “Others.” “In all those streets, those men knew where they were going; the little goals were visible.”¹⁰

“Everything was clear for these people. The world was laid out with a ruler… Solal, he had only Solal. Poor son of the Law and of raw onions.”¹¹

The marriage with Aude is the typical mixed marriage in which one of the spouses (here Solal) has completely disowned his specificity. Solal plays the game of integration to the hilt, to its ultimate consequences: “Enough of the chosen-people business. I’ve had enough of the chosen people. I haven’t got the time. Chosen people indeed! And in what way this little rabble of frightened rats… I am a renegade, thank God, tell the Jewish rabbi so and leave me all in peace.”¹²

His success in the world is exceptional; Cohen lays it on intentionally: youngest deputy of France, director of an influential newspaper, soon a minister; only his refusal to give Aude a child might reveal the trace of a certain unease — but he violently conjures away the specter of remorse by driving off his father and brandishing before him a cross that makes old rabbi Solal recoil, terrified and despairing.

Solal has thus, it seems, definitively chosen his camp; but the sudden visit of his own people reawakens his guilt and his nostalgia. Unable to introduce them into his “renegade” universe, he goes and buries them in his cellar — an admirable metaphor of the unconscious — hoping, against all realism, to hide them from his wife. Now, one cannot live with so heavy a secret; Jewish origins always end up being discovered. Since it is impossible to bring his own people into the non-Jewish world, Solal will attempt to convert his wife, to make her cross the barrier that separates the two worlds. But it is a failure; despite her love, her devotion, her docility, Aude cannot “become Jewish.” Incapable of choosing, Solal then sinks into degradation and madness, leaving nonetheless the mark of his presence in the non-Jewish world: a son. But his vitality prevails over death; he rises again, leaves the place “looking the sun straight in the face” — that is, the pagan world, since the Jewish people is a people not of the sun but of the moon.

With Belle du Seigneur (Her Lover), we come to the third stage. After initiation (Adrienne), after the attempt at integration (Aude), Solal decides to dismiss both the Jewish world and the non-Jewish world, and to live with Ariane in a kind of no man’s land of dream and love. It is the only way to escape the insoluble contradiction. Renouncing the social integration whose vanities and pettinesses he has measured, fleeing the dreamlike delirium of the Jewish world, the only solution then consists in the constitution of a space of one’s own that would escape the demands of the two equally unbearable worlds. It is the absolute triumph of the individual over the collective. Solal no longer tries to form a couple within society, since experience has shown him that this was impossible; he attempts the experiment of the solitary couple, outside any human community. It is the myth of love on a desert island, of passion as the lovers’ sole preoccupation. An adventure that only a non-Jewish woman can face: a Jewish woman, as Cohen describes her, does not renounce her surroundings so categorically.

The non-Jewish world is now seen by Solal under a very critical angle. He sees in it only hypocrisy, cowardice, calculation, jealousy. Madame Deume becomes “old Mother Deume” and her adopted son is nothing but careerism, stupidity, and servility. Ariane herself rejects this cramped universe in which she had failed out of fear of life, and superbly assumes social exclusion by following Solal. It is because she takes this risk that she is dear to him, proud to take an unavowed revenge on a world that no longer exercises over him the fascination of his youth. “Weary of being mingled with the base, she fled the chattering hall of the relation-seekers and went, voluntary, banished, into the small deserted drawing room next door… O my sister madness.”¹³

But passion that is not nourished by tenderness, by social activity, by the acceptance of everyday life and the reproduction of the couple through children, does not withstand time. In a few months, everything that fascinated Solal, everything that made the non-Jewish woman an object of mad desire, turns into negative elements. Beauty becomes obsessional; its preservation demands constant care and countless precautions. To protect it, the lovers came to create absurd rituals meant to avoid the triviality of daily life and promiscuity; the small miseries of the human body, the essential physiological needs, the digestive functions, the morning dishabille, are disciplined, concealed, denied, thanks to a complex system of comings and goings punctuated by incessant bell rings that drive the maid Mariette to distraction: “There’s one for when she asks whether she can move about without his seeing her, seeing as she isn’t dolled up enough; there’s one for when he answers all right; there’s one for when he says to come back in because he has to go fetch himself a book in the drawing room and isn’t presentable, as they say, on account of not being shaved yet,” and so on.¹⁴

All the characteristics of the non-Jewish woman that fascinated Solal will gradually turn into faults. The love of nature becomes “this morbid obsession with the beauties of nature. Beloved, come see the tint of that mountain. Fine, he would go, and it was only a mountain, a big stone… Beloved, look at that sunset!” Solal would then remember the words of old Gamaliel: “Anathema to whoever stops to look at a beautiful tree. We are the monster of humanity, for we have declared war on nature.” To ride a horse — an activity so foreign to the Jewish world, and of which Solal was once so proud — becomes “playing the English fool on a beast windier than Mangeclous.” Likewise, the sensual dazzlement of the early days, the marvelous submission of the lover and her stupefying freedom “in the state of nature on a bed,” become “monkey tricks, monkey capers… flying trapeze.” The admirable coexistence between an avowed sexual freedom and a seemly worldly demeanor becomes hypocrisy and lie.¹⁵

Finally, the Western culture on which Ariane is nourished — a fundamental element of her seductiveness — no longer holds any interest for Solal. “What good is Proust, what good is knowing what humans did and thought, if one no longer lived with them?… Monuments and museums, visits without interest because they were, she and he, outside the human community.”¹⁶

Finally and above all, no children; for “children supposed marriage, and marriage supposed life within the social.” Now, if Solal misses social contact — “He envied them for having a hierarchy, a social life, a milieu, as they say” — he cannot solve this problem, since he has rejected both communities, his own and Ariane’s.

During a solitary journey to Paris, Solal sees his own people again: “he recognizes them, recognizes his beloved, fathers and subjects, humble and majestic, the pious of strict observance, the unshakable, the faithful with black beards and temple-locks… and, standing before the shop window and its curtains, their solitary king in his turn swayed his torso, swaying to the immemorial rhythm, singing in the old tongue a canticle to the Eternal.” Solal finds himself once again in solidarity with his people, but does not rejoin them. Locked into a passion that can only degrade, the lovers live a descent into hell that ends in an abject death.

At the end of this trajectory marked out by three figures of women, there is no solution for Solal. He wanted to be king (“these women also console him for not being a king, for he is made to be king”) in the non-Jewish world, because he refused to reign in the Jewish world. He thought he had found, in the absolute possession of the non-Jewish woman, a substitute for that kingdom to which he believes himself destined by the adoration that surrounded his childhood, like every Jewish male. But this kingdom is illusory and has no impact on the outside world.

The reason for this failure lies in the wholly antinomic and Manichaean conception that Cohen presents of the two universes, Jewish and non-Jewish. It is because there are no possible passages, no compromise, no accommodation, that the situation is without exit. There is indeed, in his three novels, scarcely any Jewish woman who is “emancipated” — that is, one who has won the privileges of modernity while keeping a Jewish identity. No representative of the Jewish “enlightened bourgeoisie,” such as has existed for two centuries in Europe, comes to counterbalance the Christian bourgeoisie. Cohen ignores this reality, because for him Jewish specificity is exclusively traditional. Strangely, he never once envisages the possibility of a modern, cultivated Jewish woman, integrated into the Western world, but Jewish all the same. “I belong to the Jewish nation and to the French nation,” Solal repeats. The use of the term “Jewish nation” clearly indicates that, for him, Jewishness is established as a nation and not as a people; and, in doing so, he institutes between the two terms an absolutely symmetrical relation, and therefore an insurmountable equality.

The non-Jewish woman is not only a desired being. She is, above all, the mediation through which Solal thinks and institutes his relation to the non-Jewish world. Adrienne gives him its keys; Aude makes him enter it;

Ariane agrees to abandon everything in order to follow him. But none of the three managed to make him forget the cohort — “famished, poetic, excessive, and despairing,” at once cherished and detested — of his childhood, without which and with which he cannot live.

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