Subjective remarks of an atheist French Jew, born Polish, who leans on his elbows at sixty to reflect on all this. All this: being from nowhere.
by Jacques BURKO
for Berthe.
Being from nowhere. Already, the ambiguity. Being [Être]: subject? verb? I am from nowhere, or rather I am from nowhere? I is important, and what could be more important than my own self. And yet, in this case, it is the state that matters, that is unbearable to me: the condition of one who is not from here and who cannot say where he belongs.
I belong nowhere. Unbearable? Have I not lived in this state for— Forever, it seems to me. For the moment, an observation: this state of weightlessness, of aerial roots for want of soil in which to hook them, I accommodated myself to it in appearance for decades. Being from nowhere, I was at home everywhere, available to integrate into any milieu that did not reject me without giving me the chance to be a part of it. And so, at home in France. For years I enjoyed the French welcome; I wanted to be like those around me, simply one of them. Because I must first be like everyone else, in order to be able afterward to believe myself better than many.
After having long believed that all were like me…
After having long believed, naïvely, that all were like me, I willingly bent myself to the obligation of becoming like all. I know the wines and the cheeses, and football, and the bawdy songs; I speak of what makes up ordinary conversation — except for psychoanalysis. If Labiche strikes me as ridiculous, outdated, the symbol of a certain French mediocrity, I reassure myself with the idea that there are French people to share this view. In short, for a fairly long period I was too busy chameleoning over the French motley not to be pleased at managing it. It was a near-full-time occupation, and a gratifying one. Not only did I want to be one of them, but they saw me as one of theirs. With a touch of the exotic when one spoke of those origins that I had the flair never to conceal. No xenophobia — I resembled them well enough. Hardly any antisemitism, and that more from my paranoia than from reportable, indubitable manifestations. Nothing to do with what I had known at home, in Poland.
Is it still far off, the authentic? Hush and swim.
As the years pass, the syndrome of the so-called classic of the native land catches up with me. Weariness of the trappings that were yesterday an authentic garment to me and that no longer quite fit the silhouette in my mirror. It is time to return to the authentic. And it is there that the paradox which had never ceased to inhabit me springs out of its hole: is it still far off, the authentic? Hush and swim. But if I swim, it is like the flies of my childhood fallen into the glass of tea: in circles. I have lost the authentic; good people, pity me.
I have lost what? One would first have to try to go back to the origins; the sorting would then be more convenient. Good for a slice of personal history, on which History has laid a hand — a boot? — heavy.
I was born in Warsaw, in 1933. Only son of parents Jewish rather than religiously observant: religion played no role I can remember in that home. A Polish-speaking home — to a degree that now astonishes me when I try to scrutinize it. My father, a Rastignac of the shtetl, who came up young to the capital, came out of a family from Volhynia where, to be sure, one spoke Polish, Russian, Ukrainian (according to the interlocutor), but where Yiddish was the language. Later, I learned from connoisseurs how beautiful my father’s Yiddish was, rich in vocabulary and supple in syntax, with that Volhynian pronunciation to which the litvak [Lithuanian-Jewish] one was one day preferred as the normative model. But a Rastignac, and gifted with languages. Anxious to wed the powerful majority. He also wed, later, at thirty-six, a dentist of the same age, eldest daughter of an impoverished branch of a family of good Warsaw Jewish bourgeoisie, a family that had begun to lose at once the language (my mother spoke Yiddish, and felt it — she rocked me to sleep in it — but handled it as one does a foreign language) and the religion. A loss in no way shameful; the consequence of a concern for emancipation, for modernity and universality, on the part of those who saw in the shtetl, religious and Yiddish-speaking, an incarnation of the retrograde, a ghetto where the rabbi was scholastic, where the jargon was associated with the narrow-mindedness of the sages of Chełm (though as for the jargon— My mother’s younger brother, born at the turn of the century, paid at twenty for Yiddish lessons — proof of both ignorance and curiosity, even of a need).
This layer of urban intelligentsia, which had little in common with either the small town or the teeming proletariat of the streets of Warsaw, was no less Jewish for that. It aspired to pull its people toward what it believed to be the heights, toward the universal, but did not deny its belonging. The skeptics maintain that the Poles were there to attend to the vanity of such a denial. That is true, but it is something more besides. Both by constraint and by deliberate will, then, the environment of the first six years of my life was Jewish. When I think of it, during those six years that come up against the war, I must have heard no Yiddish other than the lullabies — onomatopoeias more than words — of my mother. So much for the language.
We were not Poles of the Mosaic confession, we were Polish Jews, secular.
Religion? In retrospect, I am astonished. After all, my father had spent two years in a yeshiva, before understanding that social elevation henceforth passed by other paths. Few traces of it remained in our house; the Jewish festivals were scarcely marked, except by vague family gatherings, by a traditional dish. In daily life, the cooking was the affair of the Polish maid; but we ate no pork. We were not
Dossier: Jewish Identities and Modernity
Poles of the Mosaic confession, we were Polish Jews, secular. There was no more question of marking Christmas, to the great chagrin of the child who gathered little branches of fir fallen from the carts in the crunching snow of the Warsaw streets. Neither Jews, nor apes of Christians; one must not confuse the impulse toward Polish culture with the acceptance of a new superstition, at the moment when we were leaving our own. My mother believed in a God, but refused any codified God. As for my father, I do not know — at least as regards that period.
(This image of our home is probably overdrawn. But I see no other. Here, it is less the truth that matters than my truth.)
Apart from the passers-by in the street, I am not aware of having met a single Pole during that childhood. (Yes — the maid. But the maid— in Polish, one said the servant. That did not count.) Otherwise, one did not associate — they did not associate with us. My father, for business. My mother, in her office. That was all, as far as I can recall. The times did not lend themselves to it; antisemitism was having a field day in our Poland of the thirties. Before, I do not know. Subjective, I said. And even so, my father worked (without having money, he was “in business”) mostly with Jews; he ended up selling parcels of land in Palestine to the Zionists of Warsaw. I suppose it happened that he went to synagogue. For his God? for his business? He is no longer here to be questioned. Were he here he would be mistaken: in old age, he had become observant again. Searching for other signs, I see him reading a Yiddish newspaper at home. They sometimes went to the Jewish theater, complained of its mediocrity, of the hackneyed subjects, of the showtimes never respected.
My language, my culture, my consciousness were Polish. In 1939, at six years old, I subscribed to the magazine Mały Płomyczek1: the concierge brought it up to me with my parents’ newspaper. Serious as a pope (?), I steeped myself in that culture which I made my own. When, at sixteen, I left Poland, a year before the baccalauréat, I had managed to steep myself in it irreversibly. (I omit, so as not to muddle everything, two “exotic” episodes. Between six and eight, I lived the life of the shtetl, in my father’s family, and I was at home there. Then, from eight to thirteen, I was plunged into Russian, become my second mother tongue, and into Russian culture, where I am a small gudgeon in a great river. At present, Russian is my domain of the holidays; Polish — my everyday. These incidents surely contributed to the feeling of strangeness that is mine. But let us decide that this is another story — my present subject is elsewhere.)
The Poles did much to make me hate and forget that language and that universe. Other choices were possible to me, between Russian and French; they would have been more convenient. French. Intoxicated by the welcome, stimulated by my gratitude, seduced by the prospects, I nearly succumbed to the desire to lose myself in it. I would gladly have lost myself in it, were it not for the chain that held me firmly to my Polish origins.
It is a lie to say that the cosmopolitan has all the choices: he is riveted somewhere. I, to Polish.
Forty-five years after having left Polish soil, I speak my language freely, and better than Poles “of the stock,” and of more recent export. One should draw from this neither glory nor satisfaction.
Here begins the reflection. Its premises are in these few paragraphs. Its development terrifies me: it implies that there is no choice. I am not free; my history induces in me a masochistic behavior, unbearable. Richer than many, poorer than all. Toward what do I turn myself in this imperative manner? Toward a wall. I am Polish, but of a Poland that is not. Poland in its time rejected me. In appearance, the one that discouraged me in 1949 both by antisemitism and by Sovietization (first the antisemitism) is not the
Poland of today. Everything has changed, or nearly; the antisemitism remains. Do not tell me that even it has molted; I care little for these exegeses — it is. It puts me in a fury. In an ardent rage.
Some hundred years ago, the Poles had concluded that these Jews invited to settle among them in the thirteenth century had become, over the decades, a body too large, and always foreign. It was then proposed to them that they assimilate, that they wed the language, the culture, the customs. The religion too, but at least all the rest. This invitation did not meet a very wide echo; there was, however, a bourgeois fringe that, after the manner of the German Jews touched by the Enlightenment, wished to have a try at it. Some went as far as conversion and lost themselves. Others remained Jews. I descend from those, and we were numerous. What had not been foreseen was the evolution of Polish thought. One day, they wanted no more of us: a Jew would remain a Jew, whatever his language; it was in the genes, they explained. They wanted us out — all out, the assimilated as well as the rest. They did what was needed to put us there, wave after wave, us, the survivors of the genocide.
Better to be out than dead. Many Jews died in Poland. I have no right to complain. Although I survived probably because I found myself outside Poland at a moment crucial for my people. (Crucial is the right word.) When I returned home, it was not home. Besides, it had never been home; I had understood nothing, they did not want me there. From 1946 to 1949, I fought (more dignified than to say I was beaten, yet more exact) practically every working day, the sole avowed non-Catholic in a lycée of 1,400 pupils.
I had no inkling, on leaving, what string was tied to my leg. For years, I believed I would end up French of foreign origin, as there are Parisians of provincial extraction. No chance. Not even a wrenching: I am not from here. French is the language I handle best. It is the only one in which I could express this reflection properly. French culture — I understand everything, I appreciate, I feel. Each subtlety is a feast to me. But I am not here at home.
At home. When I think that the Jews who came to France from their Polish small town said, speaking of the country of misery and persecution whence they came: bei ounz in Poiln [Yiddish: at home, in Poland] — at home, in Poland. If those (who thanked God every day for having permitted their coming to France) felt themselves from there, remained from there, how to be surprised if those like me are nostalgic for it? How not to understand the anger I have against those who put me out of my home? Who refused me my roots, who denied our share of “their” literature, of “their” poetry, of “their” life. No, that would be too simple. I refuse this refusal. Return to sender. A futile return, a laughable return. For the harm is within me.
Above a certain income, one is no longer an Indian.
One more word on this. I remember a stay in Venezuela: to a question about racism, I had been answered: “Above a certain income, one is no longer an Indian.” For the days in Poland it was the same: above a certain quality (but how high the bar was set!), one ceased to be a Jew. Janusz Korczak was of that mettle; and there was a moment when Poland yielded to the temptation to forget that he had been born Goldszmit. In general, at the moment of the transmutation, the party concerned is already dead. Then, miracle: yesterday, a little Jew; henceforth, a great Pole! Unjust words, words of anger.
But the anger is just, if not this particular anger. The amputation undergone is more deadly than it appears. It took me time to find my way in it. Its formulation is
not easy; not sure that a monolingual will understand me. To express oneself in French, whatever my mastery of it, sets up a screen between my emotions, impressions, desires, feelings, and their formulation, verbal as well as mental. I translate myself into French. Not from Polish, since for a long time I think, feel, and dream in French, but from jacques burko into French. This sensation of having to translate myself, I had never had it before having gulped down French, the elixir of new life. It was the hemlock I was gulping.
In Polish, I coincided with myself. My expression might be clumsy, insufficient, coarse — it did not ring false to me if I myself was not lying. Endowed with a sense of the right word, I had no dissatisfactions with the manner in which I formulated what was to be formulated. As far as it was possible I coincided with the expression of myself. One must try to make this still more precise. I feel it well: between me and reality language imposes itself and interposes itself; it mocks me, deforming, simplifying, rigidifying the impression in the process of becoming expression. The impotence to avoid the misunderstanding, the mis-heard, is unbearable to me and terrifies me in moments of lucidity; but in general I accommodate myself to it. One cannot spend one’s life without communicating, for fear of communicating badly. All the more as the betrayal begins even before one has uttered the first word: between I and me already it brushes against disaster.
This difficulty, I nonetheless bend to it, while understanding that one might go mad from it. I have but one life to live; I am not going to spend it asking myself what exactly my neighbor sees when I say red; still less interrogating myself as to why I say red when I see that. But when I function in French, one more filter is interposed between the true and me. Already I saw of reality only a reflection; now the mirror deforms. For years, I believed this reflection was twisted because I was not holding myself straight.
Whatever my efforts may have been, twisted it remained. In French, I can have satisfaction in assembling precise words, each of which is right — they seem to me no less fragile, arbitrary, aleatory for that. Thought itself wavers under the uncertainty. This discrepancy, generally imperceptible, has consequences in my relations with others. To my detriment: the reproaches made to me for sometimes using words too strong. Somewhere the too-strong is too weak for me, impotent, off the mark. My intimates, recalling my origins, then see me as a savage of the eastern steppes. But to my advantage, when I make poems — my art has unpremeditated novelties, borrowings that, through invisible tunnels, draw from Polish. These two moments sum up a situation that I have decided to be an ill, an ill that, from benign, becomes over time less and less bearable. Age rigidifies the joints. In this case, it is the soul that becomes less supple in me, to which the harness of language grows heavy. Perhaps too the game of translating oneself, a long-amusing challenge, is no longer so; because there is not only the game, because, becoming aware of this time that is no longer unlimited to me, I feel the need to quicken the pace.
By depriving me of my language, they changed my personality. A poem by Wisława Szymborska recounts the destiny (the design) of the sea cucumber. Attacked, the sea cucumber cuts itself in two. One half is sacrificed and devoured. The other saves itself, and grows back into a sea cucumber that is the same. Man is less gifted; what grew back in me after the cleaver does not resemble me. At once more and less than a sea cucumber. For this mutilation I must hold the Poles responsible.
There could be counterparts. Thus, once the expulsion from home is accepted (if indeed it is acceptable), once the impossibility of a definitive insertion into a desired elsewhere is admitted, you
try to make a value of your non-belonging, if only as a means of preserving yourself, as an antidote to despair. Being from nowhere — but that’s a good thing, that. At least you escape the partisan vertigo, you can hate no one. With a minimal effort, you could attain the universal, the love of all your neighbors.
Yes, but. Is it the result of the indoctrinations of my young age? I cannot find cosmopolitanism desirable. To be the one who welcomes is preferable to me than the condition of the one welcomed; to remain on one’s own doorstep — more enviable than the soles of wind. A personal feeling: the adventurers would contradict me. I will not accept being contradicted by Ulysses, and where is the Oedipus who would contradict me?
Our libraries end up in the trash bins, stripped of meaning for our children, who have their own destiny, who have found themselves a native language. Do I speak for myself alone? Is it vanity to believe my voice to be that of a group, of a small tribe in the process of extinction? This is not the Amazon here; no defender of endangered minorities will plead for us. We are dying out gently in the cities of the whole world, without éclat, without noise, often in comfort.
Our libraries end up in the trash bins, stripped of meaning for our children, who have their own destiny, who have found themselves a native language. We are an error of History. But we are, and it hurts. This is why I am angry. An irremediable anger, obtuse like my pain.
All these human groups that, like mine, were driven out, that are driven out each day from their homes. Often more numerous, more visible. Rarely Jewish these days, but just as worthy of compassion. One speaks of them a little; when one mentions them it is rather to praise their adaptation, their good spirit of integration. One pities the dramatic conditions of their departure, the precariousness of their beginnings elsewhere. The temptation is rarer to speak of their hidden ills; and what can be done for their homesickness for the lost country? Were I a believer, I would recite the kaddish for us all. I am not a believer; these words in its place. For the material exile and for the exile of the spirit. Individuals survive a time, but the group dies. There are dramas more visible, more remediable. Are there any crueler?
J.B.
A sort of “Épatant” of the little Poles of the time.↩︎