In 1980, in Rome, I made the acquaintance of a Soviet Jewish family in transit toward Australia. One day I went to visit them in the modest apartment they were occupying. There was a couple in their forties, two adolescents, and a grandmother. Over tea and small cakes, we tried as best we could to communicate, in English, a language the eldest daughter spoke a little. What struck me at once were the extremely slender reasons for their emigration from the USSR. The wife was a pianist and a teacher of Russian, the father a mechanic. Would they find work in the land of kangaroos, in that country I imagined as a merciless Far West? And how would they learn this new language? They were full of anguish. They were leaving above all for their children’s sake, they said. We came to speak of Yiddish. Only the grandmother spoke it. The parents understood only a few words of it, the children none at all. The father explained to me that with the Revolution of 1917 Jewish youth had turned away en masse from this language of the ghetto, of poverty… It was in Russian that the Revolution was being made. Russian was the language of hope. These good people were certainly not to be suspected of the slightest indulgence toward communism. Their history was relatively foreign to me. And yet I could not help being struck by the strange analogy between what he was telling me and what I had observed at home, here, in France. In short, under different skies, we had witnessed the same process. The Jews had abandoned Yiddish to embrace the values of what appeared to them as modernity. In France, in the United States, in the Soviet Union… then in Israel, and this, it seems, independently of ideologies, even the most coercive among them. At the risk of shocking some or others, I believe that Stalin had little to do with the extinction of Yiddish in the USSR within the space of two generations. For the same thing happened elsewhere, without Stalin. The Shoah, one will say? But the American Jews who did not live through it? Besides, Yiddish is the language of the shtetl. As many learned studies have shown, this traditional structure of life was, well before the Shoah, largely in a state of decomposition. And, well before the Shoah, the younger generation was increasingly embracing the Polish language. What was current in France and elsewhere was happening in Poland itself, before the war: the grandparents spoke Yiddish, the parents understood it, the children stumbled through it.
The fact remains that the Shoah made millions of Yiddish-speakers disappear. But I believe that the process I am describing was largely under way, and that without the Khurbn, things would simply have been deferred: Yiddish, at best, would have gained one further generation.
I had the immense privilege, as a child, of having known my maternal grandparents. More than that: of having lived in great part with them, on rue Bisson, in Belleville. Their eldest son, Henri (Heinz, Hershl), had “disappeared,” somewhere between Auschwitz and Majdanek, and my parents did not earn their living. My father threw himself into activism (he was a communist), and that was far more important than the making of duffel coats. (A parenthesis: here again I refer to learned studies: the communist activism of Jews like my parents, before and after the war, is yet another way of leaving the “ghetto,” of leaving particularism, and of joining the universal of the class struggle.) In short, I suppose that in a certain way, for my grandparents, I replaced their own Henri. (There would be much to say about this “I replaced,” which is far from self-evident.) And my parents were only too happy to unload onto them the task of guiding my first steps.
And my language? I am coming to it. But language is not abstract. Not abstract from the rest: from sociability, from history, from geography, from the individual and collective strategies of living and surviving in times hard as stone.
In a certain way, my mother tongue is Yiddish: it was in this language that we spoke, my grandparents and I. After the fact, I would say that this Yiddish must have been an eminently bastard language. First, because the Dawidowiczes were far from being lettered people. Simon could read (he read the Naïe Presse; when we went, every Thursday, the day off from school, to lunch at their place, he would read it aloud to my father); I believe Matl was illiterate; in any case, I never saw her read a thing whatever. A bastard language, too, because there must have been mixed into it a great number of Yiddishized French words. For example (I took up some of these words in Contes d’exil et d’oubli (Tales of Exile and Oblivion), Gallimard, 1979): la conciergkè, la valiskè, la cousinekè, le chmindferkè, une prostitoutkè… It is, moreover, probable that these words already existed in Polish and in Yiddish through contamination from French, prestigious at the time in those obscure regions hungry for Enlightenment. For example, in Polish a short dressing gown was called a bonjourké.
Words of my parents: la Khavèlayè, the prince of Flaskédrigué, kratznpipik, a lobous, a ganef, kratz os der teler, in der mol arin,…
On the subject of distorted words: Michéa Jacobi (Notre yiddish, un abécédaire (Our Yiddish, an Alphabet Primer), Climats, 1989), a “work of auditory memory”: that is how he notes “Roïsserour’m,” a distortion of Groyser Khoukhem = great haham = great scholar, big head. The same Jacobi, an engraver in Marseille, tells the following anecdote. As a child, he was studying German in school. “One day I suggested to my teacher that we call the orange marantz; he did not understand where this word came from, and, thoroughly ashamed, I was not about to enlighten him.” I have memories of this sort, vague, and vaguely shameful. Worse still, it was not over German, which I did not study, but indeed over French. There must be a few of us who share this shame: believing that a Yiddish word was French, thereby signaling our strangeness, our status as aliens. But it also reveals what our language was like. Perhaps children raised in two languages know mishaps of this kind.
To put things in general terms, my grandparents spoke Yiddish to me with a good number of French words integrated morphologically and syntactically into their language, so that I had no idea they were words of the language of Molière. And my parents spoke to me in French with Yiddish words likewise integrated into the system of French. For example, one said: “C’est bon, le khalè” (“It’s good, the khalè”). One did not say: “It’s good, this braided bread that has the taste and consistency of brioche and that one eats on shabbat.” Nor did one say “khala.” One said khalè, by analogy with bread. So that for me, khalè was a French word. And so many other words. Hence a great confusion in my relationship to language.
It was the same for syntax. Without knowing it, my parents, who spoke Yiddish badly (they had passed through the school of the Republic), had no idea that they often framed sentences in French according to a Yiddish syntactic structure. A minuscule example: instead of saying “Viens tout de suite” (“Come right away”), one said “Viens, déjà!” (“Come, already!”), which is a calque of “Kim shoyn!” No one, obviously, noticed it, neither they, nor I, nor the others.
The shame could show itself in the opposite direction, and it was no less painful. One summer I stayed at a holiday camp of Bundist persuasion. My parents came one day to see me. They spoke with the director of the camp, Kiwa Wajsbrot, who was to become the librarian of the Medem [Library]. Now, their Yiddish was so different that my parents had a little trouble following. The one, Kiwa, was a man lettered in this language, knowing of course how to read and write it; his Yiddish was litvak; my parents’ Yiddish, by contrast, was Polish (or Galician), and above all it was phonetic, transmitted purely orally, certainly by Yiddish-speakers, but ones who had never read a single book in their own language. It was indeed the same language, but it was a little like, I imagine, the near-impossible dialogue between an inhabitant of Marrakech and an inhabitant of Baghdad trying to communicate in the Arabic language: they would not understand one another. Some of my comrades made the astonished remark — which, rightly or wrongly, I felt to be ever so slightly contemptuous — that my parents did not even speak Yiddish! There again, I was an alien.
It was very slowly that I extricated myself from this magma. Yiddish is said to be a language of fusion; my fundamental language stems rather from confusion. It was fairly late that I wanted to acquire “good French” (a parental expression). As an adolescent, I would read, say, a page of Rousseau, and tell myself that all I hoped for in the world was that it might be granted to me, one day, to be in a position to write a page as beautiful.
There is language, but also literature. I discovered Yiddish literature late (in French translation). There already existed some Sholem-Aleichem translated (or adapted?) by Edmond Fleg, which seemed to me unbearable, folklorizing in the extreme. It was at the end of the 1970s, when I had the still-vague project of speaking about a Jewish Poland unknown to me except in scraps, that I discovered Joseph Gottfarstein’s translation of Hasidic tales by I. L. Peretz, gathered under the title Métamorphose d’une mélodie (Metamorphosis of a Melody). It was a revelation. I had the feeling of encountering there my true literary (and affective) homeland. Above all, I discovered there that writing could function like language, according to Chomsky’s generative grammar: by nesting and embedding. With scraps, one could construct narratives, just as with a noun phrase and a verb phrase one could construct a sentence, not necessarily acceptable, but grammatical. Which goes to show that language and writing are bound up together. One had suspected as much, mind you. Later I read new translations of Sholem-Aleichem, and discovered there yet something else, what in learned terms one may call the dialogic system. It is a matter of a certain relation between the narrator and his reader, a relation of complicity, with many a wink, sometimes heavy-handed, that one finds in picaresque literature, in Cervantes first of all, but also among the English and French of the eighteenth century. The Yiddish specificity, within all that, is irony and self-irony. The novelistic speaker, in Mendele Mokher Sforim (Fishke the Lame, The Travels of Benjamin the Third, etc.), in Sholem-Aleichem, is a way of saying to the reader:
“Come now, you are just like me; what would you have done in my place? I am sure you understand me, we are made of the same wood, don’t tell me stories, who do you think you are, to judge me? you think yourself superior to me? etc.”
For the reader of the Yiddish writer is necessarily a kinsman; both belong to the same sociability.
The “real” Yiddish of my home, my real mame-loshn, it exists, I encountered it. By chance, very much later still. I was collaborating with Aby Wieviorka on the translation of some works of this literature: Mendele, Sholem Asch. One day we were proposed to translate Szmuglers by Oser Warshawski. For the earlier books, Aby and I proceeded in the following way: he would translate a first draft, I would take up these pages, put them into “good French” (as my father would have said), and try as far as possible to give the whole a bit of literary turn, a tone, a bearing, returning to the Yiddish in case of doubt.
When Aby had passed me the first few pages of The Smugglers, I saw at once that this time we would not proceed in the same way. I sensed that there was something exceptional here, unheard-of, in the literal sense, that corresponded in me to a buried language which sometimes showed through in my own language of writing. So I insisted that Aby read me the text aloud. A miracle! It was my Yiddish, that of my grandparents and no longer the “literary” Yiddish of Kiwa Wajsbrot and other “great men” of whom Alain Gluckstein speaks in his novel. My Yiddish, with its approximate syntax made of words swallowed, coagulated one onto the other and into the others, its swear words, its definitive insults — in short, the language of the carters of the outskirts of Warsaw. I recovered, just as they were, my grandfather’s insults. For example: In drerdarin (I write it as Michéa Jacobi would write it; only then did I discover the morphology and meaning of the expression, that is to say that the Yiddish of my own people first had to be translated… into Yiddish. In drerdarin = In der erd arin = literally: into the earth within = may he go into the earth = may he drop dead). My grandparents were rag-and-bone men, nobly styled secondhand dealers. They bought shmattes by weight, my grandmother mended them on the machine, my grandfather resold them at the markets of the “zone”: their language was not exactly that of a prize-giving ceremony. The same in Warshawski. So I — unduly? — appropriated this text, made it literally mine, charged it with a rhythm of my own, one I had in my skin! For, as Henri Meschonnic would say, or nearly so, language is rhythm. The book had no success at all, in drerd arin! A well-informed reader said to me: “But Jews don’t talk like that!” I told her that yes they do: my grandparents. Everyone believes that the Jews are like his Jews. Well, no. There are Jews as foreign to me as Patagonians, and not necessarily the most geographically distant ones.