I try to imagine the thoughts of a Jewish family in Israel today, its history, the confrontation between its past and its present, between the ideals that those who came before it transmitted to it and the reality in which it lives — a family among others so diverse, perhaps not the most representative. This is not a study, sociological or psychoanalytic, but a reverie, with its constraints and its freedom, its precision and its blur, its intuitions and its prejudices.
David is 18, his sister Sarah 12, their parents 45 and 47. They have lived in Israel for about ten years. The paternal grandparents, aged 70, have stayed in France. The maternal grandparents have been dead for a long time. The children do not really know what happened before their birth; their mother’s side seems to them particularly opaque, their parents have not spoken to them much about it. The great-grandparents, on both sides, were all born in Poland in the 1910s. They would be 92 today. They disappeared during the Second World War, in the camps, the massacres, the ghettos — they do not know which.
The paternal grandparents were hidden and knew, each on their own side, at the very heart of the war, alternating moments of great happiness and of terror, the sordid, the generosity and the monstrousness of men. They survived. They met, still young, barely a few years after the end of the war, and they understood at once that they came from the same history, had shared the same ordeals, and they never parted again. Did they love each other? It is difficult to say; they themselves could not, never said. They lived as mirror images of each other, so alike that they had become indistinct. They needed each other, could not imagine living one without the other. They felt so different from others, from normal people, from those who had not lived through what they had lived through. How could they mingle with them? Each confrontation made resurge the difference and the fear that their parents had known, that they too had known: the other, known or anonymous, may be good or wicked, may save you or kill you. And it was painful to undergo their questions, to feel obliged each time to tell everything, or to hide, as if they were ashamed of what had happened to them. The shame should have been for the others, for all those who had not been, like them, victims of barbarism. They ought to apologize, to pay their debt, but how to say it to them, to ask it of them? To stay among themselves avoids having to speak, to come back over the past. Silence amply suffices when one knows that the other knows, knows enough. Why share with others such a suffering, such a horror — they would understand nothing of it, would not believe it. Besides, this history is their family treasure, the only one. No question of squandering it, of letting others profit from it, of offering it to their curiosity, their voyeurism, their ill-timed pity. Our parents paid enough for this misfortune, and so did we. Fierce and terrified keepers of the misfortune.
The maternal grandparents, on the contrary, at the antipodes of each other, clashed for forty years in the closed vessel of their couple, and died fifteen days apart, worn to the bone by this debauchery of energy and hatred. The maternal grandfather lost his parents during the war, in Poland too, oddly enough. He married a German woman, or perhaps Alsatian, it is not very clear, older than he, no doubt antisemitic, even if she did not realize it. Their couple seemed to be of a foolproof solidity, even if their daughter, the only child, had the terrifying impression, day after day, that it was going to shatter into a thousand pieces, that one of her two parents, perhaps even both, were going to kill or kill themselves from so much shouting and weeping. But the borders are often blurred between play and reality, and she saw her parents be, in turn, the aggressor and the victim, as if what had unfolded on the terrain of historical reality were ceaselessly replayed on the stage of the private theater. What game did they never cease to replay? Such a marriage was no doubt bracing for each of them, and each quarrel helped them to struggle against depression and collapse, to feel alive. They never ceased to reproach each other their slightest differences, truly intolerable, as if each had wanted the other to be exactly identical to him, totally on his terrain: an ideal of perfection and of the same.
David and Sarah have neither uncles nor aunts. Their grandparents could not go beyond a single child — they considered that already an incredible feat — Joseph for the one pair, Gisèle for the other. They had the impression of being survivors (they were), of living by an undue, exceptional authorization, of a life that was not a real life, of a different nature from the one others lived, that did not go without saying but that had to be fabricated day after day; they wondered whether they had the right to enjoy it, and dared not touch it, like children who, having received a toy by mistake, wait in anguish for the moment it will be taken from them by its legitimate owner. They never ceased to think of their parents, reproaching themselves for living while those were dead, for having done nothing to save them, for not even having been present at their side at the moment of their death, for not even having offered them a grave, and thus their parents were nowhere, in no earth, uprooted — just like them, who had left Poland, the country of origin, of their childhood and of their parents’ childhood, and never returned to it, all the roads of the past cut off. They had the feeling of being the last links, miraculously preserved, of a long history. They had just the strength to live; how could they have had that of projecting themselves into the future, of imagining a future without limits, of transmitting life? They did it, however. Why? They could not say. They did it; why look further?
What did they transmit of Judaism to their children? Joseph and Gisèle knew they were Jews, they could not be mistaken: the slightest gesture (of weariness), the slightest emotion (of anguish, of fear, of sadness), the slightest word (of recrimination, of advice for prudence, of criticism), the slightest silence were attached to Judaism. But they did not know what that word covered apart from a few rituals and a few culinary tastes and the bitter feeling of being the victim of a curse. Gisèle quite liked to talk with her neighbor Samuel, whose history was obviously almost identical to her own. Samuel’s father was a communist, had always been one, from his adolescence in Poland onward, and the war had only reinforced his conviction that the future of the Jews and that of humanity, inseparable, passed inevitably through revolution, and thus through support for the USSR, identified with Stalin and then with his successors. An absolute, intractable, indisputable belief. Joseph understood only much later the logic of such an attitude, which for a time had attracted him: the terrifying fear of extermination, the same as the one he had perceived in his parents — the extermination they had escaped, the one their parents had not escaped, which could return, and which the slightest signs of antisemitism, of a strengthening of the reactionary forces (those that pulled toward the past, in the opposite direction from progress, from the linear march toward the happy future) immediately reawakened, reinforcing all the more his militant energy and his communist faith. But faith is unsharable. Samuel’s father had had to choose between Judaism and communism. He had chosen the latter, breaking all his ties with the former, persuaded nevertheless that he would in the end manage to retie the threads of his history, that the future of the Jews was bound to that of all, that to be a communist was his way of being a Jew (without always seeing the antisemitism hidden in some of his comrades behind anti-Zionism, nor how much his struggle for progress masked his rage against his parents and his will to break with an unbearable past). To save himself, he had sacrificed those who had preceded him, cut his roots and the branch that bore him: a risky wager.
Joseph long accepted the family system in which he lived, but his anxieties, his phobias, his angers showed clearly that he did not share it without contradiction. He had grown used to it by force of habit, having no other models that might have introduced doubt. He shared his parents’ fears and, regularly, an antisemitic word or gesture, or one he took, sometimes wrongly, for such, confirmed him in this path that seemed to him that of wisdom and security. His adolescence passed without outbursts or revolt. He understood much later the reasons for this drab pseudo-wisdom: the lack of courage and the persistence of fear — that of confrontation (always bearing the risk of being crushed and annihilated), that of making his parents collapse fatally (he had finally become aware of their fragility, for, younger, he had attributed to them a foolproof, terrifying solidity, because, having escaped extermination, they had to be indestructible) — and told himself that the least criticism, the most discreet revolt would make them collapse, would be for them the mortal blow, and he already saw himself succeeding at what the executioners had not been able to do. He was then still too young to love them with tenderness and generosity; he feared their disappearance and the defenseless solitude that would follow.
He had no other world than theirs, no other references, no other thoughts than theirs. They were the keepers, the last repositories of the world that had been that of his family and his community before his birth. To be sure, they had told him nothing of it except by a few phrases that sometimes escaped them or that he caught on the fly when, long ago, they spoke with their friends, in Yiddish or in Polish; but as long as they were alive Joseph had no need to appropriate this past since it existed in them. How, besides, to do it while they were alive? They would have considered this effort a violent, unacceptable criticism. When Joseph tried to question them, they said they no longer remembered, that they were tired, that it was not interesting, that he had better things to do than think about these old things. But how to live in the present and go toward the future if the past is not a living presence in us, if time is amputated of a major part of itself? Years later, he thought that his parents considered themselves the last, the sole and unique repositories of the past, a terrible privilege that their suffering had sufficiently paid for, continues to pay for. It was his turn to constitute his own history, his own memory, his present and his past, to found a history, starting again from zero. The violence of history had introduced an irreparable break, and each one, children and parents, stood on either side of this gulf that never ceased to widen.
How to make the edges draw close enough together so that children and parents, present and past, might at least see one another for want of speaking to one another? Joseph, who had not had his Bar Mitzvah, attended a synagogue — and took Yiddish lessons, of which he rather quickly grew weary — then another, stricter one, dressing in black — beard, frock coat, and hat — and took part in a retreat in Russia near the tomb of a miraculous rabbi. He was happy for a time; he had found a true family, then again grew weary and told himself that he was going in circles and play-acting. What was he seeking? To return to the past, as if time had not passed, as if nothing had taken place, through blindness, an effacement of the event, to show that Jewish life continued, in spite of everything? Yet he could not deny the Shoah; he bore its stigmata in his slightest ways of thinking, of being with (or rather of fleeing) others, in his readings, his studies in psychology, his interest in mistreated children. He had finally understood that his parents never ceased to live the past in the present, a frozen present that had long shut him too within its freeze. That is why he left his synagogue in order, in the invention of the present, to give back its living place to the past.
Gisèle followed other paths, different, in appearance. Considering that her parents had transmitted to her nothing of Judaism or of their history, that being Jewish had been the cause of so much suffering, she had recognized herself as quits with Judaism, free not to claim to be Jewish. In the intoxication of this freedom she multiplied experiences and encounters, taking mad risks, and noticed, without surprise, that her parents did not react — not from a lack of love but because they were incapable, locked in mourning for their own parents, of realizing her suffering and helping her. She held it against them, then forgave. She understood that she had engaged in a logic of self-destruction and reacted violently: too many Jews had been killed, she was not going to make the task easier for those who had wanted the destruction of the Jewish people, she had to live, she was going to live. She drew great pride from her difficult convalescence, felt herself stronger. She engaged in political action, first with the communist party — she remembered the discussions with Samuel — in order to take up the continuity of the history of a Jewish family, even if this family was not her own (what continuity could she have taken up in her own except, once more, that of self-destruction?). There she displayed, and found, treasures of generosity, of confidence in the future, but also of pettiness, of selfishness and, as with her parents, an ignorance, partly deliberate, of the past — “It’s not the priority, we mustn’t scatter our energies, the question of Stalin has been settled once and for all, etc.” — as well as whiffs of antisemitism when she spoke of the USSR and the Jews.
Joseph and Gisèle met. They had come back from their experiences, rather worn out, somewhat disabused, disoriented, without a real project but without having renounced their desire to be happy and to give meaning to their lives. They married, gave birth to two children, several years apart, as if they had, like their parents, hesitated to transmit life. One child was a feat, fate flouted; two risked attracting misfortune, shaming their parents: “You see, it wasn’t so hard, you could have done it!” Joseph no longer had any religious practice, Gisèle had never had any, but they had David’s Bar Mitzvah performed, considering that they would never manage to make up their own lost ground but that all was not lost for their children, who, perhaps, would succeed in sewing back together the torn edges of time, in redeeming the failure of their lives.
Living in France was not unpleasant but they felt a growing dissatisfaction with it. A few years after the death of their parents they decided to leave for Israel. They were not Zionists, had never been, but they were pursuing the search for their Jewish identity and for a “familial” place. They settled there, relieved, happy, arrived in port. The history begun well before their birth and that of their parents would at last be able to resume its course, after the tragic rupture; their children would not have to reinvent everything of Judaism, would inscribe themselves with others in a common history made of all the individual histories. They discovered, delighted, that not all Jews came from Poland, were not neurotic, observed that the fear transmitted by their parents had subsided. David and Sarah adapted well to their new country.
The war, the Intifada blew the appeasement to pieces. They found again the fear, intact, that of their parents, and with it the questions and the contradictions of which they had thought themselves cured. They tried to reason with themselves (they are not in a foreign country, they are at home, among their fellow citizens, in solidarity), in vain. The risk of the suicide attack, of a stupid death because a chance one, shocks them: the fear of being killed or wounded (with, as a possible consequence, a serious handicap, physical or intellectual, and psychic aftereffects), as much as the feeling of the impotence once attributed to their parents and their grandparents. They reproach themselves for having come to Israel when they were living in security in France. But their reasons for it were so complex; how could they untangle them and separate those they can assume and defend before their children from the others? They feel responsible for their children, who can also be killed or wounded. Will David and Sarah not reproach them their irresponsibility, their selfishness? The proposal to send them back to France is refused with indignation; the parents are accused of defeatism, of cowardice. Their children assert themselves as full citizens of this country, their life is here, whereas they themselves still feel they belong to two territories — and to one same history. They all become aware of this gap and feel sadness and disquiet at it. They did not, to be sure, come to Israel for security, not only. They remember the anguished discussions in the face of the rise in France of the antisemitic far right. Many of theirs were considering leaving, for the United States or Canada, or for Israel. They came here so that their children might enjoy an education, a Jewish environment, that they were incapable of giving them for want of having received it themselves (had they made the effort to acquire Jewish culture and history, perhaps they would not have felt the need to come to Israel?).
Did reality correspond to their expectation? The children certainly feel Israeli, but is that equivalent to Jewish? They received a religious education, as they, secular and atheist, wished, and so they will freely choose their references. Their children do not ask themselves what being Jewish is, as equivalent to “Israeli”; they themselves remain locked in this rumination and have ended up thinking that this tireless questioning was the answer, their way of being Jews. For them the history of Judaism was reduced to that of the Jews of Eastern Europe, from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth; they tell themselves that this history is also being made here, as much as in the diaspora, that they take part in it, that it will be what they make of it. Their children say that history is being made only here. They reproach themselves for being here, as in France, more in the position of critical witnesses than of actors of history, and they feel foreign, here as before, do not recognize themselves in the government’s choices, nor in the daily style of the inhabitants of this country.
David will in a few months do his military service. They fear its heightened risks, physical but also moral and ethical. David speaks of his buddies who are already doing it in a disquieting way. They see in his words only the hatred of the Palestinians, of the other, and the certainty of being in the right: everything is justified by the legitimacy of defending the Jews and Israel against the mortal dangers that threaten them. But are these dangers real and their fear justified, or are they merely demagogic political arguments? His enthusiasm bears the mark of youth, testifies to his struggle against the fear he feels, to his will to be an actor of his history, an actor of the history of the Jewish people — a place too long occupied by the great ancestors, heroes and victims — to his will to break with the past but also with them and the world to which, despite all their efforts and their displacements, they remain attached.
Struggling against the other, against the Palestinian, David seems to them to want to struggle against the knots of the unbearable encysted in his history, his past, in himself. They do not recognize themselves in his discourse. Is this the result of the education they gave him, made of respect for the other, of doubt and scruple, the influence of Israeli society, the revolt of adolescence against them, the desire to make a rupture with the past of suffering, of powerless victim? Their dismay grows from the fact that they recognize themselves in some of his arguments, his attitudes, and violently reject others. He perhaps holds up to them a mirror — caricatural and cruel but accurate — of their own positions that they dare not formulate to themselves clearly. They imagine him doing, without qualms, what they have read that the soldiers did: marking numbers on the arms of Palestinian prisoners, exercising gratuitous violence, the contempt and hatred of the other, the sadism that fear brings out. Is this the Judaism they knew, the one they hoped to find here? They are lost, no longer quite know who “the other” is for them: The Palestinian is no longer the enemy brother with whom reconciliation and life in harmony would be possible, is no longer the Other passionately learned, in France, in the books of Levinas — the one for whom I am totally responsible, who awaits everything from me — is no longer the victim toward whom one feels in debt, in guilt and responsibility. The other has become a blind and masked force, anonymous, for whom I am anonymous, indistinct, all my characteristics lost save a single one, “Jew,” “Israeli,” the one who must be killed and destroyed. What a disaster! Sarah is lost, torn between the arguments of her parents and those of her brother.
Joseph and Gisèle feel alone in their family, and so far from their friends who stayed in France and who ask them to preserve their humanist ideals, inseparable from the ethics of Judaism, to resist the nationalist and hateful pressure. But these messages seem to them so abstract, so far from the reality in which they are caught. Here, they have the impression that society has become a bloc (apart from a small peace movement and a group of conscientious objectors), all differences abolished, welded together by the suicide attacks. The collective pressure, the fear, and the sense of urgency are so strong that they render everything that is not essential obscene and dangerous, a cause of weakness when only strength is necessary. They observe their inability to reflect and to live, except at the most daily, the most concrete, day by day, in the present (neither the past nor the future has any place in them now). To come out of this paralysis, this confinement, they strive to understand the thought of the Palestinians, at the risk of finding a justification, an excuse, for the suicide attacks, but they quickly observe its failure, for want of Palestinian texts, of a Palestinian message, that would give them the means. They turn their reflection toward their fellow citizens but see nothing more than a bloc, all the divisions abolished (the length of presence in Israel, the country or the trajectory of origin, age and sex, political positions, religious beliefs and practices, social positions, etc.) that until then excited their curiosity and seemed to them to produce stimulating effects. How to speak of it to their friends, to their neighbors? To whom to speak of it? Like David, each one explains his stances and his acts by an argument of practical self-evidence.
Fear has returned, intolerable and all the stronger in that it is well beyond the real dangers of the present situation, which their children do not fail to point out. How to explain it to them? The fear in the present is multiplied by that of the past, resurged intact from its long slumber, and they are once again incapable of telling the difference between them, between the imaginary (reworked memory and frozen recollections of the words and faces of their parents) and reality, unlike their children and their friends: they no longer belong to the same time. They need courage and humility to understand one another, so that the incessant conflicts between them do not widen and durably freeze the rift that separates them. They live this ordeal as the unbroken continuity of the past, and their children as the beginning of a new era, the occasion, at last, to prove themselves, of a departure, of a founding that would be their own and not the one they would have inherited from the founding fathers, the pioneers.
They are worried about the future of the country and wonder what kind of society is being built: Israel is a young country, which has not had the time to constitute, over the course of time, of ordeals, of the succession of generations, its coherence, its landmarks, its memory — all that consistency that allows one to advance despite the zigzags, the swerves, the dead ends without losing one’s center of gravity and one’s guiding line. And for their family? They fear that David may commit, in this war, monstrous acts. How will he bear it once the war is over, will he be able to look at himself without shame in the mirror — and the love they have for him, will it not be tainted by it, fissured? — will he not reproach them for having been responsible for it because of the choices they made and that led them to this country? They remember the debates, a few years earlier, in France, about the young conscripts who had tortured or taken part in massacres during the Algerian War: the personal, familial, collective consequences of it were terrible and lasting. What a waste. They think of their grandchildren who will be born one day or another, and wonder how David will be able to assume before them what he will have done, and what he will transmit to them of Judaism, of his Judaism. They would not want the silence of their parents about what their own parents and themselves did and underwent — from which they suffered so much — to be perpetuated in the family, to transmit to the new generations the same suffering.
Sarah observes them and wonders with anguish where they will all be in a year, in ten years, in fifty years? She has the feeling of aging fast, in the time that passes without passing, of being midway across the ford.