“You and Israel”: Robert Bober

PLURIELLES — Over these past two years, has something changed in the relationship you establish with Israel?

ROBERT BOBER¹ — I am confronted at present with discussions I did not have a few years ago. The essential part of what I have done concerns documentary films. I have happened to deal with Jewish or “so-called Jewish” subjects, among them, in 1970, La génération d’après (The Generation After), about the generation of the children of deportees, children for whom I had been a counsellor in the 1950s. I am astonished to see today that people seem to be discovering these themes.

Oddly (or not), this theme is understood less well now than back then; the directors and journalists who speak today of the deportation want to try to show that they feel compassion for the Jews, whereas they did not concern themselves with it before; this is bound up, among other things, with the fact that they are uncomfortable in relation to Israel, because they write very harsh things about Israel.

My feeling is reinforced by the fact that, Quoi de neuf sur la guerre? (What’s New on the War?) having entered a school edition, I have been much called upon to speak in French, Swiss, and Belgian schools, as the author of this novel but also as the director, for example, of the film made in Poland Réfugié provenant d’Allemagne, apatride d’origine polonaise (Refugee from Germany, Stateless of Polish Origin) (the notation inscribed on my identity card until the age of 25); each time, whatever the film I present, one question is regularly asked: “What do you think of what is happening in the Middle East?”

So, in the end, I told myself that something was not right: even if I made documentaries about sardine tins, I would be summoned, because I am Jewish, to explain myself and to try to justify what causes unease.

My answer to this question is that my film is about another subject: “I think and speak in French, I am a French filmmaker, but what interests you is my opinion on what is happening in Israel. You do not ask my opinion on what is happening in Chechnya, or even in Algeria, far more tied to France by colonization, when there have been as many Algerian dead as Palestinian since the second Intifada; and if I answer by evoking another country, it is because all the dead interest me, whereas you, you make a hierarchy among the dead: the Palestinian dead are, for you, more important, more painful than the other dead in the world where war and death spread and strike every day. Your question is therefore suspect in my eyes. Those who interest you are not the victims but those who face the victims and who console you for the time when the Jews were victims.”

It is the same with certain people for whom I had esteem, and who ask me the same questions; one hears here and there that the dead of Jenin or of Gaza efface those of the Warsaw ghetto. This seems to me scandalous, for one death never effaces another death; one death is added to a death; the dead, wherever they come from, are added to the other dead.

PLURIELLES — Do you think there is at present a disturbing change in the perception the French have of the Jews? Does the Intifada reveal or transform your bond to Israel?

ROBERT BOBER — Yes, something is happening here at present that makes me unhappy; some call themselves “French Jews” in response or in reaction to the expression “Jewish French,” as if there were a priority. As for me, I am French by nationality and by culture and I also have a relationship to the Jewish world, without there being any priority or confrontation. This hierarchy bothers me. When I hear “I am Jewish French,” I hear “I am israélite,” and that very word israélite I perceive badly, for it is a name given by others who fear that the word “Jew” might be ill received. I am French and Jewish; being Jewish is not a nationality but a feeling of belonging. Let us say that I feel myself the heir of a history that cannot be summed up in one sentence or in a brief definition.

And now, with the Intifada, the Jews are once again designated as Jews in France, whether they are Zionist or not. People do not understand here that it is not because two camps are fighting that one is right and the other wrong; people react according to the aggressor / aggressed schema; one cannot conceive here that both might be right, or wrong.

Today, there is a drawing together of those who live in Israel and those who live here; there is the feeling of a common destiny. It is no longer possible to live as a Jew in France without concerning oneself with what is happening in Israel.

PLURIELLES — What representation(s) of Israel do you give in your work, or do you have of it?

ROBERT BOBER — One does not always know in advance why one writes certain things; the explanation comes afterward, and sometimes because of a question. Thus, following the adaptation for radio and then for the theatre of my second book Berg et Beck, which takes place in the children’s homes for deportees’ children, journalists regularly cite certain passages (the made-up doll, the shoes) but almost never the chapter I perhaps prefer most. I did not put it in the stage adaptation, which I regret today.

The uncle of young André, born in 1942 and who has no memory of his deported family, wishes to adopt his nephew, his sister’s son. Yet the uncle brings him back at the end of a fortnight: the child has covered the entire interior of his uncle’s car with his excrement; he is “l’emmerdeur” — the troublemaker — in every sense of the term.

The uncle brings André back and complains of his whims: he does not like what is prepared for him to eat, and so on. “We wanted to give him a family and he refused to take to family life.” When the counsellor replies, “He doesn’t know what it is; give him time to learn,” the uncle retorts: “That’s it, and by the time he’s learned, I’ll have white hair. No, he’ll learn later. He’ll learn when he founds his own family, but no longer at my place. Then he’ll see what it is.”

Now the child, all the more demanding for having no family, has idealized the family by comparison with the children’s home: he expects better from it, and therefore more rights, hence his need to know how far one can go in this love: “André’s act, unforeseeable, almost unreal, had become the act of a child who had wanted to know whether his family was being put back together, and this act had been decisive. It was that of a boy of ten who would have liked to be able to say, as children do when they boast: Well, me, my uncle, I shat in his car and he said nothing.”

This child had only 15 days to learn what normally demands months and years, and what happened to this child can happen to a group, to a country. That is what happens to the Jews in Israel: they were given a country in 1948 because they were victims enamoured of normality: since the destruction of the Temple, one awaits “next year in Jerusalem,” but one does not know what it is like to have a place of one’s own, especially after the Shoah: this people had to learn to no longer live in others’ homes, to make mistakes like any country; that is what the world cannot bear.

PLURIELLES — In your work, you deal above all with the generation after, with the difficulty of carrying on, of surviving after the Shoah. What place did Israel fill for you in relation to this gaping void to which your work bears witness?

ROBERT BOBER — Although I was never a communist, I was in a movement very close to the communists (the UJRE, Union des Juifs pour la Résistance et l’Entraide — Union of Jews for Resistance and Mutual Aid); with regard to Israel it is a little the same: when I shot a film in 1970 on the problems of water, I met wonderful people with whom, whether Israeli or American, I could communicate only in Yiddish; I felt very close to them, in a kind of friendly complicity, because our parents and grandparents came from the same place and certain aspects of their history were like the echo of my own history.

I then understood why I had been a counsellor in the Jewish summer camps: when I went back to school after the Liberation, I realized that I no longer had much to say to my old schoolmates, and what they said to me did not interest me.

At the first camp at Draveil in May 1945, shortly before the opening of the first children’s home, I found myself with boys and girls whose history was close to mine: children whose parents had been deported but who were still awaiting their return, counsellors who had been in the Resistance like our parents. I understood it afterward, and that is why I took part in the children’s homes and the summer camps: it is because I was with my own.

That is also what I felt in Israel, all the while knowing that I would not live there, for I am very attached to Paris: when I was writing Quoi de neuf sur la guerre, I needed to stop and walk at length through Paris. More precisely, I define myself rather as a “Parisian Jew.”

PLURIELLES — Listening to you, I wonder whether the absence of Israel from your work, or its place as a hollow, does not come from the fact that this country built itself for many years upon a deafening silence. There, one did not speak of what had happened during the Shoah; the survivors said nothing, or almost nothing, as if, in order to survive and carry on, one had to, for a whole time, say nothing of the worst, of that pit impossible to close that remained in the old world.

ROBERT BOBER — Yes, surely one had to build and not leave all the room to tears. When I film someone and the tears appear, I cut out that moment of tears because it is something intimate that passes between the person and me.

This perhaps comes from what I felt at the time when I was there: never to speak in their name. The more painful things are, the more one must speak of them with distance. It is as with an actor: he does not have to weep but to recount; it is the narrative that must move the audience, and not the actor’s tears.

It is said that forgetting is founding; at the same time, one can forget only what one has known, and one wants to know what was not passed on to us. On the other hand, remembrance is not the result of a decision; one does not say “I am going to remember.” One marries, one has children, life is made of songs and tears.

In the postwar years, one knew very well, of course, that one would not forget, but one thought the painful memories would recede; one realizes that the memories accompany us still and will accompany us always.

Not only have we not forgotten, but with time it comes back with force; memory calls forth memory and tears call forth tears, for as Monsieur Albert says in Quoi de neuf sur la guerre, it is the only stock that never runs out.

Interview conducted by Chantal Steinberg 29/12/02

Notes