Gilda Stambouli souffre… — Paula Jacques Shows No Pity

Every faithful reader of Paula Jacques rejoices on discovering the title of the novel “Gilda Stambouli souffre et se plaint…” (Gilda Stambouli Suffers and Complains…): the saga of the “dissipated angels ¹” goes on, to our great delight. So we prepare ourselves to weep a little and, knowing the writer, to laugh a great deal. This unsettling blend is one of the many charms of Paula Jacques’s latest novel, already crowned with several prizes.

Here we are, then, in the Paris of the 1950s, on the road — what am I saying, in the very intimacy of this superb and insufferable Sephardic Scarlett, like her widowed and ruined, like her magnificently selfish, cunning, mendacious, pleasure-seeking, narrow-minded, stubborn, certain of her own rights, fairly hypocritical and, let us say it frankly, perfectly odious.

We follow her, then, through all her missteps, her astonishments and her schemes, from sordid little hotels out into the Parisian suburbs where, shod in pumps in the December snow, the lascivious and secular Gilda — a poor widow who has never worked — sets out in search of a job as a secretary… in a yeshiva. She will lack nothing she needs to commit blunders each more delightful than the last: neither her utter absence of spirituality, nor a sharp tongue, nor her cigarette, and above all not her perfect ignorance of her own religion…

So here we are, embarked upon this fine galley in which Paula Jacques takes apart several of our pious clichés, in a rereading of the mythologies traditionally associated with the history of our people. Thus Gilda is a concentrate of everything the word “mother” can awaken of the dispiriting in our imagination (or, for the unluckiest, in their memories). She perfectly illustrates, and for the worse, this remark of Anna Arendt’s:

“Exile is not a virtue, nor misfortune a merit (…) one can also live, after all, without the fullness of consciousness” (Rahel Varnhagen, la vie d’une juive allemande à l’époque du romantisme — Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman in the Age of Romanticism).

Likewise, the communal mutual aid that saved so many lives is reduced, under Paula Jacques’s pen, to a succession of unsavory battles with the Israeli or Parisian administration over papers or over the windfall of social services. Israel, the land of milk and honey, is reduced to a barbarous creditor refusing to let young Shulamit leave again. The kibbutz, a children’s paradise, looks, from Shulamit’s point of view, like a forced-labor camp. The Passover Seder to which Gilda is doubly invited — since she has, precisely, just come out of Egypt — becomes not a moment of working through our history and ourselves (what have I freed myself from this year?) but a succession of gags and caricatural moments. As for the yeshiva, it shelters in fact, according to Gilda, “messianic saviors who raise the abduction of children to the dignity of a profession of faith.”

Here, then, are a few avenues of reading, between variations on dereliction and devastating humor, since even the tragic element of the ending is drowned in Gilda’s bad faith, her sensuality and her unreal selfishness.

This selfishness is perhaps only the obverse of a twofold difficulty: an intrinsic difficulty in loving, and a more social difficulty, for an Oriental Jewish widow at the end of the 1950s, in being adult and autonomous, or in being able — alone and with no feminine model (we learn nothing of the women of her family) — to combine the statuses of woman and of mother: materialism and sensuality then becoming the only refuge from this impasse in which the heroine shuts herself away, and which even the tragic cannot reach.

If Lévinas could write that “exile precedes being,” this does not concern Gilda, an almost autistic fortress that nothing will make change or evolve, not even, far away, left behind on the other shore, the inconsolable child who waits within each of us.

Notes