Chronique de la source rouge (Chronicle of the Red Spring), L’enfant caché (The Hidden Child), Un prénom républicain (A Republican First Name): it is toward the territories of childhood and of History — a childhood irremediably wounded by History — that Berthe Burko-Falcman’s latest narrative carries us back.
And yet, as the narrator forcefully puts it, speaking of the generation of children who lived through her experience, “there was no spiriting away of childhood, but a ravaging after the fact. Because of the stupor that seized us all when, in spite of the adults, there was revealed to us what we had escaped and what made of us survivors, permanently dazed.”
Behind the sobriety of the narrative, it is the violence of history, of the Occupation, of the Shoah that is present on every page, evoked without emphasis by the narrator who, through a child’s and then an adolescent’s everyday life, seems to voice the destiny of thousands of children — hidden, silent, unable to express their suffering, or perhaps even to understand it, mute. Condemned in the aftermath of the war to scrutinize photographs or family record books, confronted with images looked at in secret, incomprehensible, yet inscribed in the very depths of themselves. “The photos in the pamphlet. They were gray. In my memory, they are of ash,” she says.
A round-up of Algerians, the massacres of Srebrenica, the genocide in Rwanda — the atrocities of the present, felt by a wakeful conscience, seem able to give voice to the past, to summon the absent words for speaking one’s own experience. For the link between past and present seems to constitute the very fabric of the book, as is the case with many autobiographical narratives anchored in childhood.
But childhood, here, is war, fear, hiding places, endless waiting, the mourning never begun and never finished, the quest for Aron, the father murdered at Auschwitz, obstinately absent, the solitude of a mother and a daughter, like two orphans in a world so irremediably foreign — socially, culturally, emotionally — that the child will never feel truly at home, anywhere.
The republican first name is that of Berthe, imposed by a clerk of the registry office on a couple of émigrés who had come to register their child. A first name behind which nestles the beloved name, Brucha, blessing, Bruchele, name of love, name come from the language of belonging, name of belonging to the bereaved community that was nonetheless rich with the warmth of life — whereas Berthe, the assigned name, marks exile, loss, the anguishing feeling of being at times a stranger to oneself, and crystallizes the sense of an irremediable severance.
Can one recover from one’s childhood; can one become other than what it made of us? To this question, the book offers not an answer but a melancholy tonality, almost serene yet unconsoled, inconsolable. Capable nonetheless of spelling out the joys of the present, with her lover, the certainty of having escaped the feeling of hatred. And also a few joys come from the past — at school sometimes, at Corvol, the summer camp of the Skif, and above all, perhaps, the joy of having been born of a couple, Aron and Raïzl, who loved each other.
In this fine book, as with Georges Perec, with Saul Friedländer, or with Sarah Kaufmann, children of the war, it is in writing that the bond to childhood, to the violence of History, and its inscription in the present is tirelessly undone and rewoven.