Reading Ivan Jablonka

“What have we done with our history?” It must be disclosed to the readers of Plurielles that the idea of working on this theme within the review — put forward by one of us — pleased me at once without my really knowing why. “Our” history? What history? That of the editorial committee? Of certain secular Jews? Of descendants of survivors? Of the generation of ’68, of which some might claim to be a part? What then of the other generations? Does the notion of “generation” make sense?

It quickly became apparent that it was awkward to work on a collective project, except by granting it the freedom necessary for acknowledgments, whatever they might be. On reflection, I identified myself with this project on reading Ivan Jablonka’s book Histoire des grands-parents que je n’ai pas eus (A History of the Grandparents I Never Had).¹ Indeed, even more than Daniel Mendelsohn’s work Les Disparus (The Lost),² Jablonka’s is heavy with several promises. The principal one is generational. Here is a young man, setting out from the observation that his parents’ generation — that of the children hidden during the war — transmitted to him only scraps of a family history whose mystery focuses on the deportation of the grandparents in 1942, who concentrates his quest on the lost thread of the generations, on the need to fill the gaps he senses. In short, on asking himself which history he inherits.

For my part, I remember that, in 1968, many chanted “We are all German Jews.” That was perhaps then one of the rare echoes — along with the publication of Patrick Modiano’s first novel La Place de l’Étoile³ — of the years of the Occupation and of the deportation of the Jews that would so occupy public space from the 1980s onward. The generation of ’68 was wholly taken up with breaking the social, educational, economic chains of the preceding one and thought only of imagining, of building a different future. This was less true in West Germany, where the irruption of the generation of ’68 clearly expressed the rejection of the generation of the fathers, a Germany no less lulled than France in consumerism, but which had already been awakened by several trials of Nazi criminals at the start of the 1960s. For my part, I had left in a corner of my memory the need to return, after May, to what was not yet called the “Shoah.” In that corner there was an unfinished family history — in every sense of the term: unfinished in its unfolding, unfinished in its things left unsaid — a brief visit I had made, a young high-school student from Warsaw, to the Auschwitz museum in 1964, which had enjoined me to “return” there. I returned in 1978, then in 1989: I then carried out an anthropological-sociological investigation of the museological apparatus of this institution in the context of expiring communism.⁴ The memory of the Shoah already occupied minds a great deal, to the point that some, in the mid-1990s, devoted entire books to it in order to communicate their fatigue with the event.

The second promise of Jablonka’s book — and I do not know him personally — is its inflexibility, its advance in the investigation with indispensable blinkers, blinkers in the sense in which Claude Lanzmann understood them when he was making Shoah: not to stray from the path laid down. At least so I imagine. To devote several years of one’s life to the destiny of one’s murdered grandparents, when so many works on the Shoah line the displays of bookshops, springs from a fine inner necessity.

Finally, the third promise of this book is inherent in the method, in the professional know-how and the imagination of the historian. For how is one to seek traces when one has almost nothing? The sequencing of each phase of the life of the grandparents, who left Poland in 1937, has been grasped. One of the most moving finds for the author, one of the very first, was to lay hands on archives concerning the Jablonka family in the Polish town of Parczew where it resided. There are archives and archives. Communist militants before the war, tried and imprisoned for their activities, the Jablonka grandparents left judicial traces, so precious to any historian. Hundreds of pages that make it possible to retrace their convictions, their comings and goings. It is a whole swath of the commitments of Polish communist Jews that presents itself to us, often perceived with subtlety and distance.

Sometimes with a little complacency: “It is not the failure of their dream, but antisemitism, that will get the better of the communist Jews of Poland,” writes Jablonka, for example. And also: “Jakub Berman is expelled from the Party as the ‘person responsible for the period of errors and deviations.’”⁵

I find these phrases improper, for, when all is said and done, it is indeed the failure of their dream that will fundamentally get the better of the communist Jews. Antisemitism will have served as a trigger, sometimes as a revelation, bringing them back to the status of wandering Jews. Among them, there were all sorts of situations: some of them no longer saw any future in a Poland become antisemitic again by the grace of the “comrades”; others, former officials of the regime, took refuge in Israel, but there found again… their former victims, Jews themselves. Still others, who felt responsible for the communist “balagan” (disorder), preferred to stay in Poland and remedy it. Finally, the case of Jakub Berman must not be idealized. He was indeed one of the principal officials responsible for the policy of Stalinist repression in Poland, and his expulsion from the Party — a lenient measure in view of his responsibilities — leaves me indifferent. Of course, this takes nothing away from the “complexity” of the Stalinist officials. By complexity, I mean that, as in all dictatorships, and even more so in the combination of personal dictatorship and totalitarianism, while the dependencies of the petty national masters with regard to Stalin were total, they could nonetheless be led to play subtle games in order to apply Moscow’s directives and at the same time pursue more or less distinct policies. In a fascinating interview with a Polish journalist from Solidarność, shortly before his death, Jakub Berman explained himself on this very well.⁶ This in no way exonerates him, all the more so as, unlike other Stalinist or ex-Stalinist officials, he did not manage to reexamine his past in light of his “breaks with socialist legality,” to use the terms in vogue at the time of his disgrace.

The files left by the grandparents at the Préfecture de Police and in other administrations make it possible to follow their itineraries. To learn more, Jablonka identifies, from the 1931 census, the inhabitants of the rue de Ménilmontant where they resided in 1942, thus managing to find witnesses still living in 2005 who would furnish abundant details about their arrest and deportation. He would also find again witnesses of the convoys that took the grandparents from Drancy to Auschwitz, providing him with information about their final moments. When he has no precise information, he formulates hypotheses.

What have we done with our history? The Jablonka case shows plainly that a new generation, sharing the motivations of the preceding one, is renewing the practices of investigation into the Shoah. The same is true of the book by Nicolas Mariot and Claire Zalc on the Jews of Lens⁷ and of the colloquium they organized on the “Micro-history of the Shoah” in December 2012.

To reflect on “one’s history” is also to point to failures and successes. The question of communism was important to me, while it is so little so for the generations that did not know it. At the university, I gave courses on “communism in the East” in the days when it existed, then on post-communism in the days when it no longer existed. At least for a few short years, for, very quickly, this question joined those historical pasts which, like “the Eastern question” or “the war of 1870,” ceased to “work upon” the present. As a result, those who perceived and thought communism as a living object, evolving day by day, found themselves suddenly orphaned of it. This brutal historicization-relegation of communism gave rise to no reckoning, and François Furet is right to underline that “the Soviet regime slipped out the back door of the theater of history, into which it had made a fanfare entrance.”⁸ The analyses that surrounded its nature and its dimension were likewise not equal to the event. Furet’s work Le passé d’une illusion (The Passing of an Illusion) is addressed too much, as the subtitle indicates, to the pathways of a transnational idea and not to the examination of a social system, which would have required approaches from social history, sociology or economics that might perhaps have better explained certain mechanisms of communism independent of its “seduction.” The comparisons of totalitarianisms and their crimes, so prized from time to time, brought no intelligibility to the communist question either, any more than did the opening of the archives. Our capacity to take the measure of the greatest dream of emancipation of the twentieth century is still slim.

There remains Zionism, Israel. The most difficult question. How can one hail the vigorous presence of a generation of grandchildren mindful of the Shoah and keep silent about that same generation, over there in the Near East, enlisted year after year in the repression of the Palestinians? Israeli cinema and literature never cease to unspool the psychic sufferings of the state of being an occupier. And of the state of being occupied. The summoning-up of Nazi crimes by the Israeli right, intended to bolster its policy, drives Israel a little further each day into a lofty solitude. Alone, Israel is, wedged between a hostile Egypt, a weak Jordan, a Lebanon dominated by Hezbollah. The sea remains always the only friendly neighbor (a sentence written too with irony if one thinks of the words of Ahmed Choukeiry, first leader of the PLO, who had declared in 1967 that the Jews must be thrown into the sea). The policy of the right-wing Zionism, which does not want to forge ties with its moderate Arab neighbors, is suicidal not so much on the military plane as on the moral one. Can one durably conceive of a society turned more toward the United States or Europe than toward its immediate neighbors? Powerful, supported by the powerful, Israel is nonetheless a Jew alone. It is a bitter realization for all those who took part in socialist Zionism or who took refuge in it after the war, with the hope of having at last found a haven.

But it is still a State for them too, for their descendants. Israel is a history still under construction, which cannot be reduced to the policy of occupation and colonization. It is always easy to criticize Israel from Paris, in a State comfortably settled within “secure and recognized” borders.

As regards Israel, our history, thank God, is still being written. And one must not forget the bright sparks of Israel since its birth: the kibbutzim, the democracy (the one that leads, for example, a former president to prison for rape), Haaretz, the technological, cinematographic, literary creativity, and so on.

What, then, have we done with our history? The collective dreams of social emancipation of the years 1960-1970 collapsed. Is that a good thing, is it a bad thing? Where were they going? They nonetheless transformed societies, often radically, permeating numerous reforms, even though they were largely supplanted by multiple forms of individualism. One can of course endlessly weigh the social advances and regressions. The generalized victory of capitalism and of democracy — democracy is not an ugly word — henceforth poses new questions: about the new balances of power, about the new dangers perceptible here and there.

A new history is taking shape.

Notes