What views do the grandchildren of Jews come from Poland take of their family history, of the place they occupy within it, of the way it has marked them, of the life choices they make in light of that history? Such were the questions that ran through the encounters with grandchildren of Jews come from Poland—in France, in Israel, and in Poland—and that made possible the production of the book Héritiers de l’Exil et de la Shoah, entretien avec des petits-enfants de Juifs venus de Pologne (Heirs of Exile and of the Shoah: Conversations with Grandchildren of Jews Come from Poland, H. Oppenheim-Gluckman and D. Oppenheim, Érès Ed., 2006). Élie was one of them. We publish here the interview conducted in 2005 (by Izio Rosenman) and an interview in the aftermath conducted in January 2013 (by H. Oppenheim-Gluckman).
Interview conducted in 2005
I am 24, I was born in Clamart, I am a film student. My parents married when I was ten; my father is a professor and my mother a theater director. My parents were born after the war, my father in ’50–51, my mother in Switzerland in ’48, of a Swiss father and a Lithuanian mother. My two paternal grandparents were born in Poland, in the Kraków region, and they came to France in the 1930s. My paternal grandfather, Henri, had four brothers who came to France before him to study law. He was the last, and his parents did not want to pay for his studies. He nevertheless decided to go to France, and very quickly he got involved in politics there, then the war came and he joined the Resistance. I know he was called Moshé. My real name, his name, was modified by the French administration to Frenchify it and to make it simpler to pronounce. My father lays claim to this original name, and he writes his books and his articles under it. This transformation must have taken place after the war, and not before. I also know that my grandfather worked for the army for a year after the war. He must therefore have already been naturalized, was considered French, and he himself considered himself French.
My maternal grandmother—Irène, or its equivalent in Lithuanian or Yiddish—was born in Lithuania, in Kaunas. She came in ’38 to Paris to join her brother, who was studying law there, and who then returned to Lithuania to see a girlfriend and who died there, deported. She remained in France, did secretarial studies, gave German lessons—she spoke it very well—and she was learning French in evening classes. She was very young and she helped her mother and her sister, who lived in a tiny apartment in Paris. My maternal grandfather is French, born between the Jura and Switzerland. My mother knew him little, and I knew him no better. I don’t know his name.
How did your family come through the war?
That is the part I know best, even if it is not exhaustive. My paternal grandfather fought with the French soldiers, then he joined the Resistance in the Limousin. He received medals, he was a very brave fellow. He lived there after the war, and that is why my father was born in Limoges. Though he was the one who had not studied, it was he who knew that one had to fight and not declare oneself as a Jew at the town hall. His brothers declared themselves and were deported to Germany, but not to extermination camps, and no one died. On the other hand my paternal grandfather lost a niece during the Vel d’Hiv roundup:1 he tried to find her again, but she died at Auschwitz. She was sixteen. That marked him deeply; it was one of the hardest losses. My maternal grandmother was deported at the beginning of ’44 with her mother and her sister to Auschwitz. Her mother died there; her sister and she survived. They fought to live and they returned to France by way of Sweden. Her sister, Leila, then went off to the United States, married an uncle—no, a distant Lithuanian cousin who had gone off to Mississippi in the ’30s. They were finding husbands for them, and it must have been very hard for her after coming through Auschwitz. She knew neither English nor anyone. I believe she was rather unhappy and at the same time she founded a whole line, she had very handsome children who are very successful, who are lawyers. I am in contact with them, I have often gone to see them. She died a few years ago.
I have always known that my paternal grandfather was someone extraordinary. I have a great deal of pride in this man who fought. At the same time, I have seen with time that the war was his life. Everything revolved around it; it was the most formidable thing he did. Afterward he was a tailor, he had a fine life, rather a good one, he was not too poor, they had handsome children who succeeded. But when I was younger, he spoke only of the war, of war memories, and of the incredible things that happened to him—for example, how he managed to get Hamlet performed by people of the Resistance in Marseille. When I was little, I was sure that he had killed people, and I was very impressed by that. At the same time I was not allowed to have plastic weapons; he didn’t want my parents to buy me any, he couldn’t bear it. He had a firearm at home; that I learned later. He was always on the alert despite the peace. He was an anti-communist, a socialist, he nearly held political office, but he didn’t go all the way. With my father a soixante-huitard and a Maoist, it was very hard. On my maternal grandmother’s side, I always saw her number on her arm when I was little, I always knew, everything was explained to me very well. A year ago, I interviewed her for a personal inquiry I was working on; it was then that she gave me, for the first time, the account of her journey through Auschwitz, of her deportation; it was magnificent, it was a real act for her to tell it to me. I learned of her journey during the war, how she survived Auschwitz, what her detention was like. She was someone very brave.
My maternal grandmother also has a rather astonishing trajectory, since, having returned to France, she was pregnant with my mother and was abandoned by her husband. She became a secretary and joined a meat import-export firm. As she spoke German, she rose through the ranks and became a very important member there, the first woman to attain such a high post. She had a very fine life; she earned a very good living, although she truly started from nothing. A woman who comes out of Auschwitz and goes into meat import-export, that is still rather astonishing, it’s funny too in a certain way. My grandmother is a rather rigid woman, with a great deal of wit, very cultivated and at the same time complicated. We love each other very much, we see each other fairly often, but not enough for her taste. I could be a better grandson. We talk about art, about politics, and now that she has spoken to me about Auschwitz we talk more freely. She is 83, but she is very lively; we also have rows, because she has a strong personality and so do I. I am her only grandson.
My paternal grandfather left Poland essentially for economic reasons—it wasn’t even the bourgeoisie, it was the very petty bourgeoisie—but also to flee antisemitism. He may also have fled his mother, whom he detested, a terrible woman who did not love him. He was the unloved son. We spoke little of Poland; I am not sure they ever went back, I am even sure they did not, they had no great love for their country. My paternal grandmother, Éva, is more complicated; she was a simpler woman than my grandfather, and I never really knew her, I know very little of her story, I never talked much with her about Poland. She was a saleswoman at the Printemps department store, she was a very beautiful woman. She is still alive, but very old. My grandparents spoke Yiddish, very little Polish. In my memories, they spoke in a hard and biting way about Poland or the Poles.
My major question recently was to know whether my grandfather, during the war, had fought for France and out of a patriotic feeling: I know that he fought out of love for France, for the country that had taken him in—not out of an anti-fascist concern like the communists—which he would never have done for Poland. The anti-fascist struggle was also present, since he was a socialist and since he too had ideals, but unlike others, perhaps, the French ideology of equality played a great part in his struggle against Nazi Germany. I always perceived in him a love for France: he read French novels, he loved French politics, the Front Populaire.
I have the impression that this image of France also motivated him to leave Poland. But I say this because I have heard other stories of Polish Jews who dreamed of going to France because they thought they would earn more money and have more freedom of expression.
In relation to your grandfather’s ideals?
I am in his socialist vein, while also not feeling myself communist. Nor can I completely subscribe to his idea of France; I have the hindsight of history and of the historical advances on French fascism and the Vel d’Hiv roundup. Today, much of France has disappointed me, but I feel totally French and I admire this country, I am very glad that my grandparents chose this place to immigrate to and to establish a lineage. My grandfather fought for France; I will do so too.
And in relation to your parents’ ideals?
My father was a Maoist militant, a real one, a hard-liner. My mother was less politicized, even though she was at Nanterre in ’68. I have no relation to that; I find it exotic, I cannot see myself doing it. But I am not too much in agreement with his current position, for he has changed his point of view. I situate myself in an in-between. The taking up of arms, the recourse to violence that my father kept from his own father (he is not a violent man, but without hesitation he would have pulled the trigger if it had been necessary), I feel close to that. But my mother tempered this feeling; I am someone less hard, less strong, and I would have gone less far than my grandfather or my father. My father’s relation to politics, I sense, was a function of my grandfather’s past as a resister: the struggle as a mirroring between father and son. But I do not compare the militancy of my Maoist father and the action of my grandfather during the Second World War; I do not place any continuity between the two commitments.
Did Judaism play a role in your grandparents’ choices?
My grandparents were not really religious. We did not do Shabbat, we did Pesach, but as I do it too, it was secular and not at all religious. At the same time my grandfather also fought because he was a Jew, and that played a role in his struggle. My father bears a very French first name, like many Jews. I believe my grandparents wanted him to integrate as much as possible into French society by not bringing Judaism to the fore at all. But my grandfather took part in the CLEJ, my father and my uncle too, as counselors. The CLEJ, the secular club for Jewish childhood, is a summer camp that takes in Jews and non-Jews, secular Jews in any case. It is a left-wing movement founded after the Second World War. I too went there when I was very little; my whole band of friends was there. It formed us as French citizens and French Jews, citizens open to others whatever their origin and their religion. I also went there because my father had been there. There is something very familial in it, and I am not the only example of this lineage. The CLEJ comes from the Bund: at the start it was Polish Jewish workers, and my grandfather was very close to the Bundists. In my turn I wanted to be there as a child and then as a counselor, and I also wanted to inscribe myself in this movement, even if I am not a militant as some other friends wanted to be.
What is Poland for you?
I have two ideas of Poland, one gray and dull, that of the country where there were the extermination camps, where the Shoah had the greatest effect, and at the same time that of a Poland that could be very modern, where I know things are happening, where young people are emerging who seem liberated and open. I am not totally hostile to Poland, but I know there were pogroms in ’46, a great wave of antisemitism in ’68 when the Jews had to leave again because antisemitism was too pervasive. They still have a lot of work to do. I saw a report set in Łódź, where one saw antisemitic graffiti everywhere, skinheads. I also know that the Black people who come to study there have problems, get beaten up. Racism is still very virulent there, in Russia too, and antisemitism as well. It is a country that has a great history and that could evolve.
Have you been to Poland?
No, but I will go. I had a great Polish friend who was not Jewish, who came from the Polish working class, and I have also met many Poles in Berlin. If I went to Poland, I would go to Auschwitz, even if I know that Kraków is a very beautiful city. I would go to both, but I would go to see the extermination camp where my grandmother was, that’s obvious. I made a similar trip to Buchenwald with a friend from the CLEJ.
Have you had the chance to read works on the Judaism of Poland?
No.
On Polish culture?
When I was little, I read youth novels that spoke of young Jews in Poland. I read other novels and other things on the Shoah. But, strangely, I know very little of Polish history. I know it was an incredible, important empire.
Is Yiddish culture part of your past, present, or future interests? Obviously, my grandparents led me toward Yiddish culture, but I do not really know it. It is a magnificent language. In the future, I will learn it, soon. I know it must be preserved and that Paris is the center of Yiddish in Europe. There is still a lot to do, and young people like me must take it up. I feel very close to this culture and to the Jewish artists. The Jews too had great artists, like the filmmakers in Hollywood, the Hungarian, German Jews who became great filmmakers, and it is through that that my Judaism passes. Something of Yiddish culture passes through American actors like Edward G. Robinson, or the film Scarface by H. Hawks, played by a Yiddish actor. I know that Edward G. Robinson, who played the first gangsters in American films, did not speak English but Yiddish. These are things that inspire me and that please me.
What place does Israel hold in your life?
That is a fairly new question. I have no family in Israel, I have never been there. My relation to Israel is complicated. Before the second Intifada, I took very little interest in it; now I take more. It is a Jewish state, I want to defend it, but so that it may be even better, so that it may exist at any rate, because I sense it threatened in its existence. I feel closer to Israel, but I do not have the impression that it is the same people as me. When I see Israelis on TV—I have not yet been there—but I sense that they are other Jews than my grandparents, than my uncle, my parents. I identify with the Jewish state, but not at all with the Israelis. I do not have the impression that we have the same relation to Judaism, not to mention the specificity of French Judaism, which is more open. I know there are great Israeli intellectuals, and people who went off to Israel because they sensed that it was there that they would be able to express themselves. But I think France still remains the most incredible country for that, despite the antisemitism I sense. I don’t make a big thing of it, but neither should one deny it.
Do you feel integrated into French life?
Yes, totally. I am French and Jewish afterward. Abroad I am proud to be French, I don’t say I’m Jewish. Two weeks ago, I went to vote.
What does the Israeli-Palestinian conflict represent for you?
The Palestinians have been cheated, and we behaved very badly toward them. But I have the impression that terrorism disregards plenty of other things, and it is too hard, too atrocious after the Shoah for it to be acceptable. The people who resort to that, I sense that they are antisemites and that they want to destroy Jews. On the other hand, the Israeli state is very complicated; I do not feel capable of pronouncing on it, but I know it must exist, that the Jews needed a Jewish state, because the diaspora also gave the Shoah. At the same time I am very critical and I really do not feel pro-Israeli. This conflict affects me a great deal. The criticisms against Israel touch me personally, without my really knowing why, it is of an unconscious order and a bit of fantasy, but it wounds me when Israel is attacked too much in its very foundation.
When you have children, do you think you will give them an education, a knowledge of Jewish, or Polish, or Israeli culture?
Obviously, I think about it. I will give them a Jewish culture, Jewish first names if possible. I want them to know the whole history of my grandparents, what they came through, the drama of the Shoah above all, to which my Judaism is also strongly tied, I cannot deny it, it is one of its foundations. It may be sad, but it is the truth, and I really want them to know. While knowing that my children and my grandchildren will perhaps be less conscious of it, and so much the better. The Shoah too must disappear, but a long time from now, not now, it is still too present. I want my wife too, even if she is not Jewish, to be conscious of it, to have a relation to Judaism and to be happy to share it with the children. If she is Catholic, I would prefer that they be Jewish rather than Catholic. I want them to be proud of their specificity and their originality, if it is one, and that at the same time they be French and free citizens. I would like them to know a lot about Judaism, more than I myself know, for that matter. Now, I am going to learn even more, whether it be Yiddish or the history of Judaism, and not only its contemporary history. Strangely, at the CLEJ, which was Jewish but secular, we did not learn it and we didn’t care either, and that’s no bad thing. But I hope my children will be stronger than me on this history.
I have the impression that it is now that I must do my learning, and on my own. My parents and the people around me were very good on Judaism, I bear them no grudge at all and they taught me all that was needed. But I am now an adult, it is up to me to do this work. I will do it or not. I learn as I go along, I am not uncultivated either. But I am astonished to see Jews who know the holidays very well, and people who have Jewish fathers and non-Jewish mothers and who know them better than I do, who am a real Jew, I mean by virtue of the parents. But Pesach, I know. That too is the Jewish people: there are people who know nothing about it and who are Jews all the same, that is the particularity.
What does Jewish, or Polish, or Israeli cuisine represent for you?
It represents the Sunday lunches at my grandparents’ where I ate gefilte fisch and kneidels. My father cooks Jewish food and I often go to the rue des Rosiers to buy cold cuts, I find it delicious, but I don’t know the share of Jewish or Yiddish or Polish specificity they contain, what distinguishes them.
Does the history of your grandparents seem near or far to you?
It is complicated, I don’t really know, I am truly torn. On the one hand I feel close to what happened, to their struggle and their life, it is a way of supporting them and respecting their memory, since my paternal grandfather is dead. After his death my father did a long work of mourning that concluded in a novel in which he figures. This work moved me a great deal. I was conscious that my grandfather was someone formidable, but after this novel I knew his story in more detail. On the other hand, the world before the war seems rather far to me. Their Polish origin, their childhood, that seems to me another world, but not the war and their life after the war, that is still very vivid for me, I feel myself the grandson of a tailor in Belleville, in this lineage. I often go back in front of their building. What my maternal grandmother tells me of Lithuania—how she used to ice-skate on rivers, for example—seems to me very far, even farther than Poland, like a world of books or of Singer’s tales.
The history of my paternal grandfather marked me, for example the episode where he tried to bribe a soldier to save his niece locked up in the Vel d’Hiv. This young woman was almost my age. He was in the Resistance, but not with the FTP-MOI, the communists. He was a patriot and at the same time a Jew, it is a specificity I want to support and that touches me a great deal. He fought, he killed people, he hid, it runs counter to what one thinks of the Jews as victims, dead in the Shoah, and it stirs me a great deal. I don’t know whether it constitutes me as an individual or a citizen, but I have it in my head, and in the difficult moments of my life it will resurge, that’s obvious. He also killed people, since at the Liberation he killed collaborators, perhaps he was mistaken then. Afterward, I know he was recruited by the French secret services, I found that rather exotic and funny when I was little. I also know that he detested the army, he did not like firearms, and afterward he became a tailor.
Your grandfather is a figure of a resister rather than of a Polish Jewish immigrant?
Yes. I heard little about Poland—he did not tell me the little anecdotes of the games with his brothers, unlike my maternal grandmother—because he was a Frenchman who had fought for France. The figure of the resister shatters any other image I can have of him, it is the strongest, him in the maquis fighting alongside people who were non-Jews. On the other hand I would have liked to know more about his relation to Israel, in particular to its creation. In fact I know it very well, he was totally anti-Zionist. He went to visit Israel, but for nothing in the world would he have lived there. My maternal grandmother strongly supports Israel, but she too is very harsh on Sharon (the current prime minister), she is formidable.
Do you see your maternal grandmother more as a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant?
She has a very strong accent, which my paternal grandparents also had. That is her immigrant side, but she has very little relation to Lithuania. She did speak to me of her childhood, but by culture she is truly French. At the same time she also has a Germanic culture, she knows Goethe and Schiller well. She came from the bourgeoisie, her father was an engineer, they were cultivated people, they had art books. As a child, she knew Italian painting. An uncle went off in 1900 to seek diamonds in South Africa. They were polyglots, they knew the world, whereas on my paternal grandfather’s side they were really working-class folk. When she arrived in France, she was a little Lithuanian girl who came from the countryside—Kaunas is still a small town—but she was armed with a culture and she integrated quickly. I sense her as French, but not so much, and not totally Lithuanian either. I sense her as Irène, my grandmother, very special. She worked in France, she speaks French very well, without any mistake, with a strong accent, yet she will never be able to blend into the French population. The passage through Auschwitz meant that she is no longer a citizen of anything. She is a living force, she reconstituted herself, but one does not sense her really driven by any patriotism, she is a citizen of the world. She could have gone off to the United States, she nearly did, I could have been American, or Israeli, it came down to very little in the end.
What about your paternal grandmother and your maternal grandfather?
My paternal grandmother, Éva, is still alive, she is a little over 90. I see her fairly little, she has lost her wits a bit, we have no real conversation. She was a woman devoted to her husband, a housewife, she raised her children, but it is my grandfather who remains with me above all. He wore her out, he was really very tiresome, he had a lot of rows with her. She was not a strong-willed person, she was a rather reserved woman, a little lady who did everything for her husband and her children and who had a fairly happy life. I had little relationship with her. When I went to their place, it was my grandfather who talked the most. She was very nice.
My maternal grandfather is the only French blood I have, and non-Jewish. It is complicated because my mother knew him little, my grandmother remarried an Italian Jew. My mother got back in touch with her paternal family about twenty years ago. She learned that she had a half-brother in France. I met my maternal grandfather once, he gave me a stuffed toy, he died of cancer some time later. My mother had a very difficult relationship with her mother, who abandoned her in part, who put her in boarding school, who was a woman returning from Auschwitz, it can’t have been fun all the time. My mother was born in Switzerland, my real grandfather came from the Jura, but he was a bit Swiss. I feel a bit Swiss and I also have non-Jewish blood in my veins. But I don’t know the non-Jewish family at all. I know I have Catholic family, my uncle, my mother’s half-brother, is very likable, but very different from us.
What would you like to say about all this history?
I have the impression that my Judaism is more and more pervasive, and it is a path I have been able to note in my parents too. My father was very anti-Zionist in his youth, now it is the opposite. When my grandmother told me last year of her deportation, it played a great role for me, it also grounds me as an individual. Now, I sense that I will fight for the Jews, that I feel myself entirely Jewish. I am very proud to be Polish or Lithuanian, I like to say “my grandparents are Polish” without specifying that they are Jews. I am glad to come from far away, from another life, and I tell myself that it is very close, it has not been so long since my grandparents arrived in France, fifty years is nothing. In the end, I too could have been born in Poland. I quite like this idea of chance. At the same time the Shoah was anything but chance. Everything mixes together there. It is perhaps us, the third generation, that is more mixed, more complicated, more protean, that is going to give an answer to “what is it to be Jewish?” I feel myself a rather strange object, a bit of a mutant, indefinable too. That is why I support Israel while wondering what a Jewish state is. I have read books on it, but I still have not understood, I am in doubt. In any case my children will be Jewish, even if their mother is not.
Do you have the feeling of being able to unify these various histories?
Yes. And the CLEJ is also a place that truly grounded me. It is very open, left-wing and at the same time Jewish, full of mixture, Sephardim and also non-Jews. I have non-Jewish friends who look entirely Jewish, and Jewish friends who don’t want to hear anything about it. As for me, I am a point of balance, and I have the impression of being able to unify this while not being schizophrenic, but while not yet knowing how to define what it is to be Jewish, for I have no relation to religion or to Israel. I have a relation to my grandparents, to a very personal, very private history, which also joins up with the great history. The liberal left-wing Jews are fewer and fewer, there are a few in Paris, perhaps also in New York. My American cousins are not at all like us, they have less relation to art, to literature, there are no books in their homes. They are liberal, but they go to the synagogue, they had their Bar Mitzvah, and I did not. My parents never asked me whether I wanted to do it or not. We are fairly rare, I say “we” because I have a band of friends who are a bit in the same case as me. My relation to Israel, a mixture of defense and criticism, is also found less and less. I hope we will continue to be open to the world and that we will share this with our children. In the end, there are few who are neither religious nor Israeli, nor fully into Yiddish culture, while being invested by something strange.
INTERVIEW CONDUCTED IN JANUARY 2013
H. Oppenheim-Gluckman (HOG): Today, after rereading the interview done in 2005, what would you say?
Élie: I still take an admiring view of my paternal grandfather’s trajectory. Now what I would do more, I would link my grandfather’s trajectory and my father’s, notably in relation to his political commitment, so strong, in Maoism, without ever going as far as armed struggle, but being on the fringe of legality to defend a political conviction.
HOG: That was already something you had spoken about in 2005.
Élie: Now I would do it even more, notably because I know that many young people who took part in the Maoist brigades identified with the Jewish or foreign resisters who took part in the liberation of France.
HOG: And in relation to your maternal grandmother, of whom you had also spoken a great deal?
Élie: My grandmother died two years ago, so it is very different. At the end of her life, besides the fact that she fell into a kind of madness in the last months of her life, she spoke to me again of the camps, of Auschwitz. Above all, I made a trip to the United States with my parents and my girlfriend, where we went to celebrate the 100th birthday of the man who married my grandmother’s sister in the United States. I got to know my American family better, even if I already knew it. My grandmother could not come, but she was very present. We saw photos of her, we asked ourselves plenty of questions about her name, where she came from, I was able to learn more.
HOG: Did this trip modify your vision of her?
Élie: I heard her speak Yiddish with this great-uncle, I had never heard her before. It is a very particular Yiddish, Lithuanian Yiddish, and it was very moving. No, I don’t think I learned things. She specified for me again her whole trip to Sweden at the Liberation, and then in any case she repeated herself a great deal.
HOG: Did her death or the end of her life modify the vision you had of her?
Élie: It accentuated plenty of traits, both her immense courage and her immense solitude, a solitude—how to say it—philosophical, she was surrounded, but she was unique, in her uniqueness. It also accentuated her harshness, which I knew, but not as much as at the end of her life, where she revealed herself even more. I never linked this harshness to the camps, I never told myself it was the camps that made her like that.
HOG: And what did you link it to?
Élie: To her psychology, to the strength of this woman, who survived after all, that harshness was needed; and then I also linked it to the idea that she was a bit “dinosaur-like,” that she came from another world, from another time. At the end of her life, she told me how she used to ice-skate on the frozen lake of her town in Lithuania. I was very moved to see this woman as a little girl dancing on the ice, she who had crossed the whole 20th century, who was very physical, rather strong.
HOG: So there, you could picture her.
Élie: Yes, I visualized her more, indeed, I had grown up a bit, there was Sarah who had arrived in my life, she was very present for my grandmother, that changed things a great deal. My grandmother was very, very tiresome. She asked plenty of absurd questions, but she was funny. I realized that she was very curious about life.
HOG: You had not realized it before?
Élie: A little less, but there is also Sarah’s grandmother, who is not a camp survivor, who comes from Russia, who is Jewish, she is much less curious about life than my grandmother was, so I realized that.
HOG: And in relation to your life choices, what would you say currently, seven years later?
Élie: I made a film, called Alyah (Aliyah), and I am astonished by it every day, for my grandmother had no relation to Israel, she never went there. And my grandfather, it was rather an anti-Zionist tradition, even if after the Six-Day War, when everyone attacked Israel, he sided with Israel. I went only once to Israel with my grandmother, and there I write a film about a fellow who goes off to Israel. He leaves, one doesn’t know why, without ideology, a bit out of obsolescence, out of sadness, so I think there is something very contemporary about his Alyah, where one no longer sees a future, someone in a disenchanted world. Now, in light of my film and of what I have come through, it is so strange given the little relation my grandmother had to Israel. I am at once very astonished and reassured, for I myself do not identify at all, I do not feel at all Israeli, obviously. I identify rather with those Jews who are in the process of disappearing, who are people who are totally Jewish, who came through the war, who came through life, the 20th century, but who have no link to Israel. Because they are Jews of the diaspora. And now, with my film, it is as though one had to be linked and have a relation to Israel in order to live one’s Judaism. Whereas all those people are in the process of dying and the Shoah is in the process of receding; now it is Israel that is the most pervasive point of Judaism. It is probably an unconscious thing I told myself and that saddens me a little, deep down.
HOG: For what reason?
Élie: I who come from the CLEJ, who was at Corvol, so the Bundist tradition, I had the impression that Judaism was very strong in the diaspora. It is the great strength of Judaism to be uprooted, to be everywhere and nowhere, and I do not subscribe at all to Israeli policy, I fight it, so I feel a bit isolated.
HOG: Was this project born after your grandmother’s death?
Élie: No, not at all. I wrote it just like that. I wrote the story of a dealer, who goes off to Israel, a contemporary figure, someone who would be neither really a crook, nor a good guy, someone who would be a bit on the fringe, a sort of Wandering Jew; and then came the idea of the Aliyah, because many people go off to Israel neither out of ideology nor out of religion. Obviously some leave out of Zionism or religious conviction, but others more for sentimental reasons, out of sadness, thinking that over there their life will go better, and that interested me a great deal. So they go off to the most ideologized country in the world, without any idea.
HOG: And the birth of your children, did that modify the relation to your history?
Élie: There is something that must have grounded me, which is that I am the grandson of an Auschwitz survivor, and that I see, even in relation to my friends. I have many friends whose grandparents were hidden, some were camp survivors, but not so many after all, it is still something. It moves me, obviously, and I think of my daughters, I hope to raise them in a knowledge of what happened.
HOG: Is this shared by your partner?
Élie: Yes, we made two little Jewish girls after all, two little secular Jewish girls, it’s rather strange. That’s the strange thing, but they are secular and Jewish. I identify totally with the ideas of the CLEJ and with what they took from the Bund, that is my Judaism. With its naïveté, with its total ignorance of certain aspects of Judaism, but that is my Judaism.
HOG: And yet there was this film.
Élie: If one thinks about it now, I do not believe I will be able to bypass Israel entirely, which I regard as a mythological bridge of the contemporary world. Who does not speak of Israel? There is a somewhat biblical, mythological side to it, the two friend-enemy brothers, two peoples who could be friends and who are enemies.
Notes
Roundup of the Jews, including children, carried out on July 16 and 17, 1942, by the French police directed by René Bousquet.↩︎