A few words.
Friday evening, the commemorative plaque that my brother and I had affixed to the building where our father lived for much of his life was tagged. On the plaque are his name, Pierre Pachet, and the fact that he lived in this building on the rue Chapon, that he wrote there, that he conceived a literary œuvre there. We lived in that apartment, through childhood and adolescence; our mother died there, then our father. The apartment is no longer in our name, but something remains, on the façade, of what our father was — something it is hard to sum up in a few words.
Beside his first and last name, of a thoroughly French ring, one or several individuals took it into their heads to tag a Jewish star in order to indicate (I take the liberty of interpreting their gesture) to all and sundry that Pierre Pachet was Jewish. The yellow star does not mean only, when it is stuck like that onto a commemorative plaque, that the man was a Jew; it also carries an antisemitic meaning, of course, but I will stop already at this fact. It was not obvious — a few Google searches were perhaps necessary — but we know that Google, in France, devotes a great deal of its energy to answering the question of who is Jewish, when it is not spending its time answering the other great question of internet users, namely, who is homosexual.
Pierre, my father’s first name, is the name of a well-known Christian apostle, often depicted with keys at his belt, or weeping bitterly off in his corner. Peter the apostle was called Simon before Jesus renamed him Peter. Is it because he had changed names that Peter (the apostle), sensitive to the oiled interface of the name — which adheres to the person but can peel away from it — denied the name of Jesus so easily? He told the soldiers that he did not know Jesus, or more precisely, that he knew no Jesus? The name is one’s own, that is, it is someone’s property, but it is not the person. A proper name serves to recognize and even to distinguish, but it can also serve to deny, to camouflage, to hide. One and the same name can serve as well to kill as to save a life. It is a stigma, a revelation, or an elevation. Everything depends on the use one makes of it. And that, my father’s father had understood very well.
My father’s father, Simkha Apatchevski, arrived from Odessa in France at the beginning of the twentieth century to study medicine and become a dental surgeon. He very quickly wished to become French and was naturalized in 1924. With Ginda, his wife, who came from Lithuania, they had two children whom they named Hélène and Pierre. Under the Occupation, my grandfather had the good idea not to declare himself as a Jew to the Paris préfecture and to procure papers under another name, Apa, then Pachet. He took his family to the free zone and placed his children in Catholic religious institutions.
After the war, this borrowed name that had saved his life, he wished to make official. The Apatchevskis became, officially, the Pachets. They might perhaps have emigrated to Israel, where they had family, but they stayed in France and reaffirmed their integration into French society by this rather surprising change of surname, at a time when all their friends had kept their names of origin — names that, like shofars sounding out their staccato notes, ring Jewish. The name Pachet did not sound like a shofar, but it spoke, in its own way, of a silence, a reticence. It pronounced the desire to assimilate — a term fallen into disuse today — the way one blends into the crowd, to find a place there, a place to be.
My father remained traumatized all his life by the war; he never shed a diffuse terror, arising less from the mortal dangers that he and his family had run than from the bombardments — like those of Saint-Étienne, on 26 May 1944, a city onto which 440 tons of bombs were dropped by the Allies. The danger came not only from the Germans, or from the French policemen who came to arrest his father the day after his departure for the free zone; it came from the sky. The awareness of being Jewish, for its part, came only after the war, but it never resolved this question: why being Jewish meant being in mortal danger. And why today, being Jewish is, once again, to run a mortal danger. Jewish identity does not explain antisemitism. One can know a great deal about antisemitism and understand nothing of Jewish mysticism, and vice versa.
From his father’s desire for integration, my father, Pierre Pachet, kept more than a memory, more than a name: he considered questions of identity with both respect and irony. He had with the world around him — perhaps thanks to that name, to its ring of two thoroughly French syllables — a pacified relationship. Beneath the disquiet, beneath the vigilance that all his work expressed so well, beneath the skin of exasperation, he was in reality rather calm and even serene: being Jewish did not make him any more nervous than that. He found ethnic nonsense unbearable, the hollowness of all of it. He was full of himself, but perhaps also full of that integration willed by his father, even if the change of name came with a loss. That loss had saved them. It situates you somewhere, a father’s desire.
If need be, he read the haggadah in Hebrew without difficulty and led the Seder at the feast of Pessah with assurance. In the church where we gathered for our mother’s funeral, he apologized for turning his back on us, and, taking a kippa from his pocket, he read the kaddish, turned toward Jerusalem. It is perhaps the only time in his life that he staged a Jewish happening, that he imposed something of that order. And it was sublime.
Being Jewish is not reducible to being persecuted. And being part of the “chosen people” is not having won the lottery and benefiting for life from a winning ticket. To be part of the chosen people, to take up the terms of the Bible, is to shoulder the charge of a moral responsibility that was first laid on the shoulders of the Jewish people in the idea that, in the end, all human beings would in turn find themselves the bearers of the moral charge — this moral charge that saves and justifies our humanity, which is the same for all, all religions taken together, and which sums itself up, as Hillel, the great Jewish sage, puts it, in this simple maxim: do not do unto others what you would not want done to you. Jesus, Mohammed, and Kant said the same thing, but in different tongues.
During one of the many demonstrations of the zadistes last year in Nantes, I saw a drawing pasted on the place Foch: it showed Manuel Valls on his knees, and his asshole was represented by a star of David. Hauptscharführer Thilo, in charge of the infirmary at the Auschwitz camp (sic!), said that he found himself in the anus of the world. Even the swine use the symbols. The tetragram, or shield of David, in Hebrew, was for a long time a magical sign of protection against demons, or even a simple ornament, before being chosen, very belatedly, to symbolize Judaism. Reinhard Heydrich, on 1 September 1941, took up this shape in a modern adaptation of the medieval rouelle, an ostentatious yellow sign in the form of a ring, imposed on the Jews from the thirteenth century onward by a Christendom hostile to Jewishness. In France, the yellow star appeared in Paris from May 1942. The Apatchevskis did not wear it during the war; they preferred the very risky option of concealment, and that is what saved their lives (but it is also what might have cost them their lives just as easily).
This yellow star affixed to the commemorative plaque of Pierre Pachet comes to stir all that up, history and History writ large. It comes to mark, not a protection against demons, which the shield of David was originally, but the very presence of demons. I am happy that my father was able to live his Jewishness as he lived it, without shame, without embarrassment, without humiliation. On the evening of the attacks of 13 November 2015, he was in a café and decided to go home, despite the warnings, calmly. He was not afraid. He was afraid of bombardments, he was afraid of excesses, he was afraid of stupidity.
He was not afraid of being Jewish.
This article appeared in Libération, whom we thank [Yaël Pachet].