For Anne-Lucie
Facing the public
I met Eduardo Halfon at the Museum of the Art and History of Judaism in January 2021. Well, not quite. We were not seated together in armchairs, on a stage, bothered by a spotlight that kept us from making out this or that person in the room. If we were bothered — he in a house, in the provinces, and I in my suburban apartment — it was by the hazards of an unstable connection, and by that “Zoom” which set us face to face, or rather face to the camera of a computer screen.
I have therefore met Eduardo Halfon only in a virtual way, and not “in person” as the saying goes.
Eduardo and Halfon
I do not know whom I met that evening in January 2021. Let us be clear: it was indeed the physical person one sees in the photographs. But meeting a writer is not quite the same as meeting the physical person.
It is finding oneself before someone who has donned a stage costume in order to step before the public. In Cancion (Canción), “Eduardo Halfon” (I use quotation marks to distinguish him from the one who walks in the street or plays with his son) — Eduardo, who is the narrator, finds himself at a congress of Lebanese writers in Japan: “I arrived in Tokyo disguised as an Arab.” That is the novel’s first sentence. A little further on, speaking of the invitation he had received, he develops: “I had opened the wardrobe and found there the Lebanese disguise — among so many other disguises — inherited from my paternal grandfather, a native of Beirut.” This full wardrobe sometimes places him in a quandary (the embarrassment of choice, for example) or has something surprising about it. So it is when he puts on the identity of a Polish writer “in a Barcelona bookshop which insisted — still insists — absolutely on shelving [his] books in the section reserved for Polish literature.”
At the end of Cancion, the Lebanese writer is called an impostor by an old novelist from Tripoli present in the room. What to say of the Catalan booksellers who had shelved his books among Polish texts? And why must one classify, file away, even shut up a writer? Every writer is an impostor and the reader delights in it: he opens a novel to let himself be taken in, like the child by the magician or the ordinary passer-by by the three-card-monte dealer.
The reader… perhaps I am dreaming. Which reader? We live in times of literal-mindedness, of literal comprehension, of high seriousness. Fantasy, invention, the daring association, the digression and the non sequitur are less well received than the cry of the heart, the confession, the pathos that accompanies all those emotions. It is also the time when, to take up the sales pitch one reads on posters peddling books or films, we want the famous “based on a true story.”
In Eduardo Halfon’s novels, everything (or nearly everything) is “based on a true story.” Beginning with the story that constitutes the heart of the work, the sun of a constellation in formation, Le boxeur polonais (The Polish Boxer). “But how to tell it? From what point of view? Where to begin?” wonders the narrator. To know is “to bring reality to literature.”
That alone matters.
The sun
Contrary to what the title suggests, Le boxeur polonais says nothing of that noble art, or of any sportsman in Lublin, Sosnowiec or Poznań. Here is the novel’s first paragraph: “69 752. His telephone number. Tattooed on his left forearm, so he wouldn’t forget it. That’s what my grandfather used to tell me. And what I believed throughout my whole childhood. Where we lived, in the 1970s, telephone numbers had five digits.”
At the origin of a writer’s vocation, then, there is the tale of a grandfather, a “lie” that avoids saying too much about a reality more than violent, or about a wound impossible truly to heal. I do not know if the lie is the right strategy. What I do know is that one could write a history of the numbers tattooed on forearms. One could, or, alas, one could have.
Simone Veil had hers inscribed on her sword as an Académicienne; Primo Levi had wished his to appear on his tomb. Throughout his life in France, until 1980, my father bet his on the tiercé: A17602 became 17 6 2. He still had to actually bet (he almost never did), seventeen horses had to be running, and that combination had to come out in order.
Eduardo, as a child, is not fooled for long. His “Oitze,” that is the Yiddish name by which he addresses him as he pours him the drop of whisky the old man allows himself, ends up telling him the whole story contained in that number. Toward the end, the “Polish boxer” locked up with him in Block 11 of Auschwitz — the block of those condemned to death — gives him good counsel before a sham trial. The story pleases the adult Eduardo becomes, “perhaps for the power it grants to words, the power to save.”
Eduardo will never know what the boxer told him exactly. Oitze refuses to speak Polish and thus to repeat the words: “I never knew whether my grandfather did not remember the boxer’s words, whether he had chosen not to repeat them to me, or whether, those words having fulfilled their function and no longer mattering, they had flown off forever, just like the Polish boxer who on a dark night had spoken them.”
The reader has waited to know, he knows nothing. Reason enough to be disappointed — but to be disappointed is good: there remains the imagining. A good book does not exist without its reader.
Of titles and false leads
If boxing is not at issue in Le boxeur polonais, monastic life is no more at issue at the beginning of Monastère (Monastery). We will discover that place, and the adventure it conceals, at the novel’s end, with — there too — a story of disguise and change of given name. “Oh ghetto mon amour,” the title of the last story in Signor Hoffman, refers to a song born in the Lodz ghetto. Taken literally, the title shocks; in Eduardo Halfon’s world, one is not at the literal level. Finally, to keep to this question of titles, let us say that Cancion (song in French — the title remains identical in all translations) is a play on words with no link to any melody whatsoever.
The two sides
At this point, I notice I have said nothing about the construction of the work, or about the formation of the constellation. This is not insignificant. Eduardo Halfon came to literature rather late. Trained as an engineer, he was not a great reader. Now, this is one of the paths to writing one’s own texts. Not the only one, fortunately. The child spent much time with family (and notably on those torpid and very boring Sundays). His books are filled with evocations of weddings, mournings, religious feasts, and the encounters such ceremonies provoke are always funny, surprising, and savoury. For anyone who loves them, they recall the characters of A Serious Man, by the Coen brothers.
The list of the rabbis of Guatemala City established in Monastère would deserve to be quoted. (I, for my part, would have liked to meet that Argentine rabbi, a fan of Boca Juniors, hostile to mixed marriages, “who had scored an own goal” — I shall say no more.)
Léon Tenenbaum’s story is at the origin of everything. He represents the maternal side. After Le boxeur polonais, published in 2007, there would appear La pirouette (The Pirouette; 2010), Monastère (2013), and Signor Hoffman, a collection of stories set in Guatemala or Poland.
In 2017, Deuils (Mourning) opens the cycle of Edouard Halfon, the paternal side. A Lebanese Jew, or born in Lebanon (then under Syrian or Ottoman tutelage), having passed through Corsica and Paris before at last arriving in Guatemala. Cancion, finally, recounts a violent event undergone by this grandfather Halfon in his country torn by civil war. A war which has never truly ceased, bringing massacres, even genocide, of the Amerindian populations.
There is thus, to put it briefly, the Polish side and the Lebanese side. There is always Guatemala in the background. Other settings allow the novelist to travel and above all to search (or to find): Israel, the United States, Poland, the former Yugoslavia and Japan.
There is family. And then there are women (or the women). With them the narrator searches, and often he finds. I could introduce them all, but one would tire. I keep, then, to five, thanks to whom the narration moves forward, and who each illuminate one aspect of the work (and give an idea of the narrator).
The guides
Madame Maroszek is the inhabitant of Lodz who will serve as his mentor, once he has the information provided by the grandfather. She is a woman of great elegance, despite her great age — always young, in her own way.
She is polyglot, writes very long letters on stationery gathered from the hotels of her city. She loves to write. But not only. Sharp-witted, she knows how to question her visitor: “Mrs Maroszek asked me whether my name had any meaning. I told her I was not sure, that in fact it was only half of the real name (the other half had been arbitrarily cut off by an immigration officer at Ellis Island), but that, if I was to believe my paternal grandfather, my Lebanese grandfather, Halfon came from a word in old Hebrew or perhaps old Persian, meaning the one who changes his life. Mrs Maroszek lit a cigarette and, releasing a puff of smoke, barely smiling, murmured:
Like an engineer who becomes a writer. I answered with a smile, I said perhaps, indeed, and I finished my glass of red wine in silence, thinking that a name, any name at all, is so transcendent, so capricious, so unreal, that we all end up becoming our own fiction.”
This narrator with the unreal name whom we follow does not quite know why she is so generous with him, helping him in his research on a period for which non-Jewish Poles have little fondness. Contradictory versions exist as to her parents: did they save Jews shut up in the ghetto? Did they denounce them? Impossible to know. Madame Maroszek’s life is a fiction, at bottom.
She leads the narrator to the apartment where Léon Tenenbaum and his family lived — there where, while he was playing dominoes with friends, he was taken before being deported. The episode of the visit projects Eduardo into another time: the images overlap, the questions tumble forth. And first of all, to what end this thing that gnaws at him each time he finds himself before a relic — before the Warsaw ghetto wall, at Auschwitz and at Sachsenhausen?
More astonishing still is the encounter with the woman who now occupies the place. She knows nothing of the time of the ghetto and understands little of the narrator’s approach. She nevertheless does not oppose it. The art of counterpoint transforms an episode that might be dramatic, even pathetic, into a moment of very high comedy. To develop it would be to spoil it. Let us say simply that a pressing need obliges Eduardo to make his way to the toilets where he makes a singular discovery.
Madame Maroszek belongs to the characters who set Eduardo on the path of writing — for to live without writing is not quite to live. She offers him three very particular books: “I was about to interrupt her and ask her why she was giving me such a strange present, these three books, when I remembered all her letters, her stories written by hand on stationery from different hotels, of different sizes and colours, and I felt I was on the point of understanding or glimpsing something. Either that what mattered for Mrs Maroszek was to use written papers as places of encounter and reconciliation. Or that what mattered was the very paper on which one writes one’s story, whether an account book, a piece of headed paper, a scrap of yellow paper or an ancient parchment skin. Or rather still, that what mattered was not to write one’s story in an account book, in the margins of a bad French novel, on invisible scores, or on the headed paper of the hotels of a city; the important thing, for someone like Mrs Maroszek, was not where one wrote one’s story, but that one wrote it. That one told it. That one bore witness. That one put one’s whole life into words. Even if it had to be on loose sheets or stolen papers. Even if one had to rise from a last meal to look for a last scrap of yellow paper. If one had to tell it anonymously or under an invented name, listed in some immense register. If one had to use bits of white chalk on a wall blackened with smoke. To appropriate the margins of any other book. To sing standing on a dustbin. To kneel down and dig a hole with one’s hands, in secret, beside a crematorium oven, to make sure of leaving one’s story in the world, here, well buried in the world, before becoming ash.”
This reflection forms the end of the story, and if I quote at such length it is because in it I read the whole force of a body of work. Eduardo Halfon is a tightrope walker. One needs a great deal of lightness, must know how to perform pirouettes, to arrive at such gravity, to walk on so narrow a wire.
Another woman illuminates Eduardo when he believes himself entirely lost. It is Doña Ermelinda Sobradora, an old Amerindian woman he meets by the shore of a lake in Guatemala. He is looking in that place for traces of a certain Salomon Halfon, his father’s brother, who died very young by drowning. Yet he knows the child is buried in New York. After much denial and silence, his parents had told him so. What Doña Ermelinda teaches him is nevertheless decisive: drawing up the list of all the drowned, she throws into relief, by a formula that returns many times, a family interdiction: “She told me that another child had drowned — wasn’t his name Salomon either?…” She gives the complete identity of the dead and not one bears that given name. Which is also the name of a Tenenbaum, Léon’s younger brother, who died of hunger in the Lodz ghetto. No child, no Halfon or Tenenbaum, can any longer bear that given name.
Letting oneself be seduced
The two other women playing an important role are Eduardo’s age, or nearly so. One, Aiko, welcomes and guides him in Tokyo. The attraction soon becomes reciprocal. And as often, the narrator plays on a double register: seduction, and words full of gravity, or of tragedy. Aiko is the granddaughter of a Hiroshima survivor. He was “saved” by his kimono.
Aiko and the narrator meet again after the pitiful lecture given before the Lebanese writers.
“I was only a kid, murmured Aiko, her bare knee touching mine at times (or not). But that evening, I understood my grandfather. I understood the reason for his silence. I understood that the bomb had marked his skin forever, not with just any garment, not with a shirt or a jacket, but with one of the traditional kimonos he had inherited from his father and his grandfather, a kimono that no longer existed at the time. The bomb had incinerated it, said Aiko. Rather, the bomb had embedded it in his skin.”
The man with the wild hair drew near us with his coffee siphon; without asking, he refilled our cups. Beside Aiko, the old man had his head turned toward me and was staring at me.
Hibakusha, Aiko went on. It means bombed person, she added. That is how they designate the survivors of the explosion, sometimes contemptuously and discriminatorily. Indeed, people do not contempt and discriminate against the survivors alone, but against us too, their children and grandchildren, because of the fear aroused, within the Japanese population, by the possible effects of radiation. But my grandfather never speaks of that day, she said, and he never shows his scars in public.
I was about to answer that I understood very well the silence of surviving grandfathers, that I understood very well the marks they carried in their skin for the rest of their lives. But I contented myself with finishing my coffee in that comfortable, pleasant, almost familiar place.”
The narrator’s gestures and attitudes contrast with the violence of what he hears, of what he learns and infers. Aiko and he understand each other through the experience of their grandfather. They mirror one another. The major crimes of the twentieth century create the true community. But to say it, one must place it at a distance. By finishing a coffee or by touching (involuntarily, of course) a female knee.
The effect is the same in the presence of Tamara, one of the main characters of Monastère.
Eduardo and his brother have left for Israel to attend the wedding of their sister, who has become orthodox and rigorist. The family is far from enthusiastic. They are rather secular, and Rosh Hashanah, Kippur or Pessah are more an occasion to gather than to pray or meditate. From the novel’s outset, this trip resembles a chain of vexations. The two brothers seek a way out. Tamara will help the narrator flee the ceremony. For anyone who knows Israel and its quirks, this novel has a drollery that delights — with the inevitable racist taxi driver as emblem and that Rabbi Scheinberg, conjured for the circumstance, who uses several tallits at once.
Eduardo had known Tamara in Guatemala City. Like young Israelis ending their conscription, she had set off on her tour of Latin America (or India, or Thailand etc.). He had not been insensible to her charms, but it is unclear to what extent he may have let her know. Tamara, now a flight attendant, is on a stopover in his native country. She proposes a trip to the Dead Sea. The wearing of clothing is not required and Tamara has on only a bikini. This time he speaks, answering the young woman’s questions, developing the family history and its tragic dimension, but also recounting stories of names and borrowed or falsified identities, of disguises too, made indispensable by the situation. The strongest story is that of young David, become Tereza on entering the monastery that gives the novel its title. The first paragraph of this chapter gives the “Halfon tone”: “A few years ago, I said to Tamara, trying not to look at the small red mound between her thighs that was perhaps her vulva, erect and warm, I knew an old Polish Jew who had escaped the Nazis disguised as a little Catholic girl.” Each moment of this narrative is written in counterpoint: Tamara’s body embodies temptation, one might even say life, while all the tales recall the violence of History. In other novels, the parenthesis plays this role of counterpoint. Without this typographic device, something would be missing. The indispensable distance, quite simply.
Iliad and Odyssey
Tamara is the temptress, and since every narrative leads back to the Iliad (a siege, a war, immobility) or to the Odyssey (a journey), I rather want to read Eduardo Halfon’s work as a quest and a wandering. Tamara would be a perfect Calypso (or a Nausicaa).
One needs an authorisation from the gods to travel. Or else to be compelled to it.
Fortunately, halts are possible and feminine seductions are not lacking. But let us stay serious and set out from the order of mission. It is a scrap of yellow paper on which Léon Tenenbaum scribbled his address in Lodz. This scrap of paper, Eduardo obtained at great pains: “It was a power of attorney. A mandate. An order. An itinerary. A road map. Coordinates on the hidden and battered family map. It was, in the end, a prayer. His last prayer. There, on that folded yellow paper, his final scribbles in his own hand, which now — standing in the Warsaw airport — I held like a talisman, were the axes of my grandfather’s history, a history which, in a certain way, was also mine.
In the end our history is our only patrimony.”
To obtain this power of attorney is at once indispensable and insufficient. One takes the road, one goes to the places — but what places? To see what?
The debate or polemic over visits to Auschwitz or elsewhere runs hot, and who could give the right to one “camp” or the other? Here the climax is reached near a village in Calabria where Eduardo goes to give a lecture. It is in the story entitled “Signor Hoffman.” Marina, the young student who welcomes him, takes him to Ferramonti di Tarsia, a camp built under Mussolini. Jews from all over Europe were locked up in ninety-two barracks before deportation. The camp no longer exists in its original form (and thus in its probable decrepitude); it was destroyed to make way for a motorway, and reconstructed after this displacement. What the two characters see is a “replica, a kind of mock-up, of sample, of theme park dedicated to human suffering.” All the memorial kitsch shows itself there — this need to figure what cannot be represented.
One understands the better, then, the grandfather’s reticence to speak, to give the keys to the journey. (My father, who could tell me everything, would stop at the accounts of the journey in the cattle car. According to him it was indescribable. The words remained wounds.)
Nobody and Ulysses
Ulysses, I was saying. Eduardo Halfon never stops disguising himself. And when it is not he who disguises himself, it is the others. So, to stay with kitsch, of those waiters in the only Jewish restaurant in Lodz, who feign to be Jewish themselves, exclaiming with oy-oys as is done in Rabbi Jacob.
Each plays a role and chooses a costume. Kazik, a prisoner, escapes in an S.S. uniform. Eduardo sports a rather equivocal pink down jacket in Warsaw and Lodz; he agrees to be called Monsieur Hoffman in that same Poland, remembering afterwards that E. T. A. Hoffmann, the writer, had as his administrative task the giving of German names to Polish Jews, on behalf of the Prussian state. Or that another Hoffmann manufactured Zyklon B for IG Farben. The principle of disguise is general.
Proper names, taken names
And then there is the question of the name. The one that is forbidden, as we have seen above; the one that must be silenced, as must one’s gender, when David becomes Tereza. And then the one one inherits. Eduardo, for example, like Edouard, the grandfather Halfon. But to bear a given name can also mean to bear its weight. At least one may hear it thus through the end of the account devoted to the monastery episode. Eduardo has spoken at length with Tamara. He has told her the story of that boy become a girl, whose name remains inscribed in the palm: “I stayed silent, my gaze lost. I felt empty. Empty of words. Empty of emotions. Empty of colour. Empty of everything that fills us or that we suppose fills us.
It was then that I felt a slight pain in my left hand. I had not realised I had been keeping my fist closed for some time now, well clenched, pressed too tightly. But I did not yet want to unclench it, despite the pain. Perhaps to maintain my bravura pose. Perhaps for fear that on opening it I would find there — written between the lines of my hand in black ink — my other name, my Hebrew name: Nissim. Eight days after my birth, according to Jewish tradition, and Eduardo not being a Hebrew given name, my father named me Nissim in Hebrew. Or miracles. My Hebrew name, Nissim, means miracles. Seeing my clenched fist I thought that this given name, my other name, my Jewish name, the name my father had one day written in black ink on my newborn’s little palm, had likewise been effaced by time.”
To become a writer is to give oneself a name. The real one, another one — in the end it matters little. Romain Kacew became Romain Gary, Émile Ajar, and so many others besides. Many writers have been born of a name. The essential is no doubt elsewhere, in the way in which one succeeds in “bringing reality to literature”: “Literature is nothing but a good trick, like the trick of a conjurer or a sorcerer, which gives body to reality and makes one believe there is only one. Unless literature requires the destruction of one reality in order to construct another — something which, intuitively, my grandfather had understood — destroying oneself to rebuild oneself from one’s own rubble. Unless literature, as an old friend from Brooklyn maintained, is nothing but the hurried, zigzagging speech of a stutterer.”
A great novel
One does not write about a novelist for nothing. In Eduardo Halfon’s work I have read more than a promise: the confirmation that our essential questions — that of the transmission of the past — could be carried out through words. Eduardo Halfon is certainly not the only one to do so, but he represents that third generation after the Shoah which has sufficient distance, in space as well as in time, to embrace past and present alike. A Guatemalan writer, he has seen civil war tear his country apart. He recounts it in Cancion, alludes to it in Deuils (Mourning); Guatemala is one of those echoes of the previous century.
One day all the novels will be read gathered into a single constellation. It is taking shape little by little. We will measure its importance.