Romain Gary. A Jewishness displayed and veiled
For a long time, Émile Ajar was set in opposition to Romain Gary — to Gary’s detriment. Gary was said to have remained imprisoned within a classical, conventional language, whereas Ajar had managed to invent a new one. Gary, despite his denials, would have been a man of the right (witness his loyalty to General de Gaulle and above all his rejection of communism), whereas Ajar gave voice to his empathy for the most destitute. Lastly, Gary was said to have concealed or denied his belonging to Judaism, whereas Ajar had assumed and even displayed it.
Of course, one need only reread the hilarious Friday-night prayer in Éducation Européenne (European Education), the dedication to Léon Blum, Jew and socialist, in Tulipe, the Yiddish expressions strewn through La danse de Gengis Cohn (The Dance of Genghis Cohn), or again in Les cerfs-volants (The Kites)1, the magnificent image of seven yellow kites in the form of Jewish stars flying in the sky of the Occupation, to see that this is not so. Four works written over several decades and signed Gary. Likewise, one need only remember that from his very first work, the writer evokes, alongside the battle of Stalingrad, the struggle of the Warsaw Ghetto, while the last lines of his last book are a tribute to the Righteous of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon.
It is, however, true that Romain Gary’s Jewishness remains complex, at once made invisible and displayed according to modalities of its own. A dividing line seems to run through the work, and that line does not pass between Gary and Ajar — for all of Ajar is already in Gary, including, often, at the level of language. It passes, within the texts signed Gary, between the novelistic works and the works with an autobiographical dimension.
Paradoxically, the works with an autobiographical dimension — La promesse de l’aube (Promise at Dawn), La nuit sera calme (The Night Will Be Calm) or Pseudo2 — as well as the interviews granted in newspapers and on television, are rich in fabrications and denials. Multiplying false leads, imaginary memories, fanciful filiations as much as silences and omissions, they blend the true and the false in a dizzying way, a real life and a fantasized life, right up to the last interview3 recorded in 1980, in which the same fables are repeated.
While beneath the mask of fiction, the novelistic work tells an altogether different story. It has its own autonomy and its own truth, which resist the legend the author works to construct. It appears at once irrigated and haunted by the relationship to Judaism and by the trauma of the war and of the Shoah, in which Romain Gary’s combat comrades and almost all the members of the Roman Kacew family perished. It enables us to understand that Gary, with his panache, his excesses, his irony and his provocations, is also a bereaved survivor who long kept silent about his wounds and who wished to make a part of himself invisible.
As in a Chagall painting
The novels signed Gary are peopled by a multitude of Jewish protagonists. The reader thus encounters, in the course of the pages and the works, Jewish partisans hiding in the forest, miraculous rabbis, Jewish prostitutes, fur traders, tailors, coachmen and butchers, dentists, hassidim, an army of Jewish doctors and musicians, numerous survivors.
Unforgettable characters stand out from these novels. In Éducation Européenne, there is Moniek Stern, a little violinist persecuted by Polish thugs who nickname him wunderkind and who dies clutching his violin to himself. In Les cerfs-volants, there is the intrepid Julie Espinoza, whom Gary presents provocatively as the keeper of a brothel at the head of a resistance network. He describes her as so proud of her name’s closeness to that of Spinoza, and of her sense of survival inherited from centuries of persecution, that she announces to little Ludo: “They won’t catch us easily, you can believe me… we have a thousand years of training and experience, we do4.” In Les Enchanteurs (The Enchanters), the reader can read the evocation of an old sage whom the narrator Fosco Zaga and his father go to consult in the hope of saving Teresina, the wife of Giuseppe Zaga, who is dying:
In the little town of Vlachi, an old rabbi whom the goyim themselves came to consult kept his hand on the patient’s brow for a long time and told us that what would have done her the most good was the song of the birds and the scent of the flowers, the gleam of the fruit on the branches, and that softness of the air that the benevolence of God sometimes passes over the earth.
The old rabbi’s words, placed under the sign of poetry and of union with the beneficent forces of the world, come to refute all the disquieting and stereotyped images that haunt the European imaginary. It is, moreover, a remarkable passage from the standpoint of enunciation, for the narrator’s use of the word goyim5 (non-Jews in Yiddish) suggests that he is Jewish — something that rarely occurs in Gary’s text.
Finally, at the heart of Ajar’s work, Monsieur Salomon and madame Rosa, two survivors, two old people bearing the stigmata of age and solitude but bearers of an unalterable humanity.
Gary the novelist has at times evoked the world he knew as a child and which during the war was brutally erased, wiped away6. And the evocation of this world with its customs, its rituals, its imaginary, its own language, performs a very complex knotting between a diction of History7 and the ambiguous enunciation of an identity, or at any rate of one of its dimensions, doubtless the most intimate, of that identity. Like the presence of Yiddish in the text, like the multiplication of Jewish characters in the novels and the lancinating recall of the victims of antisemitism and of the Shoah, it can be read as a proof of fidelity and an affirmation of belonging. But this affirmation is written as if in invisible ink, an ink that is invisible and yet waiting to be revealed, deciphered by those who will be willing and able to read it. In these narratives, a Jewish child, a wunderkind, displays himself and hides.
Certain French-language Jewish writers, such as Georges Perec or Patrick Modiano, who published in the same years as Gary, present themselves as the heirs of a “hollow” Judaism, inhabited by a lack, by an anxious questioning that drives them to try to fill what Ellen Fine calls an “absent memory8.” It is not the same for Gary, who belongs to another generation and who grew up in Wilno, the Little Jerusalem of Lithuania. He is the bearer of a painful memory, but it is a “full” memory, rich with images, with traces of a lived experience, with the topography of Wilno and with the echoes of a language. That is to say, with a historical, cultural, mnemonic heritage whose transmission he ensures according to modalities of his own.
The relationship to Judaism is, for him, not a fixed or immutable given. Over the years, the books and the news of the day, it will be reworked, remodeled — which makes for its richness and its complexity. It is inscribed within a long process of writing which, starting from a historical and geographical reality, that of the great Jewish communities of Central Europe and Russia (as the names of numerous characters indicate — Kaminski, Kapelutznik, Cukierman, Piekielny…), is capable of building a Jewish paradigm that is personal and bound up with the writer’s values: fidelity of memory, empathy for weakness, the courage of humor — “that disarmed assault” — the refusal of the real world in its ugliness and cruelty. For him, writing can allow a re-creation of the world as it ought to be, a form of repair, and what one might call a messianism of writing is perhaps the most incontestable Jewish dimension of his work.
The silences of dawn
La promesse de l’aube, a magnificent filial novel celebrating a sublime mother (even as it settles, at the same time, a number of scores with Mina Kacew, rebaptized Nina), gives very few details on the maternal family. It evokes her ancestry in a single sentence, insisting on her accent and her Russian exoticism, which come to cover over and veil her Jewish and Polish identity. The narrator evokes elliptically what he says he knows of his mother’s past. The daughter of a Jewish watchmaker from the Russian steppe, a very beautiful adolescent, she is said to have left her family at the age of sixteen to take up the profession of actress. In this narrative, no reference to family or religious traditions, no name of close relatives, no genealogy of the maternal branch, no allusion to Yiddish or to any language other than Russian. Nina seems not to have had any existence of her own outside her relationship to her son. Her past seems erased. Evoking the war years and the moment when he goes off to join the Free French Forces, Gary makes no mention of any danger incurred by him and his mother because of their origin. Likewise, he keeps silent about all the painful, humiliating episodes linked to his Jewish condition, and in particular about the antisemitic insults and harassment he suffered. Even when he evokes his childhood years in Poland, even when he tells how at Salon-de-Provence he was the only one of a class of three hundred officer-cadet observers not to have been commissioned as an officer, he does not utter the word antisemitism. His confessions he will make elsewhere, through other voices. In Les couleurs du jour (The Colors of the Day), through that of La Marne, alias Rapoport, Jacques Rainier’s companion, who recalls the bullying and the violence he endured as a child in Poland, or through that of Momo, discovering anti-Arab racism.
On the father’s family, even less information — which would be explained by an uncertain filiation. In fact, Gary organized a form of erasure or invisibilization of his biological father. He makes him disappear behind another more glorious father-figure who comes to cast doubt on the paternity of Arie Leib Kacew, called Léonid Kacew, a fur merchant, Jewish and Polish. A photograph of the actor Ivan Mozzhukhin, a star of silent cinema, a White Russian, Catholic and Orthodox, with whom Gary bore an astonishing resemblance, sits enthroned on the writer’s desk. Gary took it with him on all his travels and suggested on several occasions that Mozzhukhin might be his real father: he, Gary confides, used to visit him in Nice, sent him sumptuous gifts, and maintained a regular correspondence with his mother.
In La Promesse de l’aube, the writer evokes Leib Kacew only as his mother’s second husband, or as the man who had given him his name, a man who traveled a great deal and whom he had barely known. In the same novel, he recounts having received, shortly after winning the Prix Goncourt for Les Racines du ciel (The Roots of Heaven)9, a letter informing him of the circumstances of his father’s death:
Among the letters that had reached me on this occasion, there was one that gave me details on the death of the man I had so little known. He had not at all died in the gas chamber, as I had been told. He had died of fear on the way to the execution, a few steps from the entrance. The person writing the letter had been the doorkeeper, the receptionist — I do not know how to give him a name, nor what was the official title he assumed. In his letter, no doubt to please me, he wrote that my father had not reached the gas chamber and that he had fallen dead from fear, before entering… The man who died in that way was, for me, a stranger, but on that day, he became my father, forever10.
In this troubling passage, Leib Kacew is at once dismissed as biological father and acknowledged in what may appear as a deliberate choice of filiation. In fact, Gary disowns this father even as he affects, in a second moment, to choose him deliberately as father11 — which translates rather faithfully his reluctance toward any belonging that is not freely consented to. But there would be much to say on the unease these lines arouse, and on the violence that consists in qualifying as a doorkeeper or receptionist a member of the Sonderkommandos assigned to the gas chambers, with all the horror that this term evokes. One perceives an attempt to remove any affect from the account of the father’s death, to neutralize this frightful reality through the banality and neutrality of the terms used, as well as through the offhandedness of the evocation. The same form of provocative humor will be found again in La danse de Gengis Cohn.
This violent rejection perhaps settles a dispute with a father who abandoned his mother and him to start another family with a much younger woman — a father whom he qualifies as a stranger and of whom he makes a man who dies of fear, that is to say, the prefiguration of the touching but de-idealized anti-heroes who people some of the novels signed Ajar.
For a long time, Gary’s biographers and a large portion of the critics interested in his work relied on the assertions of the so-called autobiographical texts in order to decipher it. But Myriam Anissimov’s biography published in 2004, Romain Gary, le caméléon (Romain Gary, the Chameleon)12, and in particular the remarkable investigative work conducted in the chapters concerning childhood, has restored many missing statements, many trails that had been blurred or covered over. It encourages us to reread, in a new light, the relationship between a father and a son who lived under the same roof much longer than the false confidences of La Promesse de l’Aube or La Nuit sera calme suggest. Gary knows who his father is. While he did not live with him during his early childhood (because Leib Kacew had been mobilized for several years in the Russian army during the war of 1914-1918), he lived under the same roof as him at Wilno, between the ages of six and twelve.
Arie Leib Kacew is a pious Jew; he is an administrator of the Tohorat Hakodesh synagogue in Wilno13. Moreover, even while living in Nice, Gary seems to have continued seeing his father during holidays in Poland. A photograph of Leib Kacew with Romain Gary and his friend Sigurd Norberg, taken in 1933 in the streets of Warsaw, bears witness to this. Gary knew his father well enough to remember him and to be able to describe him, for his massive silhouette, so similar to that of his son, is outlined in many novels.
Part of Gary’s struggles with his identity is thus linked to his family theatre. For, as we shall see, the relation to the Father and the relation to Jewish identity are profoundly linked. Thus in La Promesse de l’aube, a book that celebrates the mother, both the father, Leib Kacew, and Jewishness, have been set at a distance. By contrast, in Les Enchanteurs14, a novel written a decade later and secretly dedicated to the father, one finds for the first time a positive description of the relationship between a father and his son. And this tenderness for the father is doubled by an empathetic, sometimes lyrical evocation of the destiny of the Jewish people. The novel is a casual and enchanted walk through time, through the cultural memory of Europe, but also through the legendary memory of the Jewish world of Central Europe. Gary has forgotten nothing — neither the Maharal of Prague, nor the Golem, nor Benazar Ben Zvi nor Isaac of Toledo, “a sephardi” come to Russia to succor his “ashkenazim” brothers in times of pogroms. He has not forgotten the ceremonies of exorcism, nor above all the Jewish violinists capable of pushing back the darkness.
Making Yiddish and Hebrew resound in a French text
Romain Gary is doubtless the first French writer to have made Yiddish and Hebrew resound in French-language novels addressed to a wide audience. From Éducation Européenne onward, the reader discovers precise references to the Jewish ritual and to the Friday-evening prayer, transcribed phonetically and marked by a very strong Ashkenazi accent. It is the episode in which the Jewish partisans of the Wilno forest gather in an old underground powder magazine to pray, and in which Cymes, the one in charge of the watch, refuses to fulfill his role because he wants to stay inside and pray with the others. There ensues a violent discussion and a comic collision of sacred Hebrew words and Yiddish protestations:
— Boruch, chein, kweit, malchuze, loeilem, boet… intoned Cymes’s voice piously. I am the rebe here. I want to pray like everyone else!
Adonaiechot! howled the cantor, kissing the corner of his tallith and savagely beating his breast. Has no one stayed outside to keep watch? Arboim chono okout… I say it isn’t right; someone must go outside to keep watch! Arboim chono okout15.
The fact that the sequence is comical because the cantor gets tangled up in his prayer has perhaps veiled the fact that it is evidently the transcription of a lived memory, in which the writer restored from memory the words and the accent of the faithful, as well as their gestures, consisting in swaying and beating one’s chest while praying. And this faithful restitution, like the use of Yiddish, can be read as a sign of belonging.
Elsewhere, Yiddish appears as a coded language of communication16, a language of complicity between the author and his Yiddish-speaking readers, who know for example that the word kibbitzer is a Yiddish word and not an American one, as young Léonce claims in Le grand vestiaire (The Company of Men)17. Likewise, in Les cerfs-volants, only readers familiar with the reputation of Helm, a small Polish town whose inhabitants were said to be exceedingly unintelligent, can appreciate the sarcasm of comparing the Maginot Line to the Helm Line, and spot Gary/Ajar’s onomastic humor: a hat-maker answers to the name of Kapelutznik (Mr. Cap), while a famous petition-signer is called Monsieur Tsures (Mr. Trouble).
But it is in La danse de Gengis Cohn that Gary signifies with force that Yiddish is the language of a people, the language of laughter, of Jewish jokes (the hohme), but also the language of the dead. This text, a masterpiece of bitter humor, constitutes an important turning point in Gary’s trajectory but also in the affirmation of Jewish memory in France. Published in 1967, poorly received in part because of its iconoclastic and provocative aspect, it is nevertheless among the first works in France to confront the Shoah without being a survivor’s testimony18. One of the titles considered for this book was a variation on the word Kaddish (sic). It is a descendant’s text bearing witness by delegation.
A Jewish comedian, Gengis Cohn, whose real first name was Moïshé, murdered by the Einsatzgruppen, recounts in the first person the circumstances of his execution. He speaks through the voice of Schatz, in whose body he has taken up residence, and delivers the inexhaustible narrative of an invisible and omnipresent Jew.
One finds in it references so numerous to a humor, a culture, a language, that the reader becomes familiar with this language at the same time as Schatz, the former Nazi recycled as a police commissioner in a small German town:
In spite of myself I catch myself uttering words in this infamous jargon… I ended up buying a dictionary to understand myself. Arakhmounes, that means pity, I’ve heard it ten thousand times at least. Hutzpe, cheek… Gvalt, help… Mazeltov, congratulations…
You know what he has me sing? El Molorakhmim. It’s their funeral chant for the dead… then he had me sing Yiddishe Mamma…
Taking up again the theme of the Dibbouk which belongs to the Jewish mystical and kabbalistic tradition, Gary pays homage to a vanished culture by borrowing the form of one of its greatest achievements: The Dybbuk, a fantastic and legendary play staged in Wilno in 1917. In Shalom Anski’s play, a masterpiece of Yiddish culture, the soul of Hanan inhabits the body of Leah, the young girl who had been promised to him and who has been given in marriage to another. He has taken up residence in her because he loves her, and he speaks through her mouth to demand reparation. It should be noted that in the play, full awareness of the fault committed and its confession are presented as important elements, prerequisites for any ceremony of exorcism. Now, it must not be forgotten, Gary writes La danse de Gengis Cohn at a time when Germany, in the midst of its “economic miracle,” has carried out no examination of conscience and has repressed the memory of the war, while Holocaust denial is developing. It is in this context that Gary creates a victim-character who appears before his murderer, marked with the stigmata of his calvary as soon as the latter makes a show of forgetting the past:
I use the soundtrack trick on him. Instead of simply standing there, in silence before him with my yellow star and my face covered in plaster, I make noise. I let him hear voices. It is above all to the voices of mothers that he is most sensitive19.
The funereal poetry of Anski’s play has been transformed into cynical mockery; love has been transformed into hatred and a desire for vengeance. Gengis Cohn appears to Schatz while around him others do not see him; he makes him hear the voices of his victims. He speaks through his mouth to persecute him. He forces him to speak in Yiddish. This hilarious and terrible text, traversed by the voice of the dead, is a doubly cryptic work. If Schatz is traversed by the voice of Gengis Cohn, it seems that Gary, for his part, is traversed by the voice of Leib Kacew. Through his writing he brings back to the world a murdered father, he gives him voice to tell the circumstances of his own death: the fear, the cries of mothers and children, the heaps of corpses, letting visions of unbearable horror appear behind the jokes — improbably realizing Primo Levi’s reflection in Les Naufragés et les Rescapés (The Drowned and the Saved)20, in which he wrote that it would not be for the survivors to bear witness to the horror, but for the dead who had lived it through to the end.
For thanks to Myriam Anissimov21, we know that Léonid Kacew did not die in a camp, nor in a gas chamber, nor of fear on the way to one as his son claims, but that he was shot, probably in the pits of Ponary, during the final liquidation of the ghetto on 24 September 1943 — a destiny similar to that of Gengis Cohn, which throws light on certain of his words: “We remain there, the two of us, listening, as a Yiddish poet wrote, to the long sobs of the violins of autumn – autumn 1943, to be precise22.” Here again, the black-humor dimension and the mischievous attribution of Verlaine’s lines to a Yiddish poet veils what can be read as a coded reference to the date of Leib Kacew’s death.
Speaking of encryption and invisible presences, it should also be recalled that the name of Gary’s grandfather, Katz, later transformed into Kacew, is one of the transformations of the patronymic Cohen (just like Kohn, Kuhn, Cohn, Kohn, Kahn). And more precisely, that Katz is a contraction of Cohen-Tsedek (priest of justice). Leib Kacew is thus a Cohen, just like Gengis Cohn. The father’s patronym is encrypted in that of Gengis Cohn, just as it already was in Éducation européenne, through the profession of one of the Jewish resistance fighters in the forest, a butcher, which in Yiddish is said Kacew.
In Gary, characters are often all the more present for not being visible.
Invisible Jews
The motif of Gengis Cohn, hidden inside Schatz, calls for a pause. For it brings together two recurrent modalities of Gary’s relation to Jewish identity. The first touches on a form of ventriloquism. Gary multiplies Jewish characters in his novels, he evokes their destiny, sometimes even “speaks them,” but this identity is never assumed in the first person. Except on rare occasions — but it is then the I of an impossible or defective Jewish speaker: the voice of a dead man speaking through the mouth of the one he inhabits (La danse de Gengis Cohn) or the seemingly delirious confession of a patient being treated in a psychiatric clinic (Pseudo).
The second modality is that of a recurrent spatial and mental configuration: the hiding-place. In the Garyan universe, to be Jewish is to have to hide, and reciprocally, the characters who hide have a great chance of being Jewish. In the works signed Gary as in those signed Ajar, one encounters a multiplication of hiding-places, refuges, cellars, holes, basements: the black and stinking cellar where Janek finds Moniek, the little wunderkind; the dark underground where the Jewish partisans go to pray; the Berlin cellar where Karl Loewy is hidden by Aryan friends who administer his property but forget to tell him that the war is over23; the cellar on the Champs-Élysées where Monsieur Salomon spent four years of war, in the dark without seeing the light of day; madame Rosa’s cellar in Belleville, which she also calls her Jewish hole. These hiding-places and these holes can shelter sometimes the Jew, sometimes his other, suggesting a strange proximity, a contiguity, between victim and executioner. Thus, in La Paz, in Bolivia, the cellar (one more) where a Nazi is hidden, whom a former deportee, Gluckman, comes to feed in exchange for the promise that he will be nicer next time24. A Jewish victim hidden in the body of a German, a former Nazi hidden in a cellar like a Jew — once again we touch here on a circulation and a reversibility of signs that insists.
To survive, then, one must make oneself invisible, or make oneself invisible as a Jew. One must change name, identity or appearance, become other. The thematics of the hiding-place is doubled by that of metamorphosis and disguise.
In Gary’s work, the protagonists who hide under a false identity or who have false papers are too numerous to count. Madame Rosa has a suitcase of false papers proving she is not Jewish. In Les cerfs-volants, Isidore Levkovitch turns into Francis Dupré and spends the war in a German uniform, while Julie Espinoza has procured papers proving she is the very authentic Countess Esterházy. But she did not content herself with having false papers made — she had recourse to plastic surgery, took lessons in deportment and elocution, and classes in the history of Hungary. Inside the Hungarian aristocrat is hidden the brothel-keeper. Just as inside the body of the respectable Lady L was hidden the anarchist Annette Boudin. Like places, like books, like languages, the body can serve as a hiding-place.
Saying without saying
The opening pages of Éducation européenne open onto the image of two men digging a hole.
the hole was three meters deep, four meters wide, in one corner they had thrown a mattress and blankets, ten sacks of potatoes weighing fifty kilos each…
This is the hiding-place dug in the forest by Doctor Twardovski and his son Janek so that the latter can hide there until the end of the war. One may wonder why a Polish boy who is only fourteen years old and who, evidently, at the beginning of the narrative, is not a partisan, should remain hidden until the end of the war in a hole, in the middle of a Polish forest. A question that can suggest that Janek is Jewish, and that this is what obliges him, in order to survive, to hide until the end of the war, like thousands of other Jewish boys at that period. Like Gregor, Elie Wiesel’s character in Les portes de la forêt (The Gates of the Forest)25, like Aharon Appelfeld’s narrator in Histoire d’une vie (The Story of a Life)26.
It is not certain that the reader, on first reading, asks himself this kind of question, but if he does, the answer might seem obvious. Thus, from this first novel onward, the protagonist’s Jewish identity seems indicated but in an implicit way; it is never formulated in the text, except for the one who interrogates it.
One then thinks of the character of Isaac of Toledo, who in Les Enchanteurs wears a very visible sign of Jewishness but which no one, except for initiates, deciphers.
He wore around his neck a chain with a pendant representing a star. No one in Russia knew of the existence of the Star of David, and this sign was taken for that of the profession of astrologer which he in fact practiced27.
The art of saying without saying and of displaying while veiling28.
Éducation Européenne, Calmann-Lévy, 1945 – Tulipe, Calmann-Lévy, 1946 – La danse de Gengis Cohn, Gallimard, 1967 – Les Enchanteurs, Gallimard, 1973 – Les cerfs-volants, Gallimard, 1980.↩︎
La promesse de l’aube, Gallimard, 1960 – La nuit sera calme, Gallimard, 1974 – Pseudo, Mercure de France, 1976.↩︎
A filmed interview, conducted by Jean Faucher for Radio-Canada, in 1980, a few months before Gary’s death, and published after his death, in 2014, by Gallimard, under the title: “Le sens de ma vie.”↩︎
Les cerfs-volants, Gallimard, 1980, p. 167.↩︎
A word meaning non-Jew.↩︎
Which is to be linked to the recurrent thematics of erasure in his work.↩︎
The same is true of other writers such as Vercors or Modiano.↩︎
Ellen S. Fine, “L’écriture comme mémoire absente,” in Les Nouveaux Cahiers, no. 101, 1990.↩︎
Romain Gary, Les racines du ciel, Gallimard, 1956.↩︎
Romain Gary, La promesse de l’aube, op. cit., p. 107.↩︎
“Free France is the only community to which I have fully belonged,” he asserts in La nuit sera calme.↩︎
Myriam Anissimov, Romain Gary le caméléon, Denoël, 2004.↩︎
Myriam Anissimov has even found the date on which he had his son Roman circumcised.↩︎
Les Enchanteurs, 1973. It is the last novel before the invention of Ajar.↩︎
Éducation européenne, p. 139.↩︎
This is also the case for his other languages, such as Russian, in many texts where he inserts place- or family-names that correspond to coarse and scatological expressions.↩︎
Le grand vestiaire, Gallimard, 1949.↩︎
La danse de Gengis Cohn appears in 1967. As a reminder, Le dernier des Justes (The Last of the Just) by André Schwartz-Bart appeared in 1961. And there appeared almost at the same time as Romain Gary’s book: La Place de l’étoile by Patrick Modiano in 1968 (a book whose publication had initially been planned for 1967), Un homme qui dort (A Man Asleep) (1967) and La disparition (A Void) (1968) by Georges Perec, La Dispersion (1969) by Serge Doubrovsky.↩︎
La danse de Gengis Cohn, op. cit., p. 14.↩︎
Primo Levi, Les naufragés et les rescapés. Quarante ans après Auschwitz, Gallimard, 1989 for the French translation.↩︎
Myriam Anissimov has been able to retrace the circumstances of the deaths of Frida, Léonid Kacew’s second wife, of Pavel, Romain’s half-brother, and of Valentina, his half-sister. (Whose name is given to a little girl in La promesse de l’aube.) Transferred to the Klooga camp, they were burned alive on pyres erected by the Nazis at the moment of the advance of the Red Army.↩︎
La danse de Gengis Cohn, op. cit., p. 128.↩︎
“Un humaniste” in Les oiseaux vont mourir au Pérou (The Birds Will Come to Die in Peru), Gallimard, 1962.↩︎
“La plus vieille histoire du monde” in Les oiseaux vont mourir au Pérou, op. cit., p. 251.↩︎
Elie Wiesel, Les portes de la forêt, Seuil, 1964.↩︎
Aharon Appelfeld, Histoire d’une vie, Éditions de l’Olivier, 2004.↩︎
Romain Gary, Les enchanteurs, Gallimard, 1973. (Folio edition, p. 160).↩︎
I take the liberty of referring to more detailed articles on themes too briefly evoked here: “Des cerfs-volants jaunes en forme d’étoiles ou la judéité paradoxale de Romain Gary,” Les Temps Modernes, November 1993. “Les cachettes de Romain Gary” in Confrontations Psychiatriques no. 48: Tourments d’écrivains. Passion de lecteurs, edited by Maurice Corcos, 2008. “Les violons juifs de Romain Gary,” in Romain Gary, une voix dans le siècle, Honoré Champion, (A. Simon, A. Schaffner and J. Roumette eds.), 2018.↩︎