It was a long time ago; I have kept of that moment only a hazy memory. Was it in the final year of primary school? In the first year of collège? Looking at the date on the Préfecture de police decree in my parents’ family record book, I did the math: I was eleven years old. And the event took place in the middle of the school year.
That day, in the classroom, the teacher, as on every other day, took the roll call. I have forgotten the names of my classmates who, at the utterance of theirs, answered in turn “present!” raising their hand. But I remember that at the call of one name, repeated several times by the teacher, no one answered. Until at last the teacher turned toward me: “Can’t you answer when you’re called?” That unknown name was mine. A brand-new name, whose contours I had not yet learned to recognize, and whose sounds had at that moment awakened no echo in me.
I quickly grew accustomed to this name, chosen by my father at the same time as he obtained French nationality, without any nostalgia for the name of my ancestors. It was insipid, without history, but it had become mine and had the great advantage of allowing me to move incognito within the most diverse spheres of society. Our father had chosen it to protect us from an identity whose dangers he had experienced. And that is how I lived with it, as a protection; but also a mask that allowed me to play, at my discretion, according to the situations and the interlocutors, with what I wished — or did not wish — to reveal of myself. I loved, and I still love, this plasticity that gives me the leisure of escaping any immediately identifiable identity assignment — however punctual and superficial this freedom may be.
For life has not refrained from making this concealed belonging resurface despite me, sometimes in a quaint way, sometimes in an awkward one. Nor have I ever lost sight of the fact that it could one day resurface tragically, masks being nothing other than thin envelopes liable to be torn open. Especially since part of my life has paradoxically been devoted to writing about Judaism. It is this hide-and-seek between the visible and the invisible that I would like to try to circumscribe here.
The first memory I have retained doubtless goes back to the year following our change of name. My father (whose accent leaves no room to imagine for a moment that he is French) had received, in his new name, a card from our arrondissement city hall presenting him with its best wishes for the Jewish New Year. Barely concealed, already spotted. He was so violently angered by this that he wrote, I believe, to the city hall to ask never to receive such letters again. Things were off to a bad start.
My life as an adolescent and then as a young woman went on, apparently, far removed from any preoccupation of this order. The scars of the war, the main marker of belonging in my family, certainly haunted the space of the home, but outside, I could live unburdened of this intimate belonging. Not that the latter shamed me or frightened me; I simply did not like it to prevail in my relationship to the world. And since then, I have always lived in this way.
Curiously, it was from the family of my first boyfriend (of Polish-Jewish origin!) that I experienced the first feeling of intrusion. We were on vacation in the south of France, and my boyfriend had wanted to introduce me to a distant branch of his family who resided there. These aunts and uncles knew nothing about me, but barely had we crossed the threshold of the apartment and had my name been pronounced by way of introduction than all of them, instantly, cried out in chorus my “real name.” There was no malevolence in this outburst, just an immediate recognition, a kindly complicity, that would more readily lend itself to a smile, but which at the moment provoked in me a profound unease.
I have hated, and still do not like, this identity being laid bare unless I take the initiative myself. Because it doubtless pertains to the most intimate — an intimacy that a form of anonymity has preserved from being exposed to every wind. But also — I formulated it differently above — something in me recoils from this form of assignment which seems to me too narrow to embrace the vast world.
In the age of social networks, where private and social life mingle without distinction, it has happened that friends kindly send me, publicly, the video of a Yiddish song, an article concerning Jewish life. I am grateful to them for having thought of me, but feel a sense of unease at having a clue to what I am thus delivered up to all and sundry. For many are the bonds I have woven that are in no way concerned with this identity, and that I wish to be maintained outside this field.
While I was a producer at Radio France, an episode — this time in real life — was to reveal in public the little Jewish girl whom certain people had once known well. As I was in charge, within my program, of all the books concerning Russia and the former USSR, I was presenting that day a critical debate around the Black Book of Ilya Ehrenburg and Vassili Grossman in studio 105 of the Maison de la Radio. Given the subject of the book, which deals with the extermination of the Jews of the USSR during the Nazi occupation, many Jews were doubtless present in the room. From afar, I had recognized some who had worked in the Sentier with my father. So when the debate ended, I had gone over to greet them. I had not anticipated that these greetings would give rise to untimely exclamations, these old garment-makers calling out to one another with a strong Yiddish accent to teach those who did not know who my father was. “It’s Siguy’s daughter, rue du Caire!” “And how’s your father?” “Does he still have the shop?” “And the geshefts (the business), is it going well?” It was a joyful and warm hubbub, all of them amused to be reunited with their old buddy’s daughter at the controls of a radio program. For my part, before my radio colleagues, I had passed in the space of three seconds from the status of producer at France Culture to that of child of the Sentier. Since the rigidities of my youth, I had grown older. That moment touched me, moved me. Perhaps it is because it unveiled, not so much an identity belonging as the world of childhood quite simply. There was something savory in reconnecting, in this context, with this buried childhood, by all of us made invisible by our social persona.
In recalling these laying-bare words, I realize that they always came from “my own.” All proceeded from a natural recognition, without ulterior motive.
From others, with a few rare exceptions (a mention in the diary of Marc-Édouard Nabe qualifying me as a “Jewess in a fur coat”), I have had the luck — largely owing to my name — of never having endured aggressive remarks referring me back to my identity, nor even remarks of any kind. My Jewishness remained invisible to them, as I wished. At the very least, it seemed so.
This invisibility, paradoxically, sometimes placed me in awkward situations. At a professional meeting in which several persons with foreign names took part, some with Jewish consonance, a woman addressed me in an aside to say to me, “luckily you are here, at least there are two of us who are French.” I could well have done without this dubious complicity, which I chose at the moment neither to deny (nor to approve).
More troubling, in 1994, was the affair of the writer Renaud Camus’s diary, which gave rise to intense polemics until it was withdrawn from sale for its antisemitic remarks. In his book, he attacked in particular the literary program Panorama, in which I worked, denouncing the overly strong proportion of Jews in the team. That Jews might speak of French literature was unbearable to him. What could Jews possibly understand of the writings of Racine or Chateaubriand? There followed the list of all the Jewish-consonance names in the program, including that of a woman who had francized hers and whom he had seen through. But not mine. I remained stunned, as if denied in my very existence, effaced; inevitably excluded from the solidarity that had been knit around those whose name had been besmirched. For several years, I had regularly interviewed Renaud Camus on his novels, before the latter was seized by a frenzied racism and antisemitism. Had this past proximity contributed to his lack of perspicacity, did it make me, in his eyes, unsuspectable? Some years later, crossing paths with Renaud Camus in the aisles of the Salon du livre, I could not help going over to him. “You forgot me!” I tossed at him sarcastically, forced before his incomprehension to specify “from your list of Jews.”
Yes, that was indeed it. I had been forgotten.
A tit-for-tat, you might tell me. By wanting too much to be invisible, one ends up being forgotten.
Such is not my view of things, even if this view — I grant it — is hard to circumscribe. Let us say that my desire for discretion, rather than for invisibility (my thought makes its way as I write this text) has never had anything to do with any kind of denial. The most accurate expression that comes to me here is a refusal to be “encumbered” by an identity whose filter I perceive as an impediment to a wider approach to the world.
Is it by chance if the first book I wrote, in which there is largely a question of my family’s history, came shortly after the upheaval of the Renaud Camus affair? I do not know. Others will follow which say at all events that a part of me long held silent demanded one day to exist. Without coming, however, to occupy a preponderant place.
This perpetual adjustment between two ways of positioning myself in the face of the world — I cannot help thinking, in conclusion, that it comes to me precisely from the earthquake of my eleventh year. Forever endowed with a family name and another for the immensity of the world.