This article is devoted to Simon Wuhl’s last book—and the most personal—published a few months before his death. Readers interested in his work will find at the end the list of his principal works. My intention was not to deal with them.

I worked alongside Simon Wuhl for some years on the editorial board of Plurielles, but it was only on reading his last book, an autobiographical one, that I took the full measure of the infinite sadness that inaugurated and marked his existence. The book is titled Une mémoire personnelle marquée par la Shoah. Le judaïsme culturel en héritage (A Personal Memory Marked by the Shoah. Cultural Judaism as Inheritance).

Of his father, he knew only the end, as Rébecca, his mother, recounted it to him “to satiety,” from his adolescence onward. Simon and Rébecca are among those miraculously spared at the Vel d’Hiv (the Vélodrome d’Hiver round-up of July 1942). A note from the Prefecture of Police of July 13, 1942 specified that the children of women under two years of age, “born after July 1, 1940,” would be spared. Now, Simon had been born on August 24 of that year.

This book is a double quest, on his father, and on himself. And on the ties he could weave between a painful youth, marked by the Shoah, and a non-Jewish environment busy with other things. “I was living a contradiction at the edge of the bearable, in which the Shoah present everywhere around me and within me was completely effaced, indeed ignored by French society […] this contradiction being accompanied by a barrier in my relations with the non-Jewish world, at the lycée for example, where no one, except Jews, was aware of the events that had occurred only about ten or twelve years earlier.”

He evokes a second contradiction, that of belonging to a Jewish culture of which he did not possess the knowledge—Rébecca had not transmitted to him the lineaments of even a secular Judaism—and from which he felt cruelly separated.

This book thus exposes a double plunge into time, a double demand: that of finding, understanding, the history of his father Isacher, which he sketches out with the elements at his disposal, including fiction; and that of exposing how he constructed his secular Jewish identity. What does it mean to be Jewish? he never ceases to interrogate throughout his life.

Who then was Isacher, and what is, what can be, Simon’s inheritance—an inheritance necessarily transmitted by his mother, since the major part of his large family had not returned from the camps? Only Rébecca and Isacher’s youngest brother, Shimshon, settled in Israel in 1946, survived.

Simon was nearly 50 when Rébecca showed him letters—five in all—that Isacher had written to her, the first from Drancy (July 21, 1942), the other four from the camp of Jawiszowice, one of the labour camps of Auschwitz. These letters, sent during the year 1943, were addressed to the concierge of the building where the Wuhl family had lived. Rébecca recovered them only after the war. The last letter is dated July 18, 1943.

We do not know how Isacher died. Simon shares Bruno Bettelheim’s idea that the absence of mourning, common to hundreds of thousands of Jews, means that “the child closes the event inside an inner iron cage, with no possibility of expressing his feelings, which is necessary to surmount the pain of disappearance.” “Thus,” he writes, “by the late reading of these few postcards, I was able to half-open my iron cage.”

From the memories of Rébecca and Shimshon, Simon was able to approach the history of his father. Isacher and Rébecca had joined the left-Zionist movement and militated in Hashomer Hatzair, Isacher in his Polish town (Sambor) and Rébecca in hers (Przemyśl). There are no photos of Isacher, apart from a few group photos in which one perceives “large dark eyes with an intense gaze” that bear a resemblance, according to Simon, to those of Franz Kafka. Each time Simon came across Kafka’s face, he inevitably thought of his father. Isacher’s family was religious and traditionalist, but the young generation joined the movement of secularisation that characterised a notable part of Jewish youth before the war. The whole family disappeared in the turmoil. Only Shimshon survived, and, like many isolated survivors without bearings, he reached Palestine, then still under Mandate.

Rébecca lived in a shtetl that was almost entirely Jewish, located on the outskirts of Przemyśl, today a border city with Ukraine. At 16, she too joined a socialist youth movement, breaking with a Hasidic father. Yiddish was her mother tongue, and she experienced, in France after 1945, difficulties with French like many Polish Jews immediately plunged into piecework. How great was Simon’s surprise when he attended in 1987 a conversation in Yiddish between Shimshon and his mother, in which she expressed herself with precision and clarity—a voluble, vital, true speech.

Isacher came to Palestine in 1929 with a group of friends from Sambor; he was assigned to a kibbutz south of Tel Aviv. Rébecca reached this kibbutz a few months later. They quickly joined together, Simon writes, enthusiastic militants “for the establishment of socialism on the land of Israel in Palestine.” From the outset, Isacher was confronted with a dilemma: should Arab workers be recruited into the kibbutzim? Hostile to all discrimination, Isacher wished all the more to associate the Arabs with the productive process of the kibbutz as he perceived the 1929 revolt as pregnant with a nationalism destined to develop. He thus decides to join the communist movement that gathered Jews and Arabs, but, in doing so, he runs up against both the British and the Histadrut, which did not want communists. Tracked by the police, he had no choice but to leave.

This is moreover the case for a certain number of Polish Jewish communist militants, and not the least of them—Leopold Trepper for example. Joining the Palestinian Communist Party, Isacher had broken with Zionism. But the sectarianism of this party, directed from Moscow, did not suit him, and he always kept, according to Rébecca, a benevolent attention to democratic Zionism (he had left Poland for that) and to the Yiddish culture embodied by Bundism. It is certain that Rébecca, having come to Palestine to build a life in the kibbutz, looked with a bad eye on Isacher’s pro-communist path. Be that as it may, the couple, attracted by the concrete experience of the Popular Front, decided to leave for France in the autumn of 1936 after their marriage. From where does Simon draw all this information on his father’s choices? On the one hand, from Rébecca, but she only distilled them sparingly; on the other, from his imagination.

We hardly know how the couple lived from their arrival in France until Isacher’s first arrest in 1941. He certainly went through the great precariousness experienced by Polish Jews, communist or not, in those years: many testimonies attest to it, notably that documented by Ivan Jablonka on his grandparents. But Simon does not search for the parental traces that Jablonka identified; he sets out the context (the rise of antisemitism, of fascism, etc.), drawing notably on the writings of Marc Bloch or Michel Winock. Might he have found traces in the archives of the Prefecture of Police? I would have liked to ask him these questions.

We know that Isacher carried out administrative work at the Amelot Committee, which depended on the OSE (Œuvre de secours aux enfants, a Jewish children’s aid organisation). Clandestine mutual-aid networks then operated within this committee: Isacher is arrested in May 1941 and sent to the Beaune-la-Rolande camp, from which he will escape. He was part of the first contingent of foreign Jews interned in the Loiret camps, known as that of the “Green Ticket.” Simon Wuhl does not tell us in what circumstances this arrest took place; manifestly Rébecca had not told him.

Thanks to the Mémorial de la déportation des Juifs de France (Memorial of the Deportation of the Jews of France) established by Serge Klarsfeld in 1978, Simon was able to learn that his father had been taken from Drancy camp to Auschwitz on July 22, 1942 in convoy no. 9. “Serge Klarsfeld,” he writes, “is, like me, the ‘son of a deportee murdered at Auschwitz, having himself by a miracle escaped the ramp of Birkenau.’ Thus, I can imagine the trauma he must have surmounted to carry out such a work to its end.” Like so many other Jews, Isacher could not imagine that women and children might be deported.

Rébecca and Simon were taken in charge by the mutual-aid networks (Amelot Committee and OSE) and hidden with private individuals in the Southern zone, but Rébecca’s memories were vague: she could not indicate which of these organisations had rescued them. Perhaps the Amelot Committee, where Isacher had been registered? “I therefore imagine Rébecca,” Simon writes, “completely distraught and in tears, not knowing what to do with her two-year-old baby, knocking at the door of 36 rue Amelot.”

What Simon was able to obtain from his mother’s memory is that he had been very ill in 1942/1943 and that he had had several stays in hospital establishments. In 1945, the mother and the child return to Paris.

After the war, Rébecca was not in a position to raise Simon. He will spend six years in three reception homes affiliated with the Bund (in Le Mans, in the sanatorium of Brunoy, and at the children’s home known under the name of “Champsfleur” at Maisons-Laffitte). They were difficult years, despite the efforts deployed by the heads of the orphanage to surmount the anguishes of these Jewish children. He has no memory of the first two (“[these memories] remain locked in my iron cage”). Turning to these years of early childhood, Simon writes: “I cannot see myself otherwise than as a profoundly sad, even depressive, child, incapable of feeling joy or the slightest desire, not even that of seeing my mother, who came to visit me from time to time on Sundays.” He thinks that he was the depositary, probably unconscious during childhood, of a burden that long paralysed him. It was at nine or ten years of age, he thinks, at the Champsfleur home, that his life started. It was there that he had a first contact with Yiddish culture. He specifies that he then had a kind of sudden intimate “revelation” of an encounter with his own culture, with Sholem Aleichem notably and his hero Tevye the Dairyman.

In the summer of 1951, Rébecca decided to move with her son into a small apartment on rue Charlot in a “neighbourhood with a strong post-war Ashkenazi Jewish concentration” (Simon). For nine years, he had practically not lived with his mother. The coexistence was certainly not easy, Simon perhaps lets us glimpse. Many are the cases of this type, just as the difficult exit from the war for these Jewish women, often widows. The apartment was cold; there was only one stove (in the living room) and one water tap (in the kitchen). Each week, the mother and the son went to the municipal bathhouses. It is as a sociologist that Simon describes their conditions of existence. Lacking a real trade, Rébecca worked selling ready-made clothes at the Carreau du Temple market—an exhausting activity: “She got up at 5 a.m. every day except Monday.” She was never flourishing, with moments of depression and weeping. The Jewish festivals were not marked. Rébecca said: “After the Shoah, I do not have the heart to celebrate anything.” (She probably did not say “Shoah,” but “Hurbn.”) She no longer had the taste for living.

But she nonetheless decided to introduce a man into their life, a man whom Simon, who was fourteen at the time, hated from the outset, whom he always addressed formally as vous, although this man was also a survivor, from Galicia, and a veteran of the International Brigades. Simon had a difficult start, but a teacher knew how to motivate him enough to help propel him into excellence. Simon then climbed various scholarly, then university rungs after leaving home. After a doctorate in physics in 1966, he turned toward the social sciences, exercising the activity of researcher and recognised expert (urban policy, social policy notably).

Then he made, in a sense, a return to his Jewish identity, by working on the question of cultural Judaism, to which he devoted important publications, notably in Plurielles.

Simon Wuhl, a very rigorous mind

Becoming (or having become?) a free man, Simon nonetheless always kept a strong guilt with regard to his mother, all the more so as the relationship with her partner had deteriorated. “One day,” he writes, “at the beginning of the spring of 1970, her partner had broken a fifteen-year silence with a phone call at 7 a.m.: Rébecca had made a suicide attempt by throwing herself out of the window […] of the third-floor apartment on rue Charlot.” She fell on a glass roof and escaped with her life.

Guilt never abandoned her son.

To conclude, this citation from Simon:

“I imagined, before approaching the writing of my book, that the unflinching confrontation with the conditions of my father’s tragic destiny would leave me overwhelmed by the anguish of powerlessness. Considering the time it took me—not to extract myself from the insurmountable grip of the consequences of the Shoah, but to hold it at least somewhat at a distance—I preferred to leave Isacher’s tragedy locked in the ‘iron cage,’ deep inside me. I feared that the brutal opening of the box might provoke uncontrollable effects by plunging me into that kind of depressive state that had been familiar to me in my childhood and part of my youth.

Now, it is the inverse that has occurred: by reconstituting not only the facts, but also the ideas, hopes, and commitments that gave such rich meaning to my father’s brief existence, I have the appeasing impression of finding again my place within my family history; and, through this intermediary, of inscribing myself within the great pluralist History of the Jewish people.”

Books by Simon Wuhl

On employment, exclusion, social justice:

On Judaism:

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