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Abstract
Sarah Kofman’s belated memoir, Rue Order, Rue Labat, narrates the experiences of a hidden Jewish child in Paris, living out the war in a vexed relationship with two mothers – her biological mother, a Polish immigrant and wife of an Orthodox rabbi, on the one hand; and a Catholic French woman who saves them, on the other. Reading the memoir alongside literary reflections by other child survivors, such as Aharon Appelfeld and Louis Begley, the article focuses on the snippets of literary, cinematic, and artistic analysis published elsewhere that Kofman has interpellated into the autobiographical details. Taken together, these critical readings and the personal narratives gesture towards the internalization and aftereffects of the Shoah for hidden children.
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This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
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Notes on contributor
Sara R. Horowitz is Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities and former Director of the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University in Toronto. She is the author of Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction, which received the Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Book, and served as the senior founding editor of the Azrieli Series of Holocaust Memoirs - Canada (Series 1 and 2). She is the editor of Lessons and Legacies of the Holocaust Volume X : Back to the Sources (2012), and co-editor of the forthcoming Shadows on the City of Lights: Jewish Post-War French Writing, of Hans Günther Adler: Life, Literature, Legacy (2016) which received the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, and of Encounter with Appelfeld, and other books. In addition, she is founding co-editor of the journal KEREM: A Journal of Creative Explorations in Judaism. She served as editor for Literature for The Cambridge Dictionary of Judaism and Jewish Culture (ed. Judith Baskin). She publishes extensively on contemporary Holocaust literature, gender and Holocaust memory survivors, and Jewish North American fiction.
Notes
1 Aharon Appelfeld, “In Discussion,” in Encounter with Aharon Appelfeld, eds. Michael Brown and Sara R. Horowitz (Toronto: Mosaic Press, 2003), p. 47.
2 Sarah Kofman, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat (Paris: Galilée, 1994), translated by Ann Smock as Rue Ordener, Rue Labat (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996). All quotations are from these two editions. On the cover and title page of the original French edition and the English translation, the two street names of the title appear on separate lines, but with no punctuation between them. Ample scholarship has commented on the implication of the unstoppered flow between the two streets where the young Sarah Kofman lived: Rue Ordener Rue Labat. Conventional bibliographic listings place a comma between the street names, and that is the format followed here.
3 Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), p. xi.
4 Ann Smock, “Translator’s Introduction,” Rue Ordener, Rue Labat [English edition], p. xii.
5 Sarah Kofman, “Cauchemar: En marge des études médiévales,” in Comment s’en sortir (Paris: Galilée, 1983), pp. 101–12 [trans. by Frances Barkowski as “Nightmare: At the Margins of Medieval Studies,” SubStance 49 (1986): pp. 10–3]; Sarah Kofman, “Sacrée nourriture,” in Manger, eds. C. Besson and C. Weinzaepflen (Liège: Yellow Now, 1980), pp. 71–4 [trans. by Frances Barkowski as “Damned Food,” SubStance 49 (1986): pp. 8–9]; Sarah Kofman, “‘Ma vie’ et la psychanalyse (Janvier 76: Fragment d’analyse),” Première Livraison 4 (1976).
6 Sarah Kofman, Paroles suffoquées (Paris: Galilée, 1987), translated by Madeleine Dobie as Smothered Words (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998).
7 Kofman, Smothered Words, p. 9.
8 However, as early as 1986, it was believed that Kofman had written an unpublished autobiographical manuscript. See, for example, Frances Bartkowski’s introduction to her translation of several of Kofman’s autobiographic vignettes, under the title “Autobiographical Writings,” SubStance 49 (1986): pp. 6–13.
9 I am indebted to Susan Suleiman’s insight regarding “mediated autobiography” as “the exploration of the writer's self … [that] takes place not directly but through the mediation of writing about another.” Susan Rubin Suleiman, Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 3.
10 Kofman, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat [English], p. 3.
11 Kofman, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat [French], p. 9.
12 Paul Celan, “‘Todesfuge,” in Mohn und Gedachtnis (Stuttgart: Deutsch Verlags-Anstalt, 1952), pp. 37–9. The poem begins: “Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken sie abends” (Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening), with the phrase “Schwarze Milch der Frühe” repeated three more times in the poem. [Translation: John Felstiner, “Mother Tongue, Holy Tongue: On Translating and Not Translating Paul Celan,” Comparative Literature 38, no. 2 (1986): pp. 113–36.]
13 Appelfeld, “After the Holocaust,” in Encounter with Aharon Appelfeld, eds. Brown and Horowitz, p. 39.
14 Kofman, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat [English], p. 39.
15 Ibid., p. 48.
16 Ibid., p. 47.
17 Louis Begley, Wartime Lies (New York: Knopf, 1991).
18 Ibid., p. 177.
19 Ibid.
20 Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (New York: HarperCollins, 2006).
21 Ibid., p. 391.
22 Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci: A Study in Psychosexuality, trans. A. A. Brill (New York: Random House, 1947).
23 Ibid., p. 64.
24 Sarah Kofman, L’enfance de l’art: Une interprétation de l’esthétique freudienne (Paris: Payot, 1970), translated by Winifred Woodhull as The Childhood of Art: An Interpretation of Freud's Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).
25 Kofman, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat [English], p. 45.
26 Kofman, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat [French], p. 55.
27 Kofman, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat [English], p. 15.
28 Ibid., p. 47.
29 Ibid., pp. 65–6.
30 Ibid., p. 66.
31 Ibid., p. 6.
32 Ibid., p. 14.
33 Ibid., p. 5.
34 Ibid., p. 3.
35 Ibid.
36 Maurice Blanchot, “L’Idylle,” Le Ressassement éternel (Paris: Minuit, 1951).
37 Kofman, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat [English], p. 69.
38 Kofman, Smothered Words, p. 19.
39 Kofman, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat [English], p. 67.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid., p. 41.
42 Ibid., p. 40.
43 Ibid., p. 55.
44 Kofman, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat [English], p. 40.
45 Kofman, Smothered Words, p. 20.
46 Ibid., p. 19.
47 Ibid., p. 23.
48 Kofman, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat [English], p. 48.
49 Ibid., p. 42.
50 Ibid., p. 43.
51 Kofman, Smothered Words, p. 22.
52 Kofman, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat [English], p. 44.
53 Kofman, Smothered Words, p. 22–23.
54 Ibid., p. 24.
55 Ibid., p. 21.
56 Ibid., p. 30.
57 Appelfeld, “After the Holocaust,” in Encounter with Aharon Appelfeld, eds. Brown and Horowitz, p. 25.
58 Ibid., p. 47.
59 Sarah Kofman, “L’imposture de la beauté: l’inquiétante étrangeté du Portrait de Dorian Gray,” L’imposture de la beauté et autres textes (Paris: Galilé, 1995), pp. 9–48.
60 Some of the discussion in this essay is based on my essay, Sara R. Horowitz, “Sarah Kofman et l’ambiguïté des mères,” in Témoignages de l’après-Auschwitz dans la littérature juive-française d’aujourd'hui: Enfants de survivants et survivants-enfants, eds. Annelise Schulte Nordholt (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2008), pp. 101–20.