The controversial question of “French Jewish literature”

Abstract

Is there is specific Jewish literature in France? The study of Jewish authors and their writing is not sufficient grounds to indicate that such a group exists as a socio-historiacal entity; that their existence is real and not merely nominal. The question of the existence of Jewish literature – not to be confused with Jewish writing – is a central preoccupation of the community press, in which preferred answers are formulated with reference to an organised group of artists rather than in terms of artistic expression. We will attempt to show how and by what devices the position adopted by the press in question, often lacking in coherence and sufficient justification, has influenced that adopted by certain writers and academics.

Keywords:

• Sociology of literature
• French Jewish writters
• community press

View correction statement:

CORRIGENDUM

Notes

On the distinction between realism and nominalism, we refer the reader to the definition of social classes in Aron (69–70).

The expression “community press” is employed here for convenience and should not necessarily be taken to imply that we take for granted that a Jewish community exists in France. On the contrary, we argue that this is not the case, even if some organizations do exist on the national level, which, though they do not represent the whole of the Jewish population in France, present their vocation as that of representing a community. As a result of this a certain number of Jews see themselves as belonging to and being represented by these institutions. It is in this rather limited sense that we talk of the “community press” with reference to certain publications linked to rabbinical or consistorial institutions in which Jewish journalists write and which are read almost exclusively by certain Jews in France.

Apart from a large number of articles on specific writers in which the journalist takes the opportunity offered by literary criticism to explain what should be understood by the expression “French-language Jewish writer,” and other articles addressing the question of its definition appearing in the midst of articles on other subjects, ten or more special issues of community journals have been dedicated to the question of the existence of Franco-Jewish literature between 1956 and 1995, despite the fact that these are not primarily literary journals. This being said, they all have a literary column in which Jewish literature is regularly reviewed.

The literary column of one of the most widely circulated community journals, L'Arche, was directed by Arnold Mandel until November 1963, and by Wladimir Rabinovitch from December 1963. L'Arche, the weekly magazine of the Fonds Social Juif Unifié, was founded in 1957. Arnold Mandel (1913–1987) was the French author of numerous articles on orthodox Judaism and Hassidism. Born in Strasbourg of a Galician Jewish family, he was a journalist, poet, essayist, and novelist. He was a member of the resistance during the Second World War and a friend of Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and André Neher. Wladimir Rabinovitch (1906–1981) – pen-name Rabi – was born in Vilna, Lithuania, in 1906. He arrived in Paris in 1910 and became a lawyer in 1930. He was struck off in 1940, under the Vichy regime, and reintegrated in 1944, when he chose to become a magistrate. After several months in Die, he received an appointment in Briançon, where he practiced until 1973. He was a writer, essayist, literary critic, and polemist (in Le Monde and Esprit). He died in 1981 in a car accident.

As we will see further on, the question of the definition of Jewish literature involves the more general question of Jewish identity. “Jewish literature is subject to certain ambiguities. These ambiguities translate the ambiguity of our Jewish condition, which translates as a radical impossibility of offering a coherent and universal definition of Jewish identity” (Rabi, “Littérature juive et écrivains juifs” 25).

Rabi refers to the final edition of L'Anthologie juive (Flammarion, Paris, 1951 [Editions Crés, Paris, 1923]) by Edmond Fleg, published in 1923 and reedited in 1951.

The controversy came to a close several months later in the reader's column, with a letter entitled “Plaidoyer pour Romain Gary.” The author disputes Mandel's point of view and concludes:

As far as I am concerned, a writer's work as interpreted by his readers is the principal criterion for attributing membership of a family, a type, or a line of thought – another factor being his personality. In my opinion, Gary-Ajar is a Jewish writer, probably not by essence, not exclusively, but in any case very profoundly. (Claude Lévy)

André Elbaz lives in Montréal. He was born in Fez and grew up in Meknès, Morocco. He has taught in Morocco, the Nigerian Republic, and the United States. A docteur ès lettres (Sorbonne, 1969), he has been a professor of French literature at Carleton University, Ottawa, since 1965. He has published a large number of works on Jewish literature in France, North America, and Morocco and several studies of the Sephardic community in Montréal.

Bernard Frank (1929–2006) grew up in a well-off, non-practicing Jewish family. In 1938, his family moved to Vic-sur-Cère in Auvergne and then back to Paris in 1946. At age 20 he met Jean-Paul Sartre, who gave him, as a trial, the direction of the literary chronicle Les Temps Modernes. He collaborated sporadically with the journal, but fell out with the direction after the publication of Rats (1953), of which Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the characters. He has collaborated with L'Observateur, Le Monde, Cahier des saisons, Nouveau Candide, and L'Actualité. He obtained the Prix des Deux Magots in 1971 for Un siècle débordé, and the Prix Roger Nimier in 1981 for Solde. That same year he began to publish his literary chronicle in Le Matin de Paris before joining Le Monde in 1985 and then Le Nouvel Observateur in 1989.

“The authors who replied to our questions are: Myriam Anissimov, who published Comment va Rachel?, the story of a young girl of Jewish descent who loses her mind. Roger Ascot, journalist, militant Zionist author of Juifs meurent aussi, a monumental fresco on Parisian Judaism. Albert Bensoussan, a Jewish author from Algeria who has just published La Bréhaigne, a book on uprootedness, on heartbreak. Jean Blot, writer and international statesman, author of La difficulté d'aimer and of an essay on Ossip Mandelstam; he has just published Là où tu iras, a travel story. Elian J. Finbert, Jewish writer, eulogist of Israel and of nature. Irène Kanfer, author of Contes d'une nuit d'hiver and translator of Yiddish poets; she has translated a marvelous anthology of poems written in the Warsaw Ghetto.” (Tribune juive 131)

Albert Bensoussan is a novelist, translator (from Spanish), and university professor. He was born in 1935 in Algeria, where he grew up. He was professor of Spanish at the Lycée Bugeaud in Algeria until 1961, assistant at the Sorbonne in 1963, and taught at l'Université de Rennes-II from 1978 to 1995. Algeria figures on numerous occasions in his work, in particular the Judo-Arabic milieu in which most of his novels are based.

“If it did exist, yes. It would express the Jewish soul, the Jewish individual for better or for worse.”

Pierre Bourdieu notes a similar double strategy in the case of French-language Belgian writers (identification with dominant literature or reliance on the national market involving an affirmation of Belgian identity) and points out that the latter strategy is adopted when the author realizes that the former is out of reach (Bourdieu 3).

This is the case for Les nouveaux cahiers (which appeared in 1965) and Pardès, which have ties with l'Alliance Israélite Universelle.

Lazare Bitoun is a specialist on American literature.

Rachel Ertel, docteur ès lettres, professor at the University Paris-VII, author and translator of Yiddish and American literature. These cultural realities are particularly compatible with the communitarian model.