by Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2021 Paul Ben-Itzak
Pour un version française – for an earlier French version of this article, expanded and edited here – cliquez ici.
Friday October 15, the twilight hour.
I am chatting on the terrace with Ferdinand (not his real name), my 87-year-old neighbor, whom I’ve just asked to recount his experience in the war with Algeria. Serving between 1955 and 1958 – “Mitterand sent me!” (when the latter was minister in charge of Algeria) – he saw his comrades shot down beside him, and also had to shoot the indigenous Independence fighters of the FLN (National Liberation Front). “When you’re ambushed, you don’t have a choice.”
“Macron shouldn’t have asked for [Algeria] to pardon [France]!” Ferdinand declared.
“But Ferdinand, the president did not ask for Algeria’s pardon.” (In fact, in his nearly five years of concerted efforts to heal the wounds between France and its former colony, independent since 1962, the French president has emphasized the need to move beyond questions of pardon.)
“Macron, he’s a Jew! Like Sarkozy.”
And voila, the truth is out, I thought, shocked all the same. (Ferdinand and I have known each other for seven years, and always enjoyed a friendly rapport.) Because of course, it’s the Jews who are to blame for and at the origin of all the wrongs in the world – because make no mistake about it: this “pardon” (never mind that it’s fictional!) is, in Ferdinand’s eyes, a very bad idea, ergo an idea whose malfeasance is obviously explained by its alleged originator being (according to Ferdinand) a Jew.
“Ferdinand, I’m a Jew.”
“You’re a Jew?! An American Jew!”
As if my nationality somehow gave me cover, a French Jew presumably being worse. (Or, as a friend decoded Ferdinand’s qualification for me later – ironically – “Because of course American Jews, they’re great businessmen.”)
Afterwards, of course, Ferdinand tried to backtrack, in the expected manner: I have nothing against Jews, it takes all kinds to make a world, there are even Algerian policemen in Marseille.
But this back-peddling didn’t stop me from reflecting: It’s exactly this optic, this way of thinking – this latent resentment of the Jews, this tendency to blame us for everything that’s wrong with society, which is as old as the crucifixion of Christ, our Original Sin – it’s precisely this attitude which often makes more virulent forms of anti-Semitism, historically and ongoing, possible.
(In France, 74,000 Jews, including 11,000 children, only 3,000 of whom returned from the death camps, were deported by the collaborationist Vichy government, whose leaders, like other Collaborationists, were later tried by the restored French justice department under de Gaulle’s post-war government and received severe sentences including death. In 1995, president Jacques Chirac decried that Vichy had carried the Deportation out “in the name of France” and said the country must share its part of responsibility. Of course there were also the many Justes, those who hid and saved Jews, often at their own peril; my Bergerac wine-maker’s grandfather was recently recognized as such, for hiding out for three years a Jewish 12-year-old boy he didn’t know until the child bicycled to his farm from Paris. If Chirac’s discourse was pronounced at the Vel d’Hiv – site of the most infamous ‘raffle’ of French and foreign-born Jews – it’s important to state that there might have been many more Jews rounded up and deported that day had they not been alerted and saved by French police and gendarmes ahead of the round-up.)
And Ferdinand, to your “Macron, he’s a Jew!” I want to respond:
And Max Jacob, Surrealist poet, “compagnon de route” of Cocteau, of Picasso, of Apollinaire, already converted to Christianity for three decades before he was turned in by a neighbor and arrested by the Gestapo, dead at Drancy before he could be deported (or, to his chagrin, given Last Rites by a priest; in his last, hurriedly scribbled note from the train to Drancy, delivered thanks to a complacent gendarme, Jacob told his own priest he had several conversions in progress), he was (seen by those who condemned him as) a Jew.
And Irène Nemirovsky, the great chronicler of the exile of 1940, as civilians fled Paris ahead of the approaching Axis invasion, already a celebrated novelist published by Albin Michel, arrested in 1942, deported, and later executed in the camps, was seen (despite her conversion) and executed as a Jew, despite the pathetic (if understandable) efforts by her (Jewish) husband to convince her captors that she’d always been critical of Jews in her writings, until he, too, was arrested, deported, and assassinated.
And Robert Desnos, another pioneering Surrealist poet, troubadour of the poetry with which every morning is fraught, also arrested, deported, and dead in the camps, was a Jew.
And Anne Frank was a Jew.
And Captain Dreyfus (whose niece Julie would be arrested, deported, and killed in the camps), unjustly accused of betraying the country he’d fought for and imprisoned on Devil’s Island until Zola, Clemenceau, Anatole France and others won his freedom, was Jewish. (The new Dreyfus museum opened Monday… in Zola’s old home in Medun.)
And Léon Blum, companion of Jaures, imprisoned by the Nazis despite that he was a former president of France, was a Jew.
And John Franklin, my civics teacher at Mission High School, a survivor of Auschwitz who told us he believed in the statute of limitations, even for the Nazis who had killed his relatives, and who went on to teach German, was a Jew.
And Paul Cenac, who worked so hard to repair the German language from the harm the Nazis had done it in his poetry until he killed himself in 1970 at the age of 49, was a Jew.
And Romain Gary, the real author of “All of life before you,” that paene to coming of age and the Cosmopolitainism of Belleville, and a Companion of the Liberation, was a Jew.
Et Chantal Akerman, another suicide (chez the children of Holocaust survivors, the phenomenon is common), the pioneering filmmaker, was a Jew.
And my dentist, who lost his cousin – who, after a good Frenchman or woman revealed her Paris hiding place, was deported to her death, and whose mother, my dentist’s aunt, tried to kill herself by jumping from the window of the apartment since become his office, where he healed my teeth and, in the process, did so much good for my soul – is a Jew.
And Ofra Haza, was a Jew.
And Joe Mazo, one of my journalistic mentors.
And Sammy Davis Jr. .
And Serge Gainsbourg (who had flirted with Sammy Davis Jr.’s girlfriend), born Ginsburg (and hidden out during the war by a Juste or Righteous, French family, because there were legions of those too).
And my great uncle Sammy, who entered in the family lore after pulling out his whip to strike a fellow motorist in Miami who had yelled out “Dirty Jew!”
And Morris Hertzon, my grandfather, so proud when I had my belated bar-mitzvah and bris (the non-medical part) at the age of 16 in Miami Beach, a sort of Cliff Notes version, arranged by him.
And Allan Sherman, the composer of “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah,” the unofficial theme song of all Jewish summer camps.
And Edward G. Robinson.
And Leonard Cohen.
And Bob Dylan.
And Camille Pissarro.
And Edward Winer, my late father.
And Eva Wise, my mother.
And Shirley Hertzon, her mother.
And Max Winer and Shirley Winer (a Jew, it seems, of Iranian or Turkish origin), my grandparents on my father’s side.
And Donna Berman, my rabbi, mode Joni Mitchell, at Princeton.
And Art Spiegelman.
And Rebecca Stenn, the dancer-writer-choreographer who inspired the Dance Insider.
And Annette Clark, my godmother.
And Annette’s cousin Gloria Lyon, who held me spellbound on her Diamond Heights terrace in San Francisco when I interviewed her for the New York Times, recounting how, en route for the death camps, she’d saved herself by jumping naked from a speeding train, and who took it on herself for decades to talk about her experience to school-children so that we would never forget.
And Esther Begin, a Belgian woman I flirted with on a Brussels-bound Paris train, who recounted to me how her grandmother had saved herself in a similar fashion.
And all the child poets and artists of Terezin, the “model” camp set up by the Nazis, authors of the post-humous illustrated book “I never saw another butterfly.”
And Humphrey Bogart.
And Sarah Bernhardt.
And Benjamin Stora, the great French historian and child of Constantine, the great cosmopolitan Algerian city, who has done so much work to enlighten the relationship between France and Algeria for decades.
And my friend KM, a major artist-activist in Belleville. (I’m giving just her initials here because, guess what, Ferdinand, even if I have no idea whether this is her sentiment, some Jews in France, even in 2021, still have the tendency to hide, or at least not discuss openly, that they are Jewish, even 75 years after World War II. Because of people like you who are still ready to blame them for all the troubles of the world, to judge them by their ethnic identity and not their acts or who they are.)
And then there was Kolya, who was also Jewish, and who he, too, was assassinated by cowards.
Kolya, gifted and gentle adolescent, like Nemirovsky and my own ancestors of Ukrainian origin. Kolya, who used to cavort with his comrades around the blue mosaic fountain in the Square Albin Cachot in Paris’s 13th arrondissement, also my first demeure in Paris. Kolya who, after he was arrested and deported, was kept alive by his comrades in their diaries. (“I saw Kolya this afternoon on the boulevard Arago.” “Kolya had the funniest expression this morning when I caught up with him on the rue Glacière.”)
And finally, Ferdinand, there was the King of Denmark, who demonstrated his solidarity with his Jewish citizens after his country was occupied by sewing and brandishing a Star of David on his coat-sleeve, a deed I heard about from another mentor, Lewis Campbell, when he directed our conservatory troupe in a production of “The Diary of Anne Frank” (I played Anne’s boyfriend Peter).
And there’s yours truly, Paul Ivan Winer Ben-Itzak, your neighbor, who is a Jew (even if I prefer to identify myself as a citizen of the world or, if pressed, a San Franciscan… and a Perigourdin like you).
And as far as Emmanuel Macron goes, I have no idea whether he is Jewish or not, and I couldn’t care less. But I love him. I love him for his courage in making sure his country, your country, my country, lives up to its promise of universalism and its heritage of “les Lumieres.”
And you, Ferdinand, who are you?
The Paris Tribune 