In a society on the whole hostile to the Jews . . . it is possible to assimilate only by assimilating to anti-Semitism also. If one wishes to be a normal person precisely like everybody else, there is scarcely an alternative to exchanging old prejudices for new ones.
—HANNAH ARENDT, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess
TOO OFTEN TODAY THE term self-hating Jew is used as a bludgeon, usually by Jews against other Jews whose opinions, whether real or imagined, they find objectionable. But in fact the concept of Jewish self-hatred has a complicated history. Although the term itself was not coined until relatively recently and was not widely used until after the First World War, the idea that assimilated Jews might consider their Jewishness a burden or a shame goes back to the early nineteenth century, when Jews in Europe had their first opportunity to enter the Christian mainstream. The life of Rahel Varnhagen (1771–1833), a German Jewish writer and salonnière, offers a perfect illustration. The daughter of a wealthy businessman, Rahel married a minor German aristocrat and converted to Christianity but never lost the feeling of being an outsider in German society. Jewishness, as she famously stated on her deathbed, was at once the source of the greatest “shame and misery” in her existence and the thing she would on no account have wanted to miss.1
The German Jewish philosopher Theodor Lessing published a book in 1930 titled Der jüdische Selbsthass ( Jewish self-hatred) in which he suggested that the sense of worthlessness many Jews felt about themselves and about other Jews was an understandable response to the suffering they had experienced as members of a despised minority in European history and culture. While he was addressing himself primarily to German Jews, his remarks also applied to Jews in other countries. Lessing saw self-hatred as a widespread human malady, and his book was meant to encourage Jews to affirm both their own worth and that of every human being. Lessing blamed narrow nationalisms for devaluing anyone who was not seen as belonging to the nation. He placed his faith in an internationalist movement that would make such chauvinism a thing of the past, and Jews, he intimated, could overcome their self-hatred by joining or even leading such a movement.2 Paul Reitter, a scholar of German Jewish history who is the author of a recent book on this subject, likens Lessing’s book to a “self-help book, where your sufferings give you opportunities for self-transcendence and improving the world.”3
In more recent times the term Jewish self-hatred was put into circulation by Sander Gilman in 1986 in his book of that title. Gilman, a noted scholar of modern German literature and culture, analyzes what he calls the psychological “structure of self-hatred,” which is not limited to Jews but can be observed in any group that is devalued in a given society, from women to foreigners to racial minorities. Self-hatred, as Gilman explains it, is a process in which the member of a devalued group internalizes the negative stereotypes by which the majority defines the group and seeks to distinguish himself or herself from those stereotypes as an exception. Thus, in Jewish self-hatred, Gilman writes, “Jews see the dominant society seeing them and . . . project their anxiety about this manner of being seen onto other Jews as a means of externalizing their own status anxiety.”4 This projection is a form of splitting: the self-hating Jew seeks to make himself into a “good” or exceptional Jew who is different from the stereotypical “bad” Jew. Hannah Arendt had already analyzed and condemned the phenomenon of “exceptional” Jews in her writings in the 1940s and later, but Gilman gave a systematic account of the psychological process it involved. While one can argue with him on specific issues, there is no doubt that he treats Jewish self-hatred as an analytic concept, not as a bludgeon. In ordinary discourse, however, and even in some critical writing, self-hating Jew usually functions as an accusation: the person accused of being a self-hating Jew is implicitly contrasted with the non-self-hating or self-loving Jew, among whom the one launching the accusation presumably counts herself. Curiously, this kind of splitting recreates the very same process that the concept of self-hatred seeks to analyze. It’s as if the accuser were saying, “Némirovsky [or Franz Kafka, Gertrude Stein, Hannah Arendt, Philip Roth, Joseph Roth, or Isaac Babel, among great twentieth-century writers who have been called that] is a self-hating Jew, but I am not.” Such splitting excludes the possibility of ambiguity and ambivalence, concepts I find more useful in discussing psychological attitudes toward Jewishness or any other minority group identity in relation to the mainstream.
Besides, since the term self-hating Jew can be and indeed has been applied to very many people, it becomes so broad as to be almost useless. What modern, urban, educated, secular Jew has not, at one time or another, felt a sense of shame, or merely uneasiness, at the look or manners or behavior of other Jews that he or she recognizes as being of the same ancestry or ethnicity yet also perceives as embarrassingly different from his or her own self or ideal? It would be dishonest to claim that one has never felt ambivalence about being Jewish, if one is a relatively assimilated or integrated Jew living among a non-Jewish majority. (Assimilation and integration are sometimes distinguished from each other, but for my purposes the two terms are pretty much interchangeable.) This is true even in the United States today, where multiculturalism and minority differences are celebrated, and it was certainly true of both Europe and the United States in the decades before the Second World War, when difference was a negative word and openly antisemitic discourses were widespread and almost casual. Even among non-antisemites or anti-antisemites, Jewish “difference” and stereotypical representations of Jews were often taken for granted, both before and after the war: witness Jean-Paul Sartre’s well-meaning but stereotypical portrait of the Jew in his Réflexions sur la question juive (Antisemite and Jew), published in 1946. It can hardly come as a surprise if many Jews at the time wished they could give up that privilege.
Rather than speak of Jewish self-hatred, it makes historical as well as philosophical sense to speak of the ambiguities and ambivalences regarding Jewish identity and self-definition during this period. The problem had to do with the relations not only between Jews and the wider culture in which they lived but also between and among Jews themselves. There exists a historically rich and complex term to designate this problem: the “Jewish question,” die Judenfrage, la question juive. The appropriation of this term by the Nazis, who claimed to have found a “final solution” to it, has rightly discredited it from civilized usage, except in quotation marks. But it is salvageable—in quotation marks—and a useful alternative to Jewish self-hatred if one wants to think about dilemmas of Jewish identity in modern times.
According to historians who have studied the evolution of this term, it first became widespread in Germany in the nineteenth century. Die Judenfrage entered public discourse with the publication in 1843 of Bruno Bauer’s book of that title (first published as a series of essays); a year later, Karl Marx responded with his own essay bearing the same title.5 While Marx and Bauer disagreed on details, they agreed on one point, namely, that “the social and economic drive of the acculturated Jew was the real crux of the Jewish question.”6 In other words, this question could come about only after the political emancipation of Jews in Europe had opened the door to Jewish participation in national life. Even though Jews in Germany did not gain full citizenship rights until after the revolutions of 1848, by the early decades of the nineteenth century many had achieved economic and professional success as well as intellectual recognition. A considerable number had even converted to Christianity in order to try, mostly unsuccessfully, to gain full integration into German society. What the “Jewish question” put into question was precisely the trustworthiness of Jews as members of the nation. Bauer claimed that even acculturated Jews didn’t really want to be fully absorbed into the Christian mainstream, clinging to their “illusory” Jewishness, while Marx claimed that Jews represented the essence of capitalism and were therefore inimical to a just society. Either way, as Jacob Toury noted in his historical-semantic study of the term, “the ‘Jewish question’ as a slogan did not take root until it had established itself as an anti-Jewish battle-cry.” This is what enabled the virulent antisemitisms of the late nineteenth century to propagate and popularize the term, carrying it through the 1930s and beyond. The common denominator between earlier and later anti-Jewish uses of the term, Toury concludes, was “the insistence upon the alien character of the Jews as a group” in relation to the mainstream.7
The “Jewish question,” then, in its antisemitic formulation, was not a question at all but a declaration. The historian Vicky Caron has summed it up well: “Jews, no matter how assimilated, can never be truly French.”8 Or German or Hungarian or Polish or, for that matter, American, for in the United States, too, Jews were seen as a problem by antisemites, who were not afraid to express their views. Father Charles Edward Coughlin, a Canadian Catholic priest based in the United States, had a popular following on his weekly radio program, during which he often spewed anti-Jewish rhetoric even as he denied being an antisemite. In the 1930s, as in the 1890s, radical nationalisms in Europe combined with economic crises to create an ideal climate for such formulations, as well as for schemes to find supposed solutions to the “Jewish question.” Thus in April 1938 the rabidly antisemitic French weekly Je suis partout (I am everywhere) devoted a whole issue to “La Question Juive.” The solution proposed in front-page articles by the two main editors, Robert Brasillach and Lucien Rebatet, both of them notorious antisemites, was to strip French Jews of their nationality. “It is impossible, as many liberals believe, to belong to two nations, the Jewish and the French,” wrote Brasillach. “We demand that Jews be returned to their condition as Jews,” wrote Rebatet, which to him meant “stripping Jews of French citizenship, and of all the rights that go with it.”9 Their words were accompanied by antisemitic cartoons that reinforced the message visually: Jews, with their hooked noses, fleshy lips, fat paunches, and grabbing hands, could not be true Frenchmen.
By an interesting twist, however, antisemites were not the only ones to refer to the “Jewish question” in their writings. The term was also used by Jews in a fairly wide variety of ways. Theodor Herzl, arguing for the necessity of a Jewish state in his book Judenstaat (1896), subtitled the book Versuch einer modernen Lösung der Judenfrage (Attempt at a modern solution of the Jewish question). Herzl reasoned that the only solution for Jews was to become a separate nation, so in a sense his assumption tallies with that of the antisemites who considered the Jews unassimilable in Europe. But for the many Jews who did not wish to leave their European homelands, the “Jewish question” was a different matter: they either denied its existence altogether, dismissing it as an antisemitic invention (“There is no Jewish question, or at least there should not be one—Jews are loyal citizens, and their religious practice is their private affair”); or else it became for them a question of individual identity, often experienced as a feeling of estrangement both from the non-Jewish mainstream and from other Jews, who themselves came in many varieties. The Jews of postrevolutionary Europe were a hugely diverse and varied population, divided by class, language, degree of religious practice, ideological and political allegiances, and many other factors. What is striking is how much writing there was, throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, on the “Jewish question” by Jewish writers and how much anguish they expressed. This was especially true in Germany and Austria, where the question, which was basically the question of assimilation, was felt most acutely.10 But the question existed wherever Jews had or could dream of emancipation and full participation in civic life.
To vary the examples a bit, I will cite a Hungarian one.11 In 1917, at a time when the so-called Golden Age of Hungarian Jewry was already drawing to a close, the distinguished scholarly journal Huszadik Század (Twentieth century), founded and edited by the secular Jewish historian Oszkár Jászi, ran a special issue titled “The Jewish Question in Hungary.” It included a survey that asked, “Is there a Jewish question in Hungary, and if so, what is its essence? What is the cause of the Jewish question in Hungary? What do you see as the solution to the Jewish question in Hungary?” Of the sixty Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals who responded, only a few stated that there was “no Jewish question.” These were the staunchly optimistic Jews who reaffirmed their belief in Enlightenment ideals. “According to my experience there is no Jewish question in Hungary,” wrote the director of the Budapest rabbinical seminary, Dr. Lajos Blau; “but supposing that there is, it is essentially a leftover of medieval feeling and thought in non-Jews who insist on a Jewish question.”12 The “leftover,” Blau claimed, would disappear once people became enlightened. Alex Bein has noted in his book on the history of the “Jewish question” that to many Jewish leaders in Germany as well, “the Jewish question existed only in the imagination of or through the activities of Jew-baiters.”13
The great majority of respondents to the Hungarian questionnaire in 1917, both Jews and non-Jews, stated that there was indeed a Jewish question. According to most Jewish respondents, its essence was antisemitism, itself a reaction to the problems and tensions of modernity. This response is not much different from that of the notables who claimed there was no Jewish question except in the minds of antisemites. Among the replies by non-Jews, the one by a university professor from Transylvania stands out for its tone as well as its content. Yes, there is a Jewish question, wrote the professor, and its essence is in some Jews’ refusal to become Hungarian, in their stubborn clinging to a nationhood different from that of the Magyars: “It’s that spoiled, Germanic-dialect-speaking, orthodox, strongly Oriental-looking Jewry that in ordinary parlance is called Galizianer [Yiddish-speaking Jews from Galicia, in Poland].” Such Jews, he stated, provoked the antipathy not only of Magyars like himself but also of “every other people brought up in a Christian civilization.” He urged the Jews of Hungary to “exterminate” the characteristics of this group from their midst (the verb kiírtani in Hungarian has acquired the same sinister connotations after the Holocaust as the English).14 One could hardly find a more graphic evocation of the divide between acculturated Jews and Yiddish-speaking Ostjuden that haunted so much of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Jewish thinking and writing about group identity than under the pen of this Christian Transylvanian scholar, whose own geographic marginality in relation to Hungary may have made him especially sensitive to issues of exclusion and inclusion. Jewish writers and intellectuals in Hungary as well as in Germany, France, and England were acutely and often painfully aware of the differences between themselves and the poor, orthodox shtetl Jews of Poland and Russia, some of whom were their own grandparents.15 Even within Poland and Russia class divisions existed. Sholem Aleichem, the creator of the immortal Tevye the Dairyman, treated them in the comic mode and in the very language of the shtetl. The bittersweet stories that would become Fiddler on the Roof, like many of Sholem Aleichem’s other works, all written in Yiddish, emphasize the disdain or else the condescension with which “rich Jews from Yechupetz,” his name for Kiev or Odessa, approached or, more often, avoided poor ones like Tevye. In western Europe a number of Jewish writers wrote stories and novels about the psychological consequences of such divisions, affecting Jews on both sides. Among the best known of these writers was the British novelist Israel Zangwill, whose works, for example, Children of the Ghetto (1892), which thematized the split between traditional and modern Jews in England, were widely translated. (Zangwill was the inventor of the term melting pot, to designate the integration of Jews and other minorities in the United States, in his 1909 play of that title.) In Hungary, Károly Pap (1897–1945) wrote some outstanding stories and novels about the inner contradictions of Jews caught between the old ways and the new, as did Isaac Babel in Russia, Abraham Cahan in the United States, and Albert Cohen in France. Némirovsky’s name can be added to this list.
One of the most interesting responses to the Hungarian survey was that of the poet and artist Anna Lesznai, who insisted on the psychological aspect of the “Jewish problem.” Lesznai belonged to a wealthy Jewish landowning family and participated as a rare female member in the leading modernist literary journal in Hungary, Nyugat (West). She was thus part of a successful, assimilated Jewish elite, yet she wrote in her response, “The Jewish problem exists even when a person of Jewish origin is sitting alone in his room. It exists not only in the relations between a Jewish individual and Hungarian society. The seriousness of the problem lies in that the Jew feels like a ‘Jew’ for himself.”16 Forty years later, more than a decade after the end of the Second World War, the French philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch expressed a very similar idea when he spoke at a gathering of Jewish intellectuals in Paris about “Jewishness, an internal problem.” Jankélévitch wrote, “It is not enough to convert in order to cease being Jewish. . . . [T]here is an essential otherness that is characteristic of Jews.” The complication of being Jewish, which prevents Jews from ever being “one hundred percent French, or Russian, or even Israeli,” was, according to Jankélévitch, both a kind of malady and a kind of privilege that defines the Jew’s very being. While all human beings are in some way other than themselves, he concluded, Jews are doubly so, caught in an unresolved and unresolvable dialectic between the desire to be “just like everyone else,” that is, assimilated, and the desire to affirm their difference.17
Are such observations manifestations of self-hatred? Perhaps. But in that case one would have to conclude that self-hatred has been the condition of the majority of educated, upwardly mobile Jews throughout Europe and beyond for almost two centuries. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt devoted many insightful pages to a historical analysis of this condition. She noted that in the course of the nineteenth century “the Jewish question became an involved personal problem for every individual Jew.”18 Arendt herself did not believe in individual solutions to the “Jewish question.” All such attempts ended in failure, she argued again and again, including in her quite harsh essay on the celebrated Austrian Jewish novelist Stefan Zweig, written shortly after his suicide in 1943. Zweig’s error, Arendt remarked somewhat cruelly, had been to believe that being part of the “international society of the successful” would grant him equal rights as a Jew; he ignored the political realities around him, and when he finally saw “a world in whose eyes it was and is a disgrace to be a Jew,” all he could do was to kill himself. But, Arendt concludes, “from the ‘disgrace’ of being a Jew there is but one escape—to fight for the honor of the Jewish people as a whole.”19 Arendt here was expressing the Zionist view on the “Jewish question,” which she had arrived at on the basis of her own experience in Nazi Germany. But she also had a very keen understanding of the existential dilemmas of those she called assimilationists, who lived the “Jewish question” as an individual rather than as a collective problem. In one of her essays from that time she referred to the “hopeless sadness of assimilationists,” precisely because their hopes of assimilation had been so devastatingly crushed. The essay is titled “We Refugees,” which implies that she includes herself, but since she claimed not to believe in individual solutions, she may have wanted to point up the difference between a Zionist like herself and individualists like Zweig and others who had seen their illusions destroyed.20 It may seem odd to refer to Arendt as a Zionist, given the harsh criticisms she received, along with accusations of being a Jewish antisemite and self-hating Jew, after publishing Eichmann in Jerusalem. In fact, she worked for several Zionist organizations in Germany and France in her youth, and, as she makes clear in her famous letter of 1963 to Gershom Scholem, she never became an anti-Zionist, even though she could be critical of Israel. About her own sense of Jewishness, she wrote to Scholem, “To be a Jew belongs for me to the indisputable facts of my life, and I have never had the wish to change or disclaim facts of this kind. . . . This attitude makes certain types of behavior impossible—indeed precisely those which you chose to read into my considerations [regarding Eichmann].”21
Whatever one may think of the collective solution, most Jewish writers in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, and many Jewish writers in Europe and the United States today, grapple with issues of Jewish identity in existential and individual terms. If to antisemites the “Jewish question” was summed up as What shall we do with the Jews?, to individual Jews the question often appeared and continues to appear as a form of inner division and as a personal dilemma, most strikingly summed up in Kafka’s famous question to himself, “What have I in common with the Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself.”22 But Kafka’s modernist formulation, which allowed him to envision existential estrangement in universal rather than in specifically Jewish terms in his fiction, was not the only way to formulate the existential dilemmas faced by Jews who were out of the ghetto. Among the more banal, everyday questions emancipated Jews in Europe could ask themselves in the early twentieth century were, What have I in common with the Jews? Do I have to marry a Jew? Must I feel solidarity with Jews who don’t speak my language, don’t dress like me, don’t belong to my world, just because they’re Jews? And what about my fellow-citizens, the non-Jews—will I ever belong to their world, really? Maybe I would belong if I converted, so should I convert? Some of the same questions continue to be asked even now, and not only in Europe. Today, we must add to them some version of What is my relation, as a Jew, to Israel and Israeli politics?, with its myriad contested, often painful replies.
Since France was the country of emancipatory rhetoric and political assimilation, French Jews for a long time idealized the Republic. “Happy as a Jew in France” was a widely shared dictum, one which spread beyond France’s borders. French Jews were largely hostile to Zionism insofar as they thought of it as competing with assimilation to Frenchness. But they did not need to renounce their Jewishness in order to assimilate, for they could maintain the idea that Jewishness was a purely private, religious affair that in no way affected their loyalty to France. Many Jews rose to high positions in the service of the French state under the Third Republic, including the army, and yet kept close family and institutional ties with other Jews and observed endogamy, even if they stopped practicing Jewish religious rites.23 Some historians have referred to the decades before the First World War, when Jews could aspire to high public office even while maintaining a serene identification as Jews, as the Golden Age of French Jewry.24 However, Maurice Samuels has more recently shown that despite this happy moment of Franco-Jewish synthesis, the existential versions of the Jewish question were an intense and vexed subject of discussion by Jewish writers in France throughout the nineteenth century. Even for Eugénie Foa, who has the distinction of being both a successful woman writer at a time when women in the literary field were rare and the first French Jewish writer to treat Jewish themes in fiction (she published her “exotic” novel Le Kidouschim in 1830), Jewish identity was, Samuels writes, “a problem to be struggled with, a series of questions to be answered.”25 And the same was true, he argues, for Jewish writers who followed Foa, among them Marcel Proust’s great-uncle Godchaux Weil and including Proust himself. Weil, writing under the pen name Ben-Lévi, published dozens of stories in the Jewish press in the mid-nineteenth century, probing the contradictions and tensions of Jewish assimilation to French culture and society.
The hoped-for harmony between French and Jewish identities came under stress by the influx of Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe starting in the early 1880s, a trend that continued in increasing numbers after the First World War. The arrival of these Juifs de l’Est ( Jews from the East), most of them poor, Yiddish-speaking, and either much more religious or much more left-wing in their politics than French Jews, not only elicited waves of antisemitism in France but also created problems for established French Jews, most of whom sought to distance themselves from the new immigrants. The crisis of the Dreyfus Affair in the last decade of the nineteenth century exacerbated both antisemitism and questions of French Jewish identity. The career of Alfred Dreyfus, who had risen to the rank of captain in the French army before being falsely accused of treason, demonstrated France’s political acceptance of Jews as full citizens. But the social and ideological reactions to his condemnation in 1894 and then to the affair itself a few years later demonstrated just how deeply divided the country was over the “Jewish question.” Many middle- and upper-class Jews who had lived with the conviction that there was no problem about being both French and Jewish saw the Dreyfus Affair as a watershed—and not all Jews chose the side of Dreyfus. Even Bernard Lazare, who became the first hero of the affair when he published his defense of Dreyfus in 1895, Une erreur judiciaire: la vérité sur l’affaire Dreyfus, did not at first think to contest the condemnation of the Jewish captain for treason. It was only after Dreyfus’s tireless defender, his brother Matthieu, met with Lazare and showed him that major improprieties had occurred at Dreyfus’s trial that Lazare threw himself into the battle on the pro-Dreyfus side. Around the same time, he became interested in Zionism and wrote polemical articles against antisemitism in France. In his youth, Lazare, like most assimilated Jews of the time, had considered himself a citizen of the Republic equal to any other, and on occasion he even attacked Jews for their “separatism.” In her often-quoted essay “The Jew as Pariah,” written in 1944, Arendt placed Lazare, admiringly, among those Jewish writers who consciously chose the status of pariah rather than adopting the illusory hope of the parvenu who sought to join the national mainstream. In fact, Lazare’s attitudes toward Jews and Jewish identity were sometimes hard to pin down and shifted considerably over time, but there is no doubt that his anarchist allegiances placed him on the side of poor Jews and the powerless, not those he identified as capitalist or bourgeois.26
Issues of political allegiance and social class came to the fore with even more intensity in the period between the two world wars, when France was flooded by Jewish immigrants fleeing Hitler’s Germany and other parts of central and eastern Europe. Between 1920 and 1939 the Jewish population in France rose from roughly one hundred thousand to three times that number. Most of the immigrants were poor, Yiddish-speaking, and considered to be troublingly foreign by French Jews. Arendt has some wonderfully humorous remarks about the way she and other German Jews were received in France circa 1933: “French Jewry was absolutely convinced that all Jews coming from beyond the Rhine were what they called Polaks—what German Jewry called Ostjuden. But those Jews who really came from Eastern Europe could not agree with their French brethren and called us Jaeckes. The sons of these Jaecke-haters—the second generation born in France and already duly assimilated—shared the opinion of the French Jewish upper classes. Thus, in the very same family, you could be called Jaecke by the father and a Polak by the son.”27 Jaecke was the name given by poor Jews from the East to arrogant German Jews who looked down on them. Just how fraught these relations could be in the early years of the twentieth century, especially in Arendt’s native country, has been amply documented by Steven Aschheim in his book whose title speaks volumes: Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness. But as Arendt points out, it all depends on who is doing the naming, for to some arrogant French Jews in the 1930s even a Jaecke could appear like a “little Jew” from Poland.
The ambiguities of naming were also apparent in the major linguistic and social divide of the period in France: the one between Israélites and Juifs. Long-established French Jews, most of whom were middle-class, usually referred to themselves as Israélites, while the more recent arrivals, wherever they came from, were Juifs. The question of how to name oneself or other Jews became the theme of quite a lot of writing during the interwar years. In 1930 Edmond Cahen, the editor of the Reform Jewish journal Archives israélites, published a novel titled Juif, non! . . . Israélite, whose title says it all, yet within the text assimilated middle-class Jews are occasionally referred to as Juifs, which shows how uncertain the division was. Today, Israélite is very rarely heard in French usage and appears slightly ridiculous, but both the opposition of the two terms and the uncertainty about their use continued into the postwar years. Thus in November and December 1945 the newly founded journal Les Temps Modernes, edited by Sartre, ran brief biographies of two “typical” Jews in France: “Vie d’un Juif” (Life of a Jew) told the story of a poor immigrant from Turkey who survived the war even though most of his family was deported, while “Vie d’un bourgeois français, magistrat israélite” (Life of a French bourgeois, an Israélite magistrate) told the story of a Jewish judge whose father had been an army officer. The magistrate’s father staunchly believed that Captain Dreyfus was guilty. The magistrate himself, who was a young man during the affair, believed that Dreyfus was innocent, but he admits that he sometimes felt repulsed by others who shared his belief.28
Aside from the linguistic conundrum, the tension between Israélites and Juifs in the interwar period occasionally took on harsh political connotations when many Israélites sought to limit the number of Juifs in France. Emmanuel Berl, a well-known essayist and journalist from a distinguished Jewish family, wrote increasingly hostile editorials against immigrants in the 1930s and moved so far to the right in his desire to proclaim his patriotism that he became a speechwriter for Marshal Pétain for a few weeks in June and July 1940. Not long after that, the Vichy government’s first anti-Jewish decree defined Berl as a member of the “Jewish race,” making no distinction between him and the recent immigrants he had thundered against. Berl lived long enough to look back on his past, but he never repented his positions, though he did admit he had underestimated the virulence of Hitler’s antisemitism and was shocked by Pétain’s Jewish decrees of 1940 and 1941, which forbade writers like himself to publish.29 While not many Israélites went as far as Berl in trying to affirm their Frenchness, they all considered the influx of foreign Jewish immigrants to France a problem, increasingly so as the political climate of the thirties became more polarized and more hostile to foreigners, especially to Jews. The historian Jérémy Guedj, who has studied in detail the attitudes of French Jews toward Jewish immigrants during the interwar period, concludes that the hostility of “Israélites toward their Jewish brethren can be seen as evidence of the lack of assurance on the part of French Jewry at the time.”30
Indeed, the greatest fear of French Jews, as shown in the many articles devoted to the problem of immigration in Jewish journals from the mid-1920s on, was that other Jews who were obviously not French would call unwanted attention to them and possibly question their own allegiance to France. The need for Jews to give up their foreign ways and become rapidly integrated into French society was one of the permanent themes in these discussions. “The world has its eyes on us,” wrote a worried contributor to L’Univers Israélite, the journal of France’s official Jewish community, the Consistoire, in October 1925. While French Jews should be sympathetic to the unfortunates who were forced to flee their homelands, the author argued, they must also demand that the immigrants make an effort to become French “as quickly as possible, in heart, in language, in customs”—otherwise, they were welcome to go to Palestine.31 In the following decade the anxiety displayed in this article would be multiplied and produce some shocking results from today’s point of view, for example, the founding in 1934 of a Patriotic Union of French Israelites, which was rabidly hostile to “foreign Jews.”32 But this was only one of a wide range of specific responses and attitudes: like Jews always and everywhere, those in France did not speak with a single voice.
Némirovsky’s place in the linguistic and sociological field of French Jewry was untypical though by no means unique. She was a “foreign Jew from the East” but not a Juif de l’Est, or Ostjude, in the usual sense since she was wealthy, well educated, and politically conservative (or at least nonleftist). Thus, while most Russian Jewish immigrants living in France in the interwar period clearly belonged among the Juifs in the Israélite / Juif dichotomy, she and her husband, Michel Epstein, whom she married in 1926, did not. Her choosing to marry someone like herself—the child of a wealthy banker, Russian, Jewish, not at all religious, wanting to live well and be assimilated in France—is significant, for it reinforced her status as a foreign Jew. It also confirmed her class allegiance: although her father, a self-made man, came from a poor Jewish family, her mother’s family had middle-class pretensions, which explains why Irène had a French governess and apparently spoke only French with her mother as a child. As the many interviews and photographs of Némirovsky that appeared in the press after the success of David Golder and throughout the 1930s attest, she lived a life of bourgeois ease and comfort. Her aspiration, in literature as in life, was to be a respected member of the establishment, and her ideal was the Académie Française, not the avant-garde.33
Despite her class allegiance, however, which would normally have placed her among the Israélites—one of her close friends was the writer Jean-Jacques Bernard, son of the famous playwright Tristan Bernard and an Israélite of the highly assimilated kind—Némirovsky did not really belong in that category because she was a recent immigrant to France and not French. The lack of French nationality made her much more vulnerable during the war, but even before then it placed her in a somewhat ambiguous position. This in-between position lends particular acuity to her views of and on Jews. Most of her Jewish characters are recent arrivals in France, having made their fortune or trying to make it after a childhood of poverty in Odessa or some other city “in the East.” They are at best newly rich, outsiders whose contacts with French people, including French Jews, are rare. One major exception is the short story “Fraternité,” which stands out as the only one of Némirovsky’s works that features an Israélite as its main character. It thus offers an excellent perspective on her view of the “Jewish question” in France. She made extended notes about this short text in her writing journal, even though normally she did not lavish so much attention on her short stories.34 She wrote the story in less than a month, in October 1936, when she was pregnant with her second child and feeling anxious about lack of inspiration for a novel. It was published in February 1937 on the literary page of the politically right-wing weekly Gringoire.
“Fraternité” stages a brief but memorable encounter between an Israélite and a Juif on a train platform in the French countryside. The date is not mentioned, but various details indicate that it is the present, circa fall 1936. The character through whose eyes and mind we observe this encounter is the wealthy banker Christian Rabinovitch, whose name is almost too transparently indicative of his inner division—and it is also a false note in the text because Israélites at that time were never called Christian. They had French names that appear in the Christian calendar without carrying any religious connotation, names like Henri, Léon, and Alfred, or occasionally a biblical name such as Emmanuel, which could also be borne by non-Jews. Despite this false note, however, Némirovsky makes good use of her protagonist’s name, which she does not reveal right away. Instead, she begins by describing him physically and emotionally: he is around fifty, a widower, thin and somewhat frail, sedentary in his ways, with a strong tendency to anxiety and worry, especially about his health and that of his grown children, and also about the future, which he feels is always capable of bringing misfortune when one least expects it. His Jewishness is alluded to quite early by means of a narrative cliché (“his lips, always dry, seemed withered by an ancient thirst, a fever transmitted from generation to generation”) and a bit of internal monologue (“My nose, my mouth, the only specifically Jewish traits I still possess”).35 Only about a third of the way into the story do we learn his name. At that point it has an almost comic punch-line effect or else that of allegory: a man named Christian Rabinovitch cannot possibly be anything other than conflicted about his identity. Dressed in fine English wool and carrying a case with expensive hunting rifles, although we are told that he hates hunting, Christian is on his way to spend a country weekend at the home of an aristocratic friend. He has had a car accident, which is why he is reduced to taking the train and exposing himself to a chance encounter with a man he would normally never meet, a poor immigrant Jew who is sitting near him on the train platform hugging a child he later identifies as his grandson.
To Christian’s shocked surprise, this poor Jew from Russia is named Rabinovitch. When Christian tells him that that is his name as well, the immigrant asks him when he arrived in France. Christian asserts stiffly that both he and his father were born in France, but the other man is not deterred: “So it must have been before your father,” he tells him, because “all the Rabinovitches come from over there.” At this point Christian recoils and asks himself the Kafka question, reported in free indirect discourse by the narrator: “What was there in common between this poor Jew and himself?”36 This is the question posed by the story’s title as well. Are Christian’s brothers the wealthy bourgeois and aristocrats he frequents in his work and social life (he refers earlier to “the rich bourgeois, his brothers”), as is promised by the French slogan Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité? Or is his brother this poor foreign Jew with his “feverish” eyes that seem to “run from one object to another,” looking “anxiously” for something he will never find?
Although the story is told from Christian’s point of view, Némirovsky gives the immigrant Rabinovitch a long monologue in which he recounts his and his family’s tale, and here we have in concentrated form a history of Jewish upward mobility and emigration from Russia in the first decades of the twentieth century, complete with the various choices Jews made. One son, refusing to be a humble tailor, went to university and ended up as a Zionist in Palestine, where he died of tuberculosis; another son became a photographer and settled in Berlin, while the father left Russia after the Revolution and settled in Paris. But when Hitler came to power, the Berlin son had to leave Germany. He came to France for a few years and now lives in Liverpool. It is this son’s child who is with the immigrant Rabinovitch on the station platform. The monologue reaches its high point with the immigrant’s reflection on exile: “Where doesn’t God throw the Jew? Lord, if only we could be left in peace! But never, never are we left in peace! No sooner have we won, by the sweat of our brow, a piece of dry bread, four walls, a roof for our head, than comes a war, a revolution, a pogrom, what have you, and goodbye! ‘Pick up your stuff, get out. Go live in another town, another country. Learn a new language—at your age, you aren’t discouraged, right?’ No, but we’re tired.”37 Christian listens to all this without interrupting, then asks him about his profession, to which the other replies that he does a little bit of everything. And he makes a remark that creates extreme discomfort in Christian: “Happy are the ones who were born here. Just see, looking at you, how wealthy one can become! And doubtless your grandfather came from Odessa, or from Berditchev like me. He was a poor man . . . The fortunate ones, the rich ones, didn’t leave, you can be sure of that! Yes, he was a poor man. And you . . . Maybe one day he too . . .”38 He points to his grandson. That gesture, which suggests that only a couple of generations separate the wealthy Rabinovitch from the poor one, again highlights the question implicitly asked by the story: who are Christian’s brothers?
The train’s arrival spares Christian from having to respond to the man, but when he finds himself alone again in his first-class compartment, his earlier question about their relationship returns in a more virulent form: “Wretched creature! Was it possible that he himself was of the same blood as that man? Once again, he thought to himself: What is there in common between him and me? There’s no more resemblance between that Jew and me than between Sestres [Christian’s aristocratic friend] and the lackeys who serve him! The contrary is impossible, grotesque! An abyss, a chasm! He touches me because he’s picturesque, someone from another age. Yes, that’s how and why he touches me, because he’s far, so far from me . . .”39 It does not require much thought to conclude that Christian doth protest too much. Even as he denies any relation to “that Jew” and tries to explain away his being “touched” by him, the reader is invited to draw a different conclusion. In the only passage in the story where the narrator intervenes above the character’s head, we see Christian swaying back and forth, unaware, the narrator notes, that he is replicating the swaying of his ancestors in prayer or work. But even without this intervention, the reader is aware that Christian and “that Jew” have a number of traits in common despite their enormous social distance: they are both beset by anxiety, and the narrator uses the word “inquiétude” in relation to both. Furthermore, they are both devoted fathers who worry about their children. The immigrant Rabinovitch worries about his son in Liverpool and about his grandson, while the French Rabinovitch worries about his son Jean-Claude, who plans to marry the daughter of the Catholic aristocrat. Will this mixed marriage work out? Christian Rabinovitch has his doubts, for they will probably never truly understand each other. Finally, he himself becomes convinced that the source of his disquiet is his Jewish heritage: “That’s what ails me. . . . That’s what I’m paying for in my body, my mind. Centuries of wretchedness, illness, oppression. . . . Thousands of poor bones, feeble and tired, created mine.”40
When the train finally stops and his Catholic friends come to greet him, Christian abandons these bitter ruminations. But his body continues to mark his difference, as he shivers from the cold air while his host revels in it. And we can be sure he will have a terrible time at the hunt the next day. Hunting really is not his thing. The relation of Jews to hunting is a recurring motif in interwar literature and film: in Cahen’s Juif, non! . . . Israélite, the Jewish protagonist’s Frenchness is shown not only by his valor as a soldier in the First World War but also by his love of the land and especially of hunting. In Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game the refined Jewish aristocrat who is the film’s most sympathetic figure is an expert hunter. Characteristically, Némirovsky offers a less idealized portrayal. Christian Rabinovitch’s dislike of hunting indicates his difficult assimilation into French society, despite his having been born there.
Is this story, which packs so much into a few pages, proof of Némirovsky’s antisemitism and self-hatred? No, but it is possible to read it that way if one has a mind to. Némirovsky does not eschew stereotyping, both physical and psychological: the little Jewish boy has big ears and “bright, nervous” eyes like his grandfather, while Christian thinks of his mouth and nose as his “Jewish traits.” On the psychological level, the anxiety and feeling of insecurity that even the wealthy Israélite experiences daily are attributed to his Jewishness. But was it a sign of antisemitism to suggest, in 1936, that Jews had reason to be anxious about their security in the European world? Némirovsky was particularly attuned, as a “foreign Jew from the East,” to all the ways in which even the country of emancipation and equality for all could become a very cold place for Jews. In “Fraternité” she presents the painful self-questioning of an assimilated French Jew as he confronts what is for him a distant Jewish heritage.
The exact nature of this heritage is left somewhat vague in the story. Is it biological, racial even, or is it the heritage created by a shared history of “wretchedness, illness, oppression,” as Christian puts it to himself? In her journal notes for the story Némirovsky seems to vacillate between those two views. In one entry she writes, “The rich one is (thinks he is) totally free of his religion, but the poor one is too. Their brotherhood does not reside in religion, but in race, oh Hitler, you’re not wrong.” This is immediately followed by, “J’ai des scrupules,” which could mean something like “What have I just said? Maybe I’m wrong.” But this in turn is followed by, “And yet, there is before and above all the inalienable right to truth.” She knows she is skating on thin ice, but she maintains the thought. A few lines later, however, she implies that the brotherhood and the heritage reside above all in history, not biology. Commenting on the immigrant Rabinovitch’s monologue as she plans to write it, she says, “The meaning of all these experiences is that things always end badly, in failure . . . to start over, and then over again, to bend your back and start over. But the one who didn’t have to do that, the rich one, still has sickening fear [in English], that heritage.” Below that she writes, “In sum, what I demonstrate is inassimilability, what a word, oh Lord . . . I know that it’s true.”41
Hers was not a happy view of Jewish existence. Her conclusion that the Jews are inassimilable may appear to tally with antisemitic views of the time, for antisemites also harped on this theme. But she didn’t write that word in the text: the story is more ambiguous than what she writes in her notes. On the other hand, she also writes in her notes that when she submitted the story to the highly respectable Revue des Deux Mondes, which had recently published one of her other stories, its longtime editor, René Doumic (who was not Jewish), rejected it “as antisemitic”! She then submitted the story to Gringoire, which also had published some of her earlier work, and it appeared there on February 5, 1937. A few years later, during the war, Horace de Carbuccia, the paper’s editor, would take risks in publishing her work under a pseudonym when she desperately needed the money. In February 1937, however, her turning to Gringoire was a decision fraught with problems. The paper had become more openly antisemitic after the elections of 1936, which had brought the Popular Front to power and the Socialist leader Léon Blum, an extraordinarily cultivated Israélite, to the position of prime minister. Némirovsky’s French biographers, Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt, following the lead of her daughter Elisabeth Gille, suggest that the literary pages of the paper were quite separate from the political pages.42 If one looks at the issue for February 5, 1937, however, one finds that the separation between literature and politics was not so clear-cut. The page following the one where Némirovsky’s “Fraternité” appeared features a “historical narrative” by one Georges Oudard titled “A Communist Experiment. Kon, aka Bela Kun.” An illustration shows a thick-lipped Kun dominating the Hungarian parliament in 1919, and the story purports to show how the Jews planned to take over Hungary! Béla Kun, from an assimilated Jewish family, was the head of the short-lived Communist government that ruled after Hungary’s defeat in the First World War. “To be continued,” says a note at the bottom of the page.43
It is impossible to know, today, how readers of Gringoire in February 1937 interpreted “Fraternité.” One can surmise that, as always, individual interpretations varied widely. But even if many readers at the time saw in this portrayal of an Israélite a confirmation of their worst prejudices about Jews, that should not prevent us from seeing it differently today. In my view, Némirovsky’s pessimism about Jewish “inassimilability” is a sign not of antisemitism but of anxiety and unease, and indeed Jewish writers living in other hostile environments during that period were arriving at the same conclusion. The Hungarian novelist and short story writer Károly Pap, who called himself a “writer of the Jewish people” and who perished at Bergen Belsen, expressed similarly despairing views about assimilation in his stories of the late 1930s. Pap too was accused by some members of the Jewish community of being a self-hating Jew.44
Antisemites claimed that inassimilability was due largely to the Jews’ refusal to assimilate, their clannishness in sticking together, whence the paranoid theories of worldwide Jewish conspiracy. To racial antisemites there was the added element of blood or race, which would prevent Jews from properly mixing with the French. A sympathetic reading of Némirovsky points out, by contrast, that in her view the determining factor of Jewish inassimilability is neither sociology nor biology but history: centuries of persecution and exclusion have had their effect, even among Jews who are now privileged. In her notes for the story she mentions “Loewel” as a possible real-life counterpart to Christian Rabinovitch. The reference is no doubt to Pierre Loewel, a politically conservative Israélite lawyer and essayist who had reviewed David Golder glowingly when it appeared and who continued to review Némirovsky’s works throughout the 1930s, always very favorably. Loewel generally published in the right-wing press, but that did not prevent him from voicing his admiration for the defenders of Captain Dreyfus. In 1929 he published a lavishly illustrated book on “figures of the Palace of Justice” in which he sang the praises of Dreyfus’s defense lawyers, men of principle who were willing to sacrifice their careers to defend an innocent man wrongly accused.45 In her notes, Némirovsky eventually decides that Rabinovitch should be even more mondain, at a higher level socially and less acute intellectually than Loewel was. She expresses quite a bit of sympathy for her Israélite, even as she notes that his typically “Jewish traits” are sickliness, anxiety about money and the future, and love of his children, in that order. Rabinovitch, as she notes in her journal, is a Jewish father who worries about “the humiliation of being rejected, for example by a French family. The son’s engagement maybe . . .”46
The view that emerges from Némirovsky’s fiction is that successful Jewish assimilation is impossible, not only because Jews are ultimately unable to transcend their origins, whether one calls them racial or historical, but also because French xenophobia and class snobbism get in the way. Although this view is expressed in the preparatory notes, it is not apparent in the published text of “Fraternité,” where the assimilated Rabinovitch seems to have only solicitous, unprejudiced Christian friends. But it is emphasized in the last novel Némirovsky published in book form during her lifetime, The Dogs and the Wolves, her most sustained effort to examine the “Jewish question” and the last of her works in which Jewish characters appear. In one of the most dramatic moments in the novel, two Jews from Kiev, one poor and one rich, one apparently assimilated, the other not, confront each other. The poor one, who in this case is a blood relation of the rich one, his first cousin, cries out, “You who look at us from on high, who scorn us, who want nothing do with the Jewish riffraff, just wait a bit! Wait! You’ll soon be mixed up with them again. And you’ll be part of them, you who had left them behind, you who thought you had escaped.”47 One can hardly think of a more pessimistic—or more prescient—view that the same fate awaited all Jews in Europe, even those who thought they had put the ghetto behind them. This realization adds one more irony to the title of “Fraternité,” for if the promise of the revolutionary slogan turned out to be false, then Jews could not be part of the French brotherhood. The historian Todd Endelman, who has written a book about the attempts of European Jews to become fully assimilated, in some cases to the point of conversion to Christianity, notes that even in countries where progressive change occurred, “it failed to uproot well-entrenched views about Jewish otherness, neither erasing the stigma of Jewishness nor ushering in an era of unconditional social acceptance. Jews became ‘less Jewish’ (in language, dress, manners, etc.) but opposition to their full acceptance persisted.”48
In the end “Fraternité” is best seen as an exploration of the “Jewish question” from an individual Jewish point of view, by which I mean that Némirovsky was writing about her Jewish characters from the inside, sometimes observing them harshly and even unfairly but always from a position that can accommodate our seeing her gaze as that of a Jew. Not a member of the Jewish community or the Jewish people defined in collective terms, but a Jew nevertheless, one who struggled precisely with those issues of Jewish identity and Jewish belonging that defined the “Jewish question” for Jews, not for antisemites. Her anxious, conflicted Israélite Christian Rabinovitch may not be to everyone’s liking. But the questions his story raises continue to resonate.
Reading “Fraternité” as a brief but profound meditation on the “Jewish question” allows us to answer another question, one which many readers have asked about Némirovsky’s posthumous novel, Suite Française: Why is there no mention of Jews or Jewish persecution in a work that purports to deal with the French defeat of 1940 and the first year of Nazi occupation, when Vichy laws started to openly discriminate against Jews?
Readers who like to see in Némirovsky an example of Jewish self-hatred attribute this absence to her lack of sympathy for or identification with Jews. She and her husband converted to Catholicism in 1939, which confirms her lack of identification, but nothing allows us to say she had no sympathy for either persecuted Jews or any other persecuted group. One of the short stories she published shortly after the outbreak of the war, in December 1939, featured a wealthy South American aesthete, unmarried and childless, who finds himself in Paris on the day war is declared in September. He feels sympathy for the French but remains a mere spectator to human suffering (the title of the story is “Le Spectateur”) until he himself is caught up in it. The ship he is traveling on to escape from Europe is torpedoed, and he suddenly understands that “it was his turn now. It was no longer a Chinese child, a Spanish woman, a Jew from Central Europe or those poor charming French who were suffering, it was he, Hugo Grayer!”49 Earlier he had noticed that among the panicked passengers crowding the decks no distinction was made between the wealthy ladies in furs and those who traveled in third class, like the “little German Jewish children that a charity wanted to resettle in an orphanage in Uruguay.” During his final moments as he awaits his death, wounded and freezing, Hugo holds the hand of a woman, a total stranger, who comforts him.
Fleeting evocations of historical catastrophes in Europe and elsewhere, as well as of the victims they created, occur in many of the stories Némirovsky wrote around this time. They indicate that she was starting to think about the major theme of Suite Française well before she actually began writing the novel.50 The question she explores there, variously and brilliantly, is how individuals respond to a collective crisis. Her focus in Suite Française, as in the stories that precede it, is on specific lives but always with the awareness of how History dominates and transforms private life in a time of catastrophe, bringing out the worst in many people but the best in at least a few. The character Hugo Grayer is an early, more positive version of the self-centered art collector Charlie Langelet in Suite Française. Hugo finally feels true kinship with those who suffer, while Langelet remains blindly egotistical right up to his absurd death. In “M. Rose,” a story published in August 1940, the title character, another wealthy loner, discovers a similar sense of solidarity among the refugees fleeing Paris in June 1940; this collective flight would become the subject of part 1 of Suite Française.
Being the writer she was, however, Némirovsky made sure to temper any edifying conclusions one might be tempted to draw from conversions in extremis like Monsieur Rose’s and Hugo Grayer’s. She ends “Le Spectateur” with a cruel image, as Hugo foresees the compassionate but ultimately indifferent reaction of moviegoers, still other spectators, to the newsreels that would announce the sinking of his ship on the high seas: “Those crowds were like chickens who let their mothers and sisters be slaughtered while they go on clucking and picking at grains, without understanding that the same passivity and inner consent would end up delivering them, when their turn came, to a strong, pitiless hand.”51 The notion of barnyard fowl letting their kin be slaughtered is a bit odd, as if they had agency and choice, but the thought it conveys about human indifference and even stupidity in the face of other people’s suffering is of a piece with the disenchanted vision that would dominate Suite Française. Indeed, even Némirovsky’s presumed lack of Jewish identification came up against the harsh fact that in the late spring of 1942, while she was most intensely working on the novel, she walked around the village of Issy-l’Évêque wearing a yellow star. Whether she liked it or not, she was identified as a Jew, and she made no effort to escape it. That is another of her life choices that many readers puzzle over: why did she not attempt to leave France or at least the Occupied Zone, as most Jews in her situation did?
One plausible explanation for the absence of Jews in Suite Française is that, since this novel is wholly focused on the way “ordinary French people” responded to the first year of German occupation, there was no real call to focus on Jews. One could say that by not showing any of her French characters as being aware of the Vichy statutes that excluded Jews from public life, or of the roundups of Jews that began as early as March 1941, Némirovsky was realistically depicting their indifference to the distress of fellow citizens—not to mention the distress of foreign Jews like herself. But this explanation overlooks a somewhat important question: if Némirovsky wanted to depict the responses of ordinary French people, why could she not imagine at least one ordinary French person of the Jewish faith as part of that category? Here one could go into some minute historical analysis, starting with the fact that in June 1940 the Jews were not yet being persecuted in France, so there was no point in singling them out among others on the road fleeing the German army.52 And when the second part of the novel takes place, between October 1940 and June 1941, the setting is a tiny French village that could be plausibly represented as having no Jewish inhabitants. But still, this explanation seems a bit weak, especially as Némirovsky herself was such an inhabitant in such a village. She and her family were the only Jews there, it’s true.
A stronger explanation becomes possible if one admits that by the time she started working on Suite Française Némirovsky had arrived at the hopeless conclusion that Jews would never feel or be fully accepted by the French. Her journals from 1940 to 1942 indicate a great deal of bitterness, which is reflected in the sarcasm of the novel’s narrator toward most of the characters. This could have resulted in the impossibility of her representing Jews together with the French, as if she could not see them in the same viewfinder—or in the same story and history. If so, then that would be the most pessimistic conclusion of all, consonant with the despair and anger she felt, for good reason, as she was writing what would turn out to be her posthumous masterpiece.