What will people think? Or, to be exact: What will the goyim think?
—PHILIP ROTH, “Writing about Jews”
What matters to me most: the Jew.
—NÉMIROVSKY, journal entry, 1938
AFTER SHARING A COPIOUS Thanksgiving meal with their Russian Jewish immigrant family in Queens, New York, in the fall of 2011, the up-and-coming young writer Gary Shteyngart and his father, Semyon, found themselves sitting together on the couch in the living room. On the television an ethnic cable station was showing a Russian soap opera set in the Stalin years, the years of Semyon’s first memories. He had been a young child during the siege of Leningrad in the Second World War. Gary too was born in Leningrad, in 1972—his name had been Igor. Suddenly, Semyon leaned over to his son and said, “Don’t mention the names of my relatives in the book you’re writing.” Gary assured him that he wouldn’t; then Semyon added in a whisper, “Just don’t write like a self-hating Jew.”1
This anecdote, recounted by Shteyngart with his characteristic mixture of humor and sorrow in his memoir Little Failure (2014), illustrates just how long-standing and deep-seated is the anxiety, among a minority that feels persecuted or misunderstood, about the way they are portrayed by writers and artists, especially by a member of their own group. I say minority rather than Jews because the same phenomenon exists among African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and other ethnic groups that have experienced prejudice. When the film Precious, directed by the African American director Lee Daniels and based on the novel by Sapphire, was released in 2009, the well-known African American novelist Ishmael Reed published an op-ed essay in the New York Times denouncing the film and its director. Precious, which won Academy Awards that year for best supporting actress and best screenplay, tells the story of a black adolescent girl in Harlem, circa 1987, who becomes the teenage mother of two children after being sexually abused over several years by her father. Despite its grim subject, the film has a somewhat upbeat ending, for the young woman is helped by an African American teacher who inspires self-confidence in her and teaches her to read and write. Reed, however, wrote that he and other black men and women felt “widespread revulsion” at the film, which pandered to white audiences’ most negative stereotypes about the black family. He quoted another writer, Jill Nelson, whose view he shared: “I don’t eat at the table of self-hatred,” she had written, nor did she embrace the “overwrought, dishonest and black-people-hating pseudo-analysis too often passing as post-racial cold hard truths.”
Reed himself maintained that this film “cast collective shame upon an entire community” and that “such stereotyping has led to calamities being visited on minority communities.”2 The anxiety expressed here is based on a widely shared assumption, namely, that an unflattering portrayal of a member of a persecuted minority or even of a minority that is merely other in relation to the mainstream will bring shame and possibly harm on the community as a whole. This assumption accounts for the powerful feeling of indignation, or, as in Reed’s case, of revulsion, that a reader or viewer may feel when she perceives negative stereotypes about her own group in a fictional work. Such perception is all the more distressing, and the resulting feeling on the part of a reader all the more heartfelt, if the author of a portrait deemed to be harmful is a member of the same group, sitting at the “table of self-hatred.”
American Jews today do not perceive themselves as others in American culture, if we are to believe the detailed studies published by the Pew Research Center in its Religion and Public Life series.3 But Shteyngart’s anecdote suggests that his father, a relative newcomer to these shores, is not yet comfortable enough in his Americanness to consider himself a full member of the pluralist majority, whence his plea to his son that he should not “write like a self-hating Jew.” If we look back over the past century we find that even Jews born and raised in this country have at times felt very uncomfortable, outraged even, at what they perceived to be negative portrayals of Jews by Jewish writers. In 1959, when Philip Roth published his first story in the New Yorker, the magazine received numerous letters from Jewish readers, including several rabbis, who protested that Roth’s story was antisemitic. One reader wrote to the Anti-Defamation League to denounce him.4 The story, titled “Defender of the Faith,” features two Jewish GIs during the Second World War, one of whom tries to manipulate the other into granting him special favors because of their shared Jewishness. The title turns out to be ironic, for faith is very far from the concerns of these soldiers: self-interest and a sheer desire to survive are uppermost in their minds. There are no positive characters in this brilliant, thought-provoking tale. At the end, the reader is left to ponder what, if anything, Jews have in common with each other and what they might owe each other.
The indignation among Jewish readers spread even wider a few months later, when Goodbye, Columbus appeared. In addition to the title novella, the book included “Defender of the Faith” and several other stories about American Jews. While it made Roth famous and was admired by many readers, Jewish and non-Jewish, others were convinced that Roth’s work endorsed and even spread harmful stereotypes about Jews in American society. Roth himself was taken aback by the passions his book aroused and wrote several essays in response, defending the writer’s duty to tell the truth as he sees it, even if it is a painful one. As far as stereotypes went, he noted that sometimes what comes across as a negative stereotype is also a fact: “If people of bad intention or weak judgment have converted certain facts of Jewish life into a stereotype of The Jew, that does not mean that such facts are no longer important in our lives, or that they are taboo for the writer of fiction.”5 By “our lives” Roth meant the lives of Jews, among whom he obviously counted himself. In fact, the article appeared in the Jewish journal Commentary. But he may also have meant human beings in general, who might recognize aspects of themselves in some of his Jewish characters.
As I read the stories in Goodbye, Columbus I don’t feel that Roth sees Jews as others, whether positively or negatively, but rather as people he knows intimately, who evoke in him the complicated feelings that often come with intimate knowledge. For example, there is the story about Epstein, a middle-aged New Jersey businessman whose humdrum existence is briefly transformed by his affair with his younger next-door neighbor, before a heart attack puts an end to his neoadolescent yearnings and restores him to the bosom of his wife. “Epstein” struck some readers of Goodbye, Columbus as hateful and potentially harmful to Jews, Roth recalled in his essay “Writing about Jews.” But the protagonist’s pathetic romance and his reunion with his scolding, devoted wife could also elicit a smile of recognition and sympathy, from Jewish readers as well as non-Jews. Jewish readers who don’t feel offended by the story may, in turn, be accused by some others of being self-hating Jews like the author himself! There is no rulebook where readers’ emotions are concerned.
Roth was not alone in attracting the ire of some Jewish readers. Almost a half century earlier, in 1913, the editor of the Yiddish-language newspaper the Jewish Daily Forward, Abraham Cahan, who had been among the first wave of Jewish immigrants from Russia in the 1880s, published his novel The Rise of David Levinsky in installments in the mainstream magazine McClure’s. Many Jewish readers were appalled by it. The novel, which Cahan expanded considerably for its publication in book form in 1917 and which is now considered his major achievement as a writer, tells the story of a poor, yeshiva-educated Jew from Russia who arrives in New York as a penniless teenager, wearing sidelocks (peyes) and speaking only Yiddish, and who, by dint of cleverness and hard-driving, even ruthless, business practices, becomes a millionaire clothing manufacturer. An unhappy one at that, for Cahan had lifelong socialist sympathies that made him less than fully sympathetic to millionaires.
McClure’s was not known for being sympathetic to Jews, and even less to Jewish immigrants, especially if they came from the “East,” as opposed to Germany or Austria. The month before Cahan’s first installment appeared, an associate editor at the magazine, Burton J. Hendrick, published a long article titled “The Jewish Invasion of America,” in which he argued that Jews were taking over every aspect of American business, from the clothing trades to real estate, theater, even the railroads. At the end of his article Hendrick announced the forthcoming publication: “Mr. Cahan will show, by concrete example, the minute working of that wonderful machine, the Jewish brain.”6 The author of the introduction to the current edition of the novel, Jules Chametzky, notes that some years later Hendrick published a book titled The Jews in America, in which he sought “to demonstrate that the Russian-Polish Jews are a different race and civilization from previous Jewish immigrants and should be prevented from entering the United States.”7 Chametzky points out that McClure’s framing of the book, accompanying it with illustrations that emphasized Levinsky’s “Jewish traits,” slanted its interpretation in a way that Cahan could not have foreseen. But he also notes that the novel continued to receive contradictory evaluations well beyond its first publication in McClure’s. While some distinguished American critics like Harold Rosenberg and Leslie Fiedler have praised it, others have found it “undistinguished, a libel upon Jews, the central character repellent, an apology for predatory capitalism, or simply unsavory.”8
Between Cahan and Roth, other North American Jewish writers came in for similar condemnations. Mordecai Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959), Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? (1941), Jerome Weidman’s I Can Get It for You Wholesale (1937), and Ben Hecht’s A Jew in Love (1931), all of them featuring unscrupulous Jews scrambling to get rich, encountered outraged rejections before becoming, in some cases, literary classics (not all: I find A Jew in Love unreadable). The eminent French Yiddishist Rachel Ertel, in her book on the American Jewish novel, devotes an extended discussion to writers of the 1930s who found disfavor with the Jewish establishment because of what was perceived as their unsympathetic portrayals of Jewish characters. She notes the “existential malaise” of Jewish novelists of that time, on both sides of the Atlantic, who had to negotiate a position between their Jewishness and their belonging to the national literary tradition. The British critic Eric Homberger has called such writers “uncomfortable,” opposing them to those who have “piously sought to present favorable ‘role models’ of Jewishness.”9
Némirovsky too, as we have seen, has been tarred with the label of Jewish antisemite, in our time and in hers. Her breakout novel, David Golder, continues to provoke debates, especially among Jewish readers. The critics who first reviewed the book in the French press, however, were almost unanimously positive. They praised Némirovsky’s “rigor” and other “virile” qualities, and her “pitiless” way of exposing “the soul” of her characters. Just about all of them noted that the novel did not present a happy view of human existence, but many found that the author demonstrated sympathy and compassion for her main character. In her career-making interview with Frédéric Lefèvre shortly after the book appeared, Némirovsky expressed pleasure that he found her portrayal of Golder sympathetic. While most reviewers noted that Golder was Jewish, many said his story was universal and tragic. If they saw him as a type, it was not of the Jew but of the self-sacrificing father or the modern capitalist, neither of which they identified exclusively with Jews. Some compared him to Honoré de Balzac’s Père Goriot, who sacrifices his own well-being in order to enrich his daughters. The critic for the New York Times, reviewing the English translation in November 1930, compared Golder to King Lear because of his solitary death and his attachment to his daughter.
Surprisingly, one of the most detailed and sympathetic early reviews was by the twenty-year-old Robert Brasillach, who would go on to his notorious career as an antisemite but who at this point was just a young movie buff and aesthete, although on the right of the political spectrum, to be sure. Reviewing the book in the right-wing L’Action Française under his nom de guerre Robert le Diable, a bad-boy hero of medieval legend, Brasillach wrote, “The need to make money is an instinct common to all the great capitalists,” but “the disdain of that money . . . is less widespread . . . and is perhaps characteristic of Jews. Others disdain honor or glory.”10 That last sentence could be read as a sly dig at Jews, implying that they possess no honor or glory to begin with and thus have nothing to disdain in that regard. But if dig it is, it’s a very indirect one, especially coming from the pen of Brasillach.
Jewish responses in the French press were more mixed, as could be expected. The independent Jewish monthly of Strasbourg, La Tribune Juive, defended Némirovsky against charges of antisemitism: “She has dealt not with a Jewish subject but with a universal one,” wrote the reviewer. But the French Zionist paper of Tunis, Le Réveil Juif, was severe: yes, the book had literary qualities, but this paled before the fact that it presented a “modern Shylock” who would please antisemites and that the author had described only “odious Jews and Jewesses.”11 Among ordinary readers, as opposed to professional critics, the responses varied as well. Denise Weill, a psychoanalyst I interviewed in Paris who actually remembered seeing David Golder on her parents’ bookshelf when she was a child in the 1930s, told me that in her family’s milieu of liberal secular Russian Jews, Némirovsky was admired as a “local girl who made good,” and her novel was considered to be a critique of high finance in general, not of Jews in particular.12 On the opposing side, Némirovsky herself made public a letter she had received after the publication of David Golder from an anonymous Jewish reader in Italy: “You are a renegade and the daughter of a renegade,” stated the letter, whose author judged that Némirovsky had provided ammunition to “our enemies,” spreading hatred of her own people. The letter was signed “A wounded Jewish soul.”13
L’Univers Israélite, the weekly journal of the Consistoire, the official representative body of the French Jewish community (Orthodox in its orientation), did not review David Golder, but it did report, in a “Talk of the Town”–type column at the end of January 1930, that the book was being much discussed and that Lefèvre, in his interview with the young woman author, had expressed special interest in the scene in the kosher restaurant on the rue des Rosiers. This had led, the journal noted with some irony, to visits to the street by a lot of men in broad-brimmed hats, obviously writers!14 A month later the weekly dispatched a journalist named Nina Gourfinkel to talk with Némirovsky, running the interview as the lead story in its issue of February 28. Gourfinkel, herself a Russian emigrée to France and a few years older than Némirovsky, published several books on literary topics after the Second World War along with two volumes of memoirs (they made no mention of Némirovsky). In her introduction to the interview Gourfinkel explains that she wanted to air with the author a question that has bothered many Jewish readers: Should David Golder, that unhappy businessman who discovers the uselessness of his lifelong struggle to become rich, be considered as a “type representative of the Jewish race”?15
Gourfinkel writes that she was apprehensive before meeting Némirovsky, as the novel had left her with a painful impression despite its undeniable literary qualities. She was expecting to see a stern-looking woman, but to her delighted surprise the person who greeted her was petite and very feminine, “with a kind and open face.” Gourfinkel launches right into her subject: “Your novel depicts a Jewish milieu that is so repulsive, it has upset a lot of people. And . . .” Némirovsky completes the sentence: “And they accuse me of antisemitism! But that’s absurd! Since I am Jewish myself and say so to anyone who wants to hear it!” Gourfinkel persists, however: None of the Jewish characters in the book elicit the reader’s sympathy. Is there really nothing good about them? Némirovsky protests again: “I don’t find them so unsympathetic. And some critics share my view.” But does she know, Gourfinkel asks, that “our enemies” are using her portrayals of Jewish characters to buttress their very unpleasant arguments against Jews? Némirovsky replies, “And yet, that is how I saw them.” Besides, she adds, the non-Jewish characters in the novel are not any better. Right, says Gourfinkel, but that may just go to show that Jews gather the “dregs” of non-Jewish society around them. She mentions a new novel by Jacques de Lacretelle, a sequel to his earlier success Silbermann, as a positive counterexample to David Golder, one that offers a very different version of “the Jewish soul.” Némirovsky agrees that Lacretelle is a fine writer, but he writes about a different milieu, she says, and besides, he doesn’t know Jews very well.
Clearly, neither party will win this debate: the journalist thrusts, the author parries. A reader today who knows Lacretelle’s Silbermann, a novel published in 1922 that had gained a solid reputation for being sympathetic to Jews, and its sequel, Le Retour de Silbermann (1929), will find Gourfinkel’s admiration for the portrayal of Jews in these works quite odd, for they are both redolent of the genteel antisemitism of the period. In both of these novels the Jewish protagonist is portrayed as an incurably alien figure in French culture. Silbermann, a French Jewish adolescent, is described at some length in the first book as being physically ugly, even repulsive. Although he is extremely brilliant, his arrogance and his difference from the other boys elicit a deep revulsion in the French Protestant narrator, who nevertheless becomes his friend before abandoning him. In the sequel, the narrator meets Silbermann again years later, when Silbermann returns to Paris after spending several years in New York. He is still brilliant but sick in both body and soul, literally consumed by his own feverish intelligence as well as by his growing awareness that he will never achieve the literary greatness he had aspired to when he was a schoolboy. Lacretelle even puts into Silbermann’s mouth one of the most noxious antisemitic myths, made popular by Richard Wagner in his essay on Jews and music and a staple of anti-Jewish discourse in the 1930s: the myth of Jews’ incapacity for artistic creation. Looking at his old school prizes, Silbermann bitterly remarks that he had been like a “little rabbi,” able to recite the Torah, or, in his case, masterpieces of French poetry, by heart but unable to create anything of his own, unlike his former classmate, “the Christian,” as he calls the narrator, who lacked his intelligence but had written a fine book.16
The dichotomy of “us versus them,” French Christians versus Jews, dominates both of these novels by Lacretelle, creating a system of meaning that relegates the “Jewish soul” to the status of an exotic, in some ways fascinating but artistically sterile and ultimately repellent, object. Gourfinkel was right, if not in her appreciation of Lacretelle’s “philosemitism,” at least in contrasting his view of Jews with Némirovsky’s. In Némirovsky’s world the Jewish other is contrasted not with the French same but with other Jewish others: rich versus poor, assimilated versus “ethnic,” dog versus wolf. Personally, I am more disturbed by Lacretelle’s portrayal of Silbermann than by Némirovsky’s Jews, just as I am disturbed by Sartre’s portrayal of the Jew in his Antisemite and Jew (Réflexions sur la question juive, published in 1946), a book that certainly had no antisemitic intent. On the contrary, Sartre thought of himself and was perceived by many grateful Jewish readers as a defender of Jews. Yet he too reproduces in his book the us versus them opposition, Jews versus Frenchmen.17 By now, however, it should be evident that in this particular area of interpretation there are no right answers, only more or less persuasive ones depending on who is judging.
Gourfinkel concluded her article with a curious remark: Irène Némirovsky was certainly not an antisemite, but neither was she Jewish! “Antisémite, certes, Irène Némirovsky ne l’est pas. Aussi peu que juive” translates literally as “An antisemite, certainly, Irène Némirovsky is not. No more than she is Jewish.” Gourfinkel adds, “For just as one cannot judge the French based on a few Parisian neighborhoods that have been arranged to the taste of ‘foreigners,’ so one cannot judge a race based on a few individuals lacking in all moral sense, and whose true homeland is a fashionable resort where the dregs of every nation mingle.” Is Gourfinkel suggesting that a Jewish novelist, in order to be truly Jewish, must present a complete sociological panoply of Jewish types, and that, having failed to do so, Némirovsky cannot be considered Jewish? Or is she merely saying that Némirovsky’s Jewish characters don’t represent all Jews, a statement Némirovsky would assuredly agree with? Whatever the case, Gourfinkel ends her article by expressing the hope that this outstanding young novelist, who has provided such a “pitiless image of a certain world,” will soon produce a work that shows a different view of “the race”: “less painful and more human.”18
In July 1935, after Némirovsky had published two more novels and a dozen stories, none of which featured Jewish characters, L’Univers Israélite sent another journalist, Janine Auscher, to interview her. Auscher, an unabashed admirer of Némirovsky’s work, had published two earlier interviews with her in the center-Left weekly Marianne and had already asked her about the “disenchanted,” generally dark vision of her works—her latest novel, for example (Le Pion sur l’échiquier), had ended with the self-inflicted death of its hero. Némirovsky had replied that her joyless childhood in Russia in the “declining years of the czarist regime,” filled with lessons and tutors and no “distractions,” might account for the pessimism of her works.19 There was no mention of Jewishness in the Marianne interviews, but Jewishness was the principal theme for L’Univers Israélite. In fact, it was on this occasion that Némirovsky produced the letter she had received from the “wounded Jewish soul” in Italy after the publication of David Golder, authorizing Auscher to reproduce it in full.
Once again, the purpose of the interview was to air Némirovsky’s response to accusations of antisemitism. Auscher makes clear from the start that she herself considers them to be based on a misunderstanding (malentendu). Still, she asks Némirovsky to defend herself, especially because, according to rumors, her next novel, Le Vin de solitude (The Wine of Solitude), would once again “provide arguments for our adversaries.” In response Némirovsky smiles somewhat “mischievously,” without “managing to adopt the contrite attitude that more severe questioners would doubtless demand,” writes the journalist. Instead, Némirovsky asks a question of her own: What would François Mauriac (a celebrated Catholic novelist, whose depictions of French bourgeois Catholics are dark in the extreme) say if all the bourgeois of the Bordeaux region where his novels are set suddenly rose against him and blamed him for having painted them in such violent colors? Indeed, Auscher replies, Mauriac is not kind to his characters, but in their case the “question of race does not intervene.” True, says Némirovsky, but she too paints only a certain type of Jew, not all Jews, and especially not the “French Israélites who have been established in their country for generations.” She paints the “rich, cosmopolitan” Jews for whom the “love of money has taken the place of all other feelings” and has “gradually destroyed all love of traditions and of the family.” She knows these Jews very well from her own experience, she adds “melancholically.”20
Auscher, ever sympathetic, evokes an earlier occasion on which Némirovsky had told her about her unhappy childhood: it may be the source of “the harsh and disenchanted talent of the author of David Golder.” Then, giving an unexpected twist to the Jewish antisemite label, Auscher adds, “The profound pessimism and occasionally cruel lucidity that mark Némirovsky’s work” endow it with an “undeniably Jewish character.” In other words, Némirovsky’s particular cruelty toward her Jewish protagonists is the hallmark of her Jewishness! A similar opinion about Jewishness, paradoxical as it may sound, has been echoed by many a contemporary commentator and was perhaps best expressed by Isaac Deutscher in his often-quoted essay “The ‘Non-Jewish’ Jew.” In Deutscher’s view, renegade Jews like Freud, Marx, Einstein, and Spinoza, a list to which one could add Kafka, Proust, and many others, are profoundly Jewish in their very critique or renunciation of Jewishness.21 Jacques Derrida expressed a similar view in a paper he delivered at the colloquium of French-speaking Jewish intellectuals in Paris in 1998, where he suggested that the inability to “live together” with other Jews, as well as with himself, defined his own ineluctable sense of being a Jew.22 Némirovsky, as if to confirm Auscher’s judgment, insists to her that she has never tried to hide her Jewishness, that she has in fact proclaimed it at every opportunity: “I am much too proud of being Jewish to deny it.”23
This conversation took place in July 1935, two and half years after Adolf Hitler had become chancellor and then führer of Germany, where Jews of all “types” had become outcasts. Auscher therefore asked a question that rings with a terrible irony to anyone who knows what happened only a few years later to Jews in France, including the securely established Israélites that Némirovsky considered to be outside her purview: “May one suppose that, under a less humane regime than the one in our country, where Israélites are treated like other citizens, you would not have provided antisemites with the arguments that people reproach you for?” Némirovsky’s reply is instructive: “It’s certain that if Hitler had already been there [in 1929], I would have made David Golder a lot less harsh [j’eusse grandement adouci David Golder].” But she adds, echoing her earlier comment to Gourfinkel (“That is how I saw them”) and resonating with Roth’s later statement that a writer must be true to his vision no matter what “the goyim think”: “And yet, I would have been wrong, it would have been a weakness unworthy of a genuine writer!” Auscher agrees with her and concludes her article with a vigorous defense of a novelist’s right to artistic freedom. Anticlimactically, she also defends Némirovsky’s cruel portraits of family life by emphasizing that in her real life she is an extraordinarily tender and attentive mother.
There exists a vast critical literature on antisemitic stereotypes in the representation of Jews in modern times, in literature and film and in public discourse generally.24 Our question here relates not to the representations themselves but to their perception: By what process of reasoning or, more likely, of instantaneous, nonreflective judgment does a reader or viewer decide that a novel or poem or film or play is antisemitic? The process involves, before all else, the reader’s or viewer’s perception that the work promotes harmful stereotypes about Jews. To be sure, at issue here are works on which readers’ interpretations differ. Works that are unambiguously propagandistic, such as the Nazi film by Veit Harlan, Jew Süss, pose no interpretive conflict, at least not when it comes to the fact that the film portrays Jews as negative others who constitute a threat to virtuous Christians. (Some viewers may have considered the portrayal to be truthful, but that’s a different matter!) In fact, Jew Süss is often invoked as an incontestable reference point when a reader or critic wants to label a work as antisemitic. Most works of fiction, however, and even many nonfictional works that lay claim to literary or artistic merit are not so clear-cut. The conflicts of interpretation that some works inspire show just how intricate and how deeply personal the act of responding to a work of fiction can be.
Professional critics are trained to explain and justify their responses to a work of fiction, with an eye to persuading others of their rightness. But every reader or viewer, no matter how ordinary, is able (and likely) to express a judgment when it comes to works that represent members of their group, and all the more so if they judge that representation to be unfairly negative or prejudicial. Think of how much ink has been spilled over Shakespeare’s depiction of Shylock. The British lawyer and literary scholar Anthony Julius has devoted a book to explaining why he considers certain of T. S. Eliot’s poems antisemitic. His detailed account of his response to Eliot’s early poem “Gerontion” (1920) offers a rare and valuable glimpse into the process of perceiving antisemitism in a work of literature. His account begins with an unequivocal statement:
No Jew reading the following is likely to doubt its anti-Semitism:
“And the jew squats on the window-sill, the owner,
Spawned in some estaminet in Antwerp,
Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.”
These lines . . . sting like an insult. Purportedly referring to one Jew alone, they implicate all Jews in their scorn. . . . The poem, so to speak, does not want Jewish readers.25
The trigger that sets the process in motion is the reader’s feeling of insult and offense, which appears immediate and visceral. Eliot’s lines “sting” him, and, what is more, they exclude him and others like him. Julius takes it as a given that every Jewish reader will respond in the same way, as “no Jew . . . is likely to doubt its antisemitism.” This assumption turns out to be somewhat problematic, for, as he notes in a long postscript to the book’s second edition, a number of critics who disagreed with his interpretation were Jewish. In his opinion, however, to fail to see the antisemitism of “Gerontion” and some of Eliot’s other early poems is to practice the worst kind of denial; it is “a refusal to acknowledge the self-evidently anti-Semitic nature of Eliot’s text” (335). Julius does not specify whether all readers of goodwill must see the antisemitism in the text, on pain of being dishonest with themselves since the truth is self-evident, or only Jews. Rhetorically and in terms of logic, a self-evident truth requires universal recognition. What Julius does make clear at the outset is his own feeling of outrage and exclusion, as a Jew, from the poem and by the poem.
Later, he provides a more detailed interpretation of the verses in question: “The ‘jew’ is on the window-sill both because he has been denied any more secure resting place and because he himself may thus deny his tenant peaceable possession of his house. He crouches because he is weak. . . . The faulty posture of Jews, and in particular their weak feet, is an anti-Semitic theme. . . . This squatting Jew, in his inability to find any permanent place of rest, is also Eliot’s gesture toward that most fatigued of cultural clichés, the Wandering Jew” (47–48). Later still, he summarizes his earlier arguments: “[‘Gerontion’] is anti-Semitic because it uses anti-Semitic language and because its tendency is to encourage readers to think badly of Jews” (306).
Following upon his first subjective response, Julius concludes that Eliot’s poem is hostile and potentially harmful to Jews in general. The reason for this, he argues, is that the work reproduces and endorses and thereby propagates traditionally negative stereotypes and clichés about Jews: the homeless Jew, the physically weak or misshapen Jew, the deceitful Jew who preys on Christians. Julius also sees in the poem an evocation of the ancient figure of the Wandering Jew, who, according to Christian legend, was punished for his refusal to believe in Jesus Christ. This is an extrapolation on Julius’s part, for Eliot makes no mention of this legendary figure. Thus far, then, we have two major criteria that seem to determine a reader’s judgment that a work is antisemitic: the presence of hostile stereotypes that implicate and are potentially harmful to all Jews, and correlatively a structure of exclusion whereby the Jewish reader, but possibly any reader who has a distaste for antisemitism, feels that the work is not addressed to him or even that the work positively rejects and insults people like him.
Stereotypes, according to the definitions offered by social scientists, are commonly held beliefs in a given society that refer to the personal characteristics of a whole group of people, such that any individual member of the group is perceived in terms of the stereotype. A stereotype is a generalization, a schematized and simplified image with little relation to reality. While it may apply to some members of a group (some Jews really are good at making money, and some Frenchmen really are great lovers), it can never function as a reliable guide to all or even most of the group’s members. Nevertheless, those who study how stereotypes work emphasize that they are extremely powerful and widespread and that their functions vary: they are not always negative or harmful. For example, they can serve as a positive self-identification for a group: “We Americans are hard-working, God-fearing, tolerant of others”; or “We women are more sensitive and nurturing than men”; or “We Jews are clever, always managing to survive despite hardships and persecution.” Even when a stereotype is invoked to define a member of another group, one different from us, it is not necessarily accompanied by negative feelings, also known as prejudice, or by discriminatory actions. One example given by Ruth Amossy and Anne Herschberg Pierrot in their book on stereotypes and clichés is that one can share the stereotyped belief that Scotsmen are stingy without necessarily disliking them (prejudice) and without excluding them from one’s neighborhood or workplace (discrimination). One might even invoke the stinginess of Scotsmen as a positive trait that the rest of us should learn from.26 I am told that a number of books have been published in the past few years in China praising the ability of Jews to make money and exhorting the Chinese to follow their example.27 In a different field, the nineteenth-century star of Parisian theater, Rachel, was often praised for her Oriental Jewish beauty. The stereotyped image of “la belle Juive,” the beautiful Jewess, as opposed to the unattractive Jewish male, goes back at least as far as Shakespeare’s Jessica in The Merchant of Venice.28
Obviously, a reader who judges a work to be antisemitic has in mind a different kind of stereotype: not a harmless, if false, generalization about Jews but a dangerous misconception whose ultimate aim is to do harm. Julius expresses this view in defending what he calls his adversarial reading of Eliot’s early poems: “Anti-Semitism is . . . a stockroom of commonplaces and clichés about Jews, discovered and adopted anew by each generation of anti-Semites. . . . It has a two-part logic: this is what Jews are, and so this is what must be done with/to them. . . . It is a discourse, then, that leans towards harm” (303). As we saw earlier, Ishmael Reed suggested a similar effect, if not outright intent, to harm in his analysis of the negative stereotypes about African Americans in Precious. It is not clear, in Julius’s formulation, whether “leans towards” implies conscious intention to harm on the part of the speaker or whether it designates only the effect of the discourse, independently of the speaker’s intention. Generally, it is assumed that a work judged to be antisemitic was intended as such, but even if we leave the question of intention open for now, we can see why the perception of antisemitism in a literary work may arouse extremely strong emotions in a reader. In such a situation it makes no difference if the work in question is fiction or poetry with some claim to artistic merit rather than an outright screed. On the contrary, the reader may argue that fictional works can do all the more harm when they do not offer outright propositions about Jews as a group but work by way of connotation and implicit generalizations, what discourse analysts call topoi. A topos is a general proposition that is not explicitly stated or argued but that forms the logical basis for an assertion. “Pierre is rich, he won’t offer to help,” for example, is a statement based on the topos that rich people lack empathy.29 Or consider an utterance like “Pierre is a Jew, he can afford to buy this house,” which assumes that all Jews have money.
Interpreting stereotypes as a discourse of harm also explains why those who perceive them in this way are confident that their reading is the correct one. Julius maintains that a Jewish reader who disagrees with his assessment of “Gerontion” is in denial: “There is a small history to be written of Jewish critics’ insensibility to the anti-Semitism of anti-Semitic works of literature” (49). Understandably, some Jewish readers may consider such assurance exaggerated, perhaps even paranoid. But Julius’s rejoinder is hard to counter: “The uninsulted should not be too quick to give lessons to the insulted. . . . Nor should the uninsulted claim the right to determine whether an insult has been delivered” (312). In the domain of reading, subjectivity rules, which does not mean that no rational thought is involved in one’s judgment. On the contrary, readers who perceive the presence of harmful stereotypes in a work of fiction tend to see them as part of a coherent system in which the stereotype is not a random effect but an essential part of the work. According to such a reading, an antisemitic work presents all Jews in a negative light, whether by themselves or in contrast to non-Jews or occasionally to “exceptional” Jews, who are positive. In other words, such a reading constructs the work as a redundant system in which identical meanings recur and reinforce each other. In Anthony Julius’s reading of “Gerontion” “the jew” is presented by Eliot as unnatural or animal-like (“spawned”), deformed physically (“squats”), a moneygrubber (“the owner”) as well as a modern embodiment of the accursed Wandering Jew.
The work interpreted as being antisemitic appears not only redundant but Manichean, setting up contrasting poles between Jews, who are presented as uniformly negative, and non-Jews or not “real” Jews, who are seen as positive: us versus them. The reader interprets the negative Jewish characters as stand-ins for Jews in the real world, whence the notion of harm and the subjective feeling of outrage as the reader experiences in a personal way the relegation of Jews to the negative side of a bipolar universe. Julius writes, “The distinction between Jew and Gentile [is what] most matters to anti-Semites” (xiii).
In my first book, Authoritarian Fictions, I spent a lot of time studying the mechanisms of the roman à thèse, the thesis novel or ideological novel, a genre that, I argued, is founded on a Manichean structure where a positive doctrine is contrasted with a negative one: Fascists are bad, Communists are good or vice versa. I sought to show, by means of complicated formulas (it was the heyday of structuralism), that this Manichean structure is created chiefly by redundancies: a character’s actions, words, physique, and personality traits all reinforce his or her ideological position in the work, on the positive or negative side. The result is an airtight system of meaning with no major contradictory elements to disturb its coherence. It now occurs to me that reading a work as antisemitic is a way of reading it as à thèse, that is, as an ideologically coherent system governed by a unified vision that the reader attributes to the author or to the text or work as a whole. The author here is technically the implied author created by the text, who is not to be confused with the biographical writer. To be sure, the implied author and the real writer often share similar ideological views, especially where antisemitism is concerned, and readers tend to conflate the two, but the implied author is an interpretive construct formed by the reader in the course of reading. Like all large-scale interpretive constructs, as opposed to the construction of the meaning of individual sentences, the implied author emerges as the result of a circular process: the reader, continuously making deductions and associations in the course of reading, constructs the author’s meaning gradually but in such a way that once an initial interpretation has been made, the others tend to confirm it. Philosophers call this the hermeneutic circle. After the first “sting” produced by an antisemitic stereotype, everything that follows falls into place. The interpretation reinforces itself both retrospectively, integrating earlier details that may have escaped notice on first reading, and prospectively, building up expectations for details to come. It then becomes possible to overlook aspects of the work that do not fit into the interpretive schema and to castigate readers who don’t see what one sees.
In Anthony Julius’s reading of “Gerontion” the sting occurs soon after the beginning of the poem, in verses 8–10 out of a total of 76. Although “the jew” is never mentioned again, those three jolting lines suffice to make Julius read the whole poem as an indication of Eliot’s antisemitism. He later suggests that “Gerontion” is too negative about the whole world to propound a “thoroughgoing anti-Semitism” but nevertheless insists it is an “anti-Semitic poem, not just a poem about an anti-Semite.”30
In the case of literary works it is likely that a reader comes to the work with certain expectations based on what she knows or may have heard about the author. If I open a book by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, for example, I expect to be stung. I may even be surprised to note that not all of his novels feature hateful portrayals of Jews. Céline was a brilliant stylist, a writer who cultivated the literary possibilities of slang and dark comedy. I cannot help but admire his linguistic exploits and his burlesque imagination, but many passages in his later novels sting me, confirming my worst expectations and turning me furiously against him, even without counting his so-called pamphlets, which go on for hundreds of pages ranting against “rich Jews.”31 By contrast, when I read a story about a poor Jewish dairyman in czarist Russia who is often insulted and made to feel inferior by rich Jews, even in his own family, and who exclaims, “There’s no knowing what goes on in the mind of a rich Jew, of a Brodsky in Yehupetz, for example, or of a Rothschild in Paris,” I don’t interpret that as a sign of the work’s or the author’s or, for that matter, the dairyman’s anti-Semitism. Nor do I feel any sting except that of the pleasure of reading Sholem Aleichem, even in translation.32 One reason is that I know Aleichem was a Jew writing in Yiddish, designating his first readers as Jews and intending no harm. Like the Jewish teller of a Jewish joke to another Jew, he pulls me in to laugh with him. But let a Céline tell a Jewish joke, and I am very likely to feel insulted.
One could spend many lively hours comparing notes on antisemitic works of film or literature with like-minded or, better still, different-minded friends. The British independent film An Educa«[[?a id=”page_154”?]]»tion (2009), based on a memoir by Lynn Barber and with a screenplay by the prolific Nick Hornby, generally earned critical praise and was nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It is a coming-of-age story set in the 1960s and features a young girl who is seduced by an unscrupulous older man named David, a charmer who is not even handsome—and who is a Jew, revealed at the end to have a very Jewish-looking wife and child. When I saw the film I didn’t fail to note the emphasis on David’s Jewishness and the stereotyped looks of his wife and child, but I did not feel offended, perhaps because the most unpleasant character in the film, the headmistress of the heroine’s school, makes overtly antisemitic remarks that the film obviously condemns. In other words, I did not consider the film itself as antisemitic. The reviewer for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, by contrast, found it disturbingly so: “The more I watched, the more the character of David Goldman resembled the parasitical Jew of “Der Ewige Juden” [sic]—one of the infamous 1930s Nazi propaganda films I had studied . . . at UCLA,” she wrote.33 Der Ewige Jude (“The Eternal Jew”), which has a well-deserved reputation as the most scurrilous of Nazi propaganda films, was a so-called documentary released in November 1940 as a companion piece to the equally repulsive fiction film Jew Süss, which had been released two months earlier.
The fact that a viewer in 2009 could seriously compare a new British comedy to “The Eternal Jew” may seem astonishing, but it actually confirms the three criteria I have proposed for how one reads antisemitism in fiction. The reviewer reports that she noticed a whole slew of antisemitic stereotypes in the portrayal of the Jewish character: he is pudgy and effete as well as an adulterer and a small-time crook; she judges that these stereotypes are harmful to all Jews, and she evokes a Nazi film as the ultimate historical reference (this corresponds to Julius’s evocation of the Wandering Jew as a historical reference in “Gerontion”); finally, she considers that the mutually reinforcing stereotypes form a coherent ideological system that can only be called antisemitism. It is highly unlikely that any argument to the contrary would persuade this viewer that her reading is wrong. In fact, she notes it is she who persuaded her husband and friends, who at first had not seen the film’s antisemitism.
Lest the reader think I am always among the simple souls who fail to perceive an insult when it is given, let me briefly cite a counterexample. When I first read a novel titled Gilles, published in 1939 by the French writer Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, I gradually arrived at the conviction that it was a horribly antisemitic work. Drieu, who had been close to the Surrealists and to left-wing politics in his youth, had by 1939 become a militant fascist, and in 1945 he committed suicide rather than have to face a trial for collaboration with the Nazis. While not as original a writer as Céline, he was a good novelist, and Gilles is without a doubt his most important work. Not too many people read Drieu these days, but among scholars his reputation as a writer is quite high, even among those who are not at all sympathetic to his ideology. The story told in Gilles resembles Drieu’s own: the hero, Gilles, fights in the First World War, returns to Paris feeling at loose ends, marries a rich “Jewess,” then divorces her: she is too “rationalistic,” and he soon finds her physically repulsive. He eventually ends up as a committed fascist intellectual who goes to Spain to fight on the side of Francisco Franco (Drieu himself did not go to Spain).
My reading of Gilles was not so much influenced by Drieu’s history, however, as by the novel itself. The decisive moment came around the middle, when a minor Jewish character named Rebecca Simonovitch makes her appearance. Rebecca is ugly, has a shrill, high-pitched voice, is a foreigner from Russia, espouses both Marxism and psychoanalysis, and exerts such a nefarious influence on the gullible son of a government minister that the young man commits suicide, precipitating a political scandal. I became so outraged at Drieu’s portrayal of Rebecca that I ended up writing an article, one of my very first publications, detailing just why I found this novel so loathsome, using the character of Rebecca as my point of reference.34 Although I considered my argument incontrovertible, I am sorry but not truly surprised to report that a number of my students and colleagues with whom I have discussed this novel over the past twenty years don’t find it as reprehensible as I do. They barely even noticed Rebecca Simonovitch, and besides, they often add, Drieu was a good writer.
All this helps to explain, I think, why even today some readers and critics feel like “wounded Jewish souls” when they read Némirovsky’s Jewish fiction and condemn her for it, while others, with equally strong conviction, find her Jewish characters compelling. Neither side will win this debate because, as I have tried to show, the debate is not winnable. In the matter of emotional response to a work of fiction, subjectivity really does rule.
Still, one can try to probe a response: Why do I count myself among Némirovsky’s defenders rather than among her attackers when it comes to her portrayals of Jews? Do I never wince when I read in one of her novels a description of Jews that sounds like a negative stereotype? Yes, I do wince at some moments. But hearkening back to my analysis of reading antisemitism in fiction, I would say that I shrug these moments off. I do not construct them as parts of a coherent system of meaning that seeks to discredit Jews—in other words, I do not read her fiction as fiction à thèse. In my reading, Némirovsky’s novels that feature Jewish protagonists are not meant to prove an idea or an ideology, either about Jews or about anyone else. More important, they do not pit Jews against non-Jews as the negative or harmful other against the positive same. On a spectrum that places Sholem Aleichem at one end and Céline on the other, I situate her closer to Aleichem (though not too close!). Was it pure coincidence that Aleichem’s real name, Rabinowitz, was the one Némirovsky chose for the two Jewish figures who meet on a train platform in her short story “Fraternité”? If so, it was a happy one: “Two Jews meet in a train” is one of Sholem Aleichem’s favorite ways of starting a story.
Only about a quarter of Némirovsky’s stories and novels feature Jewish protagonists, but they are among her strongest works, and they span virtually her whole career. Starting with her early novellas, L’enfant génial (1927) and Le Bal (1929), through David Golder (1929), then two more novels, Le Vin de solitude (The Wine of Solitude, 1935) and Les chiens et les loups (The Dogs and the Wolves, 1940), as well as the short story “Fraternité” (1937), she depicted in ever more detailed and explicit ways the existential choices and dilemmas Jews faced as they negotiated questions of identity and belonging in relation to the non-Jewish world. To these works we can add Le maître des âmes (The master of souls), which was published in book form in 2005 but had been serialized under the title Les Échelles du Levant in Gringoire in 1939. The protagonist of that novel is an impoverished foreigner in France, a doctor who starts out very poor but succeeds in becoming a psychiatric guru for wealthy neurotics in Nice and Paris. Némirovsky originally envisaged this character as a Frenchman and only gradually gave him his foreign background. In the process his name changed from Gabriel Dario to Dario Asfar, which has a more Oriental ring. The allusions to his past as a poor boy growing up in a slum in a “city in the East” recall the early lives of David Golder and Ben Sinner of The Dogs and the Wolves, and designate him implicitly as a Jew even though he is not labeled as such. The central issue in Le maître des âmes concerns the protagonist’s simultaneous feelings of longing and hatred, love and scorn, for the French society that rejects him at first and then flocks to him. This is identical to the themes Némirovsky treats in her overtly “Jewish” works.
Indirection is often Némirovsky’s preferred approach to the Jewish theme, even with characters who are explicitly identified as Jews. The protagonist of David Golder, which for many years was her best-known work, never asks, What does it mean for me to be a Jew?, let alone, What does it mean to be a Jew in modern Europe? But the reader is prompted to do so, and Némirovsky’s cruel or despairing views on that question are one reason some readers condemn her as a self-hating Jew or a Jewish antisemite. Similarly, in The Wine of Solitude, her most autobiographical novel, the Jewishness of the Karol family, who flee Russia after the Revolution, is only alluded to or mentioned in passing rather than openly discussed, but it nevertheless forms a significant subtext, especially since Némirovsky emphasizes social differences within the Jewish family itself. The novella Le Bal, written around the same time as David Golder, is most often described as a mother–daughter tragicomedy focusing on the rage of an adolescent girl who feels unloved by her egotistical, social-climbing mother. Enmity, even hatred, between mothers and daughters is a quasi-obsessive theme in Némirovsky’s fiction and is not necessarily linked to Jewishness. Indeed, in the film version of Le Bal (1931), which introduced the teenage Danielle Darrieux as the vengeful daughter, Jewishness is neither mentioned nor implied. But the work gains an extra dimension if we give full weight to the fact, duly emphasized by the narrator in the novella, that the father in the unhappy Kampf family is a newly wealthy “little Jew” who made a killing on the financial markets and whose marriage to a vulgar, uneducated Frenchwoman turns out to be a mismatch of sought-after assimilations: the husband seeking non-Jewish Frenchness and the wife aspiring to wealth.35 Of all these works, The Dogs and the Wolves offers the most extended, explicit exploration of Jewish identities in Christian France, but, significantly, it deals with various members of a family of immigrants from Russia, thus linking the Jewish theme once again to foreignness.
The word for “foreigner” in French, étranger, is also the word for “stranger.” The two meanings overlap but are not synonymous, for one can be a stranger to a community or group without being a foreigner; conversely, some foreigners are not strangers to a particular individual or group, for many people have foreign friends. But both words carry connotations of difference and possibly exclusion from the majority group or the nation. The foreigner does not have the right passport, if he has one at all, or the right accent or way of dressing or behaving, while the stranger does not quite fit in, even if she looks and speaks like others and tries hard to be one of them; occasionally, the stranger will not try to integrate, preferring instead to cultivate his feeling of difference. In all their varieties, foreigners and strangers are outsiders, perceived as such by others and in most instances by themselves as well.
Foreigners and strangers, both Jews and non-Jews, proliferate in Némirovsky’s work. The foreigners are mostly Russian emigrés, as in a number of her short stories and novellas, including Les Mouches d’automne (Snow in Autumn, 1931) and L’Affaire Courilof (The Courilof Affair, 1933). The former tells the story of an aristocratic Russian family that flees Russia after the Revolution, taking along their aged servant, who is unable to make the transition to Paris and eventually drowns herself in the Seine; the latter is a story of intrigue and political assassination in czarist Russia, told by the aged former plotter and would-be assassin, living in exile in Nice. Némirovsky also wrote several novels and many stories that focus exclusively on French people at home, especially in her last years, the best known being Suite Française. But when she tried to explain, in 1934 in a radio interview, what her work was about, she put the emphasis on “dislocated” people who were far from their origins: “I continue to depict the society I know best, which is made up of dislocated people [des désaxés] who have left behind the milieu where they would normally have lived and whose adaptation to a new life is not without shocks and suffering.”36 The emphasis here seems to be on foreigners who actually move from one country to another, but her formulation applies equally well to anyone who feels out of place in relation to the milieu they find themselves in. At the time of this interview she had just published Le Pion sur l’échiquier (The pawn on the chessboard, 1934), which is about an exclusively French milieu in Paris in the early 1930s. The main character, Christophe Bohun, is an ordinary Frenchman (his father, however, was a businessman and speculator born in Greece) who feels totally estranged from his very proper bourgeois wife and son, so much so that in a moment of depression he attempts to slit his throat and ends up dying of blood poisoning. Suicide, or at least a desire for the restfulness of death, is a recurrent motif in Némirovsky’s fiction. Emile Durkheim, in his classic work on suicide, associated it with what he called anomie, an absence of stabilizing social norms that are traditionally found first of all in the family.37
Historically, Jews have been the quintessential étrangers in European culture, in both senses of the word. Very often they were foreigners, given their frequent displacements across national borders as they fled pogroms, poverty, and revolutions in eastern Europe in the nineteenth century, followed by more of the same after the two World Wars. For much of that time, certainly until the Second World War and perhaps beyond, they were also seen as strangers, even when they stayed in place and despite their attempts to become integrated into the national culture. This was true even in countries where they were promised and indeed granted full status and equal rights as citizens, as happened in France after the Revolution and in England, Germany, and the Habsburg Empire after the series of emancipation bills enacted in the late nineteenth century. In her fiction Némirovsky emphasizes the difficulties and contradictions of Jewish existence, not only in repressive Russia but also in the more liberal West. She shows that France itself, which to many Jews appeared like a haven of tolerance, was not a place where they could feel totally at home. Her most searing insights, like those of many other Jewish writers of her time and place, dwelled on the obstacles, both internal and external, to Jewish attempts at assimilation. Her Jewish characters, who are generally divorced from religious practice, manifest both a strong desire to belong to the non-Jewish world and an equally strong sense of estrangement, the causes of which are to be found both in their own psyche and in the antisemitism that surrounds them. What Némirovsky emphasizes again and again is that they are estranged not only from the majority culture but also from other Jews who remind them of their Jewish roots by exhibiting “Jewish traits” they feel ashamed of. It is this estrangement experienced by Jews themselves from other Jews that some people call self-hatred or Jewish antisemitism. But the fact is that it existed and continues to exist, not only among Jews but also among other devalued minorities, and not only in Europe. It was the African American theorist W. E. B. Dubois who coined the phrase “double consciousness” to describe the split subjectivity that occurs in members of such a minority as they interact with their own group and with the privileged majority.38
Némirovsky was painfully aware of this phenomenon, becoming what one might call the chronicler of Jewish self-hatred from the inside. In this she was similar to Proust, who has also been accused of antisemitism, and Kafka, among other modern writers. Kafka, who once wrote to his non-Jewish lover Milena, in what Louis Begley calls an outburst, that he would like to “stuff the Jews,” including himself, into a drawer and suffocate them. But at the same time, he toyed with the idea of learning Yiddish and moving to Palestine!39 What was involved here was an acute, debilitating ambivalence and conflicted identity that went hand in hand with a pessimistic response to the “Jewish question.” Would Jews ever be considered full members of their non-Jewish national communities?
Némirovsky’s answer to that question was no, and all the more so as the 1930s moved toward their disastrous close. Instead of tarring her with the label of self-hater or antisemite, we do best to consider her as a Jew who knew exactly where to pour salt on the deepest wounds of Jewishness—in other words, who was intimately familiar with the feelings of anxiety and existential unease, often coexisting with equally strong feelings of pride, ambition, and irony toward non-Jews as well as toward oneself, that she depicted and analyzed variously in her Jewish characters. These inner contradictions are nowhere clearer than in the protagonist of “Fraternité,” Christian Rabinovitch, whose name says it all. But we also see it in the three main protagonists of The Dogs and the Wolves, who are members of the same family yet make widely divergent choices in relation to Jewishness, and in the protagonist of Le maître des âmes, Dario Asfar, who is a Jew in all but name. It comes down, finally, to this: no matter how hard a Jew tries or desires to be neither a foreigner nor a stranger in the country where she lives, she will never succeed completely or for long. The reason is both internal (the long history of Jewish persecution, the heritage of fear and anxiety that is the psychological lot of every Jew) and external (the refusal of the majority to fully accept the Jew).
Confronted with this situation, the Jews in Némirovsky’s fiction, like Jews in real life, make existential choices, which may not even be perceived as choices by the one who makes them. David Golder and his friend Soifer prefer isolation or the company of other Jews, even as they feel estranged from them; Ben Sinner in The Dogs and the Wolves, Boris Karol in The Wine of Solitude, and for that matter David Golder in his youth seek above all to escape the poverty of the ghetto and become rich, at whatever price. Dario Asfar also fits this description, but he has the additional dream of being loved by a virtuous French woman whom he idealizes. Others, like Ben’s cousin Harry, the “dog” in The Dogs and the Wolves, and Christian Rabinovitch of “Fraternité,” already benefit from the wealth and privilege acquired by their parents or grandparents but nevertheless continue to feel insecure and anxious, heirs to a history they cannot shake. Finally, there are the artists and poets: the budding writer Hélène Karol in The Wine of Solitude and the painter Ada Sinner in The Dogs and the Wolves, introspective souls who take an ironic pride in not truly belonging anywhere. The fact that these artist figures are young women adds yet another element of difference to their self-perception as well as their perception by others. Women writers and artists, whether Jewish or not, were an exception in the 1930s, often considered as bêtes curieuses, “odd beasts,” as Beauvoir wrote in her memoirs.40 The child poet Ishmael Baruch in L’enfant génial belongs to the artist group as well, but he dies too young to fill out the role.
In all these cases Némirovsky emphasizes that the unease of Jews is experienced not only, or not even primarily, in relation to the mainstream culture but also in relation to other Jews. Poor Jews simultaneously admire and envy rich Jews, while rich Jews seek to distance themselves from the “ghetto Jews,” who evoke memories of the wretchedness and poverty they or their parents have succeeded in escaping. In addition, Jews who have acquired refined taste and manners in the process of assimilation may look down on the “vulgarity” of the newly rich as well as on the “outdated” rituals of religious Jews. David Golder feels totally estranged from the wealthy but vulgar Jews who gather for the funeral of his former business partner Marcus—and he is positively revulsed by the rich Jew Fischl, who appears to him like a “cruel caricature” of a little Jew.
The sole passage in the novel in which Fischl appears in person is often cited as evidence of Némirovsky’s antisemitism and is therefore worth a close look. Fischl is introduced as one of the guests at a party in the Golders’ house in Biarritz, where Golder’s wife and daughter live and Golder himself feels like a visitor. He has just arrived from Paris and is not well. During the previous night in the train he felt frighteningly ill, suffering what would later turn out to have been his first heart attack. Now, as the party is about to start, he muses on the vanity of these get-togethers, where “dukes and counts and maharadjahs,” whom he calls filth (de la boue), come to feast at his table. They used to amuse him once, but now he is tired: “The older he got, and sick, the more he felt tired of people, of the racket they made, of his family, of life.”41
Immediately after this, Golder sees Fischl, who calls out to him, “Bonjour, Golder!” Golder turns to him without responding: “Why did Gloria have to invite that man? Golder looked at him with a kind of hatred, as at a cruel caricature. He was standing by the door, a fat little Jew, red-haired and rosy, comical-looking, vulgar, slightly sinister, his eyes full of intelligence shining behind thin gold-rimmed glasses, with his big belly, his weak legs, short and crooked, his hands of an assassin calmly holding a porcelain box full of fresh caviar next to his heart.”42 Any reader sensitive to negative stereotypes of Jews is sure to wince at this description of Fischl. One of Némirovsky’s severest critics, Ruth Franklin, points to it as a major piece of evidence when she calls David Golder “an appalling book by any standard.”43 But the passage becomes much more interesting if we read it as Golder’s jaundiced view of a man who is not all that different from him: like Golder, Fischl is apparently a successful businessman who wins and loses millions with his dealings. If Golder has amassed a fortune by being ruthless in business (the novel’s opening word, “Non,” as Golder refuses to bail out his business partner, aroused the critics’ admiration and earned Némirovsky her reputation as a “masculine” writer), Fischl is downright dishonest and unapologetic about it. He has been to jail in three countries, he tells Golder offhandedly, but is none the worse off for it. Talking with him, Golder feels almost guilty at his revulsion, for Fischl “had never done him any harm. ‘I can’t stand him, it’s really odd,’ he said to himself.” Fischl, apparently unaware of Golder’s disdain, sprinkles Yiddish into their conversation, as if to remind him of their shared identity and their common past as poor Jews. But Golder remains hostile: “ ‘He must have made millions again, the pig,’ thought Golder” (“ ‘Il doit être riche à millions, de nouveau, le cochon,’ pensa Golder”).
Fischl as seen by Golder becomes a kind of distorted mirror image. If Golder can’t stand him even though Fischl has never done him any harm, it is because Fischl looks and acts and talks too much “like a Jew” as seen by antisemites, and his presence threatens to contaminate Golder by association. Golder’s revulsion to him is like the revulsion of Christian Rabinovitch toward the poor immigrant Jew whose name he shares: “What is there in common between him and me?” As I mentioned about “Fraternité,” Némirovsky often stages this kind of confrontation between Jewish characters, in which one figure is the disturbing double of the other. These scenes pack a lot of meaning into a brief space and are highly effective dramatically. In the encounter between Fischl and Golder, for example, our attention is focused on Golder’s view of Fischl, which tells us more about Golder than about Fischl. This is achieved by Némirovsky’s use of free indirect discourse: the description of Fischl, although given in the third person, actually reports Golder’s view of him. Free indirect discourse, perfected by Flaubert and carried to new levels of intricacy by Henry James, is an extremely supple narrative technique, and Némirovsky appears to be using it almost intuitively here. In later years, when she was reading theoretical works on the “craft of fiction,” she used it more self-consciously, reminding herself in her journals that everything should be seen “from the point of view of the characters.” The very suppleness of the technique, however, means that it can elicit conflicting interpretations, depending on whether one attributes a description or an opinion to the author or to a character. If I interpret Golder’s view of Fischl as an indication of his own troubled relation to “looking like a Jew,” I feel I have gained an important insight into both Golder and the broader phenomenon of group self-hatred. If I attribute the view of Fischl to Némirovsky herself, that may prompt me to condemn her as an antisemitic author.
In the film version of David Golder (1931) by Julien Duvivier the contrast as well as the similarity between Golder and Fischl is emphasized: Golder, played by the great actor Harry Baur, is a portly, well-dressed man who bears himself with dignity, with a look that commands respect. Fischl, by contrast, looks vulgar, even in a tuxedo, and his attempts to flirt with Golder’s beautiful young daughter make him look at once abject and pathetic. In visual representation, the fruitful ambiguity of free indirect discourse disappears: since the character is embodied by an actor, who is costumed and made up to look a certain way, there is no ambiguity about who is seeing him that way. The camera’s eye is objective—at least that is the illusion created by cinema. Interestingly, Duvivier’s Fischl, played by an actor of the Comédie Française, Jean Coquelin, does not “look Jewish” in an obvious way nor does he address Golder in Yiddish, but he is still a negative character, and his name is emphasized as Jewish.
The other Jewish character that hostile critics invoke in their indictment of the novel is Golder’s old acquaintance Soifer, who, like Fischl, is described in exaggeratedly stereotypical terms—and he is played that way in Duvivier’s film, almost too much so. But in this case, even in the novel the description appears to be coming more from the narrator than from Golder. Soifer, we are told, was an “old German Jew” whom Golder had first met many years earlier in Silesia, which would mark him as being “from the East,” and who has lost and gained several fortunes in his lifetime. These days he is immensely rich, but he “has walked on tiptoes all his life to make his shoes last longer,” and he eats only soft foods because, having lost all his teeth, he wants “to save the expense of dentures.” Soifer, the narrator tells us, would later “die alone, like a dog, without a friend, without a wreath on his tomb, buried in the cheapest cemetery in Paris, by his family who hated him and whom he had hated, but to whom he left a fortune of more than 30 million, thus fulfilling till the end the incomprehensible destiny of every good Jew on this earth.”44 This last remark is one place, I believe, where Némirovsky loses control of the narration by allowing her own conflicted feelings to be expressed without adornment or indirection. If the destiny of “every good Jew” is to die alone, even while affirming his bond to a family he hates and that hates him, what does that suggest about Jewish existence?
Golder too will die alone, leaving a fortune to his flighty daughter, whom he loves with no illusions about her supposed love for him and who is probably not even his biological child, as his wife, Gloria, spitefully informs him in one of their fights. We don’t see Soifer’s interactions with his family, but Golder’s scenes with Gloria certainly bear out Némirovsky’s jaundiced view of family life, a view which applies to both Jews and non-Jews in her fiction. Gloria, a child of the ghetto like Golder (her name used to be Havke) who seeks only to get hold of Golder’s money after a heart attack leaves him an invalid, belongs in the gallery of selfish, grasping, unfaithful wives and mothers who populate Némirovsky’s oeuvre and whose most complete embodiment is the mother in The Wine of Solitude. Significantly, all of these mothers have daughters, not sons. Jewish critics who interviewed her often asked Némirovsky why her painting of Jewish family life was so grim, given that Jews prized family so highly. Her usual reply, obviously based on her experience with her mother, Fanny, was, “That is how I saw them.”
Soifer, like Fischl, is a kind of twin to Golder, but unlike Fischl, who disgusts Golder, Soifer amuses him, and the narrator tells us that it’s because Soifer “had a kind of dark humor that was similar to Golder’s own, and that made them like each other’s company.”45 After Golder breaks with his family and gives up his business affairs (temporarily, it turns out), Soifer visits him each day in his huge, almost empty Paris apartment and the two play cards together. Although Soifer is a minor character not essential to the plot, Némirovsky is sufficiently taken with him to devote two whole chapters to him. One of these recounts a visit by the two friends to the Jewish slum, the rue des Rosiers, where Soifer knows of a restaurant that makes the best gefilte fish in Paris. He calls the dish “brochet farci,” stuffed pike, but even under that fancy French name Golder turns up his nose at it. Nevertheless, Soifer persuades him to accompany him to the restaurant and even to pick up the tab! (Duvivier left this whole episode out of his film.) When they first enter the street, with its dark shops that smell of “dust, fish, and rotten straw,” Soifer breathes it all in and turns to Golder: “ ‘What a bunch of dirty Jews, eh?’ he said tenderly. ‘What does it remind you of?’ ‘Nothing good,’ said Golder darkly.”46 Soifer’s ironic nostalgia for the wretched conditions in which both he and Golder grew up is rendered here with beautiful economy by the “eh?” and the adverb “tenderly” that accompany his remark about the “dirty Jews.” The remark thus functions like a Jewish joke told by one Jew to another and is obviously part of the “dark humor” Golder likes about his friend. Golder himself has no such nostalgia. However, once they are seated in the restaurant and he looks out the window as night is falling, watching two bearded Jewish men whose gestures seem totally familiar to him, he is suddenly transported to an earlier time, to the “shop where he was born,” on a “street in the snow and wind that he sometimes saw in dreams.” Like Soifer but with less self-irony, Golder experiences a moment of nostalgia: “ ‘It’s a long road,’ he said out loud. ‘Yes,’ said old Soifer, ‘long, hard and useless.’ ”47
At the end of the novel Golder actually returns to Russia, now the Soviet Union, to complete his last and biggest deal, after which, already dying, he finds himself in the port city on the Black Sea (evidently Odessa) from which he had set out many years earlier to make his fortune. Before boarding the ship that will carry him back to Europe, he revisits the neighborhood where he had lived as a young man and muses about how his life would have turned out if he had stayed—another brief moment of introspection and nostalgia on his part. He dies on board the ship, but before that happens he encounters yet another double of himself, a poor young Jew who is setting out in the world just as Golder had done. With this young man Golder speaks Yiddish, thus reconnecting with the language of his childhood. Whereas Fischl’s use of Yiddish had simply increased Golder’s disdain for him, the Yiddish spoken by this young man makes Golder feel less alone on the ship, among the Russian boatmen and the “schouroum-bouroum,” defined earlier by the narrator as Oriental carpet merchants. I find this whole scene extremely moving, but some critics find it racist, as if Némirovsky had “sent Golder back to where he came from, where he belongs,” implying a racial determinism.48 It’s true that Némirovsky thought of Jewishness in terms of heredity, which she saw as both historical and biological: Jewish history, like Jewish blood, she often suggests, cannot be escaped. While this view may be interpreted as racist, once again, it depends on how you see it, for many Orthodox Jews also think in terms of bloodlines, whence their insistence that only a person born of a Jewish mother can be considered Jewish. On the other hand, they are not opposed to conversion, as long as it is to the Orthodox brand of Judaism, which implies that biological heredity is not the most important thing after all. Nothing is simple.
In The Dogs and the Wolves, the refined, assimilated Jew Harry Sinner marries a beautiful French bourgeois Catholic woman who loves him, but the “call of his blood” overcomes his desire for Frenchness and he falls madly in love with his cousin, the poor Russian emigrée artist Ada, to the point he is willing to leave his wife for her. Some critics have called this novel racist as well, and one particularly hostile review of the recent English translation compared it to a page out of some Nazi manual.49 But to my mind, reading it that way is a form of what Sidra Ezrahi has called, in a different context, “dead-minded literalism.”50 Ezrahi was defending the use of humor or parody in Holocaust literature and film against critics who cannot abide anything other than solemnity in such works. One can expand her notion to include critics who cannot abide anything in a work of fiction that makes Jews “look bad.”
As a final example of how different readers can arrive at widely divergent interpretations, I want to consider in detail one of Némirovsky’s earliest works, L’Enfant génial (The child prodigy), the first in which she portrayed a Jewish protagonist. L’Enfant génial appeared in 1927, two years before David Golder, in the serial Les Oeuvres Libres, which published several full-length novellas or short novels in each issue. Never reprinted during Némirovsky’s lifetime, the novella was reissued in 1992 as a slim children’s book under the title Un Enfant prodige (A child prodigy), with a preface by Elisabeth Gille, who made a few minor cuts in the text. It tells the story of Ismael Baruch, the youngest child of dirt-poor Odessa Jews, who reveals a great natural talent as a poet at a very early age. He appears to be on his way to being a true prodigy, but the story ends badly. When Ismael reaches adolescence he finds himself no longer capable of writing poetry, and, with no one to guide him toward the hope that this too will pass, he commits suicide. This is the work of a twenty-three-year-old writer with a dark imagination, and it’s full of literary clichés and stereotypes about both Jews and non-Jews. One wonders what Elisabeth Gille had in mind in considering it appropriate for children. Perhaps she thought it would interest young readers as a kind of folktale since it features gypsies, music, exotic settings, and colorful characters. Weiss reads it as a parable, though not a particularly childish one. According to him, it reveals Némirovsky’s view that “Judaism . . . is detrimental to literary creation. To become an author, Irène would try to put a distance between herself and her Jewish heritage.”51
The opening pages situate the Baruch family in Odessa’s Jewish slum, and some of Némirovsky’s stereotyped phrases here sound very offensive to contemporary ears. She could have found such phrases in the writings of the Tharaud brothers, Jérôme and Jean, for whom she often expressed admiration in interviews. Today the Tharauds are largely forgotten, but in their lifetime they were considered literary giants, and both ended up in the Académie Française. They wrote more than fifty books together, most of them published in the 1920s and 1930s, inspired by their travels in eastern Europe, Spain, and the Middle East. A number of their books feature the Jews in those regions, and for quite a long time the Tharauds had the reputation of being philosemites, even among Jewish readers. To anyone reading them today, however, they appear horribly antisemitic. One of their best-known novels, Quand Israel est roi (When Israel is king), published in 1921, is a fictionalized travelogue about the Jews of Budapest and Vienna, as observed by a young Frenchman who is both fascinated by their “exotic” ways and repelled by them. But he also fears them. The book’s title feeds into the old, powerful antisemitic fantasy that Jews, if left unchecked, will take over the world. Mysteriously, many Jews in France found this book to their liking, even after the Second World War. A French friend from a Jewish family gave me a dog-eared copy in the 1970s (the book was long out of print by then), asking whether I thought it was antisemitic. He himself found it to be so, he said, but older members of his family thought very highly of it. I agreed with him, however, and so do contemporary critics who write about the Tharauds.52
On a quick reading, Némirovsky’s opening description of Ismael Baruch’s family seems to echo the Tharauds’ combination of exoticism, disdain, and fear toward Jews, and in fact she borrows some of their imagery and vocabulary. Ismael’s mother, with her curly black wig, looks like “a Negress washed by the snows,” and his grandfather, now wretchedly poor, used to be a rich “usurer,” a word Elisabeth Gille deleted in her reprint. But the narrator immediately adds a bit of information that qualifies the image of the powerful Jew and that one is not likely to find in the work of antisemites: the grandfather’s current poverty, the narrator remarks, was caused by the pogrom that burned down his house on the Easter Sunday following the assassination of Czar Alexander II (1881). Then come two comparisons that are certain to shock anyone who knows about the Nazi propaganda of the 1930s that identified Jews with rats, though of course Némirovsky could not have anticipated that when she wrote the novella. The Jewish slum is full of scruffy children, the narrator tells us: “Babies were born in the Jewish neighborhood, multiplying like vermin [comme pullule la vermine].” Ismael and his siblings, who scrounge for money around the port by helping the stevedores, selling stolen watermelons and begging, “prospered like the rats that ran around on the beach, among the old boats.”53 Elisabeth Gille left in the comparison with rats but deleted the word “vermin.” In her version the Jewish children simply “multiply.” I counted only five cuts made by Gille, two of which are the word “usurer” to refer to the grandfather, but these tell us which words had become unpronounceable in the post-Holocaust era. They are indeed highly offensive to a contemporary ear and are often cited by critics who tax Némirovsky for antisemitism.
After these two pages that set the stage, Némirovsky abandons the verbal stereotyping, at least of Jews. She uses lots of narrative clichés, however: the dives in the port are full of drunken sailors, prostitutes, and the occasional slummer; just outside of town is a gypsy settlement with gaudy women and musicians, often visited by an “imperious woman” and her lover. Despite such clichés, the story of Ismael takes an interesting turn. At the age of ten he begins to frequent the cabaret in the port and to sing songs of his invention that the drunkards find consoling, so much so that they begin to look forward to his performances and give him money. “The boy never planned in advance what he would say; the words awoke in him like mysterious birds he merely had to let loose, and the right melody accompanied them in a natural way.”54 Ismael is a bit like a Surrealist child-poet, producing automatic poetry by simply opening his mouth and letting it all pour out. One night a well-dressed man shows up and is impressed by the boy’s singing. Some time later this “Barine,” who turns out to be a poet gone to seed, returns with his lover, the “imperious woman,” who takes a fancy to the child genius and invites him to live with her and be educated. She makes a deal with his parents, who are very happy at this turn of events and drive a hard bargain to let Ismael go.
Alas, the fine education he receives at the home of the Princess does not do Ismael much good. While he soon gets used to luxury and refined food and manners, he wastes away with passion and longing for his beautiful benefactress (by now he is a teenager). One day, after she kisses Ismael “imperiously” on the mouth, he falls into a delirium with brain fever and is expected to die. He survives, but the lady seems to lose interest in him and goes off to Europe, sending him alone to her country house to recover. He stays there for over a year and recovers fully, becoming a strapping adolescent. The only problem is, he loses his genius in the process. “Nothing remained of the child genius, but a handsome fellow grew in his place,” notes the narrator. Aside from spending long hours roaming the countryside, Ismael reads many books in the Princess’s library, but the more he reads, the more hopeless he becomes about his own writing. The great poets awe him, and he judges his own early productions as “barbaric.” One day his father arrives, clean shaven and dressed like a gentleman—earlier he had been described as a poor Jew with sidelocks (peyes, which the narrator writes as peiss and defines as “short curly locks on each side of his brow”) wearing a caftan. While the father himself has been transformed by the Princess’s money, he is not happy at the physical transformation in his son and makes him return to the city. Ismael must continue to be the soulful child-poet, for the Princess has become less generous, and the father needs money after a bad financial speculation.
The boy tries his hardest, but no words come, and this lack of inspiration makes him feel desperate. When his father takes him to see the lady again, he is tongue-tied: “Once, he had been a child genius; now, he was nothing but an awkward, stupid boy like the others. . . . The Princess looked at him with her cold eyes.”55 The fascinating thing here is that Ismael’s family is as much in despair as he is: they want him to be a prodigy. But there is nothing to be done, his genius is gone. They then mock him, calling him Wunderkind and child prodigy. Finally, the Princess tells his parents to put him into an apprenticeship, which she will pay for. Reluctantly, they place him with a tailor. After that, he hangs himself.
There is a wonderful story by the great Russian Jewish writer Isaac Babel, written around the same time as L’enfant génial, about a Jewish boy in Odessa whose parents want him to become a violin prodigy. Indeed, every Jewish family in their poor neighborhood wants the same thing and for the same reason: “Our fathers, seeing no other escape from their lot, had thought up a lottery, building it on the bones of little children.” The local violin teacher “ran a factory of infant prodigies, a factory of Jewish dwarfs in lace collars and patent-leather pumps. He hunted them out in the slums of the Moldavanka, in the evil-smelling courtyards of the Old Market.” Babel’s first-person narrator, who turns out to have no talent for the violin, fares a lot better than Némirovsky’s Ismael, as he simply stops going to lessons and spends his days down by the port trying to learn how to swim. Babel derives great comic effect from the scandal that erupts when the boy’s father finds out about his truancy. And Babel too indulges in some stereotyping of Jews: after announcing that he was unable to learn how to swim, the narrator adds, “The hydrophobia of my ancestors—Spanish rabbis and Frankfurt money-changers—dragged me to the bottom.”56 The boy in this story survived the scandal and maybe even learned to swim, thanks to his loving grandmother and to a kindly old Ukrainian journalist who took him under his wing. Némirovsky’s tale, working with a similar paradigm, opts for the tragic mode.
In Jonathan Weiss’s view, the reason for Ismael’s failure must be sought in his Jewish family. Although the Russian bohemian poet “encourages Ismael’s imagination, the boy’s parents and the Jewish community keep him from composing his verse, preferring to have him work in their grimy shops.”57 This interpretation is somewhat surprising, for Némirovsky’s text emphasizes precisely the opposite: the family is desperate to have Ismael produce poetry, and they become furiously mocking when he is unable to do it. It is not the “dark and dank” Jewish household in Odessa that is responsible for Ismael’s poetic dry spell, but rather the luxuriant Russian countryside, whose discovery coincides with his burgeoning sexuality. The more robust and less soulfully Jewish (huge dark eyes, pale face, etc.) Ismael becomes, the less of a poet he is. This would suggest that Ismael’s poetic genius and his wretchedness as a poor Jew are not at odds but, on the contrary, are linked. The authorial voice, however, makes clear that this interpretation is too simple as well. Trying to plumb the mystery of the child’s sudden loss of inspiration, the narrator comes up with an explanation based on child development:
Why had they fallen silent, the songs that earlier had come spontaneously to his lips? . . . Had his genius been a kind of morbid flower, blooming only because his life had been violent, excessive, unhealthy? . . . Alas! It was simply that he was entering the difficult period of adolescence. . . . But nobody told him that; nobody gave him the hope that his wonderful native talent would come back to him later, when he was a man. . . . Nobody was there to whisper to him: “Wait, hope. . . .” They were all bent over him, around him, hanging on to him, like people who with their sacrilegious fingers want to force open a flower.58
Ismael’s problem is not that his Jewish family refuses to encourage his poetic activity, preferring him to “work in their grimy shops.” Rather, as the concluding metaphor above indicates, the family tries to force the budding poet into flower before he is ready. True, the family’s “sacrilegious” forcing of the boy can be seen as caused by their love of money, the Jewish avidity for riches being one of the stereotypes maintained throughout the tale. (One wonders whether it is altogether wrong to imagine poor Jews wanting to become rich.) But in fact, the family’s attitude toward the boy and toward poetry is not marked as specifically Jewish. The Princess does nothing to understand or encourage the young poet either, and it is she who finally directs his father to find him a trade.
Ismael, it would seem, is a confused adolescent, having no one to turn to as he faces the storms of puberty. He is not unlike the teenage writer of Némirovsky’s most autobiographical novel, Le Vin de solitude, who feels totally misunderstood by her parents. (Yes, the parents are social-climbing Jews!) The author of L’enfant génial was herself barely out of her teens when she wrote that novella. Whatever else this supposed parable is about, it certainly expresses a young person’s anxiety over the possible loss of poetic talent. Notably, the incident that precipitates Ismael’s suicide is unrelated to his Jewish family. One day he returns to the cabaret by the port, where he meets the Barine who discovered him and who is no longer the Princess’s lover. This aging drunkard and onetime poet bewails his own loss of inspiration, in terms that recall the narrator’s earlier characterization of Ismael’s poetic gift as “mysterious birds” that rise in his chest. The older man tells Ismael, “Listen, I’m going to tell you. Don’t repeat this to anyone. Maybe . . . maybe they’re dead, my marvelous birds.”59 It is after talking with the adult poet who lost his genius long ago that Ismael, as if foreseeing his own future, commits suicide.
If it is read without imposing the grid of Jewish antisemitism on it, L’enfant génial becomes a quite interesting work. Even in this early and often clumsy story Némirovsky makes some astute observations about the difficulties of Jewish existence in a non-Jewish world as well as about the challenges of assimilation. Like so many of her later Jewish protagonists, Ismael is a divided being, and, as in the case of Christian Rabinovitch, his inner division is hinted at by his name: Ismael alludes to the biblical outcast and non-Jew, while Baruch is the Hebrew word for “blessed.”60 When Ismael first goes to live with the Princess, he discovers the refined tastes and manners of a society to which he is a stranger and learns to emulate them; the narrator observes his attempts with sympathy. But what about those nasty descriptions of the Jewish ghetto that open the novella, which any contemporary reader will flinch at? The figure of the ghetto Jew, impoverished, smelly, living in crowded quarters, is a topos of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fiction by Jewish as well as non-Jewish writers, in France and elsewhere. Némirovsky’s version is quite distasteful, since she compares the large number of Jewish babies to vermin and the children running around the port to rats. But it does not get us very far to point out indignantly, as some of her critics have done, that Hitler too considered Jews as vermin. To Hitler and his followers, the Jews’ status as “vermin” meant they were infecting the “healthy” body of non-Jewish society and had to be exterminated. To Némirovsky, the image had no such implication, and the narrator points out that the wretched condition of Jews in turn-of-the-century Russia is at least partly the result of pogroms.
Negative stereotypes must be examined not in isolation but in terms of their function in the work as a whole. This means not only comparing Némirovsky’s portrayals of Jews to those of others, ranging from Jewish writers to ideological antisemites, but also giving her works the careful reading they deserve.