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Pierre Goldman and the Beginnings of jeune litterature juive
Thomas Nolden
French Forum, Volume 28, Number 2, Spring 2003, pp. 57-76 (Article)
Published by University of Pennsylvania Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/frf.2004.0010
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/50809
[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]040 FF28-2 nolden (57-76) 11/21/03 1:43 PM Page 57
Thomas Nolden
Pierre Goldman and the Beginnings of jeune
littérature juive
Very few Jewish writers of the twentieth century have enjoyed a recep-
tion comparable to that of the political activist, self-styled guerrilla,
gangster, and author Pierre Goldman. In 1979, the assassination of the
thirty-five year old Goldman by members of a right-wing commando
provoked an outcry from the general public and prompted a reevalua-
tion of the dangers of anti-Semitism among French Jews. The Marxist
critic Régis Debray and the Jewish writer Hélène Cixous responded to
Goldman’s slaying by devoting entire books to the question of how his
life and death came to challenge the very foundation of the grande
nation. The novelist Catherine Axelrad suggested in her novel La
Varsovienne (1990) that the circumstances of Goldman’s murder—his
killers had never been found and remained at large—enabled the
extreme Left to offer quasi-national funerals for the revolution. More
than 15,000 people attended his funeral, among them Jean-Paul Sartre,
Simone de Beauvoir, Samuel Beckett, Yves Montand, and many of the
Jewish student leaders who never had gained Goldman’s support.1
For many of his peers, the killing of the Jewish enfant terrible
brought the issue of their own status and safety as outspoken Jews to
the forefront. The journalist Luc Rosenzweig—a colleague of Gold-
man at Libération—took the event as incentive to conduct a series of
interviews with young Jews, which he later published as La jeune
France juive, a title sardonically alluding to Edouard Drumont’s noto-
rious anti-Semite pamphlet La France juive from 1886. According to
Rosenzweig, the hors-la-loi Goldman became a martyr for those who,
facing the choice between Judaism (particularism) and the University
(universalism), chose the latter.2 Rosenzweig’s collection of interviews
came to stand as powerful homage to Goldman, not as a political
extremist, but as a persecuted Jew whose death told the story of040 FF28-2 nolden (57-76) 11/21/03 1:43 PM Page 58
58 / French Forum/Spring 2003/Vol. 28, No. 2
France’s inability to render justice to its Jewish citizens. In his preface,
Rosenzweig, the son of German communists, wrote: “En tuant Pierre
Goldman, ses assassins, quels qu’ils soient, ont tenté de mettre un
terme définitif à une histoire que la France traîne comme un boulet:
celle de la lâcheté collective d’un peuple qui accepte d’envoyer ‘ses’
juifs à la mort.”3 In the first survey of the emerging “jeune littérature
juive” presented in 1982, the literary critic Lazare Bitoun explained the
impact of Goldman’s life and memoirs by pointing to Goldman’s rejec-
tion of the discourse of victimization. Instead of using the “mot
israélite et sa connotation aigre-douce de la langue française,” Gold-
man had had the courage to replace it “par le mot Juif qui revendique
et affirme une différence.”4
The opening line from his autobiography Souvenirs obscurs d’un
Juif polonais né en France (published in 1975), which contained in
condensed form his historical, generational, and biographical point of
departure, was canonized by his peers and the authors following him:
“Je suis né le 22 juin 1944 à Lyon, en France, en France occupée
par les nazis (longtemps j’ai pensé que j’étais né et mort le 22 juin
1944). . . . Je n’avais pas l’âge de combattre, mais, à peine en vie, j’eus
l’âge de pouvoir périr dans les crématoires de Pologne” (27). It is this
line that Henry Raczymow uses almost ten years later as an epigraph
to his novel Un cri sans voix, in which he describes the lethal fate suf-
fered decades after the Shoah by a young Jewish woman whose
identification with the resistance fighters from the Warsaw ghetto
ultimately leads her to commit suicide in 1982. Another Jewish writer
of Goldman’s generation, Myriam Anissimov, dedicated one of her
books to Goldman. Even authors of Sephardic background, such as the
Algerian-born Jean-Luc Allouche, turned to Goldman as a Jew who—
because he could never be assimilated—embodied the absolute
stranger, the “lueur d’une dernière fraternité désespérée.”5 Allouche
had remembered in his autobiography how he, a Maghrebi-born Jew,
had felt quite vexed by a slogan celebrating solidarity with the student
leader Danny Cohn-Bendit during the student protests: “ . . . dans le
secret de mon coeur, j’eusse préféré que fût célébré un Juif algérien et
non pas un ‘Pollak’” (51–2).
Following the leftist imperatives of politicalization, Pierre Goldman
had enlisted himself into the service of those fighting to defend the
broader population of the disenfranchised from suppression, persecu-040 FF28-2 nolden (57-76) 11/21/03 1:43 PM Page 59
Nolden: The Beginnings of jeune littérature juive / 59
tion, and exploitation, rather than exclusively devoting himself to the lot
of his Jewish coreligionists. He examined the combative course his life
had taken decidedly from the perspective of Jewish experience, and sit-
uated his identification with the cause of the suppressed in the Third
World within his own existential particularity as a Jew born to Polish
members of the resistance. His autobiography, which he wrote during his
imprisonment, was published in 1975; his novel L’ordinaire mésaven-
ture d’Archibald Rapoport followed two years later. Both texts are
among the first records of the earliest cultural production by the généra-
tions d’après which emerged in the wake of the student rebellion as part
of a complex process of rejudaization. The trajectory of political eman-
cipation and radicalization did not find its climax, as the Marxist text-
books would have predicted, in the complete eradication of ethnic
differences. Rather, these differences were rediscovered and adopted as
the basis for a new program of politics which ultimately would embrace
each individual’s particularity as a vehicle for the deconstruction of any
claims of universalism. This trajectory was the one outlined and shaped
by a new generation of philosophes, critics, and historians (among them
Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, Alain Glucksmann, Bernard-Henri
Lévy, Jean-François Lyotard, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet), many of them
coreligionists and slightly older peers of Goldman.
Both Goldman’s texts and their reception confirm Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari’s notion that in a minor literature everything takes
on a “collective value.” Regardless of whether one would like to use
their concept of “deterritorialization” to describe Goldman’s under-
standing of himself as a non-French Jew writing in one of the peniten-
tiaries of the colonizing power France, Goldman’s enunciative
situation undoubtedly must be seen as analogous to that of the minor
writer described by Deleuze and Guattari:
Indeed, precisely because talent isn’t abundant in a minor literature, there are no
possibilities for an individuated enunciation that would belong to this or that “mas-
ter” and that could be separated from a collective enunciation. [ . . . ] what each
author says individually already constitutes a common action, and what he or she
says or does is necessarily political, even if others aren’t in agreement. The polit-
ical domain has contaminated every statement.6
This reading explains why Goldman’s writing has been understood pri-
marily as a political statement and why literary criticism has almost040 FF28-2 nolden (57-76) 11/21/03 1:43 PM Page 60
60 / French Forum/Spring 2003/Vol. 28, No. 2
entirely ignored it. However, Goldman’s work merits attention also
because its very features set the stage for a new discourse of Jewish
writing within French letters. Paying attention to the thematic and styl-
istic traits that characterize this writing—especially the notions of écri-
ture de soi and the relationship to writing as such—and comparing
them to the works of his peers will render critical justice to Goldman’s
unique position within contemporary Jewish literature.
I
Born in 1944 to parents who had fought in the French resistance move-
ment, Pierre Goldman signed on as a student with Communist groups.
However, instead of marching with his peers on the boulevards of
Paris, he joined a Venezuelan guerrilla force in 1967. After he was sent
back from Cuba to France in order to continue the revolutionary work
at home, he lived in Paris as a political extremist and societal outcast
who despised both the political establishment and its opponents.7
Goldman was convicted of several armed robberies and in 1974 was
sentenced to life imprisonment for a murder he had not committed. In
prison, he completed his licence in philosophy and wrote his memoirs,
in which he described his alienation from and by French society
unequivocally:
Je n’avais pas de preuve à donner—on me la demandait depuis toujours, en silence,
depuis que j’étais né et bien que je fusse né, en France, en un temps où il m’était
refusé de naître Français—je n’avais pas de preuve à donner parce que, pro-
fondément, je n’avais jamais été Français. J’étais seulement un Juif exilé sans terre
promise. Exilé indéfiniment, infiniment, définitivement. Je n’étais pas prolétaire,
mais je n’avais pas de patrie, pas d’autre patrie que cet exil absolu, cet exil juif
diasporique.8
The very beginning of Pierre Goldman’s autobiography Souvenirs ob-
scurs d’un juif polonais né en France is exemplary in exploding the
conventions of autobiographical discourse: the book commences with
his vita which from the outset is marked, if not predetermined, by a his-
tory of persecution. The narrator’s first reflection shows him as a dead
man, followed by the notion that his national and his ethnic affiliation
are in conflict with each other: “Je suis né le 22 juin 1944 à Lyon, en
France, en France occupée par les nazis (longtemps j’ai pensé que j’é-
tais né et mort le 22 juin 1944). Je suis juif. Je suis d’origine juive et040 FF28-2 nolden (57-76) 11/21/03 1:43 PM Page 61
Nolden: The Beginnings of jeune littérature juive / 61
je suis juif” (27). The account obeys the technical rules of legalistic
writing, as it is a powerful document of self-defense in which the
accused is making his plea to the French public. Goldman prefaces his
autobiography with a long excerpt of the bill of indictment for his
alleged murder of a pharmacist and his assistant on the rue Richard-
Lenoir. Following is a curriculum vitae, a chapter that scrutinizes the
police report of the alleged crime, and a chapter entitled “Le procès,”
which reconstructs the trial during which Goldman was sentenced to
life imprisonment (he was acquitted in a second trial). Goldman’s allu-
sions to Kafka were not lost on his contemporaries; Hélène Cixous, for
example, called her book on Goldman Un K. incompréhensible.9 After
all, these allusions were not merely literary, but existential in nature:
On m’autorisera aussi à dire que j’eus l’impression de vivre une situation kaf-
kaïenne: Juif et innocent, il m’arrivait de rêver que, libre, j’errais dans la ville, y ren-
contrais mes amis, sans pourtant cesser d’être, dans cette liberté rêvée, onirique,
incarcéré. J’ajoute que j’entrepris la lecture du Procès: je ne pus la terminer, elle m’é-
tait trop douloureuse, j’en ressentais une intolérable angoisse. (130–31)
His childhood, Goldman relates in the opening chapter, was “une
longue rêverie inerte qu’anima, seul, le spectacle d’Auschwitz,
d’Oswiecim, en Pologne.” (32–33) Spending his boyhood summers in
Poland, he learned about the brutal killing of his maternal grandpar-
ents—his grandfather was murdered by the Nazis while reciting the
Psalms. In describing his emotional response as a child to these fam-
ily stories, the author offers insight into the origins of the militant
activism that marked his political career, which began in the Sorbonne
chapter of the Union des Étudiants Communistes:
C’est en Pologne que je cessai de haïr la violence (mais je conservais toujours, en
mon tréfonds, une répulsion rabbinique pour la force brutale). [ . . . ] En Pologne,
je fus pris du goût de l’action, envahi du rêve et du désir de l’histoire, et je voulais
que cette histoire soit de violence, m’y libérer de la meurtrissure d’être juif. (34)
Souvenirs obscurs d’un Juif polonais né en France is Goldman’s
attempt to understand the course of his own life by relating his actions
as an adult to his family’s and people’s experience of persecution and
suffering. As a written document, it belongs to the genre of the Con-
fessions, and as such addresses a larger audience as well as a larger040 FF28-2 nolden (57-76) 11/21/03 1:43 PM Page 62
62 / French Forum/Spring 2003/Vol. 28, No. 2
cause than just the story of the self. The book aims to reveal and brand
the legal system’s anti-Semitism by alerting the public outside of the
courtroom to the “fascist-minded enthusiasm” that prevailed during
the trial. It attempts to create a public space that allows for the account
of a Jew whose conscious desire to resist acculturation and integration
into French bourgeois society had led him to collide violently with the
power centers of this society instead of settling passively on its mar-
gins. Thus, Goldman’s autobiography, written in a spirit both defen-
sive and offensive, stands as a modern J’accuse authored by the
defendant himself as an outcry against his victimization. Indeed, his
narrative is woven together by the causal psychology and milieu the-
ory of Naturalism, whose stylistic preferences it seems to share as well.
Its reception, after all, showed that it was successful as a hybrid text,
at once private confession and public pamphlet: the appearance of his
Souvenirs prompted the authorities to grant Goldman a new trial, one
in which he ultimately was acquitted from the murder charges.
The first autobiography offered by a Jew of the génération d’après
thus bears the mark of a legalistic document serving an existential
cause rather than the luxury of self-evaluation and retrospective con-
templation of an orderly life. It breaks with the Christian tradition of
autobiographical writing as a genre of inwardness and individualiza-
tion as it was advanced in modern times, because the author faces the
challenge of establishing his individuality as a highly public persona.
Instead of defending the self against the transgression of an inner law
in the court of the Lord, Goldman accuses the law of the State for trans-
gressing the rights of its subject. As a political memoir, this book also
eschews the logic of the self-appraising resistance narrative à la de
Gaulle’s wartime memoirs or André Malraux’s Antimémoires, which
surveys a grand panorama of cultivated predecessors and illustrious
combatants. Goldman’s autobiography also goes beyond both the voli-
tionist model espoused by the existentialist autobiography and the
abstractions promoted by the aesthetics of the nouveaux romanciers,
as neither of these modes of fashioning a life do justice to the limita-
tions imposed on a vita by the Jewish experience.
The enumerative Parcelles de mon enfance that are encapsulated in
his curriculum vitae instead prefigure the unique shape of Georges
Perec’s 1978 Je me souviens, although this important document of
postwar autobiographical writing by a Jewish author born before the040 FF28-2 nolden (57-76) 11/21/03 1:43 PM Page 63
Nolden: The Beginnings of jeune littérature juive / 63
war actually refuses to remember any events relating specifically to the
writer’s Jewish experience. Simply listing individual images of his
childhood—all of which are introduced by the phrase “Je me sou-
viens”—Goldman provides a sparse and self-effacing record of mem-
ory, which in both form and substance suggests that a Proustian-style
Recherche du temps perdu is no longer a narrative possibility for him
and his generation of French Jews.
II
The inclination of the jeune littérature juive to address the very act of
writing as part of its own discourse is present from its conception on
and was noticed by the very first commentators of this “jeune littéra-
ture” (Arnold Mandel).10 The critic Lazare Bitoun, in one of the first
attempts to take stock of this emerging literature, could not but mention
Pierre Goldman and appreciated his refusal to accept the “rôle his-
torique de victime expiatoire et [de fournir] autant qu’il la suscite la
possibilité d’une nouvelle identification.”11 Thus, Goldman’s work
responded to the claim issued in 1980 by Alain Finkielkraut for a reap-
propriation of Jewish history beyond the Shoah which rooted the dis-
course on contemporary judéité (Albert Memmi) in identity politics.
Arnold Mandel in his programmatic article Le néo-diasporisme culturel
from 1980 commented that the young generation of Jewish writers in
France were all products of the “lycée français avec son cartésianisme
endémique” and thus perceived a strong notion of self-alienation, of a
tension between their intellectual training and the traditions of Judaism.
This tension drives the self-referentiality of their writing, one could
argue, just as much as what the critic Rachel Ertel in her piece in the
1981 dossier Aujourd’hui, le roman juif? of the Jewish journal Traces
called the Jewish condition “reflexive.”12 Ertel’s definition of the liter-
ature at stake renders critical justice to the diversity of idioms, styles,
genres, and themes that characterize the works of the postwar genera-
tion of authors of both Ashkenazi and Sephardi background writing in
French. With regard to the notion of a brittle, frail, and highly mediated
relationship toward Judaism displayed by many of these writers, Ertel
referred to “residual forms” of being Jewish—consisting of real or
imaginary memories, memories of memories, or fragments and splin-
ters of it—as the very stuff from which they fashion their works. This
phenomenon as well as the need to articulate their own voice against040 FF28-2 nolden (57-76) 11/21/03 1:43 PM Page 64
64 / French Forum/Spring 2003/Vol. 28, No. 2
the backdrop of a long history of acculturation and invisibility prompted
forms of autobiographical writing that address, often in a provocative
manner, the rationale of its own genesis.
Patrick Modianos’s La place de l’étoile, which in 1968 launched
jeune littérature juive, introduced a young protagonist who pompously
proclaimed that the entire future of Jewish writing rested solely on his
shoulders. In texts by Pierre Goldman, the very act of writing is
revealed to be a fundamentally problematic activity which nonetheless
functions as both the object and the medium of self-explication. The
autobiographic endeavor is occasioned by the need to defend itself and
the author, and it reflects on the nature of this need by articulating the
special context from which this peculiar defensiveness emerges. In
stark juxtaposition to the very architecture of one of the most notori-
ous memoirs of postwar France, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les mots, Goldman
addresses quite expressively his aversion to the medium of writing.
Sartre, to be sure, had divided his memoir into two books, the first titled
“Lire,” and the second, in which he proclaims the motto of his life to
be “Nulla dies sine linea,”13 titled “Écrire.”
Goldman’s life is torn between the imperative “to act” and the con-
cession “to write.” He has to write because he needs to explain to the
prosecutor and to the nation at large how he has become the victim of
what he regards to be an anti-Semitic judicial system: “Pour écrire ce
texte, j’ai dû surmonter le dégoût d’écrire. J’ai dû surmonter le dégoût
de cette affaire: le dégoût qu’il y soit encore publiquement question de
moi.”14 For Goldman, the political activist and guerrilla, writing brings
with it assumptions that run counter to his life of clandestine warfare
for the sake of the oppressed. Writing implies the notion—problematic
for him—of the supremacy of reflection over action, and of the public
persona over the anonymous combatant: “(Ce qui me retenait d’écrire,
c’était la sensation qu’il s’agissait d’un acte obscène où je risquais
d’être aimé ou haï publiquement, possédé, la sensation, homme public,
d’être le masculin, ainsi, d’une femme publique)” (32). With this state-
ment, Goldman enlists himself in the long-standing tradition of anti-
intellectualism, employing misogynist imagery (the writer as prostitute)
to devalue, as it were, the potency of the writer as an “homme public.”
Thrown into jail and thus forced to renounce, at least temporarily, his
active life, Goldman has to renounce the vita activa and resign himself
to a vita contemplativa. He uses the time in prison to study philosophy040 FF28-2 nolden (57-76) 11/21/03 1:43 PM Page 65
Nolden: The Beginnings of jeune littérature juive / 65
and to write his story, in which the statement quoted above appears in
parentheses as a complete non sequitur. At the very end of “Le procès,”
the last chapter of the autobiography, Goldman returns to the very
nature of his undertaking and his concern about the act of writing:
J’ai déjà dit l’aversion que m’inspirait l’acte d’écrire et d’être l’objet et le sujet de
cette écriture. Une autre raison m’avait toujours interdit d’écrire: je voulais écrire
ma vie dans la vie, l’y inscrire, qu’elle soit un roman. Elle ne le fut pas et de l’avoir
écrite sans la romancer ne la transforme pas en roman. Au terme de ce récit, je
devrais me tuer, expier ainsi cette révélation où j’ai dû m’écrire afin de sauver ma
vie d’une accusation fausse et infamante. (279)
Goldman dismisses writing as a hyperbolic gesture of existential hero-
ism that he must renounce when self-justification becomes necessary.
His rejection is not confined to these grounds, however. Subscribing to
a combative tradition of political resistance that goes back to his par-
ent’s fight against Fascism, he favors stronger weapons than the pen,
and wants to fight for the sake of the oppressed rather than just for his
own skin. In prison, however, he is left with the pen and preoccupied
with the defense of his own life.
Goldman’s novel L’ordinaire mésaventure d’Archibald Rapoport
appeared in 1977, one year after his release from prison and two years
before he was killed by members of a right wing group. Here, his pro-
tagonist Rapoport sets up a juxtaposition very similar to the one found
in the author’s autobiography:
Il avait toujours connu le désir endeuillé d’écrire et, parmi les raisons qui avaient
empêché qu’il le fît, il y avait surtout la sensation qu’écrire était une lâcheté, une
façon d’assouvir désirs, fantasmes et rêves dans une fiction substitutive, au lieu de
les accomplir. J’aime trop vivre, disait-il, pour pouvoir écrire (j’écrirai quand je
ne banderai plus, disait-il aussi). Et la publicité de l’écriture, qui abolit l’anony-
mat, supposait, lui semblait-il, le désir terrifié d’échapper aux signes funèbres de
la solitude. Mais il n’écrirait qu’au moment où il serait dans une confrontation
inévitable et cristaline [sic] avec la mort—qui inclurait une contemplation con-
stante—il écrirait quand sa vie consisterait exclusivement à mourir, il ferait seule-
ment le récit de sa vie et son livre ne paraîtrait qu’après qu’il eût, lui, disparu: il
avait décidé qu’en vertu des multiples articles du Code pénal relatifs au châtiment
du meurtre, il serait condamné à mort et exécuté.15
This construction reveals the extremism in the design of this figure
who, like his author, is the offspring of members of the resistance040 FF28-2 nolden (57-76) 11/21/03 1:43 PM Page 66
66 / French Forum/Spring 2003/Vol. 28, No. 2
movement. Their commitment to putting their lives in the service of a
cause grander than their own existence has left their child an orphan.
The son decides to become a murderer in order to become a writer, and
to be executed in order to be read, thus turning upside down the ther-
apeutic or ersatz function of writing, and reversing fundamentally the
situation that had caused Goldman to write his autobiography. Initially,
Goldman had set out to write in order to defend himself against mur-
der charges. Two years later, he creates in Rapoport a literary alter ego
who sets out to kill in order to support his desire to ensure “qu’on sût
ce qu’il avait été. Il désira qu’on le connût, enfin, après sa mort [ . . . ]”
(62). The chain of events that had led to the celebrated accomplish-
ments of the resistance fighters is no longer intact for a member of the
générations d’après. Rapoport is trying in vain to commit acts of resis-
tance upon which he can mount a claim for glory and for an afterlife
in literature.
Rapoport’s tattoo, discovered by an officer during the physical
examination following his surrender, represents for him the only
appropriate—that is to say existentially founded and physically mani-
fest—form of writing: “Je suis un écrivain qui n’a jamais écrit, dit
Rapoport, mais j’ai écrit ces lignes sur ma chair car je suis mon propre
livre” (129). Unlike the numbers which the Nazis burned into the skin
of their victims, Rapoport’s tattoo is self-inflicted—he is the author of
a text which marks his own body, his own life. With this image, Gold-
man offers the notion of an autography as the counterpart to his auto-
biography,16 eschewing the notion that Jewish writing is driven by the
notion of Zakhor, the charge to remember the victims, that urged Perec
in 1975 to have one of his autobiographical narrators state in W ou le
souvenir d’enfance about the memory of his persecuted parents:
“j’écris parce qu’ils ont laissé en moi leur marque indélébile et que la
trace en est l’écriture; leur souvenir est mort à l’écriture; l’écriture est
le souvenir de leur mort et l’affirmation de ma vie.”17
Whereas Perec’s autobiographical voice can commence his Sou-
venirs with a reference that the act of autobiographical writing coin-
cides with the very act of writing (“Le projet d’écrire mon histoire s’est
formé presque en même temps que mon projet d’écrire,” 41), Gold-
man’s Rapoport sets out to write in the conventional way, separating
his vita from his life, only after having barely escaped imprisonment
for his senseless killings. The excerpts revealed to the reader bring040 FF28-2 nolden (57-76) 11/21/03 1:43 PM Page 67
Nolden: The Beginnings of jeune littérature juive / 67
back images of the young outlaw Goldman’s early days of combat in
the Antilles. After all, as an author Rapoport accepts that writing,
although always trotting behind life, can offer salvation and rescue, and
saves “des images perdues et . . . des expériences, les élève au-delà de
l’absurdité, du désespoir où le mutisme les ensevelit” (186). Commit-
ting the memories of his youth to paper, the hero dies crying, thus free-
ing himself from a magical spell that had kept him from showing any
signs of human emotion. Writing here has an almost cathartic effect,
because it restores the outcast to the covenant of his people and allows
him to state, as his last words, that he was a good Jew. Writing in the
face of death not only saves the memory of Rapoport’s troubled life
from vanishing into silence under the spell of the Shoah; ultimately, it
also saves him as a Jew and as a human being.
III
Souvenirs obscurs d’un Juif polonais né en France is a somber response
to an unfounded criminal charge and to a courtroom atmosphere that
Goldman considered racist. His novel—also an “histoire judiciaire”
(57)—is a hyperbolic response to the anti-Semitic projection of the Jew
as the criminal subverting the grande nation and a written fantasy of
his indomitability. At the same time, it can be read as a document
testifying to the author’s longing to participate in, if not to create, a
work of historiography that would redeem the humiliations suffered by
the Jewish people. Whereas his autobiography had fought for personal
redemption in an almost legalistic manner, his L’ordinaire mésaven-
ture evokes nothing less than a mythopoetical framework:
Quand l’indicible, enfin, sera gouverné par les écorchures invisibles de la trans-
parence, quand l’écorce brûlée des évidences illuminera le règne opaque de la
douleur normale, les chroniqueurs de la malédiction, qu’ils soient bénis, diront,
s’ils disent encore, l’histoire sans fin d’un Juif étrange qu’attendait l’échafaud.
(11)
Not without self-irony, Goldman’s novel introduces the reader to the
life and sufferings of a hero of special status and singular nature.
Grandiloquence clearly sets the tone for a picaresque narrative and thus
engages in dialogue with Patrick Modiano’s La place de l’étoile, which
also had employed the tradition of the pícaro to narrate the biography
of contemporary Jewish identity. This choice of genre can be explained040 FF28-2 nolden (57-76) 11/21/03 1:43 PM Page 68
68 / French Forum/Spring 2003/Vol. 28, No. 2
partly as a reaction to the lack of a contemporary tradition of texts nar-
rating Jewish vitae, partly as an expression of the desire to vex and irri-
tate gentile audiences ill-versed in outspokenly Jewish writing, and last
but not least as an acknowledgment of the aesthetic difficulties encoun-
tered when trying to make literary sense of the vicissitudes of Jewish
life in postwar France.
The pícaros of sixteenth century literature were born to lesser fam-
ilies and equipped with stark cynicism to battle the ill repute and bad
luck that followed them on their travails and travels through society.
The picaresque novel entered literary history to juxtapose these hum-
ble protagonists, often battling the forces of evil against all odds, with
the noble heroes of the novel of chivalry. The emergence of la jeune
littérature juive in France in the 1970s, one could argue, coincided with
the deconstruction of the Vichy syndrome by young—and Jewish—
historians, and pointedly juxtaposed its rude, loutish anti-heroes with
the stylized voices prominent in the accounts of self-aggrandizing and
often self-proclaimed resistance fighters, the chivalresque genre of the
era. Interestingly, the author of the first picaresque novel—Lazarillo
de Tormes, published anonymously 1554 in Spain—most likely was a
marrano who had converted to Christianity to avoid persecution. In
this literary tradition, Modiano and Goldman could appreciate the lega-
cies of both a certain type of protagonist who manages to weather all
sorts of societal perils and infelicitous circumstances, and a certain
kind of narrative structure that allowed for episodic fragmentation and
improbable turns of the plot, often navigated in unpolished language.
Psychological nuances are out of place in a genre that offers black-and-
white woodcuts of society instead of drawing subtle portraits of char-
acters. Drawing the genre close to the territory of black comedy, these
two authors also break with the humorous and amusing quality of older
writers like Jacques Lanzmann (born 1927), Joseph Joffo (born 1931)
or Claude Berri (born 1934), and even go a step further than Romain
Gary (born 1914) did in his La danse de Gengis Cohn from 1967. These
authors write to permit complicit laughter at their protagonists’ pranks
and elicit compassionate sympathy with the sorry fates they describe.
Modiano and Goldman, however, shape their first novels to provoke
irritation and impatience by writing about highly irreverent young
Jews who resolutely take their fate into their own hands. Modiano’s
Raphaël Schlemilovitch and Goldman’s Archibald Rapoport, we will040 FF28-2 nolden (57-76) 11/21/03 1:43 PM Page 69
Nolden: The Beginnings of jeune littérature juive / 69
see, are extremists: one of them a notorious impostor and Nazi-sym-
pathizer, the other a hardened serial killer. If one wanted to look for
Jewish authors who in the mid-sixties and early seventies published
works of similar shock-value, one would have to turn to the Budapest-
born playwright George Tabori (born 1914) and the German-Jewish
novelist Edgar Hilsenrath (born 1926). Tabori’s Cannibals (1968) and
Hilsenrath’s The Nazi and the Barber (1971) both upset the aesthetic
contracts of the postwar years, which had discouraged writers from
addressing the Shoah by means of satire, parody, and black comedy.
Interestingly, both of these pieces were conceived not in Europe but in
the US, where the authors lived before settling in Germany. Interest-
ingly, too, both Hilsenrath’s and Modiano’s novels later would fall
victim to acts of self-censure that moderated some of their most
provocative aspects.18 Passages as provocative as the following ones
did not get reprinted in the subsequent editions of La Place de l’étoile,
and their absence went unnoticed in scholarship: “Maurois m’enviait
mes amitiés fascistes. Je luis donnai la recette: abandonner définitive-
ment son exquise pudeur de juif honteux. Reprendre son véritable nom.
Devenir, comme moi, Raphaël Schlemilovitch, un juif antisémite”
(25). Or: “Mon but: créer une Waffen S.S. juive et une Légion des
volontaires juifs contre le bolchevisme” (26).
“Jewishness,” to use the words of Daniel Boyarin, “disrupts the very
categories of identity, because it is not national, not genealogical, not
religious, but all of these, in dialectical tension with each other.”19 The
very first texts of the first postwar generation of French Jews show that
Jewishness also interrupted the social and aesthetic contracts of postwar
France. They did so not by rejecting these contracts in their entirety, but
by punctuating apparently seamless continuities and pointing directly to
the tensions between the French ethnic and national tradition and the his-
torical experience of its Jewish minority. They interrupt governing con-
ventions of écriture de soi and thus articulate the difference between Jew
and gentile. Yet, neither Pierre Goldman nor Patrick Modiano—and the
same could be argued for their peers Katia Rubinstein, Guy Sitbon or
Marco Koskas—engage in any effort to mediate these dialectical ten-
sions. Instead of banking on the master-narrative of synthesis, they make
ample use of satire, pastiche, and the macabre.
Predating the era in which the discourse of identity politics came to
introduce the fine nuances of self-analysis, these authors opened their040 FF28-2 nolden (57-76) 11/21/03 1:43 PM Page 70
70 / French Forum/Spring 2003/Vol. 28, No. 2
literary careers by bluntly pulling the israélites from invisibility and
giving them a voice with which they might disrupt the complacent con-
cert of the French nation nostalgically celebrating its unifying past of
resistance. Although the family background of both authors could
hardly be more different—Modiano, born in 1945, is the son of a non-
Jewish Belgian actress and a Jew of Italian-Greek descent who in the
Occupation seemed to have engaged in small business deals with the
collaborators—there are striking similarities in the narrative choices
they made in their debut novels. Both present highly implausible sto-
ries of extreme—and extremist—characters who, albeit in diametri-
cally opposed ways, question fundamentally society’s systems of
power and belief.
Modiano has his young Jew Raphaël Schlemilovitch blatantly
transgress all political, ideological, and aesthetic boundaries of the
années noires to advance his career as a juif collabo.20 The son of a col-
laborator, the lover of Hitler’s Eva Braun, and an admirer of the writ-
ers sympathizing with Vichy, Schlemilovitch proudly proclaims that
the future of Jewish writing rests solely on his shoulders. Neither he
nor his author suffers from any “anxiety of influence.” On the contrary,
the novel welcomes both the Jew Marcel Proust and the anti-Semite
Louis-Ferdinand Céline as ghost-writers for the story of Schlemi-
lovitch’s own life. They function, as it were, as the godfathers for La
place de l’étoile, a novel by an angry young man who makes his liter-
ary debut trying to outdo the grand names of a literary history which
has proven to be politically ambiguous over and over again. Shocking
those who only reluctantly accepted the mode rétro he initiated, Modi-
ano had his protagonist pose as a “juif antisémite” (25) aiming to cre-
ate “une Waffen S.S. juive et une Légion des volontaires juifs contre le
bolchevisme” (26).
Eschewing the logic of realist narratives, Modiano’s novel sus-
pends time, place, and character to create a pandemonium over which
Schlemilovitch presides at various times, as a pimp, as a writer, as the
Wandering Jew, as a patient of Sigmund Freud and as an adherent of
Jean-Paul Sartre (“Jean-Paul Schweitzer de la Sarthe”). The Jew’s
alleged rootlessness, anti-patriotism, and craftiness here are brought to
the very extreme to expose these elements of anti-Semitic propaganda
in all their absurdity. Three decades after Modiano had published his
book in his early twenties, he commented in one of the autobiograph-040 FF28-2 nolden (57-76) 11/21/03 1:43 PM Page 71
Nolden: The Beginnings of jeune littérature juive / 71
ical statements in his book Dora Bruder (1997) on his reasons for writ-
ing La place de l’étoile:
Et cela me semblait d’autant plus injuste que j’avais commencé un livre—mon
premier livre—où je prenais à mon compte le malaise qu’il [Modiano’s father]
avait éprouvé pendant l’Occupation. J’avais découvert dans sa bibliothèque,
quelques années auparavant, certains ouvrages d’auteurs antisémites parus dans
les années quarante qu’il avait achetés à l’époque, sans doute pour essayer de com-
prendre ce que ces gens-là lui reprochaient. Et j’imagine combien il avait été sur-
pris par la description de ce monstre imaginaire, fantasmatique, dont l’ombre
menaçante courait sur les murs, avec son nez crochu et ses mains de rapace, cette
créature pourrie par tous les vices, responsable de tous les maux et coupable de
tous les crimes. Moi, je voulais dans mon premier livre répondre à tous ces gens
dont les insultes m’avaient blessé à cause de mon père. Et, sur le terrain de la prose
française, leur river une bonne fois pour toutes leur clou. Je sens bien aujourd’hui
la naïveté enfantine de mon projet . . . (72–73)
Thus, Goldman’s and Modiano’s first books have in common that they
were written as gestures of defense, as attempts to render Jewish iden-
tities readable to gentile French audiences, and to provide these audi-
ences with a mirror in which to view their distorted images of the Other.
Though he shares important narrative strategies with Modiano,
Pierre Goldman presents the very alter ego of Modiano’s Schlemi-
lovitch in his novel L’ordinaire mésaventure d’Archibald Rapoport.
Archibald Rapoport is a Jew who restlessly embarks on a merciless
rampage to execute the political and societal establishment of the
French nation, carrying out a mission determined by his father’s fate:
“Mon père est mort sur un échafaud vichyste et je veux me battre, dit
Archibald, je veux tuer des fascistes” (53).
Shortly after the heroic death of his father, an active member of the
résistance, Rapoport’s mother introduces the newborn to the long and
unending chain of suffering inflicted on the Jewish people. To com-
memorate his father’s martyrdom, she puts her child under a magical
spell: he can never laugh or cry; his father’s martyr-death will prevent
him from giving in to the weaknesses of a normal human life. The rift
between this mock-autobiography and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Con-
fessions, the archetype of French autobiographical writing, could not
be broader. Whereas both Rousseau and Rapoport take up the pen to
depict their misfortunes at length, Rousseau, writing within the cult of
sensibility, declares at the outset that he is a person of early and deep040 FF28-2 nolden (57-76) 11/21/03 1:43 PM Page 72
72 / French Forum/Spring 2003/Vol. 28, No. 2
passions who as a child already “had felt everything.” The emotional
framework bestowed on the young Rapoport is nothing short of the
opposite.
Had the mother’s spell failed to impress the sufferings of the Jew-
ish people upon the newborn, her next act certainly would have suc-
ceeded in doing so: immediately after her child’s birth, she kills an SS
officer visiting a nearby brothel with a knife normally used to circum-
cise Jewish boys, thus initiating her infant permanently into a family
history of militant action and extremism. Within the first two pages of
the novel, the stage upon which the protagonist will lead his life is set:
he will grow up among Jewish partisans, be educated by a former pros-
titute, and find comfort and inspiration by socializing with other out-
casts such as homosexuals, political extremists, and transvestites. In
postwar France, the spell cast by his mother becomes the boy’s mis-
sion as he follows his parents’ path, fueled by a strange fascination with
violence first encountered while watching the Algerian war unfold.
Driven by his disgust for the “pouvoir colonial,” Rapoport will join
various liberation movements, ultimately transforming himself into an
outlaw. Not unlike Goldman himself, Rapoport becomes entangled in
a web of post-Hegelian and Marxist thought, postcolonial politics,
sexual excesses, lone adventurism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and a
corrupt judicial system. Yet Rapoport, the offspring of Jewish resis-
tance fighters, goes far beyond his author; not even a violent rampage
in which he kills French police officers and high officials can release
his mind from its turmoil.
Goldman’s novel is a remarkable examination of the motivations
and confinements of an extreme life experienced—and released, as it
were—in the realm of imaginary deviance, rather than in reality. In this
regard, the peculiar co-existence of autobiography and novel in Gold-
man’s oeuvre resembles the co-existence of autobiographical and fic-
tional discourse in Georges Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance (1975).
Goldman crosses the historical discourse with the sexual discourse
in a most peculiar way: the mother’s killing of the Nazi officer with the
knife used in circumcision is juxtaposed with the scene of the protag-
onist’s circumcision by his aunt in a manner that carries provocative
sexual undertones. Foucault’s notion that genealogy is situated “within
the articulation of the body and history”21 appears here in extremely
combative forms: as the corporeal resistance of the genealogical bond040 FF28-2 nolden (57-76) 11/21/03 1:43 PM Page 73
Nolden: The Beginnings of jeune littérature juive / 73
against the power of history (for which the mother, to be sure, eventu-
ally will have to pay with loss of her life), and as the sexualization of
the body in an almost carnivalesque confirmation of the genealogical
principle. The partisan spirit of Rapoport’s family embraces acts of
political as well as sexual dissidence: in this respect, the sexual initia-
tion of the adolescent protagonist by his prostitute aunt complements
the ideological legacy of his parents. Thus, Goldman’s protagonist
does not revolt against a code of behavior set by his predecessors by
leading the uninhibited sexual life of an enfant terrible. On the con-
trary, even in this respect he behaves very much like a dutiful son car-
rying out a family tradition.
In yet another show of loyalty to family traditions, Goldman stuns
the reader with the father-son relationship that informs the entire biog-
raphy of Rapoport. The author constructs a system of filial symbolism
in which a messiah (Rapoport’s father) dies, leaving his son (Rapoport)
to redeem his family and the Jewish people killed by the Nazis.
. . . et Archibald Rapoport voulut pleurer, ne pleura pas, murmura mon Dieu mon
Dieu je ne crois pas en toi et son murmure devint une psalmodie où il invoquait
son père Chmoul et il disait Chmoulek mon père ô mon père je t’en supplie délivre-
moi de cette douleur qui couvre ma chair et mes viscères mes os mes nerfs et me
brûle comme une peau d’angoisse pérenne délivre-moi rends-moi à la vie je suis
un mort vivant qui meurt sans vivre . . . (120)
Rapoport utters his Christ-like plea after he has committed several
murders. He believes himself to be insane and is pondering suicide. As
the “juif maudit,” he had been charged with an impossible mission. The
personal and the political become fused and confused in this unrealis-
able quest, just as Jewish Messianism and the tradition of the imitation
of Christ become conflated in the syncretic passage just quoted. To
place oneself in the position of God’s son is the ultimate form of auton-
omy permissible within the realm of religion: proclaiming oneself a
direct offspring of the Eternal One is an unmistakable act of self-filia-
tion rivalled in its hubris only by patricide. But then, who will kill God
if he is the embodiment of the resistance fighter?
Goldman’s protagonist Rapoport pushes his mission to the extreme
of lonely guerrilla warfare; in a similar fashion, the author himself ulti-
mately pushes his literary mission beyond the picaresque in an attempt
to create a novel about Jewish life not at the margins of society—and040 FF28-2 nolden (57-76) 11/21/03 1:43 PM Page 74
74 / French Forum/Spring 2003/Vol. 28, No. 2
literary history—but far beyond them. To find models for his societal
heretic, Goldman looks to the black masses imagined by the (Catholic)
décadent Joris-Karl Huysmans, and draws on the Marquis de Sade,
Antonin Artaud, and Jean Genet for inspiration, all of them authors
who, like his protagonist towards the end of his life, were driven to
experience physically the connection between the realms of writing
and of extreme corporeal sensations.
IV
Neither Modiano nor Goldman found an ideological home in the soci-
etal and political discourses that governed their formative years. Nei-
ther of them subscribed to the Paris version of student politics; instead,
they explored their own very particular ways of dealing with family
ancestry against the backdrop of the Fifth Republic.
And yet, both of them described seemingly infinite trajectories of fil-
ial loyalty in their narratives, trajectories borne out by protagonists who,
rather than simply fulfilling the missions handed down to them by their
parents, execute their forbears’ bequests in the most extreme manner
possible: they are enfants terribles precisely because they are such loyal
children. “Les jeunes se rebellaient contre le père parce qu’il symboli-
sait l’ordre. Mais quand le père ne représente pas l’ordre, tout se com-
plique,” Modiano once stated in an interview,22 and the mother of
Goldman’s anti-hero Rapoport at one point suggested: “les Juifs sont le
peuple de la fidélité absolue absolument infidèle” (23). Self-commentary
and fictional speech here provide convex images of filial relationships
held together by the adhesive powers of obedience à contre coeur.
Though they marked the beginnings of jeune littérature juive, nar-
ratives like Patrick Modiano’s La place de l’étoile, Pierre Goldman’s
L’ordinaire mésaventure d’Archibald Rapoport, Katia Rubinstein’s
Mémoire illettrée d’une fillette d’Afrique du Nord à l’époque coloniale
(1979), Marco Koska’s Balace Bounel (Paris, 1979) or Guy Sitbon’s
Gagou (1980) remained, with very few exceptions (like for example
Annie Fitoussi’s La mémoire folle de Mouchi Rabbinou: le rabbin le
plus pauvre du ghetto, le plus misérable de Tunis, plus fort que Mus-
solini, bien plus fort encore que la mort, 1985) virtually without suc-
cessors in the further development of this literature.23
Goldman was murdered, and Sitbon and Rubinstein stopped writing
fiction; Modiano self-censored his La place de l’étoile by removing040 FF28-2 nolden (57-76) 11/21/03 1:43 PM Page 75
Nolden: The Beginnings of jeune littérature juive / 75
some of the passages considered most offensive from the first edition, and
went on to write a kind of prose far removed from that of his debut novel.
After the 1980s, the writings by the générations d’après pursued a
course that aligned stylistic preferences with less obtrusive, more con-
ventional forms and largely abandoned hyperbole, satire, and vexation.
The notion of épater le juif has since then been eclipsed by the desire to
pay narrative tribute to the Jewish life of the past and homage to the vic-
tims of the Shoah. Autobiographical writing by Goldman’s coreligion-
ists has become more formulaic, following the paths of identity politics
from which Goldman in his particular political situation was barred.
Wellesley College
Notes
1See Libération, September 21, 1979: 4.
2See interview with Luc Rosenzweig in Elisabeth Weber, ed. Jüdisches Denken in Frank-
reich (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994) 184.
3Luc Rosenzweig, Introduction, La jeune France juive. Conversations avec des Juifs d’au-
jourd’hui (Paris: Libres Hallier, 1980) 9–10.
4Lazare Bitoun, “Israélites hier, Juifs aujourd’hui” Traces 3 (1982): 82.
5Jean-Luc Allouche, Les jours innocents (Paris: Lieu Commun, 1983) 95.
6Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) 17.
7Cf. Judith Friedlaender, Vilna on the Seine. Jewish Intellectuals in France since 1968 (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). Yaïr Auron discusses the position of Goldman within the
student rebellion. See Yaïr Auron, Les Juifs d’extrême gauche en mai 68. Une génération révo-
lutionnaire marquée par la Shoah (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998).
8Pierre Goldman, Souvenirs obscurs d’un Juif polonais né en France (Paris: Editions du
Seuil, 1975) 56.
9Cf. Hélène Cixous, Un K incompréhensible: Pierre Goldman (Paris: Christian Bourgois,
1975), and Régis Debray, Les rendez-vous manqués. Pour Pierre Goldman (Paris, 1975) 13.
Cixous reads Goldman’s trial against the backdrop of her interpretation of Kafka’s Der Prozess;
Debray places it against the backdrop of his reading of revolutionary Marxism, where Kafka,
embodied by Goldman, appears as “combattant de la Révolution mondiale en pleine paix bour-
geoise. . . .”
In his recent book on the assassin of René Bousquet, Henri Raczymow reintroduces the allu-
sion to Kafka’s Der Prozess when he refers to his own emotional involvement in the trial of Bous-
quet and, later, in the one of Didier, who murdered Bousquet before handing in his verdict. Cf.
Henri Raczymow, L’homme qui tua René Bousquet (Paris: Stock, 2001) 341–42.040 FF28-2 nolden (57-76) 11/21/03 1:43 PM Page 76
76 / French Forum/Spring 2003/Vol. 28, No. 2
10A brief survey of the critical reception of the literature emerging with the end of the Sev-
enties would commence with a reference to Piotr Rawicz’ article in Le Monde (June 14, 1973),
Arnold Mandel’s Le néo-diasporisme culturel (L’Arche, 1980) and the discussions in Traces 3
(1981) in which Lazare Bitoun coined the term jeune littérature juive. For a more detailed sur-
vey see my forthcoming book In Lieu of Memory: Contemporary Jewish Writing in France.
11Lazare Bitoun, “Israélites hier, Juifs aujourd’hui” in Traces 3 (1981): 79–88, here p. 82.
12Rachel Ertel, “Une littérature minoritaire” in Traces 3 (1981): 88–91, here p. 90.
13Jean-Paul Sartre, Les mots (Paris: Gallimard, 1964) 205.
14Goldman, Souvenirs obscurs 19.
15Pierre Goldman, L’ordinaire mésaventure d’Archibald Rapoport (Paris, Julliard, 1977)
62–3.
16For a discussion of autobiographical writings by contemporary French-Jewish writers see
Thomas Nolden, “‘Autojudéographie’: ‘Réjudaïsation’ in Contemporary French Literature,”
Jewish Autobiographical Writing, ed. Christoph Miething (Tuebingen: Niemeyer, 2003) 95–109
as well as my forthcoming book In Lieu of Memory: Jewish Writing in Contemporary France.
17Georges Perec, W ou le souvenir d’enfance (Paris, 1975) 59.
18Hilsenrath revised the ending of the novel for its German edition.
19Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew. Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1994) 244.
20The literature on Modiano has grown to a considerable degree over the course of the last
decade, outpacing by far analysis and criticism on other Jewish writers of his generation.
21Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” The Foucault Reader (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1984) 83.
22Patrick Modiano, Interview by Jean C. Texier, in La Croix (9–10 November 1969).
23Henry Razcymow in France and Alan Astro in the United States were among the very first
critics to pay attention to the emergence of contemporary Jewish writing in France. See Henri
Raczymow, “Aujourd’hui, le roman juif?” in Traces 3 (1982): 71–78 and his “Avant-propos” in
Henri Raczymow, ed. “Littérature et judéité dans les langues européennes” Pardès 21 (1995):
7–15. Alan Astro, “Editor’s Preface: Jewish Discretion in French Literature” in Alan Astro, ed.
Discourses on Jewish Identity in Twentieth-Century France. Yale French Studies 85 (1994) 1–17.You can also read
