Writing Occupation: Jewish Émigré Voices in Wartime France

By Julia Elsky

Among the Jewish writers who emigrated from Eastern Europe to France in the 1910s and 1920s, a number chose to switch from writing in their languages of origin to writing primarily in French, a language that represented both a literary center and the promises of French universalism. But under the Nazi occupation of France from 1940 to 1944, these Jewish émigré writers—among them Irène Némirovsky, Benjamin Fondane, Romain Gary, Jean Malaquais, and Elsa Triolet—continued to write in their adopted language, even as the Vichy regime and Nazi occupiers denied their French identity through xenophobic and antisemitic laws. In this book, Julia Elsky argues that these writers reexamined both their Jewishness and their place as authors in France through the language in which they wrote.

The group of authors Elsky considers depicted key moments in the war from their perspective as Jewish émigrés, including the June 1940 civilian flight from Paris, life in the occupied and southern zones, the roundups and internment camps, and the Resistance in France and in London. Writing in French, they expressed multiple cultural, religious, and linguistic identities, challenging the boundaries between center and periphery, between French and foreign, even when their sense of belonging was being violently denied.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Dec 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781503614369

Book preview

WRITING OCCUPATION

Jewish Émigré Voices in Wartime France

JULIA ELSKY

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

©2020 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

The opinions expressed in this book are those of the author and are not necessarily those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Elsky, Julia, author.

Title: Writing occupation : Jewish émigré voices in wartime France / Julia Elsky.

Other titles: Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2020. | Series: Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020025606 (print) | LCCN 2020025607 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503613676 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503614369 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: French literature—Jewish authors—History and criticism. | French literature—20th century—History and criticism. | Jewish authors—France—Language—History—20th century. | French language—Political aspects—History—20th century. | World War, 1939–1945—France—Literature and the war. | France—History—German occupation, 1940–1945.

Classification: LCC PQ150.J4 E47 2020 (print) | LCC PQ150.J4 (ebook) | DDC 840.9/21296—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020025606

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020025607

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Cover design by Rob Ehle

Cover credit: Rouzes | iStock

Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture

For my parents, Martin and Harriet Elsky, and in loving memory of my grandmother, Elaine Sloan

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION: Jewish Émigré Writers and the French Language

1. A Jewish Poetics of Exile: Benjamin Fondane’s Exodus

2. Accents in Jean Malaquais’s Carrefour Marseille

3. European Language and the Resistance: Romain Gary’s Heteroglossia

4. Buried Language: Elsa Triolet’s Bilingualism

5. Displacing Stereotypes: Irène Némirovsky in the Occupied Zone

EPILOGUE: Memory, Language, and Jewish Francophonie

Notes

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In writing a book about French as an adopted language, I have also received an education in writing in my own tongue. For this, and for so much more, I thank Alice Kaplan. Without her guidance, endless generosity, and expertise, this book would not have been possible. I also thank Maurice Samuels for his kind support throughout the process. Maurice Samuels, Bruno Cabanes, and Thomas C. Connolly gave substantive feedback in this project’s early iterations. I am grateful to them and to my professors Christopher L. Miller and Edwin Duval for all that they taught me, not least about intellectual rigor. In some ways I set off on this project when Serge Gavronsky told me about the rediscovery of Irène Némirovsky during my time as his student at Barnard College. I thank my professors at Barnard, Laurie Postlewate, Serge Gavronsky, and Peter Connor, as well as Elizabeth Castelli and Tim Halpin-Healy in Barnard’s Centennial Scholars Program, all of whom inspired me and encouraged me to go to France and seek adventure in the archives.

My year at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, which was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Volkswagen Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship for the Humanities in Germany, provided me with the time and environment to write much of this book. This writing was nourished by stimulating conversations with Bernd Kortmann, Carsten Dose, Britta Küst, Marco Caracciolo, Benoît Dillet, Sabine Hake, Suzanne Romaine, and Andrew Port. Since joining the faculty of Loyola University Chicago, I have had the great fortune to continue such conversations on a daily basis. I thank my chair, Susana Cavallo, for her support throughout this project. I thank my mentors, David Posner and Suzanne Kaufman, for their advice and encouragement. I am grateful to Thomas Regan, SJ, and Arthur Lurigio for making Loyola such a nurturing place to work. Finally, I warmly thank my colleagues, Eliana Văgălău, Reinhard Andress, Clara Burgo, and John Merchant.

The Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where I benefited from the Sosland Fellowship, was the ideal place to finish this book. I am grateful to the Emerging Scholars Program at the Mandel Center for its support in the preparation of this manuscript. In particular I thank Steven Feldman for all he did to make this book a reality. I also thank the Museum’s Academic Committee and Publications Subcommittee for their decision to support the publication of this work. I am grateful to Lisa Moses Leff, Jean-Marc Dreyfus, and Samuel Spinner for their enlightening conversations and for their generosity in reading chapters of my book. I also thank Elizabeth Anthony, Aleksandra Pomiećko, and Tomasz Frydel for their expertise, Samantha Hinckley for her efficient and cheerful assistance, and the wonderful community of fellows at the museum.

I thank my generous interlocutors for their feedback and expertise: Marianne Amar, Sophie Coeuré, Claire Andrieu, Guillaume Piketty, Geneviève Nakach, Michel Carassou, Olivier Salazar-Ferrer, Ramona Fotiade, François Eychart, Alyson Waters, Na’ama Rokem, Catherine E. Clark, Bruno Perreau, Heather Ruth Lee, Felipe Brandi, Rachel Druck, Marta Skwara, and Vlad Zografi. I owe a great deal of gratitude to Susannah Heschel and Susan Suleiman. I thank my friends, whom I am also lucky to call colleagues, for reading drafts of chapters: Clémentine Fauré-Bellaïche, Annabel Kim, Robyn Pront, and Maren Baudet-Lackner. I also thank the writing group extraordinaire with Christopher Davis, Diana Garvin, and Jennifer Row. I am very grateful to Susan Johnson for her attentive reading and insightful comments as she read my manuscript. I benefited from the wisdom of archivists, librarians, and staff members, including Fabienne Queyroux, Hélène Favard, Marie-Odile Germain, Kevin Repp, Paul Cougnard, and Olivier Wagner, as well as Liviu Carare, Megan Lewis, Vincent Slatt, and Elliott Wrenn at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. I thank Margo Irvin and Susan Karani of Stanford University Press for their help and guidance, as well as the series editors, David Biale and Sarah Abrevaya Stein. I thank Gabriel Bartlett for his help in the preparation of this manuscript. I am grateful to Michel Carassou, Nicolas Dauplé, Elisabeth Malaquais, Catherine Noone, and Jean Ristat for their permission to access the archives that made it possible to trace the stories of Jewish émigré writers under the Occupation.

I could not have completed the archival research central to this project without the support of numerous grants. I am appreciative for the Whiting Fellowship in Humanities; the Bourse Chateaubriand; the Fox International Fellowship, Yale University; and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library’s Graduate Student Fellowship. I thank the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin for the Dorot Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Jewish Studies.

This book was made possible in part by funds granted to the author through a Sosland Fellowship at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The statements made and views expressed, however, are solely the responsibility of the author.

A portion of chapter 5 appeared in Russian Émigré Culture: Conservatism or Evolution?, edited by Christoph Flamm, Henry Keazor, and Roland Marti. It is published here with the permission of Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

It is impossible to compress into a paragraph my gratitude to my family and friends. My parents, Martin and Harriet Elsky, are an unending source of love, inspiration, and support. This book is presented in their honor. Stephanie, Ari, and the newest addition, Felix, keep me laughing through it all and are always willing to share their wisdom and time. Greg is the joy that sustains me and the clarity that inspires me to try my best to think carefully, openly, and with empathy. I dedicate this book to the loving memory of my grandmother, Elaine Sloan. Her stories about her immigration to America have inspired me since childhood and have led me on this path.

INTRODUCTION

JEWISH ÉMIGRÉ WRITERS AND THE FRENCH LANGUAGE

IF YOU WERE TO STAND on the rue Soufflot in Paris and gaze up the sloping street, your eyes would fall on two institutions. Straight ahead would be the Panthéon, the monument to the great men and women of the nation, a secular temple and its own lieu de mémoire of France.¹ In the choir of this sleepy edifice, to the right of the monument to the National Convention, you would read on another, more somber monument a list of names under this heading: To the writers who died for France / MCMXXXIX–MCMXLV. Among the approximately two hundred names listed, two might stand out: B. Fondane, the pen name of the Romanian-born Jewish poet and philosopher Benjamin Wechsler, and Irène Nemirowski, the Russian-born Jewish novelist whose name is more commonly spelled Némirovsky. Honoring victims of the Shoah as people who died for France was a standard practice when this memorial was consecrated in July 1949, a practice that has often been criticized for disregarding French collaboration in the persecution of the Jews. The text has since been replaced on contemporary memorials with more direct references to deportation and Vichy collaboration. Even so, this enshrinement of Fondane and Némirovsky by the French Republic not only restores universalist ideals that were suppressed under Vichy; it also actually vindicates the aspirations of these two Jewish émigrés—to be French writers.

Outside, seen from monumental steps of the Panthéon, the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève on the right spreads out in its long series of arched windows. There is no memorial plaque here, but the Polish-born Jewish novelist Jean Malaquais spent the winter nights of 1935 at one of the library desks, poring over books to improve his French while staying warm at one of the few heated places that were open into the evening at no cost. He was teaching himself to become a French writer in a library that to this day is mostly used by students. French letters and republican values loom large on the place du Panthéon. But the individual lives and writings of these three Jewish émigré writers who adopted French—Némirovsky, Fondane, and Malaquais—like all of the writers in Writing Occupation, illuminate an alternative view of French literary life from the interwar period through the Occupation. They ask us to consider their place in the buildings on the place du Panthéon and the values that they represent. These writers came to France for the promise of universalism and the possibility of adopting French as a literary language in a major cultural center. But under the pressures of World War II, they would fundamentally change what it means to write in French, and furthermore what constitutes a Jewish language. They created a new, multilingual idea of French in which to reflect on their status as Jewish naturalized citizens, stateless people, and resisters. Némirovsky actually stands out as a counterpoint, as she removed Jewish voice from French in her wartime novels; thus, an analysis of her work throws into sharp relief the multiplicity of Jewish voices in the works of the other writers.

This book studies Jewish writers of Eastern European origin who immigrated to France in the 1910s and 1920s, switching from their native tongues (in some cases multiple tongues) to writing in French. For the most part, they came to France in the interwar period precisely in order to establish themselves in a major center of the European literary world and to embrace the language of universalism. However, their approach would radically change under the Nazi Occupation of France that lasted from 1940 to 1944. I do not provide an encyclopedic study of this group; rather, I focus on five individuals who addressed their experiences through a reflection on language in ways that can be put into dialogue—Benjamin Fondane, Jean Malaquais, Romain Gary, Elsa Triolet, and Irène Némirovsky. By Eastern European Jews, I refer to Jewish immigrants from Romania, Poland, and the territories of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, among other countries. They were often described as a group, les juifs de l’Europe orientale, in the interwar and wartime periods; alternatively, they were grouped together in a discourse that negatively othered them as Eastern European Jews.²

This project began with my fascination with Némirovsky’s poignant and ambivalent portrayals of exclusion from France. The best-selling novel, Suite française, which reawakened interest in this forgotten writer, has been the subject of debate by literary critics since it was first discovered. Her daughters could not bring themselves to read the volume they believed was her diary until the 1970s, when they realized that it was actually a novel. The book was published in 2004 to great acclaim, and Némirovsky became the first author to win a posthumous Prix Renaudot. For Denise Epstein, Némirovsky’s daughter, reading the manuscript was at the same time stimulating and desperate and intoxicating.³ For literary critics, it was like opening a time capsule and finding a masterpiece, one so immediately close to the events of the day and yet so lucid in its representation of the upheavals of the French defeat and the Occupation. It has often been noted that there are no Jewish characters in the story and no significant mention of Jews. The omission is especially striking given that, in some of her most important works from the interwar period, Némirovsky depicted Jews and Russian immigrants, as well as Eastern European Jewish speech, accents, and languages, in the context of immigration to France or displacement within Russia. Némirovsky herself had learned French as a child, first in Kiev and then in Saint Petersburg, from her French governess in a French-speaking home where Yiddish was forbidden. Her mastery of French as a prestige language was a sign of her family’s entry into the Russian middle classes and later into the society of wealthy financiers. The rediscovery of Némirovsky set off debates about whether her writing can be considered self-hating, with one critic maintaining that the removal of Jews from her magnum opus about the war was proof of her self-hatred.⁴ Susan Suleiman and others, however, have rejected this view of Némirovsky as a self-hating Jew, pointing to her ambivalence about her place as a French Jewish writer, as evidenced in her interwar novels and short stories.⁵ The omission of Jewish voice and immigrant Jewish voices from Suite française can then be seen as a dramatic staging of her exclusion from the French nation.

I began to seek out what other Jewish émigré authors were writing about under the Occupation, during the undoing of the same republican universalist values that drew them to France in the interwar period. I found many texts written and, in some cases, rewritten under the Occupation that dealt precisely with the questions of Frenchness, Jewishness, and language during the war. These writers did not stop thinking about their place in France as French writers at the moment of the June 1940 defeat: the start of the Occupation did not usher in their silence. Némirovsky turned out to be the exception. While she did, in fact, depict Jewish voice and Jewish languages in her interwar writing, she banished them from her wartime texts. She moved in a direction opposite to that of the other writers in this book, from a multilingual to a monolingual French reflecting the French state’s total rejection of Jewish voice from the nation. Read by themselves outside of this context, her works would make it seem like there was no European Francophonie during the war. Simply put, European Francophonie refers to non-French European writers who wrote in French, whether or not they immigrated to France. But it is particularly useful to read Némirovsky against the other writers in this book, and to read them against her. They underscore the purposeful silences in her writing, and she highlights the resounding voices in theirs that shout out against the horrors of the war.

In fact, this period has often been overlooked in studies of European Francophonie. But in this book, I argue that the Occupation is a crucial period of study. It was precisely under the Occupation that these authors addressed the choice to write in French in new ways. The desire to find their voices led me to the archives, and to multiple manuscript versions of the literary texts in many cases. When such sources were not available, I sought out different published versions of these texts as well as archived professional correspondences and diaries. Archival materials bring to life the ways in which these writers questioned and reworked their ideas, ways that are not always apparent in the final published versions of their novels and poems. Their wartime works, which they could no longer publish legally under their own names, testify to a variety of radically altered ideas of France and of the place of Jewish writers in France, especially with regard to the French language. I also saw that not all of these writers had the same point of view as Némirovsky. I came to ask the question: Why did some of the most brilliant but often forgotten Jewish émigré writers of the first half of the twentieth century choose to write in French, the language of their rejection, even as they faced a double exclusion under Vichy, both as foreigners and as Jews?

By uncovering the voices of these writers, even of those who perished in the Shoah, I attempt to show that they themselves were analyzing their roles as French and Jewish émigré writers at this time. Coming from a specific background of what we might call an Eastern European Francophonie, they blur the binary distinction between center and periphery, between culturally powerful institutions and the margins of power, the now contested paradigm for analyzing Francophone literature. My contention is that the linguistic drama of these authors’ wartime writing has less to do with the opposition of periphery and center than with a crisis at the center itself, with culturally central writers reflecting on the political and literary implications of their multiple and contradictory identities. In this way Eastern European Jewish authors writing in French challenge the most commonly held model of Francophonie, which has begun to be confronted only in recent years.

I maintain that Jewish émigré writers negotiated their positions as French writers through fraught interactions with the French language itself. This approach departs from, but still owes much to, Gisèle Sapiro’s indispensable text La Guerre des écrivains, 1940–1953 (The French Writers’ War, 1940–1953), in which she argues that writers engaged in the war through the prism of their writerly profession and their participation in major literary—and politicized—institutions.⁶ According to Sapiro, one category that measured the political position of writers and editors, as well as having been a means of their survival, was cultural capital. In her recent return to the topic, Sapiro states more explicitly that, as the prestige of an institution—and thus its capacity to confer cultural capital—increased, the less likely it was to count Jews, foreigners, communists, or women among its members.⁷ This would mean that literary figures who were the most fragile—Jews, foreigners, communists—were the most threatened and thus were reduced to silence or clandestinity, if not to death.⁸ Sapiro does nuance this claim by addressing the role of solidarity within these literary institutions in prompting them to help some Jewish and immigrant writers.⁹ Interestingly, in both La Guerre des écrivains and Sapiro’s revisiting of it, Triolet emerges as an important example, both because of her role in the Comité national des écrivains (CNE) and because she was awarded the Prix Goncourt—that is, because of her possession of symbolic capital. Nevertheless, it is precisely the supposition of silence among those lacking symbolic capital, as well as the specific position of foreign-born Jewish writers, that can be rethought. In this sense I hope to fill a gap in Sapiro’s foundational account.

Studies of memory in Holocaust literature have recognized the importance of postwar immigrants’ writing as well as the question of the choice of the language in which they write. As Naomi Seidman argues, The polyglot nature of Jewish discourse and the displacements of postwar life affected the vagaries of Holocaust literature.¹⁰ In particular, Seidman shows that the practice of translation, either by the authors themselves or by others, has constructed the discourse of the Holocaust.¹¹ This is the case with the translations—and significant reworkings—of classic texts like The Diary of Anne Frank and Primo Levi’s memoir The Truce, as well as in the Yiddish and French versions of Elie Wiesel’s Night. When Susan Suleiman reads the memoirs of Hungarian survivors and immigrants writing in their adopted languages of French or English, she notes the ubiquity of translation in representing the Holocaust precisely because of the history of postwar migration. These memoirs are homeless because they are written in a foreign tongue, as translations with no original, but they are also able to reach a global audience, translating disparate experiences for readers across the world.¹² In this connection Angela Kershaw’s study of postwar French Holocaust fiction by André Schwarz-Bart and the Polish-born writer Anna Langfus argues for the importance of translation across time, space, and languages, and for the importance of the narrative functions of multilingualism.¹³

But if we go back in time and look to Jewish émigré writers under the Occupation, we can go one step further in our understanding of literary multilingualism during the war, as these authors conceived of their position as Jewish immigrants through writing itself, often outside Sapiro’s categories of literary institutions and prior to discourses about memory of the Shoah. I contend that Jewish émigré writers under Vichy used French to express hybrid and shifting cultural, religious, and linguistic identities. They employ strategies including: multilingualism, that is, the presence of multiple languages in the text; the translation of non-French language in the text; the transcription of so-called foreign accents in French; and a version of heteroglossia, or the way in which different languages are depicted in French in the text. When the Vichy regime and the Nazi occupiers denied them their French identity through xenophobic and antisemitic laws, Jewish émigré authors from Eastern Europe began to reexamine and, in some cases, to reassert their role in the French nation through their literature in a redefined understanding of French.

In this introduction, I provide the historical context of the interwar period and the Occupation as well as the theoretical basis of the book. Because these writers began to write in French in the interwar period and changed their positions during the war, I present a continuous but shifting narrative, rather than a story that is bracketed off by the four years of the Occupation. These authors do not represent all Eastern European Jewish writers of French expression; rather, they each illuminate different paths and responses. I look at the interwar period through the end of the Occupation, starting with the writers’ countries of origin and continuing with their lives in France. All the while, I focus on the role of language. First, I trace the motivations for Jewish writers from Eastern Europe to immigrate to France during the interwar period in order to write in French and to assume a French literary position and, in many cases, a naturalized French identity. These choices must be situated in a discussion within interwar French Jewish communities about the role of Yiddish in Parisian life or about the need for immigrants to speak French and possibly to abandon Yiddish, as well as in the context of far-right French attitudes toward Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Based on these premises, I argue that Jewish immigrant writers changed their approach to French in response to the French defeat and the Nazi Occupation. The writers in this book employ literary strategies usually associated with postcolonial Francophone writers in ways that blur the boundaries of belonging within national borders and within national languages and that obscure the boundaries between Jewish languages (Yiddish and Hebrew) and other languages that have been seen as external to Jewish languages (French, for example). The introduction places these authors within a new category of European Francophonie as a form of linguistic resistance to their exclusion from French letters during the war.

Vi Got in Frankraykh: Jewish Immigrants in France, 1920s–1930s

The writers under discussion in this book are part of a generation that emigrated from Eastern European countries with strong histories of both Francophilia and Francophonie, not least because of the legacy of universalism and Jewish civil rights that is celebrated in the Yiddish expression lebn vi Got in Frankraykh (to live like God in France). Although these writers had different experiences of migration from most other Eastern European immigrants—different networks, different neighborhoods—they reacted to the double experience for immigrants in France, terre d’accueil, France hostile (land of immigrants, hostile France), to use the expression of the Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration in Paris.¹⁴ There is an urgency in studying this group in particular, for they were the first victims of the Shoah in France.¹⁵ These writers lived the Occupation differently from many other Eastern European Jews, and indeed from each other, for they all had different paths in the war. Nevertheless, they too were the victims of persecution as Jewish immigrants in France, and they responded to this shared spectrum of experience in their writing.

Understanding the legacy of universalism in which these writers wished to participate necessitates a jump back even further in time to the French Revolution. Republican universalism as constitutionalized by the Declaration of the Rights of Man rests on the republican idea that, in Mona Ozouf’s words, recalls the possibility of rational communication between men and the unity of humanity.¹⁶ Based on these universal rights, France was the first country to emancipate the Jews, granting citizenship to Sephardic Jews in 1790, and then to all other Jews in 1791. As the Count Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre famously argued in support of Jewish emancipation at the Constituent Assembly: To the Jews as a Nation, nothing; to the Jews as individuals, everything.¹⁷ They became citizens as individuals.¹⁸ Indeed, as Maurice Samuels writes in The Right to Difference, debates about universalism in France have often centered on the Jews of France. French universalism, as Samuels argues, has a complex history that has not always opposed particularism to universalism but can rather be grasped in terms of a continuum between assimilationist and pluralist poles.¹⁹ It is a topic that has come under debate in contemporary France and should be examined in this context. Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson unpack the term emancipation, calling it a shorthand for access by Jews to the profound shifts in ideas and conditions wrought by the Enlightenment and its liberal offspring: religious toleration, secularization, scientific thought, and the apotheosization of reason, individualism, the law of contract, and choice.²⁰ Birnbaum and Katznelson locate a double transformation in this process: in standing, as Jews moved from the position of presociological and prepolitical persons to become sociological and political actors, and in the creation of new options, based on rights, for them.²¹ It was these rights that drew Jewish émigré writers from Eastern Europe to France.

The authors studied in Writing Occupation lived under radically different legal situations in Eastern Europe prior to their immigration to France. Emancipation did not come to Fondane’s Romania until 1919, and civil rights for Jews were entered into the 1923 Constitution in the same year of his emigration. But antisemitism only intensified in Romania in the wake of these newly acquired rights. In the Russian Empire, Jews were restricted to residing in an area called the Pale of Settlement, with specific exceptions, until the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917; only then were the legal restrictions on all ethnic and religious communities lifted. Gary and Malaquais grew up in the Pale in the years before World War I, although control of their native cities of Vilnius and Warsaw, respectively, shifted numerous times during this period in ways that changed the status of the Jewish communities there. Némirovsky’s and Triolet’s families had residence rights that allowed them to live beyond the legal boundaries of the Pale in Saint Petersburg and Moscow, but they did not have full civil rights.

France thus became one of the major destinations of Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe during the interwar period. This was the largest wave of Jewish migration in French history, one that radically changed the landscape of French Jewry. By 1940, of approximately 330,000 Jews in France, 140,000 were immigrants without French citizenship and 55,000 were naturalized.²² The center of Jewish life in France shifted from Alsace to Paris, in particular to the neighborhoods of the Marais and Belleville. Between the years 1921 and 1926, the number of immigrants, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, more than doubled, and by 1926 foreigners made up around 6 percent of the population.²³ In response to fears about a natality crisis after the devastating loss of life in World War I, the government reformed the naturalization laws, reducing the residency requirement in France for citizenship from ten years to three in the law of August 10, 1927. This law, which paved the way for huge numbers of naturalizations in the late 1920s and into the 1930s, would later become the target of Vichy legislation seeking to denaturalize Jewish citizens.²⁴

The writers in this book all came to France in their teens or twenties between the years 1919 and 1928 to settle in Paris and become French writers. Gary is an exception, as he came to Nice first, as a teenager, before moving to Paris, but his goal had always been to join the pantheon of great French writers. This intention distinguishes these writers from Spanish Republican refugees, for example, who arrived in 1939 (including the Spanish émigré writer and Holocaust survivor Jorge Semprún, who began to publish after the war); it also distinguishes them even from German Jewish refugees, who began to arrive in 1933 (including luminaries like Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt, among many others), but who had not set out to make careers for themselves as French authors.²⁵ The authors discussed in Writing Occupation had varied paths that did not always conform to the typical story of Jewish migration. For example, they did not live in the neighborhoods of Paris that have often been associated with Jewish immigrants, even though in France there were no neighborhoods in which Jewish residents made up the majority, as there were in England and the United States.²⁶ Rather, they lived and spent their time in areas frequented by other writers, artists, and intellectuals, and also near universities and libraries. Némirovsky was the outlier, residing in the wealthy seventh arrondissement.

Paris of the 1920s and 1930s witnessed exciting events of literary history, and these writers took part, sometimes from the sidelines. Fondane’s thrill at getting caught up in a Surrealist brawl in a Montparnasse club in 1930 is palpable in his letter to his friend, the Romanian Jewish émigré poet Claude Sernet; there he describes the Surrealist luminaries André Breton, Louis Aragon (Triolet’s future husband), and Paul Éluard, among others, entering the club in time to see the situation devolving into a free-for-all, with patrons throwing plates at each other.²⁷ Triolet frequented these bustling Montparnasse cafés too. In the Latin Quarter, again, Malaquais was often at the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève. Another commemorative plaque to Fondane marks a nearby building, just a few minutes’ walk from the library, on the rue Rollin where he lived, as a trace of the world Jewish émigré writers made for themselves through integrating into the cultural life of Paris. In an amazing coincidence, Gary lived on the same tiny street—just around the corner from Hemingway’s and Joyce’s apartments on the rue du Cardinal Lemoine. These Jewish émigré writers’ switch to writing in French, their linguistic integration, had as much to do with the hopes of a literary career in France as with their legal and political reasons for immigrating.

The Occupation

The Occupation upended these writers’ expectations. It was at this moment that they also changed the way they wrote in French and about Jewishness and Frenchness. In this sense, the Occupation set the stage for a new writing of multilingualism. In The Jews of Modern France, Paula Hyman looks at the terrible war years for the 350,000 Jewish people in France, both immigrants and citizens, that "demonstrated that the long-standing faith of French Jews in the protection offered