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The paradox of Jewish identity in the age of assimilation: Irène Némirovsky, her life and works

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The paradox of Jewish identity in the age of assimilation: Irène Némirovsky, her life and works

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The Paradox of Jewish Identity in the Age of
Assimilation:
Irène Némirovsky, Her Life and Works

By Alexis Landau
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Table of Contents

Introduction: Searching for Irène Némirovsky 3
I. Everything and Nothing: Jewishness in the Age of Assimilation 9
II. The French Connection: Irène Némirovsky and Joseph Roth’s Shared 31
Dream of Acceptance in the Land of Liberté, Égalité and Fraternité

III. Assimilation and Its Discontents: Jewish Identity in the Work of 55
Irène Némirovsky

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Searching for Irène Némirovsky

Mystery, controversy, and endless ambiguity enshroud the writing and life of
Irène Némirovsky—she is undeniably hard to locate. After her arrest and deportation on
July 13, 1942, her husband Michael Epstein wrote countless letters trying to find out
where she had been sent. Any scholarly consideration of Némirovsky’s work was nearly
nonexistent before the publication of Jonathan Weiss’s biography in 2005. Her writing
has also been denied canonical status, creating a yawning absence of over sixty years in
which Némirovsky was erased from the literary discourse in both Europe and the US,
despite the fact that in the 1930s she was one of the most prolific and widely read French
authors of her generation.
i
Then there is the mystery of the suitcase, hidden for sixty
years containing Némirovsky’s unfinished manuscript, Suite Francaise (2004), which she
was writing up until the point of her deportation to Auschwitz in July of 1942. Her
daughters—who miraculously survived the war—discovered the manuscript (but there
are differing dates as to when they knew the manuscript existed) and had it translated.
Soon after, the book became a New York Times bestseller in 2006. In terms of
Némirovsky’s identity in relationship to her position in the literary field of 1930s France,
this raises even more questions, resulting in the heated, ongoing debate over whether or
not Némirovsky should be classified as a Jewish writer, a French writer, an anti-Semite, a
self-hating Jew, or a Russian émigré desperate to fit into French society, plagued by her
conflicting and multiple identities, a debate that began with the initial reception of her
novels by the French press, and continues now, most pointedly between critics Ruth
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Franklin and Susan Suleiman. Then there is the mystery of Némirovsky’s death—how
she died remains ambiguous. According to the official Auschwitz document, Némirovsky
died on August 19, 1942 at 3:20 p.m., of the “flu,”
ii
but other accounts confirm she died
of typhus. Jonathan Weiss, in his biography of Némirovsky, explains that when Irène
arrived at Auschwitz, because of her age, she was not gassed immediately but one month
later a typhus epidemic broke out and Irène, at the age of 39, fell ill and died. Another
version of her death is that upon arrival at Auschwitz, due to her poor health and being
very weak, she was immediately sent to Revier, which was known as the “infirmary” at
Auschwitz where prisoners who were too ill to work were confined in atrocious
conditions. It is known that the SS would systematically pile the weak and the sick into
trucks and deliver them to the gas chambers.
iii
Another curious aspect of Irène’s
deportation and death is the fact that her husband was not taken into custody at the same
time as she was. He was not arrested until October, three months later. As Weiss writes,
“No document exists to clarify this odd occurrence. Perhaps there were administrative
reasons; it was necessary to fulfill quotas on certain convoys” but nonetheless, no clear
reason has been discovered.
iv
And why didn’t Némirovsky leave France when she had
numerous chances to escape? Did she truly believe that her conversion to Catholicism in
1939 would save her family from mass extermination? Or was Némirovsky so convinced
that she had finally “arrived” as a member of the French literary establishment that,
despite not possessing French citizenship, she alone would be spared while French Jews,
regardless of their social status and cultural capital, suffered and died under the
increasingly stringent anti-Jewish laws?
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Beyond these questions about her life, the main focus of my investigation is
Némirovsky’s ambivalent representations of Jewishness in her fiction, representations
rife with nostalgia, despair, repulsion and attraction. She illustrates an example of cultural
self-loathing, literary ambivalence, and portrayals of Jews that straddle the paradox of
essentialism and diasporic identity. She is both culturally invested in (and desirous of) the
world of Catholic upper-middle class French society, as well as having a necessary
identification with Jewish émigrés, parvenus, Eastern European refugees and outsiders in
general, as she herself never ceased to be an outsider. An examination of her novels,
specifically David Golder (1929), The Dogs and the Wolves (1940), All Our Worldly
Goods (1947) and her most celebrated work, Suite Francaise (2004), may shed some
light on the types of anxieties and contradictions she dealt with in her attempt to define
Jewishness, her relationship to her own Jewish Russian identity, as well as the nature of
her historical moment—specifically her political and social position as a Russian Jewish
writer, writing in French, and living in Paris on the eve of the Second World War. I also
draw on Joseph Roth and Franz Kafka, both assimilated Jewish novelists writing during
the interwar period, as points of comparison to Némirovsky, to demonstrate the varying
reactions assimilated Western European Jewry experienced regarding their identity as
Jews.
Irène Némirovsky, a highly-assimilated Jewish Ukrainian who emigrated from
Kiev to Paris in 1919, by way of Finland and Sweden, portrays the Jew as a figure that is
habitually grasping after the fantasy of assimilation, only to be haunted by an inherent
Jewishness, a quality that proves inescapable and decisively negative for her, reinstating
the insoluble divide between the non-Jewish world of interwar France and the Jewish
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one. But in looking more closely at Némirovsky’s entire oeuvre, I argue how her early
fiction, particularly the novel David Golder (1929), represents Jewishness as a collection
of immutable qualities that are negative and oftentimes offensive, despite, or rather,
because of her Jewish origins. Her early fiction is also highly autobiographical (a
common source of inspiration for writers at the beginning of their careers)—in this case,
the figure of the Jew can be read as a reflection of her upbringing, as well as a reflection
of her anxieties and negative feelings regarding her own Jewish identity, which she had
yet to come to terms with. But as Némirovsky matures as a writer and establishes herself
on the French literary scene, she does not only focus on Jewish themes. She also writes
novels and short stories about rural life in the French countryside. Interestingly, by the
late 1930s and early 40s, Némirovsky returns to the theme of assimilation and Jewish
identity in the novel The Dogs and The Wolves (1940) and the short story Fraternité
(1937), but by now, her treatment of Jewishness is much more nuanced and ambivalent,
and her view of assimilation is increasingly empathetic, a process Némirovsky represents
as riddled with unfathomable loss and eternal nostalgia for an unrecoverable sense of
home and selfhood. Perhaps Némirovsky could only really confront the complicated
nature of Jewishness, as it pertained to herself and to assimilated Western European
Jewry as a whole, once she felt secure enough in her social and cultural position as a
celebrated French novelist, a position she felt so secure of that she did not feel the need to
leave France even as the socio-political climate grew progressively worse for French
Jews, until, as Némirovsky unfortunately learned, it became untenable.
In Chapter 1, I first examine shifting definitions of Jewishness in the age of
assimilation from various perspectives to provide some context for our analysis of
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Némirovsky’s fiction and the ways in which she handles the “Jewish question.” I include
perspectives of Western European Jews examining what it means to be Jewish as well as
the Christian majority thinking about Jewishness after emancipation and the advent of
assimilation. Given how Némirovsky identified with both of these camps, it is
illuminating to see in Chapter 3 the ways in which her fiction reflects the agendas of both
parties in her multi-layered response to Jewishness: ambivalence, revulsion and attraction
vacillate in her texts. What I describe is how her aesthetic aims both coincide and conflict
with her “politics,” while also looking at the extent to which her characters and plot
define the period, and interrogate some of its strongly-held practices and beliefs.
Chapter 2 specifically addresses the history of Jewishness in France to provide
further context for Némirovsky’s work. I also examine how France, in particular,
provided a dreamy respite, a kind of paradise not just for Némirovsky but for Joseph
Roth, another Eastern European Jewish writer who strongly identified with France as a
creative safe haven, a place where he felt most free, accepted, and uninhibited. What was
it about France in this particular historical moment that imbued such hope in these Jewish
writers, before it all turned dark?
Chapter 3 is dedicated to analyzing Némirovsky’s fiction in regards to the “Jewish
Question,” specifically David Golder (1929), and The Dogs and the Wolves (1940),
including comparisons to Joseph Roth and Franz Kafka. I also include Suite Francaise
(2004), her last unfinished novel, and her most accomplished work. Interestingly, the
“Jewish question” is strikingly absent from this text—a question that consumed her on a
personal level and is present in many of her other novels. The pointed absence of
representing Jewishness in Suite Francaise leads to an unprecedented freedom in the
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prose, allowing her to experiment with multiple points of view (even one from a cat),
which creates the sensation that a beautiful glass orb has been smashed, and yet the
fragments reflect the alienation and lack of wholeness inherent in her time and place.
Such narrative disruption is not found in her other works of fiction. Suite Francaise also
achieves a greater degree of lyricism and avoidance of the tired stereotypes she often
relies upon in her other works. But why the Jewish question is absent in her last novel
remains a mystery to readers and critics; I explore some possible answers.

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Chapter I
Everything and Nothing: Jewishness in the Age of Assimilation
It is like a miracle! I have experienced it a thousand times and it remains forever new to
me. One blames me for being a Jew, the other forgives me for it; the third even praises
me on this account; but they all think of it. As if they were caged in that magical Jewish
circle, no one can get out. –Ludwig Borne, in a letter from Paris, February 7, 1832

Hannah Arendt, in her introduction to Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations, discusses
the Jewish question before the catastrophe of European Jewry “washed away” its
relevance
v
, examining how the Jewish intelligentsia struggled to define themselves before
the extermination of the very identity they questioned. One of the central questions
regarding Jewish identity pre-World War II, a question that had been evolving since the
1880s, was the tension between religion and race in terms of how Jews were to define
themselves. With the advent of assimilation in the late 19
th
century, a shift from pre-
modern anti-Judaism to modern anti-Semitism occurred, in which Jewishness was no
longer viewed as a religion that one could discard, but as a race, an inherent “essence”—
disallowing the possibility that conversion or allegiance to the state could ever change the
definition of a Jew. Alain Finkielkraut makes the compelling argument that modern anti-
Semitism did not develop in spite of emancipation and assimilation but in reaction to it.
He writes:
Anti-Semitism turned racist only on the fateful day, when, as a consequence of
Emancipation, you could no longer pick Jews out of a crowd at first
glance…Since the Jews—those revolting mimics—were no longer distinguishable
by any particular trait, they were graced with a distinct mentality. Science was
charged with succeeding where the gaze had failed, asked to make sure the
adversary remained foreign…Racial hatred and its blind rage were essentially the
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Jews’ punishment for no longer placing their difference on display.
vi

This shift from religion to race contributes to the question of Jewishness and how
to define it, creating the assimilated Jewish “dual aspect” of existing in a world divided
between the non-Jewish environment and assimilated Jewish society, of wishing to
remain Jews and not wanting to acknowledge their Jewishness, thus creating a bifurcated
and fragmented identity.
vii
Hannah Arendt elucidates on the dilemma of assimilation:
The behavior patterns of assimilated Jews, determined by this continuous
concentrated effort to distinguish themselves, created a Jewish type that is
recognizable everywhere. Instead of being defined by nationality or religion, Jews
were being transformed into a social group whose members shared certain
psychological attributes and reactions the sum total of which was supposed to
constitute ‘Jewishness.’ In other words, Judaism became a psychological quality
and the Jewish question became an involved personal problem for every
individual Jew.
viii

She emphasizes how the majority of assimilated Western Jewry existed in this
ambiguous “twilight” space in which they felt “simultaneously the pariah’s regret at not
having become a parvenu and the parvenu’s bad conscience at having betrayed his people
and exchanged equal rights for personal privileges.”
ix
Alain Finkielkraut also supports
how European Jewry maintained a Janus-faced existence, straddling the cultural divide
between the external national host culture, and a more private internalized one by making
their Jewishness invisible in an effort to fully assimilate, fashioning themselves as even
more French then the French, more German than the German, working hard at becoming
“irreproachable modern men” thus erasing their difference for the sake of “historical
progress.”
x

Interestingly, Arendt interprets the dilemma of Western European Jewry pre-
world war II as not solely a Jewish question, but a larger existential one. She writes:
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What was decisive was that these men [referring to Walter Benjamin and Franz
Kafka] did not wish to ‘return’ either to the ranks of the Jewish people or to
Judaism, and could not desire to do so—not because they believed in ‘progress’
and an automatic disappearance of anti-Semitism or because they were too
‘assimilated’ and too alienated from their Jewish heritage, but because all
traditions and cultures as well as all ‘belonging’ had become equally questionable
to them. This is what they felt was wrong with the ‘return’ to the Jewish fold as
proposed by the Zionists; they could have all said what Kafka once said about
being a member of the Jewish people: …My people, provided that I have one.
xi

Arendt does not deny the problematic nature of Jewish identity, as Finkielkraut
illuminates, but she sees it as a “much more general and radical problem,” a problem
questioning “the relevance of the Western tradition as a whole,” contributing to
Benjamin’s view of history, and consequently the future, as a state of perpetual decline,
and all tradition, including the illusion of a communal past, as merely a “field of ruins.”
xii

Benjamin elucidates on this theme most famously in his “Theses on the Philosophy of
History.” Wherein we perceive the past as “a chain of events,” maintaining the illusion of
linear progress, his angel of history “sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling
wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”
xiii
In a letter from Paris dated
1935, Benjamin reiterates this catastrophic vision:
Actually, I hardly feel constrained to make head or tail of this condition of the
world. On this planet a great number of civilizations have perished in blood and
horror. Naturally, one must wish for the planet that one day it will experience a
civilization that has abandoned blood and horror; in fact, I am…inclined to
assume that our planet is waiting for this. But it is terribly doubtful whether we
can bring such a present to its hundred-or four-hundred-millionth birthday
party.
xiv

Despite the chronological overlap of Jewish assimilation with the advent of
modernism in regards to how one’s national, religious or sexual identity was being
reconsidered and, in some cases, reconstructed, Jewish identity in particular underwent a
sea change. Following the age of emancipation and assimilation, approximately between
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1781-1881, the figure of the Jew in Western Europe becomes less and less visible and
Jewish identity harder to define, receding into the realm of abstraction and ambiguity. As
Michael Brenner points out in The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany,
before the advent of assimilation, Western European Jews “occupied a clearly defined
place in society. With a few exceptions, they spoke their own language, used Hebrew
script, lived in separate quarters, dressed differently from other Germans, married among
themselves, sent their children to Jewish schools, and shared particular values and
beliefs.”
xv
At this point, Judaism and modern culture appeared separated by an
unbridgeable gulf; “It was un unwritten law that in order to become Germans, Jews
would leave behind the world of the Talmud and Hebrew liturgy and would instead adopt
the culture of Goethe and Beethoven.”
xvi
Hannah Arendt also concedes that in the
nineteenth century, “Jews who wanted culture left Judaism at once, and completely, even
though most of them remained conscious of their Jewish origin. Secularization and even
secular learning became identified exclusively with secular culture, so that it never
occurred to these Jews that they could have started a process of secularization with regard
to their own heritage.”
xvii
Or as Ismar Schorsch explains, the conflicted and ambivalent
tendencies of German Jews during the Weimar period is manifested as both a rejection of
traditional Judaism and a drive towards revitalizing a weakening sense of this identity,
thus creating a split within the community itself.
xviii

Once the ghetto walls crumbled and Western European Jews began leaving
behind the religiosity of their forefathers, aspiring to, and in many cases achieving
successful assimilation, the question of what formed the nature of their Jewishness
became a conflicted and acute one. As Franz Rosenzweig states: “From Mendelssohn
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on…the Jewishness of every individual has squirmed on the needle point of a why.”
xix

Clearly, religion no longer worked as the singular binding force. Brenner further explains
how religious practice alone “proved a fragile basis for self-definition among a highly
secularized Jewish population…Those Jews who rejected both the view that Judaism
could be defined in purely religious terms and the view that Jews should assimilate
completely into German society were thus confronted with the central problem of Jewish
existence in modern secular society: How to create a new form of Judaism, and what
content to give it?”
xx
In Assimilation and its Discontents, Barry Rubin also addresses the
dilemma facing assimilated Western European Jewry in that the era “saw a transition
from a traditional Jewish society wrapped in religion, through a period of demoralization,
division, and uncertainty…Jews had to choose among loyalties to nations—a Jewish one,
or a dominant or minority group among whom they lived; religions—traditional or
revised Judaism, atheism, some form of Christianity, or an exotic alternative;
ideologies—Marxism, Zionism, liberalism, or conservatism” leading them to question,
amidst this dizzying array of alternative identities, if they should “conceal or take pride in
being Jews, continue this line or break the long chain which had produced them? What
loyalties, language, and beliefs should they espouse?”
xxi
This period of intense
questioning and examination of what it meant to be Jewish led to both self-doubt and
self-affirmation, fervent assimilation and a fervent revival of traditional Judaism as well
as a glorification of the “authentic” Eastern European Jew and an increasing number of
Zionists who believed Jews could only truly exist in a Jewish state, resulting in a set of
conflicting and multiple identities.
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The Western European Jewish discourse reacting to this crisis of identity results
in a contradictory and multi-layered one that concentrates on, as Steven Aschheim puts it,
a “hypostatized conception of essences of visible and hidden, external and internal
characteristics taken to be profoundly determinative of Jewishness that assimilation could
neither repress nor dissolve.”
xxii
Many liberal Jewish, as well as non-Jewish thinkers, who
were not necessarily anti-Semitic, construct their argument as to what Jewishness is
within this reductive framework, and in some cases, such as Némirovsky, employ the
same racialist language used by anti-Semites of the time period. But the most extreme
example of defining Jewishness in racialist terms, thus inscribing the Jewish body and
mind with various derogatory stereotypes, is exemplified by Otto Weininger in his
inflammatory book Sex and Character (1903). What is his agenda in further Otherizing
the Jew through the ideology of race, and how it this complicated by the fact that
Weininger is Jewish, albeit self-loathing? What types of anxieties and contradictions do
his attempts to define Jewishness reflect about his historical moment and his relationship
to Judaism?
Otto Weininger devotes a chapter to Judaism in his book Sex and Character in
which he defines, or rather fails to define, Jewishness. Despite his attempts to pinpoint
specific physical and spiritual characteristics possessed by Jews, he constantly contradicts
and undercuts his own argument, demonstrating the impossibility of categorizing
Jewishness. He begins by comparing the Jewish “race” to “both negroes and
Mongolians” because the “readily curling hair points to the negro; admixture of
Mongolian blood is suggested by the perfectly Chinese or Malay formation of face and
skull which is so often to be met with amongst the Jews and which is associated with a
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yellowish complexion.”
xxiii
But a few paragraphs later, Weininger states, “I must,
however make clear what I mean by Judaism; I mean neither race nor a people nor a
recognized creed. I think of it as a tendency of the mind, as a psychological constitution
which is a possibility for all mankind, but which has become actual in the most
conspicuous fashion only amongst the Jews.”
xxiv
By shifting the argument’s focus from
physicality to a psychological position, we are led to assume that Jewishness mutates and
transforms, by one’s own will, into something more agreeable, and is a quality, like
jealousy or lust, found in all of us, thereby universalizing the “Jewish condition.” He
continues along these lines by emphasizing how “There are Aryans who are more Jewish
than Jews and real Jews who are more Aryan than certain Aryans”
xxv
stressing the
malleable, slippery quality of Jewishness, leading one to conclude that it is a changeable
construct as opposed to a fixed, static aspect of identity.
Interestingly, Weininger defines Jewishness as a race when discussing Jews in a
collective sense, but the figure of the individual Jew has a very different meaning for
him, reflecting the concept of Bildung, which is based on the individual’s moral and
aesthetic betterment executed through one’s will, and in Weininger’s case, the will to
transcend the perceived shortcomings of his Jewishness. George Mosse in Geman Jews
Beyond Judaism describes how the timing of German-Jewish emancipation, following the
German enlightenment, greatly influenced the definition of Jewishness in terms of
Bildung. He writes, “Jews were emancipated during the first decade of the nineteenth
century in the autumn of the German Enlightenment. This gave them their optimism, a
certain faith in themselves and in humanity…” which made the concept of Bildung so
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attractive to German Jewry in its support of self-education and improvement.
xxvi
Mosse
illuminates how promising Bildung appeared to German Jews:
The term ‘inward process’ as applied to the acquisition of Bildung did not refer to
instinctual drives or emotional preferences but to the cultivation of reason and
aesthetic taste; its purpose was to lead the individual from superstition to
enlightenment. Bildung and the enlightenment joined hands during the period of
Jewish emancipation; they were meant to compliment each other…Surely here
was an ideal ready-made for Jewish assimilation, because it transcended all
differences of nationality and religion through the unfolding of the individual
personality.
xxvii

Mosse reiterates how the concept of Bildung seemed ready-made for the needs of
German Jewry because “everyone could attain [it] through self-development and
education…Bildung made it easy for Jews to ‘embrace Europe’ ”
xxviii
and Weininger uses
Bildung for his own purposes, as a justification that the individual can change his
Jewishness by pointing to how “when men change, it is from within, outwards.”
xxix

After equating Jewishness with femininity, weakness, materialism and a lack of
asceticism, Weininger then does an about-face, completely undermining his argument
when comparing the limits of the Jewish “race” to the potential of the Jewish individual:
I desire at this point again to lay stress on the fact, although it should be self-
evident, that, in spite of my low estimate of the Jew, nothing could be further
from my intention than to lend the faintest support to any practical or theoretical
persecution of Jews. I am dealing with Judaism, in the platonic sense, as an
idea…I am not speaking against the individual, whom , indeed, if that had been
so, I should have wounded grossly and unnecessarily.
xxx

He then stresses how only the individual can “free himself from Jewishness,”
xxxi

through inner resolve and determination, an act that cannot be carried out by the “group,”
mimicking the concept of Bildung in terms of the emphasis placed on self-education and
character formation as a result of the cultivation of one’s moral and aesthetic inclinations.
Interestingly, Bildung had been conceived as an immanently individual process of
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character formation, specifically in terms of Jewish assimilation, and the campaign
against Jewish collectivity simultaneously underpinned the move towards assimilation.
As Shulamit Volkov explains in Germans, Jews and Antisemites, the “initial principle of
emancipation that was formulated during the French Revolution was ‘Everything—to the
Jew as individual; nothing—to Jews as a group’ and there was nothing accidental about
this formulation.”
xxxii
She argues that one of the preconditions of emancipation was the
dismantling of the Jewish community structure, in that “the state categorically refused to
recognize their separate institutions and grant them legal status.”
xxxiii
Although many
representatives of organized Judaism resisted emancipation because they feared forsaking
their group identity, emancipation was ultimately embraced given how at the time, the
Jewish community was weakened and unstable because the traditional rabbinate was
losing influence while a new form of leadership had not yet taken its place.
xxxiv

Weininger demonizes Jewry as a collective idea, but idealizes the potentiality of
the individual, which not only reflects the precepts of Bildung, but also reflects
Weininger’s personal motivation for writing this. The essay is his means of escape by
positing that the reality of Jewishness comes down to one’s individual relationship to it.
He restates, “Therefore the Jewish question can only be solved individually; every single
Jew must try to solve it in his proper person.”
xxxv
This conception of Judaism provided
Weininger with the mechanism to transcend the “tragedy” of his Jewish birth, and explain
away his Otherness with the hope of full acceptance by the norm-setting Gentile majority.
However a few months later, after the publication of Sex and Character, he rented a room
in the house where Beethoven died and shot a bullet through his chest. Weininger’s
friends and colleagues surmised that his suicide was prompted by his failure to convince
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the world and himself that he had overcome his Jewishness, failing to appropriate the
authentic Aryan spirit and body.
xxxvi

Despite Weininger’s evident desire to escape his Jewishness, he is also intensely
plagued by the ambiguity and lack of cohesion Judaism offered acculturated Western
Jews. This group shared, as Aschheim notes, “an explicitly post-assimilationist
perception and impulse: while the psycho-cultural and ideational dimensions of their
‘German’ identity were all too clear (and in their view, problematic), it was still the rather
inaccessible but nevertheless—what they took to be—primary Jewish self that had to be
re-acquired, rediscovered.”
xxxvii
Or as Walter Benjamin put it more succinctly, “I am
learning Jewish [Ich lerne Jude] because I have finally grasped that I am one.”
xxxviii

Weininger grapples with the ineffableness of a Jewish self in a decidedly negative sense,
and views its ambiguity and permeability as a maddening source of unending lack and
negation (he enumerates what Judaism is not, unable to define what it is), as well as
describing Jewishness as an embarrassing display of excess in its refusal of containment.
He muses, “To reach so important and useful a result as what Jewishness and Judaism
really are, would be to solve one of the most difficult problems; Judaism is a much
deeper riddle than the many Antisemites believe, and in every truth a certain darkness
will always enshroud it.”
xxxix

In his attempt to define Judaism, despite the “darkness” obscuring it from full
view, Weininger first inscribes it with excess—an excessive and particularly Jewish
preoccupation with sexuality and marriage, as opposed to upholding the distinct
boundaries between people and classes. Weininger would have probably preferred for the
Jew to stay put in the ghetto (with the exception of himself), limited by the parameters of
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one’s class and station in life, but in the world of post-emancipation, Western assimilated
Jews moved with social fluidity, encompassing various identities and worlds, blending
the once apparent divisions between insider and outsider, Jew and German, serving as an
example of successful financial and cultural achievement within a strikingly short amount
of time and space. While most would interpret this ability in a positive sense, Weininger
reads it as a manifestation of excess and uncontrolled mobility in that the Jew “is the
great remover of limits between individuals; and the Jew, par excellence, is the breaker
down of such limits. He is at the opposite pole from aristocrats, with whom the
preservation of limits between individuals is the leading idea.”
xl
Weininger does not stop
here. He then attacks Jewish identity for its pluralism—a quality that is now celebrated—
but Weininger, fitting the “authoritarian personality” type described by Theodor W.
Adorno, is in horror of such ambiguity. He expresses his intolerance for such multiplicity
in the following passage:
The psychological contents of the Jewish mind are always double or multiple.
There are always before him two or many possibilities, where the Aryan, although
he sees as widely, feels himself limited in his choice…[The Jew] is without
simplicity of faith, and so is always turning to each new interpretation…Internal
multiplicity is the essence of Judaism, internal simplicity that of the Aryan.
xli

A common trait of fundamentalist thinking, Weininger yearns for order and
simplicity and cannot tolerate contradiction. The muddled gray area between German and
Jewish identities, which engendered a time and space characterized as the epitome of the
cultural avant-garde, a well-spring of artistic creativity that reached its zenith during the
Weimar Republic, proved untenable for Weininger.
Ultimately, Weininger condemns acculturated western Jews for their ability to
exist both inside and outside the universalist modern culture, slipping between every
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crack and crevasse, chameleon-like: “He [the Jew] adapts himself to every circumstance
and every race, becoming, like a parasite, a new creature in every different host, although
remaining essentially the same. He assimilates himself to everything, and assimilated
everything.”
xlii
Jean-Francois Lyotard in Heidegger and “the jews” also formulates how
the “the jews” (without capitalization) have been an eternal object of frustration for the
majority culture which desires unity, cohesion and dominance:
They [the Jews] are what cannot be domesticated in the obsession to dominate, in
the compulsion to control domain, in the passion for empire, recurrent ever since
Hellenistic Greece and Christian Rome. The jews, never at home where they are,
cannot be integrated, converted, or expelled. They are also always away from
home when they are at home in their so-called own tradition, because it includes
exodus as its beginning, excision, impropriety, and respect for the forgotten.
xliii

If the Jew, according to Weininger, is everything and everywhere, then he must
also be nothing and nowhere, a line of argument that Weininger takes up next, and one
that is infamously echoed by Sartre in Anti-Semite and Jew (1948).
Judaism’s religious paths in this post-assimilation age divided into a variety of
options, such as the Reform movement and Neo-Orthodoxy
xliv
not to mention Zionism,
all of which engendered various interpretations, where there is never one absolute
meaning but multiple meanings often riddled with contradiction—for Weininger this is a
theological nightmare while others experience it as a paradise of synthesis, an amalgam
of differing opinions and revisions. In reaction to this decrease in traditional Judaism,
Weininger reads it as an essential lack, in that the Jew “is really nothing, because he
believes in nothing.”
xlv
There is a certain plaintive ring to his accusation, as if Weininger
wishes Judaism was more dogmatic and cohesive, which would give him something to
grasp onto (or at least a sure target of attack), versus the infuriating absence he
experiences. He describes how Jews cannot convert people to their faith because they
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have none and criticizes the Jew for neither believing in anything nor disbelieving in
anything…they are solely characterized by negation. He writes, “Need I remind readers
that the Jewish religion is a mere historical tradition, a memorial of such incidents as the
miraculous crossing of the Red Sea…[the Jew] has none of the heroism of faith, just as
he has none of the disaster of absolute unbelief.”
xlvi

Sartre echoes this sentiment by stating that Jewishness in the modern world is
characterized by absence, being a mere “empty category,”
xlvii
and that “twenty-five
centuries of dispersion and political impotence forbid its having a historic past.”
xlviii
But
as Michael Walzer rightly points out, the assimilated Jewish intellectuals Sartre knew in
the 30s and 40s were not struggling solely with anti-Semitism or with an absence of
identity, but “they were also escaping the closed communities and orthodox
traditionalism of their Jewish past—a presence, not an absence.”
xlix
Rather than
acknowledging the heaviness of the past many Jews encountered, Sartre diminishes all
notions of a collective history, religion, or “soil,” and rather attributes Jewish collective
identity to how “they live in a community which takes them for Jews,” implying that if
no one named them as such, their identity as Jews would evaporate.
l
Thus, Sartre reduces
the modern Jew down to a figment and/or projection of the Christian imagination by
stating “…To know what the contemporary Jew is, we must ask the Christian conscience.
And we must ask, not What is a Jew? but What have you made of the Jews? ”
li

Similarly, Weininger continues to define the Jew with a litany of what he is not;
“The Jew is neither enthusiastic or indifferent, he is neither ecstatic nor cold. He reaches
neither the heights nor the depths”
lii
and asks on a high note of fraying despair: “What,
then, is a Jew if he is nothing that a man can be? What goes on within him if he is utterly
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without finality, if there is no ground within him in which the plumb line of psychology
may reach?”
liii
For Weininger, the Jew is the ultimate contradiction in terms, existing in
the middle space between inclusion and exclusion, between various religious practices,
cultural affiliations, and nationalities. This causes Weininger to pathologize Jewishness
as both everything and nothing, a manifestation of vulgar excess and terrifying absence.
Only able to think in “either/or” terms, he cannot integrate the ambiguity and
ambivalence of the assimilated Jewish position in the majority culture at the time, and
this inability to hold the tension between these two identities (he also struggled with the
male and female aspects of himself) created such a crisis of identity that he took his own
life to end the struggle. His dichotomous thinking is reiterated in the last lines of his
essay: “The decision must be made between Judaism and Christianity, between business
and culture, between male and female…Mankind has the choice to make. There are only
two poles, and there is no middle way.”
liv

For Weininger, the middle way proved tragic, but as Samuel Moyn argues, this
“third space,” inhabited and constructed by the hybridized identity of German Jews,
rejects either pole of universalism or particularism and instead, results in a “charged
liminal space in between.”
lv
Unfortunately, Sartre and Weininger both mistake the
ambiguity of Jewish identity as lack. They are correct to observe that there is no central
language, nationality nor binding religious practice, but as Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin
note, this allows for a formulation of Jewish identity “not as a proud resting place (hence
not as a form of integrism or nativism) but as a perpetual, creative, diasporic tension.”
lvi

Its disaggregated and fluid quality is what makes Jewishness a charged and shifting entity
in a positive sense, and by default, a nexus of overlapping identities as opposed to the
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homogeneity of non-diasporic communities. Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin argue that such
communities increase a sense of pluralism and acceptance as opposed to being tied to a
singular national heritage:
Diasporic cultural identity teaches us that cultures are not preserved by being
protected from ‘mixing’ but probably can only continue to exist as a product of
such mixing. Cultures, as well as identities, are constantly being remade. While
this is true of all cultures, diasporic Jewish culture lays it bare because of the
impossibility of a natural association between this people and a particular land—
thus the impossibility of seeing Jewish culture as a self-enclosed, bounded
phenomenon.
lvii

But the very impossibility of enclosing and containing Jewishness, and its lack of
a common language, nationality or land, was enormously threatening to Weininger and to
anti-semites due to the disruption of ethnicities and political hegemonies, evidencing how
“peoples and lands are not naturally and organically connected.”
lviii

Another interesting turn in this discourse, which both challenges and in some
ways affirms how Weininger and Sartre frame Jewish identity, is how the “essence” of
Jewishness is often described in vague, allusive and ambivalent language. For Walter
Benjamin, “Judaism was an ‘esoteric’ matter: it’s power derived from the fact that it was
both ill defined and yet self-understood.”
lix
Or as Franz Rosenzweig put it, Jewishness
was “no entity, no subject among other subjects, no one sphere of life among other
spheres of life; it is not what the century of emancipation with its cultural mania wanted
to reduce it to. It is something inside the individual that makes him a Jew, something
infinitesimally small yet immeasurably large, his most impenetrable secret, yet evident in
every gesture and every word—especially the most spontaneous of them.”
lx

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In terms of examining the nature of this discourse, with its contradistinctions,
tensions and anxieties, what is at stake in defining Jewishness by a lack of definition, as
exemplified by Rosenzweig, and in turn this very lack of definition is what feeds the non-
Jewish imagination, a perfect screen onto which one can project every evil, while at the
same time, maintaining that there is an inescapable reality to one’s identity as a Jew?
Perhaps this aspect of the discourse, with its fixation on absence and lack, is a reaction to
the static and concrete language of 19
th
century racial theory. Such theories attempt to
nail down what constitutes a Jew both physically and psychologically, and therefore this
discourse elides a settled collective identity by concluding that Jewishness cannot be
defined, thereby defying the modern popular obsession with marking and categorizing
difference, an obsession the Third Reich later co-opts as a means for mass extermination.
Throughout his life, Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) navigated the uneasy union
between the worlds of Judaism and the German protestant establishment. Nearly on the
threshold of converting to Christianity in 1913, he reverted his decision after a spiritual
awakening at a Yom Kippur service in a small, orthodox synagogue in Berlin attended by
Eastern European Jews
lxi
and thereafter dedicated his life and work to redefining Judaism
for the modern assimilated Jewish community. During the Weimar years, a small circle
often gathered at his home to explore the meaning, or lack thereof, of their neglected
Judaism. Rosenzweig played a leading role in the founding of the famous Frankfurt
Lehrhaus, an institute for adult Jewish education that sought to teach assimilated Jews
about a more sustainable and understandable Jewish identity.
lxii
Living as a Jew and a
German, Rosenzweig is a model for diasporic identity. In a letter from 1923, he relays
how during an interview for a position at a Jewish school, he was asked to state his
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stronger sense of loyalty—with his German or Jewish self: “I retorted that I would refuse
to answer this question. If life were at one stage to torment me and tear me into two
pieces, then I would naturally know with which of the two halves the heart—which is,
after all, asymmetrically positioned, I would side. I would also know that I would not be
able to survive the operation.”
lxiii
Clearly, Rosenzweig maintains the tension between
these constitutive, and at times, opposing identities, viewing allegiance to one over
another as death, whereas Weininger opts for death because he could not reconcile them.
One of the most revealing examples of Franz Rosenzweig’s attitudes towards
Judaism is his essay On Being a Jewish Person (1925). In search of a new conception of
Jewishness, Rosenweig, along with many Jewish intellectuals, was frustrated with the
anachronistic Judaism of the past, in its support of separatism, as expressed in the
traditional synagogue and home rituals all of which felt meaningless and obsolete to the
assimilated. Besides the untenable option of returning to the past, the only other avenues
Rosenzweig saw were Zionism, if one wanted to affirm one’s Judaism, or baptism, and
neither of these appealed.
lxiv
On Being a Jewish Person is Rosenzweig’s attempt to
grapple with the dilemma of assimilated Jewry in its struggle to redefine and revitalize
itself and interestingly, he draws similar observations as Weininger in his focus on
Judaism’s limitlessness as well as its lack of definite characteristics, but concludes how
these qualities are both a source of inspiration and critique.
As opposed to interpreting the multiplicity and malleability of Jewish identity as a
dangerous threat, as Weininger does, Rosenzweig celebrates how this quality is the very
essence of identity and defines Jewishness as lacking borders and boundaries in a positive
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sense. “The Jewish human being” he stresses, “does not mean a line drawn to separate us
from other kinds of humanity. No dividing walls should rise here. A reality that only
sheer stubbornness can deny shows that even within the individual many different
spheres can touch and overlap. Yet sheer stubbornness and its counterpart, a cowardly
renunciation, seem indeed to be the two main features of our present-day Jewish life.”
lxv

He continues that as “strange as it may sound to the obtuse ears of the nationalist, being a
Jew is no limiting barrier that cuts Jews off from someone who is limited by being
something else” and that Jewishness must be “above and beyond all divisions of
nationality and state, ability and character,” favoring an all- encompassing universalist
position.
lxvi
The very transnational, borderless quality that Weininger despairs over,
Rosenzweig views as a paradigm of the humanist liberal position, explaining how “Just
as Jewishness does not know limitations inside the Jewish individual, so does it not limit
that individual himself when he faces the outside world. On the contrary, it makes for his
humanity.”
lxvii
Stressing Judaism’s hybridity, he rejects Judaism as a “creed” or
“religion,” stating, “God keep us from putting that old cracked record on again—and was
it ever intact?” instead opting for a much more allusive and far-reaching way of thinking
about Jewishness. He writes: “No, what we mean by Judaism, the Jewishness of the
Jewish human being, is nothing that can be grasped in ‘religious literature’ or even in a
‘religious life’; nor can it be ‘entered’ as one’s ‘creed’ in the civil registry of births,
marriages, and deaths…It can be grasped through neither the writing nor reading of
books…It is only lived—and perhaps not even that.”
lxviii

But in his rejection of all that can be named as Jewish, celebrating only what can
be felt and experienced on an individual level (and doubting even that) does Rosenzweig
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run the risk of reducing Jewish difference to the point of erasure? In conjunction with his
already vague use of language in discussing Judaism, he characterizes its current state as
lacking all substance and life, thus leaving the reader with nothing to grasp onto. After
affirming that one is ontologically Jewish (an already shaky ground for identity
formation), the other component to Jewish identity is the literature; that of Jewish study
and teaching, Jewish learning and education, which he claims are “dying out among
us.”
lxix
He continues, “teaching and study have both deteriorated. And they have done so
because we lack that which gives animation to both science and education—life itself.
Life. A void, unfilled for over a century…Emancipated Jewry lacks a platform of Jewish
life upon which the bookless present can come into its own.”
lxx
He describes how the
three main elements of Judaism: Jewish law, the Jewish home, and the synagogue are
now defunct because of emancipation and modern life—there is no longer any communal
glue holding these Jewish fixtures in place. Without the unity of the ghetto, with its
physical proximity, the only unifying force is the drive towards full emancipation and
assimilation, which as we know, Jews reacted to in a diverse and fragmented way,
ranging from Zionism to conversion, a process that would foster a much more divisive
climate than a cohesive one. Rosenzweig asks, “What, then, holds or has held us together
since the dawn of emancipation?...The answer is frightening. Since the beginning of
emancipation only one thing has unified the German Jews in a so-called ‘Jewish life’ :
emancipation itself.”
lxxi

Rosenzweig’s solution to this Jewish identity crisis is expressed in allusive and
vague language, which only reiterates the emptiness and lack for which he condemns it.
He states that having any “plan” to revitalize Judaism is wrong simply because it is a
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plan, and suggests that “there is one recipe alone that can make a person Jewish…that
recipe is to have no recipe.”
lxxii
His only requirement re-emphasizes absence in his
assertion that the individual needs nothing but to fashion himself as a ready “empty
vessel”
lxxiii
in order to “see the whole”
lxxiv
and yet Rosenzweig never formulates what this
“whole” means as opposed to the separate parts of Judaism he criticizes. One could fault
Rosenzweig for attempting to dissolve Jewish difference, representing the identity as an
ungrounded but “felt” essence awaiting some sort of future fulfillment. In this sense,
Jewish difference is enveloped into a universal human essence—not necessarily a
Christian one, but Judith Butler correctly interrogates the naïve idealism of such
universalism when its imposition of hegemonic power onto the subject is not
acknowledged. She asks, “How is it that we might ground a theory or politics in a speech
situation or subject position which is ‘universal’ when the very category of the universal
has only begun to be exposed for its own highly ethnocentric biases?”
lxxv

Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin note how Jews have historically occupied the
position of difference, which “increasingly becomes the Jewish place, and thus the Jew
becomes the very sign of discord in the Christian polity. That this is so can be shown
from the fact that as other ‘differences’ appear on the medieval European scene (the
Lollards, for example), they are figured in literature as ‘Jews’ ” and they argue how the
tendency towards “sameness” is a “coercive move.”
lxxvi
They write: “Christian
universalism, even at its most liberal and benevolent, has been a powerful force for
coercive discourses of sameness, denying, as we have seen, the rights of Jews, women,
and others to retain their difference.”
lxxvii
But at the same time, valorizing Jewish
difference at the exclusion and domination of others would result in a kind of Jewish
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racism. How to negotiate between these two poles of vague universalism and
exclusionary separatism? Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin suggest that we can begin to
articulate a notion of Jewish identity that “recuperates its genealogical moment—family,
history, memory and practice—while it problematizes claims to autochthony and
indigenousness as the material base of Jewish identity”
lxxviii
and that somewhere in this
dialectic [between universalism and particularism] a synthesis must be found, one that
will allow for a “stubborn hanging-on to ethnic, cultural specificity but in a context of
deeply enacted human solidarity,”
lxxix
arguing how Diaspora provides a possible
groundwork for this synthesis to occur.
Still relevant today as in Rosenzweig and Weininger’s time, Jewishness resists
definition yet it remains an inescapable reality. Such tension creates an identity that is
decidedly ambiguous, malleable and uncontainable. And the inability to set limits or
boundaries on what a Jew is or isn’t, where he/she begins and ends has proven to be one
of main catalysts for anti-Semitism. Nothing is more fearful than the unknown, the
uncontainable, the unruly element that refuses to be harnessed, enumerated and pinned
down. Quite accurately, this is why Finkielkraut suggests how the perceived threat of the
Jew inspires a special kind of paranoia—a paranoia of the Jew’s invisible yet all
consuming ability to “enclose the entire human race in its network of coils,” like that of
an octopus, because Jewishness does not subscribe to a particular nationality, language,
shared religious practices, or physicality. Finkielkraut concedes how “there is, to be sure,
a Jewish type, but the rule has too many exceptions to be a reliable guide…in fact you
can rarely pick out a Jew at first glance. It’s an insubstantial difference that resists
definition as much as it frustrates the eye: are they a people? a religion? A nation? All of
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these categories apply, but none is adequate in itself.”
lxxx
He continues: “The Jews are to
be found everywhere. Since the breakup of the ghettos, they can’t be localized in a single
group. Diaspora, invisibility, indeterminacy: it’s the triple failure of clarity that makes
Jews so vulnerable to accusations of conspiracy…if he is scattered all over the world, it’s
because all the world must belong to him.”
lxxxi
As Finkielkraut concludes:
We Jews are certainly too busy bustling here and there to nail down a definition of
what this collective sensibility means…Judaism’s very lack of definition is
precious: it shows that political categories of class or of nation have only a
relative truth, and stands as a sign of their inability to encompass the world in its
totality. The Jewish people don’t know what they are, only that they exist, and
that their disconcerting existence blurs the boundary, inaugurated by modern
reason, between the public and the private.
lxxxii

This “disconcerting existence” contributes to how Weininger and the proponents
of the Third Reich view Jewishness as both a signifier of unruly difference and
bewildering universalism, and an uncontainable identity they could not name, which
leaves them horrified by its ambiguity. Even though Rosenzweig may be faulted at times
for his provisional and ungrounded Judaism that could easily dissolve into humanist
univeralism, he acknowledges the preciousness of its malleability and ambiguity.
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Chapter 2

The French Connection: Irène Némirovsky and Joseph Roth’s Shared
Dream of Acceptance in the Land of Liberté, Égalité and Fraternité

While the previous chapter discusses conflicting attitudes and responses regarding
Jewish identity and assimilation from a Western European perspective, this chapter
specifically addresses the history of Jewish identity in France, particularly during the
interwar period, to provide further context for Némirovsky’s depiction of Jewishness in
her fiction. I also examine how France in the 20s and 30s, in comparison to other Western
European countries, provided a dreamy respite, a kind of paradise not just for
Némirovsky but for Joseph Roth as well, another Eastern European Jewish writer who
strongly identified with France as a creative safe haven, a place where he felt most free,
accepted, and uninhibited. What was it about France in this particular historical moment
that imbued such hope in these Jewish writers, before it all turned dark?
Joseph Roth, famously unhappy throughout his life, given to drink and
psychological instability, first experienced Paris in May of 1925 when he was just thirty
years old. He communicates his rapturous encounter with the city to his friend and editor
at Frankfurter Zeitung, Benno Reifenberg, in a letter dated Paris, May 16:
I hope this letter doesn’t give you the impression that I’ve quite lost my mind with
delirium over Paris and France. I assure you I’m writing in complete command of
my skeptical intelligence, and that I’m deliberately courting the risk of sounding
moronic, which is about the worst thing that could happen to me. I feel compelled
to inform you ‘in person’ that Paris is the capital of the world and that you must
come here. No one who hasn’t been here can claim to be more than half human or
any sort of European. It is free, open, intellectual in the best sense, and ironic in
its magnificent pathos…I feel at ease with everyone, even though we continually
misunderstand each other when we talk about practical things, just because we
understand each other so perfectly on every subtlety and nuance…patriotism is
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justified here, nationalism is a demonstration of a European conscience…the
soldiers are like whimsical children, the policemen witty editorial writers.
lxxxiii

Roth goes on to writes about how Eastern European Jews in Paris live almost as
well as God in France
lxxxiv
in comparison to Germany, and how:
In Paris, crude anti-Semitism is confined to the joyless, the royalists, the group
around Action Francaise. I am not surprised that the royalists are without
influence in France, and will remain so. They are not French enough. They have
too much pathos and not enough irony. Paris is objective…Paris is democratic.
The German perhaps has warmth. But in Paris there is a great tradition of
practical humanity. Paris is where the Eastern Jew begins to become a Western
European. He becomes French. He may even become a French patriot.
lxxxv

But Roth also concedes that even outside royalist circles, anti-Semitism persists in
France, but it is a gentler, kinder type of anti-Semitism, its own special brand, arguing
how Eastern Jews were accustomed to a “far stronger, cruder, more brutal anti-Semitism”
and are therefore “perfectly happy with the French version.”
lxxxvi

Roth grows particularly enthusiastic in the section entitled “The White Cities,”
where he describes Provence, a landscape that Hofmann notes offers something like a
“psychological vita, or a founding myth” for Roth, providing him with a feeling of finally
having come home.
lxxxvii
Here Roth expounds on the vibrancy and stability of Provencal
culture:
They [the people of Provence] wear traditional clothes and speak the beautiful,
old, melodious Provencal language. Everyone loves his country. But it is not
difficult for anyone to love this country. It grows as abundantly as the most
delicious fruit. The earth is full of sap and juice. The bush will feed whoever
needs…White stone, white stone, white stone! Olive trees among the white stone.
But someone wants bread. See, the bread is behind high walls! Churches,
churches, churches!...High windows, deep recesses, sun, sun, sun…Mighty
arenas, holy temples, museums full of stone memories, tradition, faith. Slow to
look to the future. How sunny life is! …Here you find a childhood, your own and
Europe’s. Nowhere do you feel so easily at home. And even the one who leaves
the country behind takes with him the best that a homeland has to offer: the
memory of it, homesickness.
lxxxviii

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The prose vibrates with an unprecedented sense of earnestness and childlike
wonder at his new surroundings, which starkly counteracts the more subdued and critical
descriptions of Berlin (as a comparison, see Roth’s What I Saw: Reports from Berlin).
Roth employs an almost prayer-like quality in his description of the countryside,
enumerating its beauties with the use of repetition—white stone, white stone, white stone!
Churches, churches, churches!—chanting his wonder and astonishment at something as
prosaic and inanimate as stone, or olive trees, or churches bathed in sunlight. At a
clipped, breathless pace, Roth echoes the fervent enthusiasm of a new convert, sounding
nearly manic as he rejoices in how every need is met, every desire fulfilled to the brim.
It’s as if the skeptical alienated Roth is continuously upended by this new, eternally
optimistic version of himself, evident in how he poses a question or a concern that is then
immediately answered in the positive: “But someone wants bread. See, the bread is
behind high walls!...Everyone prays for his daily bread and doesn’t know what it is not to
have it.”
lxxxix
Or, “But maybe someone is crying for shade? White stone, white stone,
white stone! Olive trees among the white stone.”
xc
The answer, to Roth’s former doubting
self, is always a resounding yes, instead of the persistent lack and emptiness Roth
experienced in Berlin as an Eastern European Jewish immigrant trying to make his way
in the cold, bracing city. In France, everyone’s cup is overflowing, the earth abundant
with “sap and juice.” Bread, love and sun are equally available for the plucking. No one
feels cold, hungry, or alone here.
The same love of France, particularly French rural life, is also evidenced in Irène
Némirovsky’s novel All Our Worldly Goods (1947). The world she builds here serves as
the model for a way of life she always yearned for, a life she never stopped wanting.
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Jonathan Weiss, in his seminal biography of Némirovsky, supports this, indicating how
All Our Worldly Goods characterizes an ideal of French country life that was not found in
Paris, but rather in the provinces, a place that upheld tradition and resisted change at all
costs.
xci
All Our Worldly Goods, although written in 1940, first appeared in French as Les
Biens de ce monde, in 1947, five years after the author’s death in Auschwitz. As the title
suggests, it is about all the good things (“les biens”) in French provincial life. The novel
spans from 1911-1940, following the Hardelot family, described as having “an
extraordinary feeling of stability” with strong ties to the land. Pierre Hardelot and his
wife Agnes live through the horrors of the First World War, the social dissonance of the
interwar period, and the French defeat of 1940 without ever leaving their ancestral home,
even when their town is bombed.
xcii
The narrative offers a similar panoramic view of life
in France as Némirovsky’s last novel Suite Francaise, but the difference being
Némirovsky completed it in 1940, without the mounting anxiety of her impending
deportation and death, which occurred two years later. All Our Worldly Goods ends on a
note of hopefulness, which is all the more heartbreaking given Némirovsky’s doomed
fate.
The opening lines of All Our Worldly Goods conveys an overwhelming sense of
stability among the French bourgeoisie who are vacationing at a seaside resort:
It was the beginning of the century—an autumn evening at the seaside,
overlooking the English Channel. Pierre and Agnes, their parents and Pierre’s
fiancée had all gathered to watch the last firework display of summer. On the fine
sand of dunes, the inhabitants of Wimereux-Plage formed dark little groups,
barely visible in the starlight. The moist sea air drifted around them. A profound
sense of tranquility reigned over them, over the sea, and over the world.
xciii

In this opening paragraph, the prose gently washes over the reader with the use of
repetitive syntax—“over them, over the sea, and over the world,” lulling one into
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believing that like the Hardelots, one’s place in the world is fixed, that human existence
is part of a greater, intricate design that has long since been predetermined. The narration
also sooths the reader by assuming a God-like confidence when introducing the
Hardelots, starting off in great broad strokes—“it was the beginning of the century”—and
then, like a camera lens, Némirovsky zooms in on her subject, Pierre and Agnes and their
families, before zooming out again, resuming an all-seeing, all-knowing bird’s eye view
of the scene, providing the reader with the security of an omniscient narrator to tell us the
story.
In addition to the evident stability in the omniscient narrator, Némirovsky
repeatedly uses the metaphor of a fortress to suggest the intransience of this family and
their fixed socio-economic station, especially when compared to her own upbringing—
that of a Russian Jewish refugee, in constant flight, in constant negotiation with the
shifting political climate of her host nation. Perhaps this explains Némirovsky’s refusal to
escape France in the early 1940s—fleeing, uprooted yet again, and leaving behind her
beloved dream of French acceptance was more than she could bare, and perhaps she
would have rather died than leave again, combined with the fact that not many could
really imagine the horrors that awaited them—maybe a work camp, but mass
extermination was unthinkable.
The second paragraph of the novel makes use of this fortress metaphor again
when describing the class distinctions between Pierre and Agnes’ families, a difference
that would be imperceptible to an outsider (but not to Némirovsky, who perhaps is being
playfully self-referential) and yet starkly obvious to those who have inhabited this
provincial town for centuries, as these families have: “The families were not very friendly
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to each other, for they belonged to different social classes: the bourgeoisie didn’t mingle
with the lower middle classes. Each kept its place and its distance with modesty,
steadfastness and dignity. Each built itself a fortress out of spades and folding chairs.”
xciv

On the next page, Némirovsky reiterates the petty social barriers that separated
lovers such as Pierre and Agnes, suggesting how such class distinctions are set in stone:
There was no hope for him and Agnes. So little hope that they hadn’t even
confessed their love to each other. It was pointless. Pierre Hardelot came from the
Hardelot Paper Mills family of Saint-Elme. Agnes’s family were brewers. Only a
foreigner, someone from the outside, would have thought a marriage between
them possible. The people of Saint-Elme had no such illusions; they understood,
with infallible, subtle tact, how the two young people’s different social standing
was a barrier. The brewers were from the lower classes and, even worse, they
weren’t from the region but from Flanders. The Hardelots were from Saint-
Elme.
xcv

Again, a few pages later, when Agnes walks over to Pierre on the beach, hoping
to speak to him, “she found him flanked by his mother and fiancée…And so, protected on
three sides, Pierre was as defended as a fortress.”
xcvi
The gradations in social class,
between a brewer’s daughter and the heir to a paper mill, are distinct and impenetrable, as
opposed to the striking social mobility assimilated Jews displayed in cities such as Paris
and Berlin. Moving beyond the regional and class distinctions among native Frenchmen,
Némirovsky then describes how the foreign outsiders who vacationed in the same seaside
town did not even proffer consideration or acknowledgment from the Hardelots of the
world, given how vastly different their social status was:
Wimereux was already getting ready for a peaceful night. Here and there, a light
flickered behind the shutters, then went out. Each household barricaded itself in to
keep out the nocturnal wind, the roaring sea. There was no singing; no shouting:
the people of Wimereux were ‘respectable.’ Further down the coast, a luxury
hotel had been built, so they’d heard; its guests were gentlemen who dressed for
dinner every evening, and ladies who went riding every day. Down there, they
danced and gambled until dawn. But no one envied those outsiders. That sort of
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thing went on far away, or so it seemed, on another planet, one that deserved
neither interest nor consideration of any sort.
xcvii

Here Némirovsky equates the threatening changeability of nature—the roaring
sea, the nocturnal wind—with the rabblerousing outsiders who make a similar racket,
dancing and singing until dawn, hinting at impropriety, whereas the respectable rooted
French bolt their doors and lock their windows, and even check under the beds before
heading off to sleep.
xcviii
This passage is also a gesture to herself and her upbringing—as a
young girl, Némirovsky was one of those “outsiders” vacationing on the Cote d’Azur, at
the luxurious Negresco Hotel or Regina Hotel in Nice.
xcix
Before the revolution, when
still living in Russia, her family went numerous times to Paris, as well as the resort towns
of Vichy, Divonne, Plombieres, and Vittel, Cannes, and the Cote Basque (Biarritz).
c
After
the revolution and their move to Paris, the Némirovskys continued to vacation at these
French seaside resorts. But despite how much time her family had spent in France before
their emigration, in addition to the fact that French was their preferred language to speak
at home, Némirovsky never felt fully French given her family’s showy extravagance, her
mother’s ongoing illicit affairs, and how indelibly different, other, and less than Irene felt
in comparison to people like the Hardelots. This deep desire to be thought of and
accepted as French also explains Némirovsky’s close friendship with Madeleine Avot,
whose French Catholic family is considered to be the inspiration for the fictional
Hardelot family. Némirovsky met Madeliene when she was sixteen after the family had
recently arrived Paris in 1919. As Weiss notes, “Nothing is more revealing of Irene’s
desire to meld completely into the French landscape than correspondence she carried on
with Madeleine [who was] the daughter of a prosperous paper manufacturer from
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Lumbres.
ci
This Catholic girl from the French provinces embodied all that Némirovsky, a
sophisticated literature student at the Sorbonne, wanted to emulate, perhaps because such
an existence and upbringing was the exact opposite of her own family life. Weiss adds
how the letters between Madeleine and Irene exhibit her move away from her own family
and cultural milieu, and “an increasing appreciation—even infatuation—with the life of a
Catholic French family.”
cii
He writes: “Irene was certainly an apt pupil for this sort of
acculturation. She seems to have had little interest in spending time with Russian émigré
circles and although well aware of the tribulations of Russians who did not assimilate,
she shows little inclination to identify with them.”
ciii
At a dance at the Russian Club in
Paris, Irene complains in a letter to Madeleine how even though she was surrounded by
all her usual friends and the people she occasionally flirted with, she felt “completely out
of place, almost a stranger in their midst.”
civ
In another letter, she rejoices over the time
she spent with the Avots at their country home in Lumbres, explaining how only there did
she “get to know and love family life,” in comparison to her cold, gloomy, and rainy
Parisian existence.
cv

Her infatuation with the Avot family bleeds into her fiction as well. In All Our
Worldly Goods, Némirovsky uses the Avot family as the basis for the Hardelot family—
both families owned a paper mill in rural France, and the Hardelot patriarch echoes
Madeleine’s father as an ideal model of stability, forever attached to the land of his
ancestors, despite the upheavals of war. In the novel, Némirovsky describes how
…an extraordinary feeling of stability and security filled [Julien Hardelot’s] soul.
He was sure of himself and sure of everything around him: his house was solid,
well built, set securely on its foundations; his factory was thriving; his family was
obedient; his money invested in government stocks. His universe was small; he
had never left France, rarely travelled beyond the borders of his own province, but
he knew this little corner of the earth as well as he knew his own
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heart…Everything was calm and indestructible, within him and around him. He
could calculate how much money he would have the following month or the next
year, what the figures would be for the factory in ten or twenty years’ time, in
1920 or 1930. He himself would be dead and buried by then. But here on earth,
everything would remain the same…[The Hardelots] would buy land, see their
children marry, save their money and die in their beds. Not the slightest doubt or
anxiety would trouble their minds.
cvi

Weiss adds how “this faithfulness to the land…would come to constitute a model
to be contrasted with the world of international business depicted in David Golder,”
cvii
, a
world Irene found inherently distasteful and devoid of all moral integrity, which closely
reflected her own materialistic and uprooted childhood. Némirovsky’s description of
Julien Hardelot contrasts every aspect of the Jewish patriarch in her first novel David
Golder (1929): Golder deals in shady stocks and bonds, as opposed to the fortune
Hardelot creates out of a tangible material product—the production of stationary.
Hardelot can project what his income will be twenty years from now, whereas Golder
makes great sums of money only to lose it all the next day and then gain the money back
again the day after, his financial status constantly shifting and unpredictable. Golder,
unlike Hardelot who never leaves his ancestral home, travels incessantly for work and
uproots his family from Russia to Paris to flee the revolution—but in Paris, despite
Golder’s wealth, he and his family are outsiders to the French Catholic upper-class into
which they so wish admission. And Golder’s family is far from “obedient;” his wife and
daughter cause him tremendous anxiety and pain. His daughter is greedy, selfish and
takes him for all he has, always demanding more money. His wife cheats on him with
various exotic gigolos. At one point, the paternity of his own daughter is even questioned
in a bitter conversation with his wife Gloria as they fight over her infidelities and his
failure as a husband: “She [Gloria] laughed even harder. ‘Loved? You? David Golder?
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But could anyone love you? Do you want to leave your money to Joyce because you
think she loves you, is that it? But she just loves your money, her as well, you old
fool!...She’s left you, old, sick, and alone! But while you were close to death, she was out
dancing, do you remember?”
cviii
Golder rejoins how his daughter, Joyce, is all he has in
the world, all he loves, to which his wife responds: “Your daughter! Are you sure about
that?...Well, she’s not yours, do you understand? Your daughter is not yours at all. She’s
Hoyos’s daughter, you fool!” and this final blow of information nearly takes the life out
of Golder.
cix
At the end of the novel, Golder dies alone, “like a dog, the same way [he]
lived,”
cx
on a ship en route from Russia to Constantinople, in the middle of the ocean, his
death as uncertain and lonely as his life—peripatetic, rudderless, despairing, as opposed
to the calm certainty that radiates from the point of view of Agnes, who, at the end of All
Our Worldly Goods, is reunited with her husband Pierre after their village has been
bombed by the Germans:
She no longer felt any pain, any weariness. She felt that she had reaped her
harvest, gleaned all the wealth, all the love, the laughter and the tears that God
owed her, and now it was over, that all she had left to do was eat the bread made
from grain she had milled herself, drink the wine from grapes she had pressed.
She had gathered all the good things of this world, and all the bitterness, all the
sweetness of the earth had born fruit. They would live out the rest of their days
together.
cxi

The endings of these two novels strike a stark contrast for how Némirovsky
perhaps feels as a Jew, or at least how she imagines a figure such as her father to feel,
compared to how she imagines a native French woman to feel at the end of a life well
lived. And perhaps, as Claire Messud points out in her introduction to David Golder
(1929), Némirovsky is not just depicting the transitory despair of a Jewish life but the
“potential horror of any immigrant’s life: if one were to substitute the word ‘immigrant’
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for ‘Jew’, Némirovsky’s depiction would carry the same force, with considerably less
offense.”
cxii
Messud then asks: “How many immigrants have been emotionally deformed
by their travails, have given everything for their families only to be hopelessly
misunderstood and even abandoned by their kin? Is it not the fate of many diasporas of
different kinds, not simply of Jews? Agonizing isolation—to be unknown,
unacknowledged, unloved—is mercifully not every immigrant’s fate [or every Jew’s
fate]; but it is certainly a fate of immigrants, of the displaced, more surely than the
rooted.
cxiii
And as Némirovsky wrote in 1934: “I continue to depict the society I know
best, that is composed of misfits, those who have been expelled from their milieu, the
place where they would normally have lived, and who do not adapt to their new lives
without clashes and suffering.”
cxiv

The same year Némirovsky wrote All Our Worldly Goods, she wrote to
Madeleine, after the defeat of June 1940: “I find that your father shows incredible
courage staying in Lumbres. Besides, it doesn’t surprise me: he personifies the good
decent Frenchman.”
cxv
Similarly in the novel, Pierre, who by the end of the book has
become the patriarch of the Hardelot family, remains in Saint Elme, the town of his
ancestors, despite the German invasion, the falling bombs and the burning houses. The
family’s tenacity and rootedness endures, and by the end, everyone and everything
remains intact—an ending that vibrates with hope and rebirth, almost as if Némirovsky is
writing this novel as a wish fulfillment fantasy of what her future could be. A new
grandchild is born amidst the chaos: “The heavens leaned gently down towards the
devastated land, the cities in flames, the poor men who had no food, no shelter…It was
four o’clock in the morning when the child came into the world. It was a beautiful boy
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and Rose did not have a difficult birth.”
cxvi
By the last chapter, order has been restored, as
Némirovsky describes how the villagers return to the mundane details of their lives with
her use of simple and direct language that focuses on the external world, bringing our
attention back to the immediate pleasures of fresh bread, warm coffee, clean sheets; “The
coffee smelled good; the miller’s wife sliced some fresh bread. They had made it through
the night….The Armistice had been signed. German soldiers occupied the village; they
were sleeping at the mill, and in the morning the miller’s wife cooked pork chops and
omelets for them. Rose was out of bed; the child was doing well.”
cxvii
If only, by 1942,
German soldiers could have been appeased by pork chops and omelets, Némirovsky’s
fate living under German occupation in the small village of Issy-L’Eveque would have
looked quite different. But perhaps in 1940, when she moved to Issy-L’Eveque and wrote
this novel, Némirovsky still believed in the essential goodness and hope of France.
Jonathan Weiss comments on this:
When one looks at Irene’s literary production during the early period of the
German occupation, one notices her faith in the essential goodness and generosity
of the French. Even when she was unable to get her texts published, even when
she could not travel without special approval, France remained for her the country
of courage and sacrifice in the face of adversity and hardship imposed by the war.
Later, when she writes Suite Francaise, this faith will be sorely tested.
cxviii

The landed gentry of rural France, tied to each other, to the land, to the earth: this
kind of life provides Némirovsky with the counter opposite of what it must have felt like
for her as a Russian Jewish émigré living in Paris between the two world wars, equally ill
at ease with those of her same milieu as she was with the French Catholic majority.
Interestingly, it seems both Roth and Némirovsky seem able to escape their itinerant
rootless backgrounds when they write about this traditional French lifestyle, almost as if
through the act of writing, they occupy the same imaginative space as these people, thus
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temporarily granting them a much needed reprieve from their sense of not belonging, of
not being at home in the world. Perhaps Némirovsky chose to live the last two years of
her life in Issy-L’Eveque as a last stab at emulating the life she so hunkered for, despite
the painful reality that she would never experience it.
cxix
In addressing the mystery as to
why she did not flee France when she had countless opportunities to do so, perhaps the
thought of having to leave again, even though she was only a few kilometers from the
“free zone,” and could have fled to Switzerland was too much for Némirovsky to bear—
perhaps she would have rather died than leave her beloved France, which in the end, is
what she did.
Némirovsky’s desire to be fully French not only affects the content of her work in
regards to the novels and short stories she wrote about provincial French life, but also its
form, raising the question as to why Némirovsky avoids modernism, which was the
avant-garde aesthetic of the time. Formally, all of her literary production is traditionally
realist, while All Our Worldly Goods, Fire in the Blood and Suite Francaise, all written
between 1940-1942, as well as a handful of short stories, are also thematically traditional,
focusing on the small-town domestic dramas of provincial French life, whereas her
fiction about Russian and Jewish immigrants living in Paris between the wars explores
themes of assimilation and the mingling of ethnicities, and challenges the idea of a fixed
stable identity, themes that modernist writers were also addressing at the time. But why
does Némirovsky avoid modernism on a stylistic level, when such literary
experimentation was happening all around her, especially in Paris? The reason may be
that Némirovsky was intent on establishing herself as a real “French” writer as opposed
to a Russian Jewish immigrant trying to emulate French values and customs. In these
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novels, she demonstrates how she knows what it means to be French even better than the
French do. Angela Kershaw supports this possibility by explaining how Némirovsky’s
position as a Jewish Russian immigrant, who was linguistically and culturally assimilated
into the Parisian bourgeoisie, guided her aesthetic choices in the direction of acquiring
social capital:
…to be accepted as a successful French novelist was to attain her fantasy of total
assimilation into the host culture. Némirovsky rejected the narrative
experimentation of the inter-war avant-garde and of high modernism, and avoided
the political extremism of the roman a these. She chose to produce novels in the
French realist tradition, which drew comparisons of her novels with Balzac and
Dostoevskii…Potentially lacking symbolic capital as a Jewish immigrant,
Némirovsky rejected literary audacity in favor of a position she believed would
bring immediate consecration.”
cxx

Weiss, at least in terms of All Our Worldly Goods (1947) and Les Feux de
l’automne (1957), has a more pragmatic explanation for Némirovsky’s reliance on
traditional narration and themes—the novels show a point of view and style that fits well
with the Vichy regime and in writing them, Irène hoped her publishers would take them
on, especially given how her husband had lost his job at the bank and the family was
strapped for income by 1940. In reality, her publishers would not even look at these
novels, a reason why the manuscripts were not published until years after her death.
cxxi

Weiss also asserts how these novels do not actually reflect Irène’s political attitude at the
time and in fact, when looking at her other literary projects and unpublished texts, it
becomes clear that she doubted the Vichy government and its ideology, as well as
exhibiting a critical stance toward those who cooperated with the regime.
cxxii
Susan
Suleiman also makes the important point that despite Némirovsky’s lack of stylistic
experimentation, the power of her fiction, especially with Suite Francaise, is the “acuity
of her vision, the precision of her gaze at the history of the present—at what is our past,
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but was her present” in that Némirovsky wrote about the German occupation of France
while it was actually happening all around her, whereas Tolstoy, who is one of her main
influences, wrote War and Peace half a century after the history he recounts in fictional
form occurred, giving him that distance to see events clearly.
cxxiii
Némirovsky did not
need the distance of history to understand the ironies and nuances of her time—she
already possessed it in the present.

In terms of Némirovsky and Roth’s love affair with France, it is interesting to
note how both novelists converted to Catholicism in the late 1930s (rumor has it that
Roth even had two funerals—one Catholic, one Jewish). The motivations for
Némirovsky’s conversion in 1939 are widely debated by critics—some say it evidences
her Jewish-self hatred, others posit that Némirovsky really did share a spiritual affinity to
Catholicism and was a true convert, but the overriding argument is that she converted to
protect her family from deportation. There may be some truth to all of these reasons, but
another motivation, less obvious perhaps, is that for Némirovsky, becoming Catholic was
an extension of becoming fully French, a widening of her French identity. In the
introduction to Report from a Parisian Paradise, Michael Hofmann explains Joseph
Roth’s affinity for Catholicism in much the same way that one could explain
Némirovsky’s attraction to the religion—that in a cultural sense, Roth equated
Catholicism with Judaism in that Catholicism acts as the “permissive, universal vehicle
for Judaism.”
cxxiv
Roth writes, in his piece on Avignon, how:
If I were the pope, then, I’d live in Avignon. I would take pleasure in seeing what
European Catholicism had brought about, the wonderful mixing of races, the
colorful confusion of all the different essences of life, and how the results of
miscegenation are actually not dull monotony. Everyone carries in himself the
blood of five different races, young and old, and every individual is a world
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comprising five continents…This is assimilation at its best: A person may remain
as different as he is and feel at home.
cxxv

In order to feel “at home” in the world, Roth defines himself as both Jewish and
Catholic, as a composite of various ethnicities and nationalities. He famously wrote in
another letter to Reifenberg in 1926: “I yearn for Paris, I have not given it up, ever, I am a
Frenchman from the East, a humanist, a rationalist with religion, a Catholic with a Jewish
intellect, an actual revolutionary.”
cxxvi
As Hofmann aptly explains, Roth “sought to couple
together such vast, mutually opposed blocks of ideology. As long as his eloquence—and
his capacity for self-deception—held, it seemed to work…When [such ideologies] split or
realign themselves, the politics, the nationalities, the religions—like the same-pole
repulsion of pairs of magnets—his identity and felicity unravel. The blocks, the concepts,
the allegiances, the tribal nationalisms he opposed all his life turned on him, and ground
him up between them.”
cxxvii
Sadly, at the end of his piece on Avignon, Roth writes:
Will the world ever come to look like Avignon? The ridiculous fear of the
nations, and of the European nations at that, that they might lose this or that
‘characteristic feature’ and that colorful humanity might mix into a gray mush!
But people aren’t pigments, nor is the world a palette! The more mixing, the more
characteristics! I won’t live to see the beautiful world in which every individual
can represent in himself the totality, but even today I can sense such a
future…
cxxviii

Unfortunately Roth was right—he did not live to see the mingling of races and
nationalities and religions—in 1939, he died in a Parisian hotel room from alcoholism.
Roth’s last years were filled with despair over the fate of Europe. He wrote to Stephen
Zweig in February of 1933 shortly after Hitler’s rise to power: “It will become clear to
you now that we are heading for a great catastrophe. Quite apart from our personal
situations—our literary and material existence has been wrecked—we are headed for a
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new war. I wouldn’t give a heller for our prospects. The barbarians have taken over. Do
not deceive yourself. Hell reigns.”
cxxix
But in 1925, Roth still believed in another kind of
future for Europe in which he could have existed and flourished, one of pluralism, where
a diasporic identity would have been celebrated instead of shunned, a world that would
reflect his paradisiac experiences of France in the 1920s.
On 2
nd
of February, 1939, Irène Némirovsky, her two daughters and her husband
were baptized at the chapel of the Abbaye Sainte-Marie, in the 16
th
arrondissement.
According to Némirovsky’s main biographers, Jonathan Weiss, Olivier Philipponnat, and
Patrick Lienhardt, Némirovsky did not convert to gain French nationality or as protection
from the mounting anti-Semitism, but rather for personal reasons that are harder to
define, reasons that may have more to do with making sense of her hybrid Franco-Jewish
identity. In The Life of Irène Némirovsky, Philipponnat and Leinhardt conclude that for
Jews converting to Catholicism at this time, such an act was actually a deepening of their
Judaism. Bergson, for instance, saw in Catholicism ‘the complete fulfillment of Judaism
and as Jean-Jacques Bernard states, who was a close friend of Némirovsky, “ ‘They [the
Jews] had simply cast off from their shoulders the worn cloak of their fathers…For them,
Judaism had become a word void of any meaning. But when a spiritual impulse opened
the doors of the Church or those of the Temple, what did they discover at the very heart
of Christianity? Their Judaism!”
cxxx
Nadia Malinovich, author of French and Jewish:
Culture and the Politics of Identity in Early-Twentieth Century France also supports how
French Jews converting to Catholicism was not necessarily a rejection of Judaism but a
broadening of their identity as Jews … as a form of “re-Judaization.”
cxxxi
She explains
how such conversions may not have “represented as much of an opposition to their
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‘Jewishness’ as one might think given the overrepresentation of French Jews converting
to Catholicism between 1885-1935.
cxxxii
She writes, “By latching on to the philo-Semitic
Catholicism of someone like Charles Peguy, for whom Jews remained the chosen people,
these converts were able to understand their baptisms as an act of fulfillment rather than
as treason.”
cxxxiii
Jonathan Weiss makes the interesting point that one of the great ironies
of Némirovsky’s life is that just as she converts to Catholicism, she also exhibits a
renewed interest in her origins as a Jew, which would further support the theory that
Catholicism broadened and perhaps even deepened her identity as a Jew, as opposed to
viewing the conversion as a rejection of her heritage.
cxxxiv
Perhaps Roth’s relationship to
Catholicism differs from Némirovsky’s because he sees Catholicism as an all
encompassing umbrella under which Jewishness, Rome, and the Duel Monarchy of the
Austrian-Hungarian Empire falls—thus enveloping the myriad aspects of his identity—
whereas Némirovsky’s conversion has more to do with a deepening of her French
identity than with a rejection of her Jewish identity.

Némirovsky and Roth’s blind faith in France may, in part, reflect how historically
France exhibited an unprecedented level of acceptance of Jews, demonstrated by France’s
early emancipation of the Jews in comparison to neighboring states.
cxxxv
On August 26,
1789, the constitutional assembly of representatives of the French people adopted a
Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, Article 1 of which declared: “All men are
born free and equal in their rights. Social distinctions may be founded only on the
common good” and granted French citizenship to “all men who take the oath of
citizenship, and undertake to fulfill all the duties imposed by the Constitution.”
cxxxvi
As
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Louis Begley describes in his book Why The Dreyfus Affair Matters, “French Jews
greeted the news with jubilation and flocked to mass oath-swearing ceremonies. For the
first time since Babylonian captivity they were truly free.”
cxxxvii
The French treatment of
Jews was truly exceptional, especially when compared to the Jews’ socio-political
situation in Spain, the Habsburg lands, the German states and England. Begley points out
how the Inquisition was still persecuting Marranos, descendants of converted Jews who
still secretly practiced Judaism in Spain, and how the Austrian Empire did not grant Jews
any of the rights of citizens: Jews were restricted to ghettoes unless they lived in the
countryside and they were subject to special taxes for living in specified areas. With the
wave of revolutions to sweep across Europe in 1848, Austria granted freedom of religion
to all minorities and lifted the special restrictions on Jews, but then a counterrevolution
followed which redacted the new rights and it was not until 1867, the year the Austro-
Hungarian Empire was founded, that a new constitution granted Jews full legal
rights.
cxxxviii
But in comparison to France, Jews still suffered discrimination. For example,
although Jews were allowed to serve in the Austro-Hungarian army, they were limited to
the reserves as staff and regimental officers and their chances at promotion were strongly
dependent upon conversion, which was not the case in the French army. In Austria-
Hungary, Jews were also barred from the civil service and university teaching posts. In
Germany, Jews served as officers in the reserves, but at the turn of the 19
th
century, there
were no German-Jewish career officers.
cxxxix

Malinovich supports this theory as well, emphasizing how France held a special
place in the Eastern European Jewish imagination as the land of revolution, being the first
nation to grant Jews citizenship and how this attraction to France persisted into the
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1920s.
cxl
Maurice Samuels, in his piece Jews and the Construction of French Identity
from Balzac to Proust, also notes how by being the first nation to grant Jews citizenship,
the revolutionary authorities attempted to dissolve the problematic Jewish “nation within
the nation” and to modernize one of the most backward populations in France, the Jews,
with new opportunities provided by Enlightenment reforms. Up until this point, the Jews
were confined by law to rural areas where they were only allowed to depend upon petty
trade and money lending, as opposed to joining one of the guilds or professions; they
spoke Western Yiddish and lived in medieval, primitive conditions. But now, for liberal
reformers, “the Jews offered a test case for Enlightenment: if even this group could be
transformed into productive citizens through the granting of equality, then anyone
could.”
cxli
By the mid to late 19
th
century, it seemed as if the Enlightenment experiment
had worked; French Jews were now well assimilated and integrated into French society,
obtaining high positions in banking, business and arts, as well as in the liberal
professions, the army and the government.
cxlii
As Samuels states, “In no other country did
Jews attain such integration without converting,” a trend that would accelerate during the
Third Republic (1870-1940).
cxliii

But despite France’s early emancipation of Jews (which occurred nearly sixty
years before German Jews were emancipated), the event was followed by a virulent anti-
Semitic backlash with anti-Jewish riots, killings and arson, which continued into the
1830s and culminated in the Dreyfus affair. As Begley explains, instead of this backlash
against Jews deterring Jewish allegiance to France, it only “transformed their sense of
gratitude for their citizenship into an unswerving patriotism and self-identification with
France. They [French Jews] made the desirability—if not necessity—of assimilation the
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foundation of their modern Judaism.”
cxliv
Begley also points out how this unswerving
desire to be French above all else created a culture of silent, passive acceptance among
French Jews when confronted with anti-Semitism. Leon Blum, in his memoir of the
Dreyfus affair, wrote that at first:
…as a general matter, Jews had accepted the conviction of Dreyfus as definitive
and just. They did not speak of the case among themselves; far from raising it,
they fled from the subject. A great sorrow had fallen upon Israel. One suffered it
without saying a word, waiting for time and silence to erase its effects…The
dominant feeling expressed itself by a formula such as this: This is not something
with which Jews should get mixed up…Jews did not want it to be believed they
defended Dreyfus because he was a Jew.
cxlv

Despite the spike in anti-Semitism exhibited by the Dreyfus affair, what followed
was a general period of acceptance of Jews in France, particularly during and in the
aftermath of World War I, a theory that is supported by Paula Hyman, author of From
Dreyfus to Vichy as well as Nadia Malinovich. Malinovich, in her book French and
Jewish, reiterates this, explaining how while anti-Semitism did not entirely disappear, in
comparison to the United States and Germany, anti-Jewish feeling in France remained
marginal to French political and cultural life due to the French Jew’s willingness to
assimilate into the non-Jewish majority, and their participation in the war effort, which
provided them with “a new language with which to link their particular religious heritage
to their French patriotism.”
cxlvi
Malinovich further explains how the Ligue des Patriotes,
presided over by Maurice Barres, welcomed Jews as members, as did the majority of
French patriotic movements during the 1920s.
cxlvii

Jonathan Weiss also supports how when the Némirovskys arrived in Paris in the
spring of 1919, there was a palpable sense of acceptance towards immigrants and Jews,
given how the country had just lost 1,300,000 men in the war and was eager for
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replacements, combined with a general feeling of sympathy for refugees fleeing the
revolution or religious hatred.
cxlviii
Weiss adds how the 1926 acquittal in Paris of the
Yiddish poet Scholem Schwartzbard, who had killed a Ukranian soldier in retaliation for
pogroms, indicates a period of French sympathy towards persecuted Eastern European
Jews.
cxlix
But it is important to note that even though the Némirovskys were part of the
second wave of Russian Jewish immigrants coming to Paris after the First World War
(Russian Jews had begun to emigrate to France from 1881 onward), they had little in
common with the majority of impoverished Russian Jewish immigrants, given their
unique social status, which was just as true in Kiev as it now was in Paris. Weiss
reiterates:
In every respect the Némirovsky family lived an exceptional life [in Russia].
Although Jewish, the family’s social position brought them much closer to
Orthodox Christian high society than to the Jewish commercial classes…[Her
father’s] closeness to the economic system of the Russian Empire put him clearly
on the side of those Russians who hated Bolshevism and often blamed the Jews
for fomenting the Revolution. Finally the family’s linguistic situation was typical
of the highest strata of Russian society, for French was spoken at home almost
exclusively. For Iréne, French would become her linguistic home; if it was not
strictly speaking her mother tongue, it would become the language of her cultural
identity.
cl

Honing in more specifically on what Némirovsky’s experience of France would
have been like from 1919 onward, there were other currents shaping Franco-Jewish
identity that are necessary to consider when evaluating the context of Némirovsky’s
work, particularly her representations of Jewishness. To begin with, upon her arrival in
France, Irene hardly felt like a new immigrant—she had already spent many summers
there and French was spoken at home. She explains how “From the age of four up until
the war, I came to France regularly once a year. The first time, I stayed there a year. I was
raised by a French governess, and with my mother I always spoke French.”
cli
But despite
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how Irène didn’t share the feelings of dislocation and culture shock many new
immigrants experience, she also was not part of any larger community in Paris,
immigrant or otherwise, which perhaps added to deeper feelings of displacement
throughout her life. As Weiss notes, “Irène’s personal situation fits neither that of Jewish
immigrants nor White Russians,”
clii
in that they did not identify with the poverty many
immigrants struggled with upon their arrival in France, nor did they align themselves
with the majority of Jewish immigrants in Paris who had Socialist and Communists
leanings. Irène married Michael Epstein in 1926, who was from the same unique niche as
she: the son of a banker from Saint Petersburg working in Paris, though never rising to a
high position.
cliii
Suleiman adds that, “Not surprisingly, it was in the ranks of the
academically, socially and artistically conservative establishment that Némirovsky sought
to find a place as a writer.”
cliv
For the Némirovskys, Paris allowed them to resume their
commercial activities—they stayed out of politics and had no interest in the creation of a
new, just state
clv
, but at the same time, unlike many White Russians who shared their
political and economic views, the Némirovskys did not particularly mourn Mother Russia
or the former luxuries they had enjoyed there, but rather seemed to feel as if they were
already French (or nearly so), given how linguistically and culturally they had defined
themselves as such, even when still living in Russia. Weiss further explains how the
Némirovskys lived quite comfortably upon their arrival in France, in stark contrast to
most other White Russians, who had lost everything, as well as to the impoverished
Jewish refugees:
All of Irène’s family—her mother, father, and her maternal grandparents—moved
into one of the most elegant neighborhoods in Paris, at 115 rue de la Pompe, in
the 16
th
arrondissement. By 1921, they had a telephone…and had engaged an
English governess (Miss Matthews) to be in charge of Irène’s education. They
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had a cook. For them, life in Paris was much like life in Kiev.
clvi

Suleiman raises an important point when comparing Némirovsky’s privileged and
politically conservative position as a writer to two other Russian Jewish women who
were her contemporaries and who also became celebrated French writers: Elsa Triolet
(1896-1970) and Nathalie Sarraute (1902-1999). Triolet with her husband Louis Aragon
were associated with the French Communist Party from 1930 into the 50s, although she
wrote in a realist conventional style, similar to Némirovsky. Sarraute, who was mostly
apolitical, demonstrates a radical innovative form of writing, drawing comparisons to
Beckett. What would have happened to Némirovsky’s writing style, both thematically
and formally, if she had survived the war?
clvii
Neither associated with the left, nor part of
the literary avant-garde movement before the war, would she have sought new
allegiances or modes of writing after witnessing the devastating outcome of being on the
wrong side of history? We can only wonder.
As we shall see in the next chapter, Némirovsky’s ambivalence towards her
Jewish identity has more to do with a desire to be fully French as opposed to a rejection
of her Jewishness. The construction of her cultural identity—as a “French writer”—was
essential and paramount to how she wanted to be seen by others and to how she saw
herself. I don’t think she was capable of seeing herself in any other way.
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Chapter 3
Assimilation and Its Discontents: Jewish Identity in the Work of
Irène Némirovsky

Irène Némirovsky, Joseph Roth and Franz Kafka, three Jewish novelists writing
before World War II, represent the problematics of Jewishness in a spectrum ranging
from repulsion to nostalgia and ambivalence, reflecting the varying reactions assimilated
European Jewry experienced in relation to their identity as Jews. Irène Némirovsky, a
highly-assimilated Jewish Ukrainian who emigrated to Paris in 1919 from Kiev, by way
of Finland and Sweden, portrays the Jew as a figure that is habitually grasping after the
fantasy of assimilation, only to be haunted by an inherent Jewishness, a quality that
proves inescapable and, at times, decisively negative for her, reinstating the insoluble
divide between the non-Jewish environment of interwar France and the Jewish one. In her
debut novel David Golder (1929), published by Grasset, she represents the plight of
newly arrived Russian Jewish immigrants in Paris. Although they quickly assimilate and
relish their status as accepted members of French society, Némirovsky defines their
Jewishness as a collection of immutable qualities that she depicts in a negative and
offensive light, despite, or rather, because of her Jewish origins—in this case, the figure
of the Jew may be read as a product of her cultural self-loathing. But it is crucial to note
that Némirovsky’s representation of Jewishness shifted toward a much more nuanced,
empathetic, and ambiguous viewpoint as she matured and developed as a writer when she
returns to themes of Jewishness and assimilation ten years later, specifically with the
novel The Dogs and the Wolves (1940).
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David Golder, published in 1929 by Bernard Grasset (the publisher of Proust),
was Némirovsky’s big debut novel—she was only 26 years old, and had published a few
short stories and a novel with Les Oeuves Libres of not much consequence. She sent the
manuscript to Grasset in an envelope with only ‘Epstein, General Delivery, Paris-Louvre’
for a return address. How the author of the novel was then “discovered” garnered much
publicity and added to the novel’s success by the time of its publication. Henry Muller, a
close collaborator of Grasset, recounts how he was assigned to read the manuscript:
As soon as I finished my report I looked at the author’s card in the book of
manuscripts; there was a simple name, Epstein, and a general delivery address.
The next day Grasset…wrote to the author to inform him that he would eagerly
publish the work, and he requested that he come by as soon as possible to sign the
contract. Then we waited three weeks; so long that at one point, one of us, full of
consternation, suggested placing an add in the newspapers: ‘seeking author who
sent a manuscript to Grasset under the name Epstein.’ In the end things moved
quickly; it took less than one half-hour for the young woman who appeared
(petite, dark-haired, of Russian origin, and ostensibly quite intimidated) to sign
her contract.
clviii

The way Grasset marketed the novel added to its enthusiastic reception, by
emphasizing Némirovsky’s youth (he encouraged the press to state that the author was
only 23 years old when she was actually 26) as well as her exotic origins—that of a
Russian Jewish émigré who had fled the revolution and settled in Paris. Némirovsky was
also relatively complicit in how her publisher chose to position her as an emerging
novelist—she did not correct the misrepresentation of her age, and she also used her
Russian maiden name for her published novels, rejecting her ashkenazic married name of
Epstein, as well as the French pseudonyms she often used for her short stories.
clix

In terms of examining the novel’s reception, its success is partly due to how
Némirovsky located her work in relation to the cultural fascination with Russia which
had developed in Paris during the 1920s. Némirovsky was not just in love with France;
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France was also in love with her exotic otherness. Among the Parisian elite, this
fascination with Russia meant visiting Russian art exhibitions and patronizing shops
selling Russian products, and in literature, film and theater la mode russe manifested into
various stereotypes such as the Parisian taxi driver who was once a Russian prince, the
White Russian forced to sell off her family heirlooms, and above all, the myth of the ‘l
ame russe’, portrayed as “melancholic, mystical and filled with nostalgia, mysteriously
impenetrable to the rational French mind.”
clx
Némirovsky capitalized off of this French
rage for all things Russian not just by using her cultural heritage as a selling point and by
depicting the world of newly arrived Russian Jewish immigrants in Paris, but also by
later writing other novels and short stories that center solely on Russian themes, such as
The Courilof Affair (1933) and Snow in Autumn (1931).
David Golder, the novel’s protagonist, raised in the port cities of the Black Sea, a
“melancholy and funereal atmosphere,” leaves behind his dark and mysterious origins for
New York, where he’s a peddler before moving to Paris. In Paris, because of his sharp
intelligence and ambition, he amasses a fortune by investing in oil wells in the newly
formed Soviet Union. It was not just the Russian context of this novel but also the Jewish
context that fascinated the French public and caused much debate when the novel was
initially received by the French press in 1929, a debate that has been reignited by its
current reception in terms of how Jewishness is represented here. But one must take into
account that Némirovsky was far from being the only Jewish French writer writing on
Jewish themes—she fit into a growing genre of Jews writing about Jews for a non-Jewish
audience. As Malinovich points out, “over the course of the 1920s, what had been the
novelty of a few maverick intellectuals became a recognized genre of writing…[filled
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with] dozens of novels, poems, plays, collections of folklore, and short stories that
explored different aspects of Jewish life and the issues of assimilation and acculturation
in modern society.”
clxi

This outpouring of Jewish literature in France made an impact on the broader
French literary scene, a trend that was acknowledged by the Mercure de France in 1925:
“When we take stock of the fiction of this century we must consider the discovery of the
Jewish soul as one important element in it.”
clxii
Within this expanding genre, there were
various sub-genres: Jewish literature from Eastern Europe that was then translated from
Hebrew or Yiddish into French, often depicting shtetl life and the details of traditional
Jewish religion and culture. The French reading public was also introduced to the world
of Eastern European Jewry by French writers of eastern European descent, writing in
French, who had recently immigrated to France as children or young adults.
clxiii
In regard
to her novel The Dogs and the Wolves (1940), Némirovsky falls into this category of
writers. There were also French Jews, who had lived in France for more than one
generation, writing about Jewish history and culture, producing Jewish stories and fables.
The fourth category, under which Némirovsky most strongly aligns herself, is one in
which Jewish French writers created ambivalent and critical portraits of Jewish life,
committed to the idea of painting “realistic” rather than idealized images of Jewish
society; negative and positive aspects of Jewishness vacillate in these texts. The most
common stereotype associated with Jews in these novels, and one that Némirovsky
employs in David Golder, is that of materialism and unscrupulous ambition. Similar to
David Golder, Sarah Levy’s 1930 novel O mon goye!, also condemns the world of
wealthy Jewish arrivistes, while at the same time the narrator expresses a strong
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connection to her Jewish heritage, “constantly fluctuating between feelings of revulsion
and attraction to Judaism and the Jewish people.”
clxiv
Especially since anti-Semitism was
waning in France at this point, many Jewish writers did not feel the need to censor
themselves, and even went so far as to claim that by depicting Jewish society realistically,
with both its faults and attributes, this would accomplish much more in the cause of
Christian-Jewish relations—as Jacob Levy explained: “Like other men, the Jew has his
faults: is it by ignoring them that they will go away?”
clxv
And as Susan Suleiman points
out in her article Irène Némirovsky and the ‘Jewish Question’ in Interwar France,
“openly anti-Semitic discourses were widespread and almost casual.
clxvi
She adds that
among both Jews and non-Jews, “Jewish ‘difference’ and stereotypical representations of
Jews were often taken for granted, both before and after the war (witness Sartre’s well-
meaning but stereotypical portrait of the ‘Jew’ in his Relexions sur la question juive,
published in 1946). It can hardly come as a surprise if many Jews at the time [such as
Némirovsky] wished they could give up the privilege” of being Jewish.
clxvii

But at the same time, as we shall see in Némirovsky’s case after the publication of
David Golder, an insistence on such Jewish themes, especially when depicting Jews in a
negative light, created a sense of anxiety within the Jewish community as reflected in the
Jewish press. In an article in L’Univers Israelite in 1925, Jules Meyer, a regular
columnist for the paper, wrote about his concerns regarding the impact of Jewish writing
on both Jews and non-Jews living in France:
We French Jews are a bit perturbed by this profusion of public demonstrations of
all kinds (novels, plays, films, posters, meetings)…And if we are shocked, what
must non-Jews think? Certainly here in France…the interest that people are
showing in us is friendly. But anti-Semitism has existed and prospered in France.
It has perhaps not said its final word. We must not forget that we are not at an
oriental bazaar: we are here in Paris, in France.
clxviii

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Perhaps Némirovsky’s unflinching portrayal of Jewish Russian arrivistes in David
Golder reflects the over-confidence French Jews felt at having fully assimilated into
French society—having finally “arrived,” they now felt confident enough to write about
their difference in an uncompromising light. But clearly, not everyone felt as confident—
the Jewish press worried that such negative images could easily be misread as paradigms
of the ‘Jewish personality,’ thus essentializing Jewish difference. When criticized by
Nina Gourfinkel, also a French Jewish writer of Eastern European origin, for presenting
her characters (both Jewish and non-Jewish ones) in such a negative light, Némirovsky
simply replied, “That is how I saw them.”
clxix

David Golder instigated various opinions from factions of the press upon its
publication. As seen above, the Jewish press reacted emotionally to Némirovsky’s
negative portrayal of Jews, accusing her of providing fodder for anti-Semites. The right-
wing press—Le Temps, La Revue de Paris, Comoedia—supported the theme in David
Golder of Jews possessing inherent intractable traits that assimilation could never erase.
The far-right publication Gringoire gave more space to David Golder than any other
newspaper and started to take an active interest in Némirovsky’s career.
clxx
Weiss points
out how the relationship Irène maintained after 1930 with the right-wing press—
Gringoire and also Candide—is troubling and begs further explanation. Némirovsky tried
to repair the situation in 1935 in response to how the right-wing press supported her
career and to accusations of anti-Semitism, which continued to appear in the Jewish
press, with the statement: “I never dreamed of hiding my origins…Whenever I had the
occasion, I protested that I was Jewish, I even proclaimed it!”
clxxi
Her regret at writing
such unattractive Jewish characters in David Golder increases as anti-Semitism became
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increasingly problematic in France throughout the 1930s. Again in 1935 in L’Univers
Israelite she states, “It is quite true that if there had been Hitler [at the time], I would
have greatly toned down David Golder, and I wouldn’t have written it in the same
fashion.”
clxxii
And four years later, when anti-Semitism raged in France in opposition to
Leon Blum’s Popular Front, she had another regret, which she declared in Les Nouvelles
litteraries: “How could I write such a thing? If I were to write David Golder now, I
would do it quite differently…The climate has quite changed!”
clxxiii

Reactions in the press to David Golder and to the enigma of Némirovsky’s
feelings regarding her Jewish identity are just as much an issue now as then. Most
famously, Ruth Franklin in the New Republic in 2008 called Némirovsky “the very
definition of a self-hating Jew” and a critic reviewing the English translation of The Dogs
and the Wolves (1940) went so far as to claim that a “Nazi publishing house” with the
aim to perpetuate racial stereotypes would have been very happy with the novel.
clxxiv
The
reviewer was then challenged by Némirovsky’s translator Sandra Smith in a letter of
defense published in a subsequent issue. In France as well, various critics have expressed
concern over anti-Semitic stereotypes in her work and evidence of Jewish self-hatred. But
such a decisively unambiguous reaction to what was clearly an ambiguous and
ambivalent relationship, between Némirovsky and her Jewish identity, essentializes and
skips over the importance of context to her work, both on an individual level and a more
general one, as well as simplifying the problematic nature of Jewish identity in modern
times, both before and after the Shoah, in the United States and in Europe. As the
celebrated novelist Claire Messud rightly states in an homage to F. Scott Fitzgerald, at the
end of her introduction to the English translation of David Golder, that the complexities
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in Némirovsky’s fiction demonstrate how Némirovsky has the unique ability to hold two
oppositional ideas in mind at the same time while still being able to function,
Némirovsky’s fiction requires the reader to perform the same feat.

In David Golder (1929), Némirovsky offers an ambivalent and oftentimes
undeniably negative portrait of a dying Russian Jewish businessman and his family in
1920s France, but it is far too simplistic to claim that the novel is anti-Semitic or a
reflection of Némirovsky’s Jewish “self-hatred” as some critics have done. At the same
time, some of the destructive Jewish stereotypes Némirovsky employs here cannot be
overlooked, and will be examined in the context of Némirovsky’s unique cultural and
social position as a White Russian Jewish émigré in interwar Paris, whose primary desire
was to become fully French. And while some critics have read the ending of the novel to
be a final indictment on the despairing rootlessness inherent in the Jewish condition, I
propose a more nuanced reading in which Némirovsky offers David Golder a measure of
grace and empathy.
Our initial understanding of David Golder is one of a ruthless, corrupt, and
heartless entrepreneur who denies his business partner, Simon Marcus, the ability to sell
off their shares in Russian oil wells, a refusal which results in Marcus’ suicide.
Némirovsky is making use of the stereotype circulating since the mid-1800s in France,
which equates Jewishness with a love of money and power above all else. Known as the
“new economic French anti-Semitism,” Jews, such as the wealthy banking family the
Rothschilds—with banking houses scattered across the European capitals—were viewed
as nefarious agents of modernity, symbolizing the shifting cosmopolitanism of the new
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global markets, another signal of modernity that caused fear and anxiety in the general
French public.
clxxv
In the opening pages, Golder, a stone-cold calculating businessman,
appears to prioritize money-making above all else, which is emphasized by a
conversation between Golder and his partner, Simon Marcus. Marcus grows more and
more desperate after Golder’s refusal to sell their shares:
Golder watched Marcus’s shaking hands as if he were contemplating the final
death throes of a wounded animal. ‘I need the money, David,’ Marcus suddenly
said in a different tone of voice, the corner of his mouth contorting into a grimace.
‘I…I’m really desperate for money, David. Couldn’t you…let me make just a
little? Don’t you think that…’ ‘No!’ Golder shook his fist in the air. He saw the
pale hands clasp each other, the clenched fingers digging their nails into the flesh.
‘You’re ruining me,’ Marcus said finally, in an odd, hollow voice.
clxxvi

Here Golder’s total lack of empathy dehumanizes him, much in the same way that
Golder’s view of Marcus dehumanizes Marcus into a “wounded animal.” And when
Golder observes Marcus’s clasping hands and clenching fingers, the expected use of the
possessive pronoun—his hands, his flesh—is replaced by the definite article: “the pale
hands…the clenched fingers… digging into the flesh.”
clxxvii
Némirovsky is, within the
space of one paragraph, doubly dehumanizing her subject, first from the reader’s point of
view of Golder and then she dehumanizes Marcus from Golder’s point of view.
Némirovsky may inadvertently imply here that when one is viewed by society as an
animal, as less than human, then one sees and treats others in a similar manner. Perhaps
this makes Golder less culpable, if we view him as product of a society that judges him
mercilessly, as many Russian Jewish immigrants were received quite harshly by French
society at the time. In this opening portrait of David Golder, Némirovsky may also be
commenting on how stereotypes work on us and on others, as a dehumanizing force,
stripping us of our humanity. An overly simplistic reading of David Golder would
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suggest that none of the characters—especially the Jewish ones—invoke our empathy,
thus solidifying them into calcified stereotypes. I argue that as the novel progresses,
Némirovsky moves towards an empathetic and human portrait of David Golder, as a
tragic figure who has been abandoned by his family, especially by his daughter, who he
loves above all else, even above money.
We realize early on in the novel that despite Joyce’s grasping nature, Golder still
longs for his daughter’s love to be reciprocated and will do anything to appease her. After
returning from a business trip, he travels to Biarritz to meet his wife and daughter. Upon
his arrival:
[Golder] peered through the car’s open window, trying to see if anyone was
inside. Hadn’t Joyce come? He took a few hesitant steps forward to take a final
hopeful but humble look at the dark corner where he imagined he would see his
daughter in her light dress, her golden hair. But the car was empty…His
daughter…Every time he came back from a trip, he looked for her in the crowd,
in spite of himself. She was never there, and yet he continued to expect her with
the same humiliating, tenacious, and vain sense of hope.
clxxviii

A few scenes later, when Golder finally finds Joyce at home she is all in “white
and silver”
clxxix
and Golder admires her, overcome “with a rush of secret pride that made
his heart beat faster, almost painfully.”
clxxx
Despite his exhaustion, he gives into Joyce’s
pestering to go to the casino that night, so that he will win at cards and buy her a new car.
After a night of gambling, as dawn is breaking, Joyce “woke up, held out her hands, then
closed them over the crumpled banknotes that her father, standing over her, slid between
her fingers. ‘Oh, Dad,’ she murmured joyously, ‘so it’s true! You really did win?’ but in
response, “at that very moment, [Golder’s] large body collapsed in a strange and
terrifying way: he raised both arms in the air, waved them about, and fell to the floor with
a deep, dull moan that seemed to rise up as if from the living roots of a falling tree that
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has been struck right through its heart.”
clxxxi
Tragically, in spite of all he painfully learns
about Joyce, she continues to be his Achilles’ heel, his one weakness and point of
vulnerability that humanizes him in contrast to the initial portrait at the start of the novel,
when he handles his business partner so ruthlessly. Golder is even willing to die for Joyce
in order to secure her financial future and happiness, as this passage foreshadows.
As the novel draws to a close, we come to view Golder less as an all-powerful
domineering figure, but closer to a deracinated solitary immigrant who, despite his
financial success and assimilated status, feels just as rootless and alone as he did upon his
arrival in Paris decades ago. After his wife and his daughter abandon him, Golder is
utterly alone except for daily visits from the doctor, living a cocoon-life, isolated and cut
off from the world: “…Golder too seemed to have subsided into a kind of slumber, a
depressed stupor. He would get up and dress, trying to move as slowly as possible in
order to save as much strength, as much of his life force as he could. Then he would walk
around the apartment twice, aware of every movement of his muscles, every beat of his
pulse and heart. After that he would measure out his medicine himself, one gram at a
time, on the kitchen scales, then boil an egg using his watch as a timer.”
clxxxii
The sad
reality of his life contributes to an increasingly empathetic view of him—the only person
who still visits Golder aside from the doctor is his friend Soifer, a German Jew from
Silesia who is equally old and alone, despite his great fortune. Soifer acts as a kind of
mirror to Golder, and a mirror to all immigrants, Jewish and non-Jewish, who are adrift in
a foreign land, alienated from family and friends: “Much later, Soifer would die all alone,
like a dog, without a friend, without a single wreath on his grave, buried in the cheapest
cemetery in Paris by his family who hated him, and whom he had hated…”
clxxxiii

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In an unexpected self-referential move, a few pages later, Némirovsky also
describes Soifer’s lack of French citizenship, placing him (and many Jewish immigrants,
including herself) in the category of the “stateless” person, powerless when confronted
with the impersonal bureaucracy of the state. In a conversation between Soifer and
Golder, Soifer complains about how he just “heard today that if I don’t renew my identity
card right away, I’ll be deported. A miserable, sickly old man! I ask you, where would I
go?” Golder replies, “To Germany?” In response, Soifer says, “Oh, sure, to
Germany…Germany can go to hell! You know what happened to me before in Germany,
when I had trouble over providing them with war supplies. No? You don’t know? Look,
I’ve got to get going now…”
clxxxiv
In this eerily prescient passage, given Némirovsky’s
future deportation from France, she implies Soifer’s inability to truly belong without the
persistent threat of being uprooted and tossed out yet again because of his Jewishness.
She also indicates an awareness of Germany’s increasing anti-Semitism, in contrast to
France at this point, specifically the “stabbed-in-the-back” myth that circulated during
and after World War I.
clxxxv

Interestingly, despite Golder’s pitiful existence, Némirovsky gestures towards a
homecoming of sorts, or at the very least, a reconnection to his Jewish roots, which
additionally challenges the interpretation that the novel offers a solely negative depiction
of Jewish life. Soifer and Golder drink tea together every afternoon, using a silver tea set
that Golder, “long ago, had ordered from Russia” and discuss stocks that are going up or
down, a strange comfort to Golder who, without Soifer, would be alone in his spacious
apartment. Together, they also wander into the French Jewish neighborhood for a simple
dinner, on the Rue Vieille-du-Temple, a place Golder is initially hostile to, but slowly a
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certain tenderness washes over Golder, and he revisits his past: “He half closed his eyes.
Now, as night began to fall and the tops of the houses were cloaked in shadow and the
clatter and creak of a handcart drowned out the sound of the cars on the Rue Vieille-du-
Temple, he felt as if he had been transported back in time to the old country, was seeing
once and again those familiar faces, but distorted, deformed, as in a dream…”
clxxxvi

Once in the restaurant, Golder “stretched out his hands towards the glowing stove
that had just been lit; it radiated a heavy smell of heat from its corner. ‘At home,’ he
thought, ‘a smell like that would make me choke…’ But he didn’t feel sick. A kind of
sensual warmth, something he’d never felt before, seeped deep into his old bones.”
clxxxvii

Another buried memory resurfaces as he next observes the lamp-lighter lighting the
lamps through the restaurant window: “Outside, a man walked by carrying a long pole;
he touched the street-lamp opposite the restaurant and a flame shot out, lighting up a
narrow, dark window where washing was hanging above some empty flower-pots.
Golder suddenly remembered a little crooked window just like it, opposite the shop
where he’d been born…remembered his street, in the wind and snow, as it sometimes
appeared in his dreams.”
clxxxviii
In each instance, Golder is overcome by the senses—
sound, scent, and sight trigger within him a memory from his childhood, challenging his
current understanding of himself as divorced from the past. One would expect that such
memories would cause a negative reaction in Golder, given how he clings to his
assimilated status, but his reaction is positive, which surprises both Golder and the reader.
A certain melancholic nostalgia, coupled with feelings of “sensual warmth” and his
recognition of something familiar, something from home, pulses through Golder as he
contemplates his surroundings. He even suggests to Soifer that they should return here
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again, suggesting that his Russian Jewish origins and all he left behind in the old country
could occupy a place in his current life now—that perhaps these two aspects of himself
are not necessarily separate entities, but there exists a chance for these divergent selves to
cohere, gesturing towards a sense of wholeness, as opposed to the bifurcated fragmented
identity of the immigrant.
And while some critics read the ending of the novel as definitively negative—
that Golder dies alone on a ship in the middle of the ocean, severed from his origins as
well as from the assimilated status he sought after all his life—I argue how Golder is
granted a measure of grace and redemption at the end of his life. The novel concludes
with his death, but not before Golder returns to his native Russia, and leaves from the
same port from which he departed as a young man. Némirovsky allows Golder to see his
homeland one last time, and without a hint of sentimentality to the description, Golder’s
homecoming alleviates, to a certain degree, his life-long deracination:
…On the corner opposite, his old lodging house, a place frequented by sailors and
prostitutes…The shoemaker was one of his father’s cousins who had settled in the
town; Golder used to go and have a meal with him from time to time. He
remembered the place well…The port. He recognized it clearly as if he had left
the day before. The little customs building, half in ruins. Beached boats buried in
the black sand, which was littered with bits of coal and rubbish; watermelon rind
and dead animals bobbing in the deep muddy green water, just as in the past.
clxxxix

Golder’s memories clearly do not harken back to a youth bathed in golden
nostalgia, but the fact that he returns to where he came from, as impoverished and dirty as
it always was, still provides him with a level of comfort, of having come full circle,
allowing him some peace at the end of his life.
While Angela Kershaw emphasizes how once on board, Golder dies alone,
abandoned and cast out from all he knows
cxc
, she skips over the fact that in his dying
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hours, a young man, also Russian and Jewish, who shares the same lilting accent of
Golder’s youth, keeps him company.
cxci
Despite Golder’s belief that he is going to die
alone—“At first, he thought he was alone. Then, when he began feverishly to look
around the room, he heard the voice of the little Jew behind him”
cxcii
—he soon realizes
the boy will not leave his side. In this moment, “the boy leant over him, listening intently.
Golder said a few words in Russian; then suddenly the forgotten language of his
childhood unexpectedly spilled from his lips, and he started speaking Yiddish.”
cxciii
Here
he returns to his mother tongue, his native Yiddish, a language that, despite the many
years of not speaking it, comes back to him. And in these last moments, after this
linguistic tie has been reestablished, Golder is also granted a vision of his own boyhood,
overlaid with the sound of his mother’s voice: “And, deep from within his memory, until
he drew his final breath, certain images continued to flash before him, fainter and more
indistinct as death drew nearer…And as he reached the end, all he could see was a shop,
lit up, on a dark street, a street from his childhood, a candle set behind an icy window, the
night, snow falling, and himself…And he could hear someone calling: ‘David, David…’
A voice hushed by the snow, the low, dark sky…”
cxciv

The main problematic aspect of this novel, and one that critics have taken the
most issue with, is how Némirovsky often constructs Jewishness as a set of physical
characteristics that signal particular psychological traits.
cxcv
Ruth Franklin asks, in an
inflammatory indictment of Némirovsky in The New Republic, “Would it be too much to
say that such a book published in such a year was complicit, as similar books were
complicit, in the moral degradation of a culture that became one of the causes of the
imminent genocide?”
cxcvi
She then adds derisively how it has been “painful to watch
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Némirovsky’s contemporary defenders tying themselves into knots to explain this racist
travesty of a novel.”
cxcvii
But, I think, Franklin is taking this too far. At the time
Némirovsky was writing, this was a somewhat acceptable discourse for portraying
Jewishness despite how anti-Semitic it appears to us now. As Malinovich points out,
before World War I French Jews struggled with the “racial” sense of themselves as Jews
as well as committing to a liberal individualist model of national identity whereas by the
mid 1920s, “the idea that there were certain distinct, unalterable traits that set Jews apart
from the rest of the population had become much more widely acceptable, both among
Jews and in French society as a whole.”
cxcviii
Malinovich then uses Maurice Donnay’s
play Le Retour de Jerusalem as an example of this cultural shift. The play is about a
failed relationship between a Jewish woman and a Christian man due to their
irreconcilable racial differences. When the play first premiered in 1903 in Paris, the
French public viewed its message as anti-Semitic, including numerous articles in both the
Jewish press and the French liberal press denouncing its thesis
cxcix
whereas a quarter of a
century later, when the play was revived in 1928, it sparked almost no reaction in the
Jewish press, and the French press reviewed it as “a well-structured, entertaining study of
the ‘Jewish-Aryan drama’ that French audiences no longer in the heat of the Dreyfus
affair, were now prepared to hear without rancor or uproar.”
cc

The example does not excuse Némirovsky, but we must consider her historical
conditions when examining this problematic aspect of her writing. At the same time, one
cannot deny that in David Golder, Némirovsky represents her characters, particularly the
Jewish ones, as caricatures, often relying upon stereotypical descriptions, especially when
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relaying their physicality. For example, when Golder unexpectedly meets Fischl, an old
acquaintance, at his villa in Biarritz, Golder
…looked with a kind of hatred at Fischl, as if at a cruel caricature. Fat little
Jew…He had a comical, vile, and slightly sinister air as he stood in the doorway
with his red hair, ruddy complexion and bright, knowing eyes behind thin gold
spectacles. His stomach was fat, his legs short, skinny, and misshapen. He calmly
held in his killer’s hands a porcelain bowl of fresh caviar against his chest.
cci

Golder’s wife, Gloria, is also described as a similarly grotesque creature: “Slowly
Gloria turned towards him; her ageing face was so covered in make-up it looked like an
enameled plate…her neck was lined, and her face sagged. This, together with her dark-
pink rouge, which became purplish beneath the lights, gave her an air of decrepitude that
was both sinister and comical.
ccii
Later in the novel, Soifer, an old friend of Golder’s, is
depicted as a wealthy but nevertheless extremely frugal businessman, a regrettably
grotesque stereotype of the greedy Jew, who despite his great wealth, skimps on every
penny. Némirovsky describes how Soifer “lived in a sordid little furnished room…All his
life, he had walked on tiptoe so his shoes would last longer…since he had lost all his
teeth, he ate only cereal and pureed vegetables to avoid having to buy dentures.”
cciii
She
foretells how Soifer’s fate is to die alone, hated by his family, but to whom he
“nevertheless left a fortune of some thirty million francs, thus fulfilling till the end the
incomprehensible destiny of every good Jew on this earth.”
cciv
Even Golder himself does
not escape Némirovsky’s critical eye, as she emphasizes that “above all his
nose…enormous, hooked, like that of an old Jewish usurer…and his soft, trembling flesh
smelling of fever and sweat”
ccv

Némirovsky depicts her greedy avaricious characters as not just having these
traits on a psychological level, but that such traits are written on their bodies, inscribed on
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their physiognomy, which reflects the anti-Semitic argument at the time that Jews
contained certain internal, psychological traits that could be readily detected on an
external, physical level. But Némirovsky then complicates this equation by presenting us
with Joyce, Golder’s daughter, who is the most avaricious of them all, and yet physically
she is beautiful, the emblem of Golder’s assimilation fantasy, with her golden voice,
golden hair, and fair complexion. At the start of the novel, she seems on the verge of
escaping her Jewish origins by marrying Alec, a figure of minor French nobility, but by
the end, despite her gleaming exterior, Joyce becomes a morally and sexually corrupt
figure, crippled by her insatiable greed for materialistic riches, a daughter who abandons
her father as he nears death. Némirovsky seems to be making a statement—that despite
youth, beauty and the opportunity to “marry up” and dispose of one’s Jewishness, the
age-old association of Jews with a love of money is compounded here, as Joyce’s
unquenchable desire for it, how she spends money like water, is what eventually
interdicts her ability to disown her Jewishness.
ccvi

Némirovsky is repeating an old literary trope in representing Jewishness that had
persisted in French literature since the 19
th
century—that of the dishonest greedy
moneylender, stockbroker, or Jewish banker who loves money above all else and wields
his power through economic domination. This stereotype contributed to the discourse of
the Third Republic, which blamed Jews for contemporary economic instability.
ccvii
But
Némirovsky gives the trope a twist; whereas Shakespeare, Balzac and Walter Scott
(Némirovsky was especially influenced by Balzac) divide the image of the Jew along
gender lines in that Jewish moneylenders often have a “beautiful daughter free from the
Semitic sin of greed,” endowing the figure of the Jew with both positive and negative
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qualities, thus reflecting the ambivalent attitude these writers had towards Jewishness,
ccviii

Némirovsky does not fulfill the reader’s expectation that Joyce will redeem Golder’s
greed.
Rather, Joyce is just as morally corrupt, lacking in humanity and empathy, if not
more so, than her father. Not only is she insatiable when it comes to monetary gain—a
sad fact Golder mulls over throughout the novel: “His daughter…Yes, even her, he was
no fool. He was nothing more than a money machine…Good for nothing else…Just pay,
pay, and then, drop dead…”
ccix
—but Joyce also partakes in sexually illicit behavior.
Towards the end of the novel, Joyce comes to Golder desperate for money, explaining
how otherwise she will be forced to marry the much hated Fischl; “It’s luck he wants to
marry me,” she explains, “Otherwise I would have to sleep with him, wouldn’t I?
Although that might have been better, easier at least, one night with him from time to
time…but that’s not what he wants, you see? The horrible old pig wants to get his
money’s worth!”
ccx
Here, she equates herself with a prostitute, willing to sleep with an
old ugly man in exchange for money. But it gets worse. After hearing this Golder refuses,
telling Joyce to go ask her mother’s boyfriend, Hoyos, for money instead. Joyce rejoins
with an even more startling revelation, the ellipsis standing in for such graphic sexual
content not even the reader should be privy to: “Hoyos? Are you sure? Oh, Dad! If you
only knew! Alec and I meet at his place…and we…with him right there…” She hid her
face in her hands. He could see the tears running through her fingers.”
ccxi
Aside from her
external beauty, in almost every other way—sexually, economically, socially—Joyce is
portrayed as a morally bankrupt figure. Traditionally, the virtuous daughter oftentimes
acts as the moral counterpart to her grasping Jewish father, as in the case with Jessica and
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Shylock, but with Joyce and Golder the opposite is true, leaving us with no consolation in
the end. But then again, Némirovsky isn’t very interested in consoling the reader.
Certainly Némirovsky paints some grotesque portraits of Jews in this novel, but
no one escapes criticism. The entourage that surrounds the Golder family villa in Biarritz,
none of them Jews, are described with an equally searing eye—one could argue that
Némirovsky is criticizing a specific cultural milieu of social climbers and money-
grabbers, of poseurs and hypocrites, some of them Jews, and some of them not. Here
Golder reflects on the tiresome crowd that invades his house every summer:
Later on, the brilliant Biarritz crowd would invade the house. Those
faces…it made him sick to think of them. All the crooks, pimps, the old
whores of the earth…And he was the one paying for that lot to eat, drink,
and get sloshed all night. The bunch of greedy dogs…’The Duke
of…Count…Yesterday, the Maharajah was at my house…Filth. The older
and sicker he got, the more tiresome he found people and the racket they
made, the more tiresome his family and even his life.
ccxii

The scene is despicable, and not because it is a “Jewish” one. Gloria’s Latin
American gigolo, Hoyos, is portrayed as a leech, forever hanging around Golder’s villa as
a kept man. Alec, the man Joyce wants to marry, is considered part of the French nobility
and yet he has no money; in order to keep himself financially afloat and afford his
luxurious lifestyle, he sleeps with an older rich woman known as “Lady Ravenna,” while
at the same time sleeping with Joyce. In all these ways, the social circle Némirovsky so
coldly observes reeks with sexual immorality, a cast of Jewish and non-Jewish characters
that are avaricious parvenus who will stop at nothing to get what they want. When the
Jewish journalist Nina Gourfinkel, herself of Russian extraction, criticized Némirovsky
for painting Jewish society in such a negative light, questioning why Némirovsky refused
her characters “some sympathetic qualities to temper the kind of decadent materialism
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that you are describing?”
ccxiii
Némirovsky repeated three times: “That is the way I saw
them.”
ccxiv

Perhaps Némirovsky is merely following the dictum many writers subscribe to:
write what you know. The world of international finance, including the corruption and
greed that went along with it, was Némirovsky’s world growing up, a world she had
always intensely disliked. In her most autobiographical novel, The Wine of Solitude
(1935), she writes of her childhood through the perspective of the young girl, Helene:
“[her father] would bring home men whom Helene knew under the term ‘business
associates,’ nervous, anxious men with impatient eyes and hands as taut and grasping as
claws; she closed her eyes, imagining she could already hear the word they endlessly
spoke, the only word Helene understood, the word she heard again and again, buzzing
around her, the word that invaded her waking moments and her dreams:
‘Millions…millions…millions.”
ccxv
The setting and characters of David Golder reflect her
childhood, an extravagantly nouveau riche upbringing that caused Némirovsky to
experience feelings of self-loathing and distaste for her origins. In another passage from
The Wine of Solitude, Némirovsky emphasizes the nouveau riche materialism she so
despised growing up:
Helene sat down at her place, next to Mademoiselle Rose. The dining table was
weighed down by heavy silver place settings, bought at auction, for the old
aristocracy had managed to lose all its money and was selling just about
everything it owned to the newly wealthy businessmen. ‘Everything in this house
is second-hand, like in a thieves den,’ mused Helene; the heavy silver pieces came
from various sales; they hadn’t bothered to remove the initials, coronets, or family
crests that decorated them; only their weight interested the Karols.
ccxvi

A photograph from a childhood vacation in Nice also reveals how closely her
youth mirrors the people and places in David Golder:
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In a photograph from that period, probably taken in a large hotel in Nice, Anna
[Némirovsky’s mother] can be seen with bare arms, several necklaces adorning a
bosom sheathed in pearl-white, tight-lipped, with a moon-like complexion, a
smug expression, and a drink in her hand. Leonid [Némirovsky’s father], in a
dinner-jacket with shiny lapels, wizened and looking as if he’s seen it all before,
is holding a cigarette. He appears indifferent to the male escort, with his
detachable collar, fine moustache and beaming smile, who is probably playing
footsie with his wife.
ccxvii

As Jonathan Weiss explains, Némirovsky’s ambivalent attitude towards
Jewishness in David Golder reflects aspects of her own personal dilemma. He writes: “In
creating a protagonist who is part and parcel of this world and at the same time critical of
it, she reveals her own dichotomy. Firmly rooted in the world of her parents, married to a
Russian Jew, Irène is torn between a rejection of this world…and the certainty that she
will never be able to escape her origins.”
ccxviii
Interestingly, the Jewish characters in David
Golder never question their own identity as Jews, or their assimilatory status. David
Golder never wonders ‘what does it mean for me to be a Jew?’ let alone ‘what does it
mean to be a Jew in modern Europe?’ But, as Susan Suleiman explains, the reader is
prompted to do so, and Némirovsky’s rather unflinching views on that subject are
precisely the reason why some readers find the novel “anti-Semitic.”
ccxix

Additionally, as Suleiman suggests, instead of claiming, as many critics have
done
ccxx
that Némirovsky’s ambivalence towards her origins, which then spills over into
her fiction, evidences her as a self-hating Jew, she argues how the term is reductive and
does no work in helping us attain a deeper understanding of Némirovsky’s relationship to
her Jewishness. Suleiman pointedly asks why Némirovsky’s supposed anti-Semitism and
“self-hatred” arouses such strong emotions and heated debate, especially among Jewish
readers, now and then?
ccxxi
The answer, she explains, proves much more complex than a
surface reading of certain Jewish characters in Némirovsky’s work, but suggests how the
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passionate critical response “concerns ambiguities and dilemmas of Jewish identity in
modern times, both before and after the Holocaust, in the U.S. and in Europe,” and
emphasizes the differences between pre-Holocaust and post-Holocaust definitions of anti-
Semitism and Jewish identity.
ccxxii

Suleiman then deconstructs the contemporary usage of the term, taken from
Sander Gilman’s 1986 book entitled Jewish Self-Hatred, which I think is helpful to our
understanding of Némirovsky. Gilman explains the term as a psychological “structure of
self-hatred,” which can be observed in any group that is marginalized and devalued by
society due to race, nationality, gender, sexuality, etc. Self-hatred, as Gilman explains it,
“is a process in which the member of a devalued group internalizes the negative
stereotypes by which the majority culture defines the group and seeks to distinguish
himself or herself from those stereotypes as an ‘exception.’ Thus, in Jewish self-hatred,
Gilman writes: “Jews see the dominant society seeing them and… project their anxiety
about this manner of being seen onto other Jews as a means of externalizing their own
status anxiety.” This projection is a form of splitting: the self-hating Jews seeks to make
himself into a ‘good’ or exceptional Jew who is different from the stereotypical ‘bad’
Jew.
ccxxiii
Suleiman explains how the analytical concept of self-hatred is a psychological
phenomenon that can be useful when looking at marginalized groups, but that in
contemporary cultural discourse, and even in critical discourse, it has been wrongly used
as an accusation, pitting the “good” Jews against the “bad” Jews for not being “Jewish
enough” or for not “owning” their Jewishness, which ironically, recreates the same kind
of splitting that the concept of self-hatred seeks to address. Suleiman describes the
problem of branding Némirovsky as a “self-hating Jew”:
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It’s as if the accuser were saying: ‘Némirovsky —or Franz Kafka or Gertrude
Stein or Hannah Arendt or Philip Roth or Isaac Babel, among the greats of the
20
th
century who have been called that—is a self-hating Jew, but I am not. Such
splitting excludes precisely the possibility of ambiguity and ambivalence,
concepts I find more useful in discussing psychological attitudes toward
Jewishness, or any other minority group identity in relation to the mainstream.
ccxxiv

Suleiman then explains how a much more useful way of examining the nuances in
Némirovsky’s work in regards to Jewish identity is by looking at the historically rich
term the “Jewish Question,” and how this question is handled in Némirovsky’s fiction,
particularly the fiction that deals with Jewish protagonists (which amounts to about a
quarter of her work). Before the Nazis coopted the term and provided their answer—the
final solution—the term first appeared in public discourse in Germany with the
publication of Bruno Bauer’s book by that title in 1843 to which Marx responded with his
own essay with the same title a year later. The question of what to think of the Jews, and
what to do with the Jews, only appeared relevant after their emancipation and
assimilation into the mainstream cultural life of Germany and its surrounding nation
states. Up until this point, as discussed in Chapter 1, Jews were relegated to confined
geographical locations, known as the shtetl in rural areas or the ghetto in urban centers.
Because they were physically isolated from the mainstream population, and also because
they dressed differently, spoke a language (Yiddish) other than the one spoken by the
host culture, and generally tended not to mix with the gentile majority population, Jews
were easy to identify, and also easy to classify. After the advent of assimilation, the social
and cultural parameters of defining what it meant to be Jewish turned blurry and it
became harder and harder to determine a person’s Jewishness from the outside looking
in, as well as harder for Jews to determine the nature of their own Jewishness (from the
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inside looking out at the majority culture). What the Jewish question put into question,
Suleiman clarifies, “was precisely the trustworthiness of Jews as members of the nation.
Bauer claimed that even acculturated Jews didn’t really want to be fully ‘absorbed’ into
the Christian mainstream, clinging to their ‘illusory’ Jewishness, while Marx claimed that
Jews represented the essence of capitalism and were therefore inimical to a just
society.”
ccxxv
The term took root in contemporary political discourse as an anti-Jewish
slogan, in the sense that it insisted upon the inherent alien nature of the Jews as a group in
comparison to the mainstream. It no longer became a question but a declaration that Jews,
no matter how assimilated, could never be fully French, or German, Italian or Hungarian;
essentially Jews could never fully belong to any country—they would always be viewed
as a nation within a nation, their loyalties always split and divided between their
Jewishness and their Frenchness.
ccxxvi

The Jewish question also became a question among and between Jews
themselves. For example, Theodore Herzl, subtitled his book Judenstaat (1896) as
Versuch einer modernen Losung der Judenfrage (Attempt at a Modern Solution of the
Jewish Question) in which he argues for the necessity of a separate Jewish state. His
argument coincides with those of anti-Semites who believed Jews were inherently unable
to assimilate into Western European culture. But for many Jews who had no desire to
leave their European homelands, as in Némirovsky’s case, they either denied the
existence of the “Jewish Question” altogether, ignoring it as an anti-Semitic invention, or
else it became for them, as Suleiman explains, “a question of individual identity, often
experienced as a feeling of estrangement both from the non-Jewish mainstream and from
other Jews, who themselves came in many varieties.”
ccxxvii
Suleiman then cites an example
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that is particularly illuminating in terms of how acculturated Jews dealt with this question
on an individual level. In response to a 1917 survey conducted in Hungary (during the
“Golden Age” of Hungarian Jewry), put out by the scholarly journal Huszadik Szazad
(Twentieth Century), which ran a special issue on “The Jewish Question in Hungary,”
poet and artist Anna Lesznai insisted not on the social but the psychological aspects of
the “Jewish problem.” Lesznai, similar to Némirovsky, came from a wealthy Jewish
family and was a member for the successful and assimilated Jewish elite, yet she wrote in
her response: “The Jewish problem exists even when a person of Jewish origin is sitting
alone in his room. It exists not only in the relations between a Jewish individual and
Hungarian society. The seriousness of the problem lies in that the Jew feels like a ‘Jew’
for himself.”
ccxxviii
The fact that the “Jewish question” posed a psychological dilemma for
every individual Jew is echoed by the response from various Jewish intellectuals writing
during this time period, as discussed in Chapter 1, including Hannah Arendt, Walter
Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, Franz Kafka and a host of others, all offering various
approaches to dealing with the nuances and ambiguities of Jewish identity. Arendt did not
believe in individual solutions to the “Jewish question,” but rather expressed the Zionist
view: “From the ‘disgrace’ of being a Jew there is but one escape—to fight for the honor
of the Jewish people as a whole.”
ccxxix
Despite Arendt’s belief that Jews should respond
collectively by establishing a Jewish homeland, she also offers sensitive insights into the
plight of assimilated Jews in her essay “We Refugees” in which she refers to the
“hopeless sadness of assimilationists,” based on her experience in Nazi Germany. But as
Suleiman rightly points out:
Whatever one may think of the collective solution, I believe that most Jewish
writers in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, and many Jewish
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writers in Europe and the United States today, grapple with issues of Jewish
identity in existential and individual terms. If for anti-Semites, the ‘Jewish
question’ was summed up as ‘What shall we do with the Jews?’ for individual
Jews the question often appeared—and continues to appear—as a form of inner
division and as a personal dilemma, most strikingly summed up in Kafka’s
famous question to himself: ‘What have I in common with the Jews? I have
hardly anything in common with myself…
ccxxx

As we see in Némirovsky’s fiction, the Jewish question concerned her on a
personal, individual level. Given her unique and somewhat isolated position as a White
Russian Jewish immigrant in the French literary scene, it isn’t surprising that she failed to
find comfort in collective solutions to the Jewish question, but rather strove to define
Jewishness on her own terms. Why was Némirovsky’s social position so unique that she
failed to find a sense of community, literary or otherwise, with other Jews? She was a
“foreign Jew from the East,” but not an Ostjude in the typical sense because she was
wealthy, educated and politically conservative. At the same time, she did not chose to
marry a French, non-Jewish husband, but chose someone like herself, who was part of the
wealthy educated elite Russian Jewish émigré community. But this choice reinforced her
identity as a “foreign Jew” whereas other Russian emigrant writers, like Nathalie Sarraute
or Elsa Triolet, married non-Jewish Frenchmen.
ccxxxi
Because of her socio-economic
status, she did not harbor the typically leftist leanings of her contemporaries, but instead
she “lived a life of bourgeois ease and comfort; her aspiration, in literature as well as life,
was to be a respected member of the establishment—her idea was the Academie
Francaise, not the avant-garde.”
ccxxxii

Malinovich also explains how the categories of Parisian Jewish society during the
interwar years were blurred and often hard to define. She cites how even the most
acculturated and educated foreign-born Jews coming to Paris from other urban centers
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were not easily accepted into the inner circle of the French Jewish establishment, let
alone the majority culture of Catholic France. She describes the three main groups of
Jews in Paris during this time: French Jews (native born Jews), Oriental Jews (Sephardi
Jews from the former Ottoman Empire), and “foreign” Jews (immigrants from Eastern
Europe). But even more demarcations existed within these groups. For example, many
“foreign” Jews who had achieved considerable social and economic success very much
desired to distinguish themselves from the newly arrived shtetl Jews from the East, many
of whom were barely surviving in the poorest neighborhoods in Paris.
ccxxxiii
At the same
time, despite the success of this “immigrant elite,” many of whom had settled in Paris
from 1910 onwards, they were not fully accepted by the French Jewish establishment, as
evidenced by the fact that they could not serve on the Consistory council until 1939.
ccxxxiv

Where does Némirovsky fit in here? As Kershaw emphasizes, not only as a
Jewish writer did she not quite fit into these categories, but as a Russian writer
Némirovsky was diametrically opposed, in both form and content, to the community of
Russian émigré artists in Paris. Kershaw explains how their aesthetic project was to
affirm an ‘authentic’ Russian cultural identity in exile in relation to the host culture in
that “they modeled their situation as a state of cultural crisis, alienation, solitude, and
anxiety resulting from the social turmoil that marked their lives. This interpretation of
their cultural situation motivated their ‘modernist’ refusal of ‘traditional’ literature. By
contrast, Némirovsky modeled her exilic experience as a rejection of crisis and thus
positively assimilated the ‘traditional literature’ of the host culture.”
ccxxxv
Even though
Némirovsky was anti-Bolshevik, similar to the Russian émigré community, she had no
interest in their aesthetic project, and did not partake in the debates of Le Studio Franco-
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Russe.
ccxxxvi
Stylistically she had more in common with the French literary tradition as
opposed to Russian traditions, and culturally she did not share the collective identity of
the Russian émigré writers as a “society in exile.”
ccxxxvii
And, as Suleiman explains,
despite her class allegiance and political leanings, which would have normally placed her
in the category of native French Jews who were rooted and established in French society,
she did not really belong to this category either given the fact that she was a recent
immigrant to France and not French.
But the question of why Némirovsky failed to request French citizenship in the
20s when it was much easier to obtain than in the late 30s (when she requested it twice
and each time, was denied) remains a puzzling one in terms of her life choices. The lack
of French nationality made her vulnerable during the war but even before that it placed
her in an ambiguous position.
ccxxxviii
Némirovsky’s in-between ambivalent position—not
really a French Jew, not really a newly arrived “foreign” Jew in the typical sense, lends
her a particularly acute vision on Jewish life in France, as she is both an insider and an
outsider to that world. It also influenced her creative choices because she rarely portrays
French Jews in her fiction with the exception of one character from the short story
Fraternité (1937). All the other Jewish figures in her writing are more or less recent
arrivals in France who, despite having assimilated into French society, spent a childhood
in Odessa or some other city in the East. As Suleiman reiterates, “[Némirovsky’s Jewish
characters] are at best newly rich, foreigners and outsiders who rarely have any social
contact with French people, including French Jews.”
ccxxxix

Némirovsky’s particularly unique social position influenced her views on
assimilation and the Jewish question, a view that is most significantly expressed in two of
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her later works written in the late 1930s. These two examples, Fraternité (1937), and The
Dogs and the Wolves (1940) explicitly interrogate what it means to be Jewish, a question
that is asked by the characters themselves, reflecting Némirovsky’s own internal dilemma
on the issue. For the purposes of this project, I will focus on The Dogs and the Wolves as
our primary example of Némirovsky’s response to her Jewish-French identity.
In The Dogs and The Wolves (1940), written eleven years after David Golder,
Némirovsky revisits the Jewish Question, but this time she offers a much more nuanced
and sympathetic view of the problem given how she inhabits multiple points of view,
demonstrating how each type of Jew views another type of Jew, as well as the non-Jewish
French host culture, with suspicion and antipathy, concluding how in this historical
moment, the possibility for true assimilation and acceptance fails to become a reality.
Némirovsky’s ability to see the problem of Jewish identity from all sides—the high
society circles of the Parisian French elite, the wealthy acculturated French Jews, and the
newly arrived poor Jews—and to so acutely portray the nuances inherent in the
relationships among and between these factions of Jewish and non-Jewish society reflects
her own in-between social position as both insider and outsider, Jew and non-Jew,
Russian and French, the immigrant and established French novelist.
The novel’s first lines set up a false dichotomy, created by the illusion of class
and wealth, between the “unsavory Jews…the tenants of sordid little shops, the
vagabonds, the people whose children rolled in the mud, spoke only Yiddish and wore
ragged clothes” and the wealthy Jews, who lived in beautiful villas “far, far away, where
lime trees crowned the tops of the hills, and important Russian officials and members of
the Polish nobility had their houses.”
ccxl
This Ukrainian city is home to two distantly
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related Jewish families, the Sinners. The wealthy Sinners live high up in the hills, and
their poor relatives live down below, like a Medieval painting in which the “damned were
at the bottom…and at the top was the realm of the blessed.”
ccxli
The two sides of the
family eventually move to Paris; the wealthy Sinners quickly assimilate and intermarry
into French Catholic society, while their poor relations, Ada and Ben, remain perpetual
outsiders who are eventually exiled from France.
Némirovsky begins her examination of the relationship between the wealthy
acculturated Jews and the “unsavory” poor Jews before both sides of the family move to
Paris. Still in the Ukraine, the wealthy Sinners give a birthday party for their young son,
Harry. Ada, his distant cousin, attends the party and Harry, upon meeting her, feels a
deep sense of repulsion and fear:
Harry raised his eyes and recognized the child he had seen two years before,
covered in dust, her hair disheveled, her hands scratched. She surged out of the
horrible, sordid world, a world of dirt, sweat and blood, far removed yet, despite
everything, mysteriously, terrifyingly linked to him. His entire body bristled as if
he were a little dog in a forest who was well fed and cared for and who hears the
hungry cry of the wolves, his savage brothers…If he was trembling as he stood
opposite her, it was not because she represented poverty to him, but because she
represented unhappiness: a kind of unhappiness that was strangely, terrifyingly
contagious, the way diseases can be contagious.
ccxlii

And Ada, sensing Harry’s rejection of her, feels “at that instant, extreme hatred
and extreme love… creating a feeling so violent, so contradictory, so upsetting, that she
felt as if she had been wrenched in two.”
ccxliii
Némirovsky continues to tackle these
feelings of both repulsion and attraction from the standpoint of Harry, returning to his
point of view: “But Harry’s emotions weren’t simple either: he was afraid of Ada and
attracted to her at the same time. He looked at her with passionate, sad curiosity. For a
second, his attraction to her was so strong that he said, ‘I’m very sorry.’”
ccxliv
In this
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passage, which bears the novel’s title, Némirovsky conveys the confused and
complicated sense of belonging and also not belonging within the Jewish community due
to socio-economic differences, which appear quite stark even before both sides of the
family emigrate to Paris, a move that adds yet another layer of difference between them.
Later on, once the wealthy Sinners have moved to Paris and after years of living
there as established members of the Parisian Jewish elite, Harry’s mother reflects on how
despite all this, certain foreign traits cannot be expunged, even with time and education:
“Years of living in France had not blotted out their foreign accent, but had refashioned it:
they no longer rolled their ‘r’s the way Russians normally did, but pronounced them more
gutturally, which gave a strange Parisian sound to their extremely refined, polite,
delightful phrases. Some even called it ‘Slavic charm,’ in the most well-meaning
way.”
ccxlv
A few pages later, Némirovsky illustrates how difficult it is to fully escape
one’s linguistic ties, despite decades of assimilation: “[Harry’s mother] sighed to herself
in Russian: ‘God, oh, God!’ At times of extreme emotion, she couldn’t find the words in
French; she suddenly made mistakes when she spoke—she, who had learned French from
a Parisian since she was three years old…it was undeniable that when upset, it was hard
to remember all the rules of French grammar and syntax; they were so difficult.”
ccxlvi
Here
Némirovsky demonstrates how even highly-acculturated immigrants, such as herself,
never really lose their Slavic exoticism in the eyes of the “well-meaning” French and a
few pages later, she deconstructs the gradations of assimilation between second
generation and third generation wealthy Jews of the same cultural subset. Madame Sinner
compares herself to her sister-in-laws and how even among them, there is rivalry and a
desire to be more refined, more French, more restrained, less outwardly Jewish, a quality
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that is theoretically mastered by repressing one’s emotions. In reaction to the news that
her son Harry has proposed to a French woman, Madame Sinner:
…crumpled her fine pink handkerchief and pressed it nervously to her lips and
nose. She had been extremely well brought up and knew that one mustn’t express
sadness and disappointment by shouting or swearing, but she was, in spite of
everything, from a lower social class than her sisters-in-law, wealthy for only two
generations while the Sinners had been wealthy for three. She still had not learned
how to display her pain as they could, with trembling lips and a disdainful toss of
the head … [she] had not attained such heights of refinement: she still found it
necessary to wring her bejeweled hands, blink her eyes, groan, sigh, in a word,
display in the most spectacular manner the feelings that were oppressing her,
feelings that were deep and uncomplicated.
ccxlvii

Instead of feeling pleased that her son has achieved the height of the assimilation
fantasy by marrying into an old established French Catholic family, Madame Sinner
experiences intense anxiety that marrying outside his religion, outside his cultural and
ethnic circle, will inevitably cause him great unhappiness. In an unanticipated switch of
naming who is “foreign” and who is not, Némirovsky demonstrates how Madame Sinner
views the Catholic French girl as “foreign” as opposed to her son, who is technically the
foreigner here. In reflecting on her own life and marriage, she thinks: “But most
importantly, she and her husband spoke the same language, more or less understood one
another, while this young woman, though certainly pretty and from a good family, this
young woman was a foreigner. And how was it possible to understand the soul of the
French?”
ccxlviii

And of course, the girl’s father, Delarcher, feels that the Sinners are the
foreigners, incomprehensible and ambiguous. Here Némirovsky adroitly assumes the
French Catholic point of view when assessing these wealthy assimilated Jews: “These
foreigners who came from goodness knows where were so arrogant: you offered them
hospitality and they marched into your house like conquerors…No, such a marriage was
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not desirable…Besides, it was not simply a question of his being Jewish; he was a
foreigner. One does not marry, one does not allow a foreigner into the family.”
ccxlix
He
then makes the distinction between different kinds of foreigners—not all foreigners are
foreign in the same way—apparently, “An Anglo-Saxon or someone from the
Mediterranean was still acceptable” whereas “everything that came from the East aroused
insurmountable mistrust within him. Slavonic, Levantine, Jewish—he didn’t know which
of these terms disgusted him the most. There was nothing you could count on, nothing
solid…”
ccl

Ironically, towards the end of the novel, when Madame Sinner realizes her son
loves Ada, their poor distant cousin from the same Ukranian town, she feels this is far
worse than Harry marrying a French woman: “A simple girl from the slums! It’s the
worst thing that could possibly happen. It’s what I’ve feared all my life. I wanted to save
him from that poverty, that misery, that curse! But it was all in vain! And now, he’s sunk
down to their level…”
ccli
Given the Sinners precarious social position in French society,
there is no good match for her son—everyone is the foreign “Other.” A woman from their
own family, from their own Ukranian town, poses more of a threat to their carefully
constructed identity as assimilated wealthy Jews (as opposed to the “undesirable” shtetl
Jews) when compared to a woman who is truly different from them, being both Catholic
and French. The assimilated Jew’s abhorrence towards his poorer and less refined
relations is a familiar trope in Jewish culture at the time, and such relationships came
under particular stress beginning in the early 1880s with the influx of Jewish immigrants
from Eastern Europe, a trend that continued in increasing numbers after World War I. As
Suleiman clarifies: “The arrival of these ‘Juifs de l’Est’ most of them poor, Yiddish-
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speaking, and either much more religions or much more left-wing in their politics than
French Jews, not only elicited waves of anti-Semitism in France but also created
problems for established French Jews who sought to distance themselves from the new
immigrants.”
cclii
The arriving flood of these poor Eastern European Jewish immigrants,
combined with the Dreyfus Affair at the end of the 19th century, caused middle-class and
upper-class French Jews to intensely doubt their long-held belief that there was no
problem about being both French and Jewish. Suleiman further explains how such
divisions within the French Jewish community created “ambiguities of naming” in terms
of who was “foreign” and who was not, who was “desirable” and who was not. She
writes:
Long-established French Jews, most of whom were middle class, usually referred
to themselves as ‘Israelites;’ the more recent arrivals, wherever they came from,
were ‘Juifs.’ The question of how to name oneself, or other Jews, became the
theme of quite a lot of writing during the interwar years. In 1930 Edmond Cahen,
who was the editor of the ‘reform’ Jewish journal, Archives Israelites, published a
novel titled Juif, non!...Israelite, whose title says it all—but within the text,
assimilated middle-class Jews were occasionally referred to as ‘Juifs,’ which
shows how uncertain the division was.
ccliii

Not only in her fiction but also in her life Némirovsky illustrates the desire of
upper-class acculturated Jews to distance themselves from “Juifs de l’Est,” for fear of
being lumped in together with them after having spent generations trying to escape such
an identification. Fearing deportation in 1942, in a desperate letter she sent to the head of
France’s collaborationist Vichy regime, Marshal Philippe Pétain, she writes: “I’ve
learned that your government had decided to take measures against stateless people…I
am unable to believe, Monsieur le Marshal, that no distinction whatsoever can be made
between undesirables and those honorable foreigners who have received royal hospitality
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from France but have conscientiously made every effort to deserve it.”
ccliv
Clearly
Némirovsky believed herself to be one of the “honorable” as opposed to “undesirable”
foreigners, but the crush of Fascism did not care for such imagined distinctions.
Interestingly, even though in this letter Némirovsky pleads these distinctions exist, she
also suggests how such distinctions are ultimately meaningless in an eerily prophetic
passage from the point of view of Ben, one of the “undesirable” Jews, in The Dogs and
the Wolves. At the novel’s climax, Harry, the acculturated wealthy Jew from the East,
comes to blows with his cousin, Ben, the poor Jew from the East, because they both love
Ada. Némirovsky illustrates Ben’s disgust for Harry’s trained upper-class civility, as well
as Harry’s disgust for Ben’s ghetto ways:
When [Ben] heard the way Harry said ‘Ada,’ he flew into a rage. It was the
French pronunciation, with the accent on the last letter, which Ben found affected
and almost insulting. He shouted out his fury in curses and insults; the words he
spoke were interspersed with Yiddish and Russian: Harry barely understood them.
To Harry, there was something repugnant and grotesque in the way he swore,
gesticulating wildly in an outburst of hatred… These howls of passion, these
frenzied calls to a vengeful god came from a different world.
cclv

After Harry tells Ben to stop shouting and cursing, they aren’t in the ghetto any
more, Ben’s response proves eerily perceptive in terms of how the “final solution” to the
Jewish Question disregarded distinctions of wealth, social status or nationality, a startling
reality Némirovsky appears aware of here: “You look down on us from on high, who
despise us, who refuse to have anything in common with Jewish scum. Wait a bit! Just
wait! You’ll be considered part of that scum again one day. And you’ll be dragged back
into it, you who got out, you who thought you’d escaped.”
cclvi

Perhaps Némirovsky, through the character of Harry, indicates herself as
maintaining the false illusion of being better than those poor, newly arrived Jewish
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immigrants (the Juifs). But the idea that Irène and her family believed they were better
than the typical Juif is later evidenced in a frantic letter her husband Michel Epstein
wrote to the German ambassador of occupied France, Otto Abetz, in an attempt to save
Irène after she was deported on July 13, 1942. He writes:
In none of her books (which moreover have not been banned by the occupying
authorities), will you find a single word against Germany and, even though my
wife is of Jewish descent, she does not speak of the Jews with any affection…If I
may also take the liberty of pointing out to you that my wife has always avoided
belonging to any political party…and that the newspaper she contributed to as a
novelist, Gringoire, whose editor is H.de Carbuccia, has certainly never been
well-disposed towards either the Jews or the Communists.
cclvii

And yet, despite her husband’s protestations that she reserves no special sympathy
for Jews and, in fact, represents Jews in quite an unsympathetic light, her fiction indicates
how she was aware that such arbitrary distinctions among different kinds of Jews and
foreigners could dissolve in an instant.
But, regardless of her ability to inhabit multiple points of view, thus challenging
the idea of who really is the “foreigner,” showing how as individuals we collectively
define the “Other” from our own vantage point of belonging, in The Dogs and the
Wolves, Némirovsky still defines Jews in racialist terms who share a collective history of
negation, suffering and exile as well as a particular sensibility, characterized as anxious
and fatalistic. Regardless of how assimilated, the Jew is represented as the eternal Other,
often conflated with the decadent and mysterious East. In this novel, Orientalizing the
Jew is another way Némirovsky names their difference and increases their foreignness in
juxtaposition with the host culture. But at the same time, she also critiques the ways in
which the host culture exoticizes the Jew, perhaps as a reflection of her own experiences
as a foreigner from the East. And despite how the novel seems to argue that Jewishness is
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a trait that cannot be expunged no matter how assimilated one becomes, the ending offers
a redemptive and more hopeful answer to the “Jewish question.”
In numerous instances throughout The Dogs and The Wolves, Némirovsky depicts
Jews as having a particular Jewish essence, reflected as external difference. When first
depicting Ada’s family, who’s profession is buying and selling sugar and other goods on
the behalf of others, Némirovsky writes, “They begged, they pleaded, they belittled their
rivals’ goods; they moaned, they lied…You could tell who they were by their rapid
speech, their gestures, the way they hurried, their tenacity, and by the many other
qualities unique to them.”
cclviii
Némirovsky reflects the current discourse on Jewish
identity at the time, which emphasizes Jewish difference as an internal essence translated
into external markings. Walter Rathenau, a self-proclaimed Jew, in his ironically titled
editorial “Hear, O Israel!” (1897) also harps on the physical traits of Jews to a presumed
Jewish reader: “Look at yourselves in the mirror!...Nothing can unfortunately be done
about the fact that all of you look frighteningly alike,” urging Jews to recognize “your
unathletic build, your narrow shoulders, your clumsy feet, your sloppy roundish
shape…two thousand years of misery cannot but leave marks too deep to be washed
away by eau de cologne.”
cclix
The same tendency to define Jews by identifiable
characteristics is supported by the radical anarchist Gustav Landauer, convinced that he
could identify fellow Jews just by looking at them, and Ludwig Strauss states, “The
obvious bodily differences between Jews and non-Jewish Germans is necessarily
connected to an inner difference, a dissimilarity in national substance.”
cclx

Némirovsky also reiterates particular Jewish stereotypes in which Jews are
depicted as a cursed yet arrogant people, economic exploiters, and the strange, foreign
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Other par excellence. Adrift in Paris, Ada loves her cousin Harry but he is unattainable
due to his elevated social status. Reflecting on her longing, Ada concludes: “We are such
a hungry race, starving for so long that reality is not enough to satisfy us. We must have
the impossible.”
cclxi
Ada re-inscribes the myth of “Jewish arrogance,” (springing from
Jews refusal to accept Christ) as well as pointing to how a history of negation and lack
has created a group of people who are born parvenus, always seeking and grasping for
more, while at the same time arrogantly bold in what they desire, as if such desire has no
limit. Ada continues to describe this desire as “something so vast, such an abundance of
happiness that nothing can possibly satisfy [it],” reinforcing the idea that Jewishness is
synonymous with excess, in this case an excess of emotive desire, and this desire spills
over the boundaries of what is considered acceptable to the Christian majority.
cclxii

When discussing the wealthy side of the Sinner family, Ben states that all Jews,
despite how Europeanized they become, are united by suffering and displacement:
“Because when all is said and done, those Sinners, with their racing stables and famous
art collections, had fathers who were kids like me: starving, beaten, humiliated. And that
creates a bond that is never forgotten…”
cclxiii
A few pages later, Ben reflects on how Jews,
himself included, have an innate proclivity for conning people in business, a natural
predisposition for economic exploitation; “[Ben] had already conned so many
others…Perhaps his race also played a part? Perhaps he felt, like all Jews, that vague and
slightly frightening feeling of carrying within oneself a past that was heavier than the past
of most men. At times when someone else might need to learn something, he, Ben, was
remembering it—at least, that’s what he believed.”
cclxiv
What makes this past heavy for
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Némirovsky is her belief that Jewishness is a history of humiliation, and in order to
survive one must resort to economic exploitation, a persistent image she reiterates here.
Némirovsky also echoes Marr’s 1873 definition of the Jew as a Semite
cclxv

meaning alien, Oriental, inherently non-Western, and in opposition to the Christian Aryan
“spirit.” By Orientalizing Jews in this novel, she further compounds their Otherness from
Western European culture. For example, when describing the wealthy patriarchs of the
Sinner family who reside in Paris, but originally emigrated from the Ukraine,
Némirovsky uses familiar Orientalizing tropes employed by Western writers, such as
Flaubert and Loti, when viewing the East, which is often represented as decadent and
languid, as well as morally ambiguous. Némirovsky paints the Sinner patriarchs as men
who rise late and after “scrubbing their old delicate bodies [they] swathed their dry
carcasses in dressing gowns through the richness of their colours and the perfection of
their cut were the triumph of two combined arts: the art of the Orient and the art of
London.”
cclxvi
Clothed in these “gold and scarlet dressing gowns” the Sinners drink
Turkish coffee while servants place down fresh fruit to purify their “sluggish blood.”
Invoking a “strange feeling of drowsiness…the presence of these old men acted…like a
drug; their slow gestures and monotonous voices cast a sort of spell,”
cclxvii
implying that
the seductive languor of the East has been successfully transplanted into their Parisian
apartment, the atmosphere of which also points to the East, with the “reddish darkness of
the stuffy dining room…[infused with] the vague aroma of spices and ginger.”
cclxviii

As if the conflation of the Jew with the Orient is not already explicit, Némirovsky
adds how “they both had large, almond shaped eyes, like the young men in Persian
miniatures.”
cclxix
The Sinner patriarchs are also mysteriously investing in foreign
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companies, and the ones located in the East give Harry, their assimilated grandson and
heir to the fortune, the greatest sense of unease due to the enlarged profits being entirely
out of proportion.
cclxx
And yet, when he asks them about their dealings, Harry gets no
direct response from them, only a sly smile that “appeared and disappeared from his lips
like a soft ripple on the murky water of a lake.”
cclxxi
Again, Némirovsky is representing
the Jew as an economically untrustworthy and purposefully cagey figure, as well as lazy
and decadent.
She also emphasizes this representation from the point of view of Delarcher,
Harry’s French Catholic father-in-law, as he contemplates his Jewish in-laws:
He wasn’t actually xenophobic, no…yet everything that came from the East
aroused insurmountable mistrust within him. Slavonic, Levantine, Jewish—he
didn’t know which of these terms disgusted him the most. There was nothing you
could count on, nothing solid…They would suddenly appear at your side, with
that little ironic, anguished smile so unique to their race. He disliked everything
about the Sinners’ house. Luxurious but in bad taste…the mother, that fat Jewess
covered in jewelry! The aunts, coy, affected, reading Nietzsche…[They were]
ambiguous, incomprehensible.
cclxxii

The question remains as to why Némirovsky, an assimilated Jew from the East
herself, would mark Jewish difference to such an extent in her fiction, risking the hard-
won acceptance of her French peers. At one point in The Dogs and The Wolves, she
reveals a possible answer from the point of view of Harry: “Like all Jews, he was more
sharply, more sadly scandalized than a Christian by the faults that were specifically
Jewish.”
cclxxiii
Perhaps she is motivated by the desire to detach herself from the Jew as
“Other,” in that such unfavorable depictions of Jews would evidence her difference from
them, as if the ability to otherize Jews somehow alleviates her from this otherness.
Certainly, she struggled with her Jewish identity, evident in her veiled autobiography,
The Wine of Solitude (1935), “I spent my life fighting an odious blood, but it is inside of
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me.”
cclxxiv
But at the same time, she also believed that her highly assimilated status in
French society, along with her conversion to Catholicism, exempted her from her
origins.
cclxxv

But Némirovsky refuses to offer the reader a black and white picture of how these
various relationships were navigated among and between Jews and between Jews and the
French Catholic majority. In The Dogs and the Wolves, Némirovsky also criticizes how
French society views foreign Jews. When Harry brings his French wife and their French
friends to visit Ada in her studio, she describes the scene: “They gathered around her
easel. Feelings of curiosity, excellent intentions, the desire to shine, to be amused, to have
their spirits soar, rushed through them, drove them towards Ada, inspired exclamations of
admiration, as if they were at a zoo, studying a rare, wild animal in its cage.”
cclxxvi
The
French ask Ada how old she is, and then, shocked by her youth, they exclaim, “What you
do is so sincere, ingenuous, barbaric! That’s what’s so beautiful!”
cclxxvii
Perhaps the way
in which Ada is treated here, as a “rare, wild animal in its cage” reflects the way in which
Irène was perceived by the French public upon the publication of her first novel David
Golder at the age of 26. Her publisher Grasset capitalized off the marketability that she
was a young Jewish woman from the East, lying about her age to make her appear even
younger—23 instead of 26. The enhancement of her literary persona created a kind of
“literary happening,” which projected Némirovsky from the fringes of Parisian literary
society onto center stage, but through the character of Ada, Némirovsky also critiques the
overblown attention she received as a result of her exotic origins.
Némirovsky’s contradictory position, at once a Jew in the blood, as she writes, as
well as never quite at home within her fantasy of assimilation (which came to an end in
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1942 when taken to Auschwitz, she died not long after her arrival there), her life and
work represent the inability of these two selves to cohere. She best captures her dilemma
in the character of Harry, the wealthy, highly-assimilated Jew, who realizes that he would
“forever be rejected by both sides, endlessly snubbed by each”
cclxxviii
and despite his
efforts to render his Jewishness invisible, he realizes, while “rubbing his beautiful hands
together, he swayed gently in the darkness, just as so many moneychangers standing
behind their counters, just as countless rabbis bent over their books, just as a multitude of
immigrants standing on the bridges of innumerable boats had done before him. And, like
them, he felt like an outsider, lost and alone.”
cclxxix

But, in terms of Némirovsky’s consideration of Jewish identity, there is never one
answer, never one ending. Even as Harry suffers at the end of the novel, forever unhappy
and uncomfortable in his own Jewish skin—“He felt as if some stranger’s body had been
attached to his own and that he would never succeed in tearing it away without
destroying his own flesh”
cclxxx
—there is Ada, who offers a more hopeful vision of the
future. Similar to David Golder, she returns to her origins, to a “small country in Eastern
Europe” where, the next spring, she gives birth to a son.
cclxxxi
Here, Ada is in the company
of other displaced persons, exiles and refugees who forge their own community of
outsiders. About to give birth, she is surrounded by warmth and a sense of abundance;
she also has access to the medical expertise of all the educated refugees who are staying
in the same hotel:
The room was warm, the swaddling clothes and cradle were all ready, and they
weren’t short of medical assistance: the hotel was full of refugees from central
Europe, the majority of whom were medical students and midwives. Ada didn’t
know anyone, or so she thought, but everyone knew about her condition, and she
was more fussed over and spoiled on that day than she’d been in all her life: they
brought her apples, cushions for her and the baby, Viennese pastries, honey-
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covered nuts that were a Jewish specialty, little flasks of eau de cologne.
cclxxxii

And unlike Harry, whose marriage ends because his French Catholic wife accuses
their son of carrying on certain physical and psychological traits that she claims are
inherently Jewish, Ada’s son holds the promise of not being weighed down by anyone
else’s history. When he is born, Ada “studied him intently but could find no features she
recognized” because “He didn’t look like anyone in particular.”
cclxxxiii
And, after
contemplating her child, Ada reflects on her future: “Her destiny was certainly harsh and
incomprehensible, yet without quite knowing why, she sensed that she was at the brink of
an explanation, of some truth that would suddenly shed light on the injustice of it all and
resolve the dilemma. She had no doubt that her child knew something of this truth—and
this is what made him look so old and wise.”
cclxxxiv
If not in life, then at least in her art
Némirovsky imagines a future in which Jewishness is not inscribed on the body and the
soul.
Suite Francaise (2004), on the other hand, raises questions about what
Némirovsky could imagine in terms of the “Jewish Question” in France. Given the
resounding chorus of disapproval among critics over the fact that Némirovsky does not
have any Jewish characters in Suite Francaise, I will explore some possible answers as to
why the “Jewish Question” is absent from the text. Some critics claim that the absence of
Jews in Suite Francaise evidences Némirovsky’s lack of sympathy and identification
with Jews but as Suleiman explains, nothing points to this reason given how in the spring
of 1942, while she was deep in the writing of the novel, Némirovsky walked around the
village of Issy-L’Eveque wearing the designated yellow star—“Whether she liked it or
not, she was identified as a Jew, and she made no effort to escape it.”
cclxxxv
Suleiman then
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offers what seems to be a more plausible explanation for why Némirovsky doesn’t
include Jews in her novel. Given how, by the early 1940s, she had arrived at the
conclusion that Jews would never fully feel, or be, fully accepted by the French, this
perhaps translates into the impossibility of her representing Jews ‘together with’ the
French, “as if she could not see them in the same viewfinder—or in the same story and
same history.”
cclxxxvi
Jonathan Weiss offers another conclusion—that from 1940 onward
no Jews appear in any of Némirovsky work because she had now decided to fashion
herself into an entirely French writer writing on French themes, which no longer included
the Jewish Question. He writes: “It is doubtful that the projected volumes of Suite
Francaise would have taken Jews into account; the notes Irène left behind do not reveal
any Jewish characters or any reference to deportation. After the publication of The Dogs
and the Wolves in 1940, Irène kept Jewishness out of her writing. As an author, she
continued to create for herself a purely French identity and left no trace of her origins in
her later fiction.”
cclxxxvii

Another reason, perhaps, was that while writing Suite Francaise, Némirovsky felt
the most rejected and cast out by her beloved France, and therefore used the novel as a
vehicle of criticism and, in part, revenge on the French, the same land and its peoples she
so idealized in All Our Worldly Goods only a few years earlier. In the early summer of
1942, before her deportation, a journal entry reads, without a date: “My God! What is this
country doing to me? Since it rejects me, let us think about it coldly, let us watch it lose
its honor and its life. And others, what are they to me? Empires die. Nothing is important.
Whether one looks from a mystical point of view or a personal one, it’s all the same. Let
us keep a cold head. Harden our hearts. And wait.”
cclxxxviii
Increasingly, from 1940
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onward, life for Némirovsky and her family grew more difficult. In June of 1940, after
the German occupation of Paris, the Némirovskys moved to Hotel des Voyaguers in Issy-
l’Eveque. In October of 1940, a law was passed giving Jews inferior legal and social
rights and most importantly, it defined Jewishness based on racial criteria. The
Némirovskys were classified as both Jewish and foreign, becoming “stateless” people in
the eyes of the French state, rendering their baptism certificates useless. Michel could no
longer work at the bank and the publishing houses were “Arayanizing” their staff and
authors, prohibiting Irène from being published there. More race laws were passed in
October 1940 and June 1941 stipulating that Jews could be placed under house arrest, or
deported and interned in concentration camps. Issy-l’Eveque was now in the occupied
zone and the hotel where Irène and her family were living was full of German soldiers.
Irène, her husband and her eldest daughter all openly wore the Jewish star.
cclxxxix
Even
though in Issy-I’Eveque life was still relatively calm for Jews in the summer of 1941,
Irène was aware that in Paris, round-ups continued—on July 16, 4,000 Jews were
deported, both children and adults; between August 20 and 23, 4,000 more were arrested
and the detention camp at Drancy was opened. In occupied France, Jews were no longer
allowed to own radios. And on September 5, an exhibit entitled “The Jew and France,”
went up in Paris. The catalogue reads: “Jews are at the root of all the troubles, all the
perturbations, all the conflicts, all the revolts of the modern world.”
ccxc

In 1941, in the thick of this persecution, Irène feverishly began working on Suite
Francaise. She envisioned the project as a five part novel of a thousand pages in length,
and she started to write notes while simultaneously writing the book, notes that indicate
how she no longer had any illusions about the French, loathsome in their defeat and
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collaboration, and about her own doomed fate. In the first two parts of the novel, Storm in
June and Dolce—she did not survive to write the last three parts— Némirovsky casts a
critical eye on the hypocritical and immoral nature of the French people living under
German occupation. Storm in June, Part I of Suite Francaise, Némirovsky views the
industrial middle-class with cold irony, a stark contrast to how the similar Hardelot
family is depicted in All Our Worldly Goods as a bastion of stability and abundance. In
Storm in June, the wealthy Pericand family is hypocritical to the point of satire—they
create a charitable organization just to make themselves appear virtuous but underneath
this façade, they are only concerned with their own wealth and safety. When Madame
Pericand looks at the masses of Parisians fleeing the city on foot, desperate and afraid of
the German occupation, she, who has the luxury of an automobile, says, “Do you see how
good our Lord Jesus is? Just think, we could be those miserable wretches.”
ccxci
And later
on, after making a show of handing out food to the refugees flooding her village, when
Madame Pericand realizes her own food supply is in danger of running low, Némirovsky
writes: “Christian charity, the compassion of centuries of civilization, fell from her like
useless ornaments, revealing her bare, arid soul. She needed to feed and protect her own
children. Nothing else mattered.”
ccxcii

Némirovsky also criticizes the literary world with the character Gabriel Corte, an
egomaniacal writer who is “violently collaborationist”—during the occupation, Corte is
crestfallen when he hears that his politician friend Jules Blanc has fled to Portugal: “Like
everyone who makes sure they get the most comfort and pleasure from life, Gabriel Corte
had a politician in his pocket. In exchange for excellent dinners, wonderful parties…in
exchange for a few well-placed and timely newspaper articles, he had from Jules Blanc
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thousands of small favors that make life easier.”
ccxciii
Clearly, Corte only cares for his
own personal preservation and a continuation of the luxury and comfort he enjoyed
before the war. In her representation of Gabriel Corte, Némirovsky very consciously set
out to attack the Parisian literary world, which is further indicated by the notes she made
in her notebook at the time: “Hit the writers hard…example: AC…we have never
attacked some authors, like A.B.” As Weiss explains, we cannot be entirely sure to whom
she is referring here, but “AC” could very possibly be Alphonse de Chateaubriant,
minister of education and art in the Vichy government and a great admirer of Hitler and
“A.B.” may pertain to Abel Bonnard, member of the Académie Francaise, supporter of
Petain and participant in the infamous voyage of French authors to Germany, organized
by the Reich in October 1941.
ccxciv
If criticism and revenge was her aesthetic and political
aim, then it makes sense that Jews do not appear in this novel, given how her focus is on
ordinary French people leading their small, mean lives.
But characteristic of Némirovsky, even when she decides to portray the French
living under German occupation in an uncompromising light, she still conveys a sense of
empathy when describing the torment of a young French woman, Lucile, who falls in
love with an attractive and cultivated German soldier billeted in her home— Némirovsky
is always able to see the other side and this sensitivity and acuity of vision is what
elevates her writing. Némirovsky laments in her journal, in June of 1941, when the
German soldiers, whom she and her husband have grown to know and like, leave their
village to fight the Russians: “I swear here and now never again to take out my bitterness,
no matter how justifiable, on a group of people, whatever their race, religion, convictions,
prejudices, errors. I feel sorry for these poor children. But I cannot forgive certain
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individuals, those who reject me, those who coldly abandon us, those who are prepared to
stab you in the back. Those people…if I could just get my hands on them…”
ccxcv
It makes
sense how “coldly abandoned” she felt at the end of her life, how rejected and cast out
she was made to feel by her desired native land given her intense attachment to the idea
she maintained of herself as being fully and solely French. This is why, when, in March
of 1940, for an interview with the literary magazine Les Nouvelles litteraires, when asked
who she was: a French author or a Russian author writing in French, her response is so
poignant given what we know of her fate:
I hope and I believe I am more a French than a Russian author. I spoke French
before speaking Russian. I have spent half of my childhood and all of my young
adulthood and married years in this country. I have never written anything in
Russian except for my schoolwork. I think and I even dream in French. All is so
totally amalgamated into what remains within me of my race and my native land,
that even with the best will in the world, I would be incapable of knowing where
one ends and the other begins.
ccxcvi

Joseph Roth and Franz Kafka, Jewish writers who found the Judaism of their
forefathers spiritually bankrupt, seem more interested in how the ambiguity of Jewish
identity—as a result of existing everywhere and nowhere, a history of ruptures and
national fluidity, a transportable past reliant on memory and ritual—may represent the
modern condition of containing multiple selves, a flexible, malleable selfhood resulting
in hybridity, mimicry and ambivalence. Kafka and Roth question the impact of modernity
on the subject, examining the resultant alienation and rootless despair of not being at
home in the world, and perhaps never remembering a time when one was, a condition not
limited to the “wandering Jew,” or the foreign immigrant, but applicable to all. Zadie
Smith, in her essay “F. Kafka, Everyman,” supports how Kafka’s ambivalence towards
his ethnic background perhaps reflects the universal modern question of how we are to
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define ourselves in the shifting landscape of cultural, national and sexual normativity.
She writes, “There is a sense in which Kafka’s Jewish question (‘What have I in common
with the Jews?’) has become everybody’s question, Jewish alienation the template for all
our doubts. What is Muslimness? What is femaleness? What is Polishness? What is
Englishness? These days we all find our anterior legs flailing before us.”
ccxcvii

Némirovsky seems to hope that if only she could extricate herself from her Jewish
condition, she would be healed, alleviated from her former fragmentary and stateless self,
when admitted into the abundantly “whole” reality she imagined her non-Jewish peers
enjoyed. Kafka and Roth, on the other hand, both write about the absence of such a
reality.
Joseph Roth, of a similar background to Némirovsky, was born in Galicia in 1894
and moved westward, passing through Vienna and Berlin, and experienced Paris in the
30s as the place he felt happiest.
ccxcviii
And like Némirovsky, he wrote, mainly as a
journalist, about the multitudes of refugees and displaced persons, Jews and others, in the
aftermath of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the redrawing of national
frontiers following the Treaty of Versailles in 1919
ccxcix
, but unlike Némirovsky he did not
equate Jewishness with deracination, but rather viewed the loss of a sense of “home” and
stable identity as a modern condition, which he depicts in Flight Without End (1927) and
The Emperor’s Tomb (1938). The protagonist of both novels is a wandering ambiguous
figure afloat in the shifting political and cultural landscape of post World War I,
encountering a future that never eventuates, lost to a liminal space devoid of context and
meaning—ultimately a superfluous and irrelevant man.
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If Roth subscribes to any narrative of wholeness, it is a construction of Jewishness
before it acculturated to Western European society, coupled with his nostalgia for the
Duel Monarchy of Austria-Hungry, something whose time was—or was almost gone.
ccc

Michael Hofmann describes a story that Roth often told: “An old caftaned Jewish
refugee, sitting in a train compartment, shows his ticket to the inspector. The inspector,
suspicious, thinking that perhaps he is hiding a child in his caftan to save the price of a
ticket, asks the Jew what he has in there. The Jew produces a framed portrait of Emperor
Franz Joseph.”
ccci
As Hoffman suggests, old world Judaism and the crumbling Duel
Monarchy represented to Roth something “supranational, something that contained
multitudes”
cccii
and perhaps something atemporal yet on the verge of disappearance,
resisting the onward rush of modernity despite the inability to do so.
Unlike Némirovsky who believed that her assimilated status lessened her
Jewishness and would later save her from persecution, Roth maintains no such illusions,
and instead, offers a scathing portrait of assimilated Western Jewry in his non-fiction
book, The Wandering Jews:
They fell in with Western abuses and bad habits. They assimilated. They no
longer pray in synagogues and prayer houses, but in boring temples where the
worship is as mechanical as it is in the better class of Protestant church. They
came to be temple Jews, in other words: well-bred, clean-shaven gentlemen in
morning coats and top hats, who wrap their prayer book in the editorial page of
the Jewish newspaper in the belief that it will attract less attention that way.
ccciii

Roth reiterates this vision of assimilated European Jewry in Flight Without End
when the protagonist Tunda comes to visit the narrator, also named Joseph Roth, in
Berlin 1927. In a fashionable café, Roth shows Tunda these new “young people” who are
all “wearing monocles and coloured cravats calling to mind the progeny of rich bankers,
and oscillating indecisively between being the grandsons of Jewish grandmothers or the
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illegitimate sons of Hohenzollern princes.”
ccciv
Kafka similarly condemns the young Jews
of Inner Bohemia: “With their posterior legs they were still glued to their father’s
Jewishness, and with their waving anterior legs they found no new ground.”
cccv
And in his
Letter to his Father (1919)
cccvi
, Kafka reveals how the watered-down variety of Judaism
his father passed onto him felt like nothing but empty rituals devoid of intrinsic meaning:
“Later, as I grew older, I couldn’t understand how, with the utter nothing of Judaism you
had at your disposal, you could reproach me for not making an effort (out of reverence, as
you put it) to practice a similar nothing. And as far as I could see, it really was a nothing,
a joke, not even a joke.”
cccvii
Only the nostalgic past offered Kafka an authenticated
Jewishness, which was now gone. His father held the last remnants of it between his
fingers, but it was unavailable to Kafka: “From your little, ghetto-like village community
you really had brought something of Judaism with you still; it wasn’t much, and it got
lost bit by bit in the city, and in the army; nevertheless, the impressions and memories
from your youth were just enough to sustain a sort of Jewish life” but “it trickled away
even as you were passing it on.”
cccviii

Similarly, Roth in The Emperor’s Tomb, longs for a nostalgic past that has since
vanished, a past in which Jews and non-Jews experience an Edenic wholeness. Roth
represents the unassimilated Jew as a symbol of authenticity, of an older era, an era of
glorified order and wholeness associated with the Duel Monarchy. In this sense, the Jew
stands outside of time, an eternal figure resisting and, in some instances, colliding with
the onward rush of modernity. Manes, the Jewish coach driver, with whom the narrator
Trotta identifies, is seen as authentic and integral to the natural world, a figure of
yesteryear, imbued with the vitality of the land. He reminds Trotta of “the primeval
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forest, of primitive man, of prehistoric times, of something confused and anachronistic.
He would take off his shirt and wash at the fountain, puffing and blowing, all the while
shouting almost bellowing, as if the prehistoric world really had broken through into the
modern.”
cccix

Just before the war breaks out, Trotta also describes Jadlowker, “an ancient silver-
bearded Jew, [who] was in the habit of sitting motionless…He looked like winter
enjoying the last fine days of autumn, wishing he could take them with him into the fast-
approaching eternity which knows no seasons.”
cccx
After a burst of lyricism in which Roth
describes the silvery and warm autumnal sun shining its dying rays upon the old man, he
writes, “A great peace reigned in the world, the austere peace of autumn.”
cccxi
The Jew is
positioned in a temporal stasis, an Eden before the fall, existing within a season when it
was “custom…in obedience to an old tradition handed down from the chestnut roasters of
the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to set up his stand in the main square of Zlotogrod.”
cccxii

The last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Jew are intertwined here as two
relics about to be swallowed up by the barbarity of the oncoming age in this lyrical
passage, reported through a backward nostalgic glance, as Trotta already knows what
he’s about to lose. Directly following this description, Trotta states: “It began to rain. It
was a Thursday. The next day, Friday, the notice was up at every street corner. It was the
manifesto of our old Emperor, Franz Joseph, and it was headed: ‘To all my peoples!’”
cccxiii

For Trotta, the beginning of the war marks “the end of the world.”
cccxiv

Unlike the Jews existing during the last days of the empire, Trotta lacks all ties
and connections to the past. The opening page of the novel make this clear, conveying the
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disappearance of the connective tissue which held the old regime, and the people living
under it, together:
Our name is Trotta. Our people came from Sipolje, in Slovenia. I say ‘people’
because we are not a family. Sipolje no longer exits, nor has it existed for a long
time past. Merged with a number of neighboring parishes, it has become quite a
sizable market town. That, as we know, is the way of the world these days…In the
present-day Austria and in the former Crown Lands here can be very few people
left in whom our name will evoke a memory.
cccxv

Narrated retrospectively, the rupture engendered by the first World War and the
monarchy’s collapse infuses the text with a sense of inevitability and fatalism, as if the
storm, mistaken for “progress” as Benjamin puts it, is unstoppable and always already
happening. All we can do is turn our face toward the past while being propelled into a
blood-soaked future. Such is the temporal confusion in which Trotta finds himself, a
confusion that only heightens his sense of estrangement when he returns home from the
war, a home that bears no resemblance to the one he left behind. His fiancé has become a
lesbian who designs “crazy necklaces and rings, modern things…all corners, and clasps
of fir,”
cccxvi
Trotta has no real profession, most of his friends have either died or lost their
minds, and sitting in a familiar café with his wife and father-in-law, a café he’d
frequented often before the war, Trotta felt “very alien here, stranger than a
stranger.”
cccxvii
Despite the familiar setting, he adds, “But strangers were serving me as I
sat at the table eating with strangers. I understood nothing of their conversation.”
cccxviii

In the end, after his wife has left him and his only son has gone to study in Paris,
after his mother has died, Trotta finds himself alone, sitting in this same café, deserted of
its patrons. The Jewish owner has just fled; before leaving he says to Trotta: “Herr baron,
we are taking leave of each other for ever. Should we meet again sometime, somewhere
in the world, we shall know one another. Tomorrow you will certainly not come back
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here. Because of the new German people’s government.”
cccxix
With the disappearance of
the Jew, Roth is signaling the disappearance of a vanished world, and the emergence of a
new reality in which those like Trotta are lost, wandering the dark streets, accompanied
by a strange dog, asking the question: “So where could I go now, I, a Trotta?”
cccxx

Kafka also recognizes the futility of existence among the ruins of the Austro-
Hungarian empire, a time and space where the court of judgment comprises the whole
world. The crime is not necessarily Jewishness, but humanness—having been born into
the world. As Smith points out, “Kafka found the brotherhood of man quite as
incomprehensible as the brotherhood of Jews. For Kafka the impossible thing was
collectivity itself: “What have I in common with the Jews? I have hardly anything in
common with myself, and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can
breathe.”
cccxxi
Smith continues, “Kafka’s horror is not Jewishness per se, because it is not
a horror only of Jewishness: it is a horror of all shared experience, all shared being, all
genus.”
cccxxii

In one of the central moments of The Trial (1925), the priest (who is also the
prison chaplain) tells K. the story about the doorkeeper who disallows a countryman from
entry to the Law; he lets him look inside, but forbids him from entering through the Door
of the Law, which symbolizes the transcendent divine knowledge of God. The man waits
on a stool outside the door for many years, interminably hoping the doorkeeper will
change his mind, but the doorkeeper never does, leaving one with the feeling that there
was something we could have done but left undone, and therefore we are left bereft.
cccxxiii

Essentially, Kafka is saying that there is hope, symbolized by the Law in the parable, but
not for us. For Kafka, all systems are bankrupt of meaning, and all institutions (family,
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marriage, religion, the body, even writing) are inherent with violence and terror, leaving
us, at the end of The Trial, with a shame no different from a dog’s life, despite our
illusions about the importance of knowledge, culture, or nationhood.
An acute sense of estrangement, losing one’s temporal foothold without gaining
another, the rejection of any collective identification; national, linguistic, ethnic or
otherwise—does Kafka not epitomize the modern subject? Peter Nicholls describes the
modern subject as if describing Kafka: “a combination of apathy and boredom which, in
rendering the subject claustrophobically inactive, also brings painful hypersensitivity and
nervousness…the axis of the self seems precarious, barely sustainable.”
cccxxiv
For Kafka,
in addition to Jewishness being an “utter nothing,” so too did all other ways of being and
belonging, resulting in a self that appeared quite precarious and unsustainable. Kafka
claims that he is “mentally and spiritually…incapable of marrying. The outward signs are
that from the moment I decide to marry, I can’t sleep; day and night my head is burning;
it is a life no longer”
cccxxv
and then if not marriage, the family is also filled with violence
and fear, a suffocating net of relationships engendering guilt and conspiratorial alliances.
The head of the family, his father, is conveyed as a kind of Grand Inquisitor who instills a
feeling of eternal unease and severe anxiety, his judgment always imminent. Kafka
describes how he and his sisters nervously speculate on his father’s thoughts:
You are one of the main subjects of our conversations, as you have been subject
to our thoughts, but it is truly not to dream up plots against you that we sit
together…it is to discuss together in every detail, from every side, on all
occasions near and far, this terrible trial hanging fire between us and you, in
which you constantly claim to be judge...
cccxxvi

The ability to even “belong” to his own body also becomes an impossibility: “…it
was natural that I should become unsure of the thing closest to me, my own body. I shot
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up, but couldn’t cope with my height, the burden was too heavy; my shoulders stooped; I
scarcely dared moved…I remained weak; in amazement I regarded everything that still
functioned as a miracle…That was enough to lose it.”
cccxxvii
And of course, the
impossibility of writing and literature, which he believes will, like Judaism, end in the
same “nothing”:
The impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing German, the
impossibility of writing differently. One might add a fourth impossibility, the
impossibility of writing…Thus what has resulted was a literature impossible in all
respects, a gypsy literature which had stolen the German child out of its cradle
and in great haste put it through some kind of training, for someone had to dance
on the tightrope. (But it wasn’t a German child, it was nothing; people merely said
that somebody was dancing.)
cccxxviii

And yet, given these protestations against existence, and the faceless persecution
of modern bureaucracy and the tyranny of the father and the state, and the inability to
believe in a collective idea, and the failure to write and marry and tolerate the intolerable
aspects of modern life, Kafka still wrote and existed, despite himself.
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GLASS ANIMALS

Short Stories
by Alexis Landau

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Table of Contents

Paris 1959 113

Fjallbacka 133

If I Had Glass Hands and Glass Feet 141

A Sexual History 160

This May Hurt 181

Capri 188

Goodbye To All That 204

What He Was Like 229

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Paris, 1959

“When we get over there, we’re going to get a French prostitute. I hear there’s
nothing like it.” Jack’s older brother Marty dispensed this worldly advice while puffing
on a cigar in his office cubicle. The day after tomorrow Marty and Jack were going to
Paris, to see the world, as their father generously put it. It was a college graduation
present of sorts for Jack, with the stipulation of having Marty along as his traveling
companion. Marty was twenty-four and he worked for the New York Times obit section.
The suicides were the hardest to write because the pieces should read as inevitable, as if
the taking of one’s life was as natural as dying in sleep. Marty pushed aside what he was
working on, a widow who’d swallowed too many sleeping pills. She was found slumped
over on the toilet, her head against the wall. “French women. Dynamite,” Marty
reiterated, coughing into his tie.
Jack noticed how the tip of Marty’s tie sported a small coffee stain, and he
attributed such imprecision to his brother’s poor eyesight and how he was overweight,
whereas Jack believed that the discipline of his body, made lean and wiry from running,
enforced discipline on all other areas of his life. Jack had gotten into college because he
could run fast. New York state champion of the 110 meter high hurdles with a time of
12.35 seconds. The coach of the college track team had recruited Jack when he was a
senior at New Rochelle High School, and by the next fall Jack wore the vaunted white
“H” set against the crimson team shirt.
A secretary stepped into Marty’s office, asking if he had his copy ready. While
she complained of the crippling heat, fanning herself with a rolled up sheet of paper, Jack
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thought about yesterday’s graduation, the phony ceremonial pomp. The day was for
nancies and mothers crying into their handkerchiefs. At the urging of his parents, Jack
had posed for a group picture with the track team. Pete Kowalski, who ran long distance,
was leaving tomorrow to drive a truck across the country, from Newark to San Diego.
Ricky Harnett and Stew Lapin had landed jobs at an accounting firm in midtown with
windows that wouldn’t open. The joke was that the windows didn’t open to prevent men
from jumping because accounting was so damn boring. Others went home to white
weddings waiting to happen on well-manicured lawns, to color-coded Tupperware
(yellow for meat, green for fruit), and to a new Frigidaire with an automatic defrost
machine. Jack thought those guys had it the worst, having graduated from one institution
only to become shackled by another, much more terminal one.

The first thing they did in Paris, after showering and getting some eggs and
coffee, and bitching about how long the flight had been—Jack had thought his circulation
had all but stopped at one point and feared his legs, his reliable running legs, would be
compromised in some way—was dig out the scrap of notebook-lined paper that had been
folded behind Marty’s traveler’s checks in his wallet for over a month. It was creased and
thin, the pencil writing faint.
Marty shrugged, puffing on a cigarette. “I got this from John Walmack’s brother.
He swears by it.”
“Jesus, will you put that thing out?” Jack cut his hand through the smoke.
Marty placed the cigarette down on the ashtray between them. They sat in the
hotel café. Jack plucked the piece of paper from between Marty’s fingers and said, “I say
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we start at the Bois de Boulogne, cause he listed it first, and if we strike out there, we
head to the Pigalle.”
They rented a scooter around the corner from the hotel and fought about which
make to get. Marty wanted to rent a red Vespa because it was Italian. “Otherwise we’ll
look like two fags riding around on some flimsy scooter.”
“You think you’re Marcello Mastroianni or something?”
Marty shrugged.
Jack pointed to the shiny blue Velosolex. “It’s French. We won’t be pegged as
tourists—or not immediately.”
By the time they reached the Bois de Boulogne, they couldn’t figure where to lock
the scooter and John Walmack’s brother had not specified where to go in this vast rolling
park filled with two lakes and a multitude of streams, the sound of falling water coming
from an indeterminate place, and such peacefulness was not how Jack had imagined the
setting of his erotic adventure. After all, they were on the lookout for illicit women,
women of ill repute, women from whom one could buy sex.
They rolled the scooter between them down a wide gravel path. “This place is
twice the size of Central Park. How the hell are we supposed to know where to go?” Jack
said, his ears reddening.
Marty trained his eyes on the gravel crunching under his loafers.
Jack kicked at a small stone. It skipped a few feet ahead. “This was your idea.”
Marty shrugged.
“All you ever do is shrug that aw shucks shrug with your thumb up your ass.”
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A man strode past them, late for work. A whiff of his heavy aftershave lingered
in the shaded heat. Marty sneezed.
Jack, feeling a twinge of guilt, said, “Man, they pour on the cheap cologne here to
make up for not showering. I guess it’s true about Europeans not being all that clean.”
Marty said Old Spice was the only thing he would ever wear, in terms of cologne,
and it wasn’t really cologne.
The path led them to a small lake with a stranded rowboat trailing in the still
water. Two women strolled around the lake, the black net veils of their hats obscuring
their faces. They carried snakeskin purses. The blonde with dark red lipstick winked at
Jack, a beckoning glittering wink. Jack whispered, “Let’s go over.”
When they walked up, everyone smiled. The smiles were forced and wide and
predatory. The lake attracted a constant fluttering of mosquitoes, which the women
absently fanned away with their Chinese silk fans. Their eyebrows were penciled into an
exaggerated arch, as if they were constantly surprised. The blonde had a small black mole
above her upper lip and her teeth, Jack thought, did not look healthy. His cousin Bobby
had gotten VD during the war from some Czech girl. He gripped the handlebars of the
Velosolex. It wobbled awkwardly next to his side. Marty breathed into Jack’s neck, as if
he was about to say something, and this made Jack more nervous.
Jack thrust his hand forward, to shake, but neither woman reciprocated. He slowly
withdrew it and ventured, “Hello, ladies. I’m Jack and this is Marty. We’re American.”
The women giggled. The one with the auburn hair raised an eyebrow. Then she
asked, “Would you like to spend, with us, the afternoon?”
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“How much?” Marty whispered hoarsely. He was practically panting by now.
Pathetic, Jack thought.
One hour each. Two rooms somewhere in the 15
th
arrondissement. A nondescript
building from the outside: brick with green shutters. At the front desk, Jack folded fifty
franks into a manila envelope and handed it to a large woman behind the counter, who
looked as if she had been here as long as the faded floral wallpaper and the velvet green
chairs with the threadbare armrests. She handed Jack and Marty their keys. The room
numbers were engraved in cursive on each one. Then she tilted her head to the side, and
motioned that the winding staircase was to their left, past the fake Grandfather clock.
As Jack walked up the stairs, his heart galloped up into his chest, like the tight
energy he held within himself before a race, before the bullet sounded and he bolted out
of the blocks. He checked his pocket again, and yes, he still had the four rubbers. He
started to sweat and wondered which girl he might get. He had wanted the blonde, but
when he had asked the old woman she had only shrugged and nodded passively, and he
didn’t know if that meant yes or maybe, or nothing. When the four of them had pulled up
in the cab, while Jack was paying, the two women had slipped out of the car, entering the
brothel through an alternate entrance. They had disappeared around the corner with coy
smiles, their eyes promising pleasure.
Upstairs, Jack and Marty walked single file down the dimly lit hallway. The
carpet, a swirling pattern of arabesques, was thick and substantial underfoot. Jack thought
the carpet absorbed most of the sounds, but not all of them, as they both heard a woman’s
lilting laugh floating through one of the doors. Another door opened and Jack caught a
glimpse of a woman brushing her hair in the mirror, expertly using the cylindrical brush
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to make the ends curl under as a man in a suit, his hat apologetically pressed to his chest,
made his way out.
In room 20, Jack sat down on the edge of the single cot. Off to the side stood a
washbasin. The room had white-washed walls and a gauzy curtain that kept blowing up
in the sunlight. He was fully dressed in his khakis and button-down shirt. He stared down
at his loafers. Under his palms, the sheets felt stiff, clean. It was hard for him to swallow.
He rubbed his eyes and tried to remember some high school French. Nothing came.
The door opened and the brunette walked in. So Marty had lucked out and got the
blonde. Now, without her hat and gloves, without the rush of spying her under the linden
trees, she looked like an ordinary woman, in her pencil skirt and powder blue silk blouse,
her hair in a dark bob. She had a heavy accent, her voice raspy and deep when she said,
“Hello.” She started to undo her blouse. When he saw her green silk bra, and the little
crucifix hanging between her large pointy breasts, the combination of the bra and the
crucifix reminded him, in a nauseating flash, of his mother. Some abandoned memory
raised up from the ashes, phoenix-like. She lifted up her gray pencil skirt to reveal a black
garter belt. “Do you like me?” she asked in an off-handed way. Then she sighed, and let
her skirt fall back down. She went over to her purse and took out two cigarettes, lighting
one of them and offering it to Jack. “Smoke?”
“Doesn’t that come after?” Jack asked roughly. He did not smoke, being an
athlete. She sat down next to him on the creaking bed. He noticed the heavy black
eyeliner on her lids, a weak imitation of Brigitte Bardot.
She smiled casually, and then brought the cigarette to her lips. Halfway through
the cigarette she suddenly stood up and put it out in the washbasin. Then she faced him
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and undid her bra. European breasts looked different. The nipples were browner, the skin
slightly looser, with a few white stretch marks. He was used to the bright shininess of
American girls, their breasts cosseted in bras beneath cashmere sweater sets. It took a
year, in the front seat of his Chevrolet with Barbara, his steady in college, the radio
playing softly, just to touch the under-wire running beneath the cup of her bra.
The woman clasped the sides of his face and nuzzled his pursed lips between her
breasts. She smelled of lavender and cigarettes. This French woman was controlling the
situation, putting him out of his depth, with her cigarettes and the musk she had sprayed
on her collarbone, and the black silk garter belt, which had been flung despondently to
the floor. She quickly undid his shirt and motioned for him to stand up, so that she could
take off his pants. He obeyed, and half-way through it all, as his shirt bloomed open to
reveal a white smooth chest, she gave him a challenging look which he took to mean: Is
this all too much for you? He stepped out of his khakis and kicked them to the side of the
room. Now he stood in his thin white shorts, and under that, a jockstrap. He had gotten
used to wearing one for running, and now wore it always, but as she tugged off his shorts,
he suddenly felt as if the jockstrap would be the sole cause of his downfall, and the color
of the thick cotton pouch, an unappealing off-white (almost beige), made him cringe. But
when he felt her slim fingers slide beneath the elastic waistband, and then further down
towards his groin, he forgot about the jockstrap. She took it off and clenched it in her fist,
dropping it to the floor. It landed alongside her garter belt.
He took her in his arms as she straddled him on the bed, and he buried his face
into her skin, smashing his mouth into her neck, and he felt his chest soften, his body
liquidate, and his checked desire, which he had checked through long shadowy car rides
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after a mixer—his date in the passenger seat staring out the window, at the passing elm
trees, her hands folded neatly on her lap—and in movie theatres with the credits rolling
after only getting so far, as far as a brush of lace, the curve of a kneecap, and in middle
class living rooms lit by a single Tiffany lamp in which he had delivered the girl home by
curfew, and now it was time to say goodnight, was no longer checked. It came rushing
towards him, as violent and unhinged as a mob of angry helpless men. A guttural sigh
escaped his mouth, and for a quick moment he pulled back, embarrassed by his obvious
need.
Afterwards, he waited for Marty outside of the building in the late afternoon sun.
That is the last time, he muttered, kicking the brick wall, the first and the last time I’ll
pay for a piece of ass. His timing had been off, and it had ended sooner than he had
anticipated. With Barbara, when she had finally relented in the back seat of his car, he
had lasted longer. She had breathed into his ear, “Do you love me?” and he had pretended
not to hear her.
Marty strode out of the building. He slapped Jack on the back. “Now that, my
man, was a woman.” He went on about the woman, how uninhibited they were over here,
how it must be something about the Parisian air that got into their bones and made them
unafraid of sex and men.
“Know what I mean?” Marty asked as they rounded the corner, the Eiffel tower
rising up in the distance, penetrating the generous sky.
“We should head back. Get the scooter.”
Squinting, Marty pretended to pinch the tower between his forefinger and thumb.
“Let’s check out the Eiffel tower first. It’s walking distance.”
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They made their way through the congested streets. A vendor on the corner
displayed dolls for sale, dangling from a line in the air, outfitted in white lace dresses and
bonnets, their glassy doll eyes shut. There were also newspapers for sale, packs of gum
and matches, yo-yos, and off to the side, a chair for shoe shinning. Marty bought an
International Herald Tribune and absently read a headline. “Vincent Astor dead at age
70. He dropped out of Harvard.”
Jack glanced at the faded photo; a high forehead, a weak mouth. “He could have
dropped out or stayed in. Doesn’t make much difference when you’re that loaded.” He
paused, considering something. “You still thinking of asking Teresa Mancini out?”
“What’s it to you?”
“You better think twice about the newspaper business before asking her out.”
Teresa’s father, sarcastic, boisterous, and Roman Catholic, was the largest producer of
shoes and handbags in the tri-state area and did Marty think Teresa would consider living
on a newspaper man’s salary? “Hell no,” Jack said, letting out a low whistle.
Marty’s glasses glinted in the sun. “You’re an asshole.”
“I’m just trying to show you reality.”
“I understand reality fine.” Marty rolled the newspaper into a tight baton and kept
walking, tapping his outer thigh with it.
After a few minutes Jack quietly asked, “Wanna piece of gum?” He held the thin
rectangular piece between his fingers.
Marty took it and chewed.
They walked on, taking in the early evening air, heavy with exhaust and heat and
perfume. It was almost dusk. Barbara had once said that the only time to see the Eiffel
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Tower was when the sky was pink, as pink as the inside of a conch shell. Even if he
agreed with her, and thought it made sense in a poetic kind of way, only a woman would
put it like that.
Before buying tickets, they sat down for two bottles of coca-cola at the little café
alongside the tower. The walk here had taken longer than expected. They kept seeing the
tower just before them, as if all they had to do was turn one more corner and cross one
more street, but it kept tricking them, promising proximity, and then taking it all back.
Like a bad flirt, Jack thought. Whenever he would start to complain, wondering when
they would actually reach it, Marty would sagely say, “We’re closer than we were
before.”
And so they were relieved to see the little café where they could get some cold
sodas first. Marty motioned towards the sign: 328 steps to the first level. 340 steps to the
second level. 18 steps to the lift platform after that. They sat amongst the cone shaped
trees lining the gravel path, which led to the wide base of concrete underneath the tower.
They were only a stone’s throw away from one of the four massive legs planted into the
cement. When Jack leaned back, straining his neck, staring up at the massive architecture,
the beams and steel and criss-cross patterning, he felt dizzy. “It’s like this overpowering
machine with no motion to it. Entirely still,” he said, taking a swig of soda.
A flock of schoolgirls passed. American girls. Ponytails, white bobby socks,
billowing skirts, hourglass waists. “High school,” Marty commented. They smelled of
freshly cut grass and warm laundry. One of the girls wore a yellow blouse and the sleeves
lifted up slightly in the breeze. She urged everyone to walk faster. “It closes in half an
hour,” she said, her voice tight.
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Marty trailed their light frames. “Too young to be coeds,” he added thoughtfully.
Some of the girls held hands, arms swinging, humming Bobby Darin’s Dream Lover.
Marty stretched his arms behind him, cradling his head in his hands, almost falling back
in the rickety chair. “That Bobby Darin’s a fag.”
Jack grinned. “He wouldn’t know what to do with a woman if he had one.”
And then Marty revisited his rant about the French prostitute, how her mouth had
felt like velvet, how afterwards she offered him a real odd kind of cigarette, a kind they
didn’t have in the states, called a Galette, or was it a Gitan? “Unfiltered too.”
Jack broke in, “Will you just shut up for once? What’s the big deal with your
French chicks…”
In a flash of clothing and weight and body, a girl dropped from the sky, and fell,
to the left of their table. She landed face down. A dull thud. They could see her russet
hair, her head cocked to one side, away from them. One arm, spilling out of her puffed
yellow sleeve, splayed out unnaturally, as if someone had bent it out of spite. Her Mary
Janes pointed inwards, the black tips kissing. The backs of her milky calves. A glint of a
gold chain around her neck, peeping out from under the wispy curls. A few seconds later,
her pocket book landed next to her head. A faded leather clutch.
Marty leaned forward. “Holy shit.”
“Jesus Fucking Christ,” Jack said, getting up, walking towards the girl, his chest
chalk full of blood, as if his veins would burst, as if he was on his last lap, and he
couldn’t suck in any more air, as hard as he tried to breathe. Marty hovered behind him.
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Jack bent over her, holding out both arms, as if to shield her, from what he didn’t
know. “Don’t touch her. Don’t touch anything. We just saw this happen.” He sucked in
the humid air. “We don’t know the circumstances.”
From the upper observation platform they heard her friends screaming. It would
take them some time to ride the lift to the second level, and then run down all those steps.
Marty started to curse, throwing up his hands, and Jack barked at him to stay
calm, but Marty shook his head and squeezed his eyes shut. “This is,” Marty began,
hardly able to get the words out, “this is just awful. Just awful.” And then he bent over
and threw up on the pavement, coca-cola colored, watery. He remained bent over,
waiting for the next wave of it, sweat peppering his back, dotting through his white shirt.
Jack shook his head in disgust. “Jesus, Marty.”
Still bent over, Marty smacked the air with his hand.
People started to notice what had happened. A mother held her two children close.
An older man tried to speak to Jack in French but Jack said loudly, “I don’t speak
French.” If only he could remember just a few words but his mind had dissolved into a
racing blankness. But the man, with his gray stubble, his breath smelling of strong
tobacco, did not understand, or want to understand. He stood too close to Jack. Jack
wanted to punch him in the face. A police officer strode up, his eyes guarded underneath
his hat rim.
Jack motioned to the girl’s body. “Officer. She landed right here. She fell from
the tower.” The officer nodded, and then touched his chin. Jack wanted the other man to
leave. Why was he still standing here, staring at Jack as if this was his fault? The officer
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removed a notepad from his inside jacket pocket and asked a few questions. His English
was not bad. How long ago did this happen? Where was Jack sitting?
A small crowd gathered around them. The officer’s head snapped up, and he blew
his whistle for the people to stand back. He lit a cigarette and ordered an approaching
officer to call an ambulance. Blood edged out from under the girl’s stomach. It spread
methodically across the concrete. The blood was the shade of the whore’s lipstick today,
Jack thought, and her mouth moved before him like a movie without sound.
“Marty?” Jack yelled, his throat dry and closed up. His eyes traveled across the
way, to the row of prune trees where Marty sat. His back slumped against a tree stump.
He had a faraway look on his face as he stared into the thick air, smoking
absentmindedly. His shoes were off and his bare feet flopped over to either side, turned
out.
“Marty!” Jack shouted. But Marty continued to smoke serenely on the grass.
As if the sound of Jack’s shout had prompted them, her friends came running
towards Jack, their faces flushed and twisted. It had taken the girls almost seven minutes
to get down from the tower, to find where Marjorie had gone. But when they got close
enough to really see her, they stopped short, too afraid.
But two of the girls walked towards Jack and the policeman, their arms swinging
jerkily. One of them gasped when she saw the blood traveling slowly towards her ballet
flats. Her left eyelid twitched. The other girl, she held herself erect, said in a matter of
fact way, “When I turned around she was gone. We rode the lift up together, to the
observation deck.” She stopped to steal more air into her lungs. Her pale skin pulled
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tightly over her freckled cheekbones. The other girl bowed her head, clenching a piece of
shredded Kleenex in her fist.
The girl with the freckles continued, her voice growing lighter and lighter.
“Yesterday she called her boyfriend on the phone from the post office, and last night she
went to bed early, too tired to eat.” She blinked, gathering her thoughts, her pupils
enlarged, the black rounded pools nearly eclipsing the blue. “This morning she seemed
swell.”
The officer took notes. Then he asked her some questions: When did you arrive
in Paris? Where are you staying? As he was doing this, the other girl picked up the
leather clutch from the ground, and found her passport. She took it out and showed Jack.
The blue book opened up to a glossy square photograph of Marjorie Deerborn, from
Scarsdale New York, wearing a yellow blouse, her hair pulled back. The date of issue had
only been a few months ago, the back pages blank except for a stamp through French
customs. Jack examined her photo: a pretty upturned nose, a full mouth, dark eyes. She
seemed to smile just for him.
More people gathered to watch, straining to see her body, and when they drew too
close the police blew their whistles and barked orders to get back, get back. A middle-
aged woman in a tight floral dress rolled up a man in his wheelchair. The man was
missing a leg. Jack stared at the deflated trouser leg dangling from his truncated thigh.
The woman grunted when the man removed his pipe from his front pocket and lit it.
The girl who had given him Marjorie’s passport, she started to panic again,
rambling about how she should have known, after that phone call yesterday, that Marjorie
wasn’t quite right. Her hysteria was renewing, whirling up from the cool concrete.
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“Now listen to me,” Jack cut in. “We’ve got to telephone the American embassy.
Get a hold of the authorities.”
The two girls nodded, their eyes saucer-like. Jack felt the fear and heat rising up
in his chest; he hated the fretting and fidgeting of women. It reminded him of his mother
waiting in the living room holding her nightly vigil in her stockings and leather pumps,
fidgeting and fretting about his father not yet home, probably stuck in some ditch, she
would mutter to herself, as the hours slid into dawn. Jack squeezed his eyes shut. Then,
quickly blinking, he ordered the girl with the freckled cheekbones, the girl who seemed
the most alert and ready, to run across the street to that pharmacy there, see, with the
neon sign lit up, the orange and blue one? She nodded. Run across the street and ask to
use the telephone behind the counter and call the operator. Ask for the number to the
American embassy.
The girl nodded and ran. He watched her go, in her pastel orange skirt. The color
made him think of sherbet, the kind his mother used to serve in little glass bowls on warm
summer nights, nights like this one.
The rest of them waited, staring at their shoes, at the concrete, at the Laurel and
prune trees swaying slightly in the evening wind, at the crowd slowly dispersing, at the
quaint dark green benches stationed along the edges of the park, waiting for the siren
sound of the ambulance to end this unbearable quiet. Jack looked down at Marjorie, at
her satiny pink skin, which still seemed so alive, at her tangled hair and the backs of her
calves rising up like sloping hills, and he almost wanted to touch her before she was
carried onto the stretcher which finally arrived, accompanied by the bleating yet
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reassuring cry of the ambulance, before the thin white sheet settled over her lithe frame,
and covered her, forever.

Jack didn’t know then that this would become one of his stories, one of the
melancholy stories he would pull out of his back pocket, after one too many white
Russians, and he would say the girl, Marjorie, haunted him still, years later. He would tell
it sadly, when the mood struck, and recount how one moment they’d been drinking cold
coca-cola out of glass bottles, and the next, a girl fell from the Parisian summer sky.

On a sharp cold night at the end of October, his second wife had rented out the 21
club for his fiftieth, and towards the end of the evening, when speeches were about to be
given, his wife said to him, “Marty’s going to give a speech tonight. I think you better
have the nanny take Kate and Allison home.” His girls, of course, wanted to stay, having
had the chance to drink their first bellinis. They tearfully clung to him when the nanny
carted them away. Jack was happy they were beautiful. He wouldn’t know what to do
with homely daughters. He just wouldn’t. Jack’s banker, Bobby Stockton from Chicago,
was giving a speech now, his tie loosened, telling about the time that Jack had come to
him, asking for some astronomical sum, so he could buy the GM building. “It was the
seventies,” Bobby said, his voice brimming with laughter, “we wore wide lapels…”
Jack’s wife laughed too early, her nasal laugh throwing Bobby off for a split second. He
resumed, sweating under the lights, “So he comes into my office, sits down, and says
with a straight face, it’s 500 dollars per square foot. That’s how much I need. And by
some sheer flight of insanity, I said okay Jack.” Now everyone laughed, a sonorous hum
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of appreciation. “After the GM deal, Jack basically had carte blanche at Northwestern.
We all lived,” Bobby paused, “quite well.” More laughter followed with the clinking of
glasses.
Jack looked at Marty, red faced, but he still had his hair, the bastard. It was a
surprise he’d even shown up. For the last ten years, he’d been living in Mexico with his
former housekeeper. After Teresa left him, he had a nervous breakdown. Was even
selling off his furniture in the end. Jack remembered seeing the grand piano standing on
the sidewalk outside of Marty’s apartment on 71
st
street. And, for no apparent reason,
Marty wore a black patch over his left eye.
The last time Jack had seen Marty was two years ago, in his hotel room at the
Beverly Wilshire. Jack had a suite there because the custody battle was dragging on. His
first wife, originally from Encino, had moved back there, and she wanted the girls all year
round. Marty walked into Jack’s suite, with his eye-patch, smoking one of those damn
cigarettes. The first thing he did was ash on the cream colored carpet without even the
slightest idea he had done so. Jack cursed him. “Will you look at what you’re doing
Marty? And what the hell is with the eye-patch?”
Marty grumbled something about how his eye was hurting; it felt good to wear the
patch. He ignored Jack’s comments about how bad it was to smoke, in this day in age,
with all they knew now.
“You wanna end up like our old man?” Jack had asked, pained. “Dead at fifty-six
from emphysema? Jesus, Marty.” Then he shook his head and turned away from his
brother, studying Wilshire Boulevard below, the slow moving cars, the brash sunlight
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reflecting off the white buildings. After a few minutes, he handed Marty a manila
envelope with fifty grand inside. “This should get you through the end of the year.”
Marty nodded. “Really appreciate it. Really do.”
Jack sighed, leaning against the mahogany desk. “No more two a.m. phone calls
when you’ve run dry, okay?”
“No more,” Marty echoed.
It’s better this way, easier for everyone, Jack had thought.

People clapped when Bobby Stockton finished his speech, passing the
microphone to Marty, who didn’t want to stand under the lights. “Can’t I just tell it from
my table? You can all see me, right?” he asked, turning around. Marty started telling the
story about the prostitute in Paris, and how Jack, surprisingly, didn’t have a taste for
French ass, “Whereas I’m a much more refined and sensitive man, and having a higher
register of taste, well, you can imagine the debates we had.”
Jack’s wife nudged him. “Do you think he’ll get much worse than this?” Let
Marty get as dirty as he wants to get, Jack thought. He swirled the lime slice through the
melting ice cubes of his vodka tonic. She had been such a useless lay. All that talk about
French women over nothing.
Marty continued, “Afterwards she gave me one of those fancy French cigarettes—
well, I still like one, now and then.” He winked and went onto to describe how afterwards
Jack was all bent out of shape because he hadn’t gotten the blonde. “He was in love with
Bardot—we all were!” and how they couldn’t make it out of those damn Parisian
roundabouts. “I mean, the amount of times we went around that obelisque… I counted
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twenty rounds.” Jack’s wife relaxed a little. He could tell by how she started to drink
more of her Chardonnay. She probably thought, now that Marty was talking about traffic
and roundabouts, and the size and make of their rented scooter, that they were out of the
woods, in terms of him saying something really dirty.
“But then,” Marty began soberly, wiping his brow, “we went to see the Eiffel
Tower. I didn’t know people wanted it torn down after it was built because it was so ugly,
so modern. But that was before our time. We’re not that old. Yet.” He paused.
Jack shifted in his seat. He didn’t want Marty to tell this story. Not tonight.
“We sat down, we had some cokes, we were bullshitting about god knows what,
and then, out of the sky, a girl falls. She had jumped from the tower. She fell, dead, just a
stone’s throw away from us.” Marty laughed to himself. A hushed quiet permeated the
dining room. Even the waiters seemed suspended, unable to move forward or back.
Marty’s voice broke the quiet. It was jarring, almost barbarically hoarse from the smoke
and the booze. It sounded too loud, coming through the mic. “So of course Jack, always
the man in charge, goes over to her. He tells me to stand back. He’s really spooked by the
whole thing. He’s sweating through his shirt. And we don’t know what the hell to do.
Then Jack lightly nudges her elbow with his shoe, because we’re both too afraid to
actually touch her.” Marty stopped again, breathing a little heavier.
Jack’s wife shot Jack an anxious look: where the hell is this going? Jack already
knew somehow that the evening, even with all his money and his buildings, had turned
dark too quickly.
Under the yellow spotlight, as yellow as a full moon, Marty was bursting with
laughter, his face even more red than before. He bit his fist for a moment, as if he could
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hardly stand himself, stand how hilarious he was. “And then this dead girl, her head jerks
up, like some kind of electric shock, and she moans: Jack—fuck me. And then boom—her
head drops back down. And she’s dead. For good this time.”
And then suddenly people were clapping and raising their glasses. Jack nodded, a
false smile on his face, but his heart was pounding, bringing him back to that July
evening, with the fading pink light, and the dead girl before him. He saw Marjorie
Deerborn, under a thin white sheet, lifted into the ambulance.
Marty was grinning and sweating, his face a red ball of vigor. Jack hated him. His
sick speech some kind of revenge, but for what? Jack didn’t know. He only knew that the
summer of 1959 in Paris felt ancient, more than twenty years ago, and yet, it was
painfully close, the longing and the mystery of his future, which was now so certain and
convinced of itself. Jack blinked and raised his glass to join the others, to appear merry
and jovial, to appear as if he felt happy.

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Fjallbacka

After finding his wife’s wedding band at the bottom of the toilet one morning,
Stellan Larson moved out of their Stockholm apartment and went searching for a house
on the water. Possibly the toilet had been the reason for their failure; going to the
bathroom in front of each other, flossing side by side, discussing bowel movements over
morning coffee. People complain about not having enough intimacy—possibly they’d
had too much. Contemplating that perfect gold circle resting against the toilet’s ceramic
throat, he wandered through a white house for sale. It had blue shutters, and was situated
on a compilation of rocks off of the East coast of Sweden. Fjallbacka was the name of
this place on the map. He could be an island here, in this white house.
The realtor led him through the small inter-connected rooms with low ceilings.
The four quiet children, two boys and two girls, watched him evaluate the sturdiness of
the walls, and the old and rusted sink pipes. The walls were insulated with dry sea grass,
a feature of older houses. He opened the oven. It was dirty, filled with the smell of burnt
dough and sugar. The children followed him with glazed blue eyes, using glances and
nods instead of words. Stellan wanted in on their game; did they recognize him? But
they’d probably not seen his films, which were violent, rife with sex and death. The
children stared. The girls’ eyelashes were as white as sand. The boys stared at him long
enough for Stellan to wonder how long a person could go without blinking. They
followed him into the living room. The realtor was still in the kitchen, fiddling with one
of the knobs on the stove.
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“Where are the parents?” Stellan leaned against the mantel, which was decorated
with little wooden horses even though Christmas had passed three months ago.
The realtor, a wiry sexless woman, called from the kitchen, “I’m sorry? Do you
have a question about the radiator?”
He lifted up his forearm, which had been resting on the mantel and discovered
that the elbow of his nice black blazer was covered in a fine layer of dust.
She poked her head around the corner, her thin eyebrows raised.
Stellan shook his head. “The radiator looks in fine condition.” Her fingers were
bare and thin. Some people didn’t think about getting married. Stellan had already had
three wives. He really thought the last one, Afka, with the blond hair and green eyes,
would last him at least a decade, well into his fifties. His parents loved her, and she had
wonderful breasts.
The following week, a boat filled with his furniture and possessions was docked,
tied to the rock, and the hired men unloaded his cardboard boxes, bringing them into the
house. But when Stellan walked into the kitchen with the beautiful bay windows, the
family sat at the table, all six of them, with their heads bowed, staring into dark empty
cups.
Stellan froze in the doorframe. “It’s Saturday,” he said.
The family, a huddled clump of blond hair and ruddy cheeks, of sullen eyes that
wouldn’t meet his own, did not answer.
“Saturday the 29
th
.”
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“We have nowhere to go,” the oldest little girl offered. She didn’t look up from
her cup. Her two thick white plaits hung alongside her face, the ends of which skimmed
the sturdy wooden table, like miniature brooms.
“I’m sorry?”
“We have nowhere to go,” the mother said, stretching out her bony fingers.
Stellan gripped the doorframe. “Well, I…”
The movers interrupted. “Where do you want this?”
A fine panic spread through his chest. The movers held up the white Joseph Frank
couch: sleek, long and expensive. That couch had cost him a commercial and now there
was nowhere to put it, because the living room was crammed with the family’s shit, with
their two rickety rocking chairs, a miniature wooden stool painted as blue as a blue jay,
with their needlepoint pillows overflowing on the couch, and the children’s toys scattered
under a squat oval coffee table. Toy soldiers. One naked baby doll. A bright pink plastic
bottle of bubbles. Legos were strewn across the scratched floor of the room. The floors
would need refinishing, Stellan thought, as he noticed a miniature wooden sailboat turned
on its side, the bow nearly touching the tip of his suede loafer. He fought the urge to kick
the sailboat clear across the room.
“Just put it down,” Stellan told the movers. He glared at the family through the
kitchen doorway, at their bowed heads and the clean parts striping their golden hair, at
their hunched shoulders and their hands coiled around their mismatched mugs. They sat
at the table in a circle, immovable and resolute. The wife, the way she played nervously
with her ring, reminded him of Afka, of how her hands were never still, and how he used
to reach across the table at dinner and quiet them, and she would smile with such
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radiance it hurt his heart. Then she left him for that two-bit Norwegian director with
greasy hair, who had recently made a movie about teenage vampires set in Oslo. Blood
and Ice. Stellan sighed, suddenly feeling out of sorts. An empty chair rested against the
wall of the kitchen, and next to it, the phone hung from the wall. He should call the
realtor to complain. She should be the one handling this, with her astute and professional
air. He started to dial her number, but the line was dead. He looked at the family, receiver
in one hand. No one would meet his gaze. Of course, Stellan realized, they hadn’t paid
the phone bill in God knew how many months. His hand flew to his jean pocket, before
remembering that his cell phone got no reception here.
Stellan set the empty chair a few feet away from the kitchen table where the
family sat. He intended to sit down as well, but somehow got caught in that awkward
moment before sitting. His palm rested on the curved wooden back of the chair.
He began again, to explain. “You see, today is the day,” but then his voice grew
slightly hoarse because of a sharp lump in his throat, a dull pain. He swallowed
forcefully. The family remained quiet and still, as if holding their breath. Even the
children barely moved. The father’s left eyelid twitched. If Stellan said anything more, he
would clearly be the selfish jerk forcing them out. And maybe he was selfish. Maybe that
was the reason why one afternoon all of Afka’s clothes had been stripped from the closet,
just the hangers hanging eerily on the rack. Maybe she had seen through to his secret
inner selfishness, to the part of him that wanted to throw these people out right now, so
he wouldn’t have to stand here in a half-crouch any longer, his palm still resting on the
dull flat wood of the chair, unsure of whether or not to sit down, whether or not to say
something more, and whether or not the family would ever leave this house.
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Evening crept up into the walls. Stellan’s six mid-century modern dining room
chairs were stacked on top of each other in the middle of the living room. He had jammed
their coffee table against the wall to make space, and he had fought the urge to kick the
childrens’ toys out of the way. His white couch had been placed directly in front of their
old couch. He had floated a sheet over his couch and tucked in the corners, as a signal
that they should refrain from sitting or sleeping on it.
Stellan told them, before going up to bed, that they could stay for the night. They
had not moved from the kitchen table. When he said this, his eyes traveled upwards, and
he vaguely pointed to the stairs, indicating that he had not emptied the guest room yet. In
the middle of the table, someone had carefully arranged some cheese and knäckerbrod on
a chipped porcelain plate. The crisp hard bread had been buttered, probably for the
children, but no one had touched it. The mother and father nodded. They were all still
sitting at that kitchen table. “Well, goodnight then,” Stellan said, raising a hand, as if to
offer up some shred of comfort when there clearly wasn’t any to be had. Under his left
arm, he carried a long thin bottle of whiskey. A stout glass bulged in his cardigan pocket.
In bed, he listened for them, wondering when they would travel upstairs and make
use of the guestroom. He strained to hear them downstairs, waiting to catch the tail end of
a sentence, or the mother rinsing off a dish, or even the opening and closing of the
refrigerator door. But he heard nothing. Two unread scripts lay next to him in bed. Stellan
cupped his third glass of whiskey to his chest, before taking another sip, anticipating the
warm tingling rush of this wonderful tawny liquid, and wondered where they would go.
In the middle of the night, Stellan woke to light blazing across the back lawn. The
orange light whirled from the living room, which had French doors that opened up into
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the garden, where he’d imagined throwing midsummer parties as his new single self. He
would invite Afka’s artist friend who he’d always had a crush on, and Christina from the
opera house with her golden arms and golden hair, and sympathetic Elsa who lived in his
old building. She had witnessed the awful breakup, and two weeks ago, she had made
him a poppy seed bundt cake. It had been carefully placed in front of his apartment door,
wrapped in green cellophane.
The next morning the distinct smell of kerosene lingered, a mixture of recent
flames, dry ash and heat. Getting up, Stellan nearly stepped on the empty whiskey glass
placed on the floor next to his bed. His head pounded ferociously. The walls of his throat
burned; he wondered if he had a fever and fingered his damp limp hair. It was late, nearly
ten. Squinting into the strong northern sunlight, he opened his bedroom windows and saw
a patch of burnt grass in the center of the garden. He went downstairs and stopped on the
bottom stair. He whistled into the stillness, as a bird might call to a mate. The whistle
echoed against the whitewashed walls. The rooms were deserted, ghostly. Everything had
been emptied out and cleared away. His remaining furniture suddenly struck him as
overtly Spartan. The sheet over his white couch was still perfectly tucked into the
corners. He wandered through the living room, his dark gray bathrobe open and flowing
behind him like some kind of cape. He ended up in the middle of the kitchen, where the
table had been, and peered through the bay windows, at the dense gray sea with no land
marking where the water ended or where it began.
Walking barefoot through the backyard, he gathered up a few chunks of a four-
poster bed. Near the rosemary bushes on the far side of the garden, he found fistfuls of
polyester pillow stuffing, as well as a stumpy wooden leg from one of their kitchen
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chairs. In the center of the burnt patch of grass, Stellan rescued a toy soldier. He was
made of cast-iron, and had not burned. He held the soldier in the palm of his hand.

Five months later, Stellan was standing on his dock, enjoying a cold beer. It was
August, nearly nine o’clock at night, and the sun, a great red ball of fire, dipped into the
dark ocean. He had never thrown his imagined midsummer fête in the garden and now
with summer dwindling, he smelled fall in the air. He had heard that Afka was getting
married in October. Her engagement was announced so soon after she had left Stellan, he
vaguely wondered if she had been sleeping with the Norwegian all along. A few weeks
ago, out of sheer loneliness he had invited Elsa out to the island but her arrival only
compounded his loneliness. She came baring various baked goods, and all that butter and
sugar and cream had made Stellan sick to his stomach. And she only wanted to talk about
the precision of baking and her three Persian cats. Over the course of two rainy days, they
engaged in unsatisfactory bouts of sex, and then Elsa left. Afterwards, in the still kitchen,
he had tossed the remaining pastries, one by one, into the trash bin.
Stellan squinted into the lowering sun, wondering if and when he would ever
return to Stockholm. He palmed his empty beer bottle and thought about retrieving
another from the kitchen. As he was about to go inside, a boast appeared from the north.
A long wooden sailboat. A faint wind pushed the boat past his dock. The people on the
boat were familiar; six white-blond heads parted with pink stripes. Round blue eyes. Two
young girls in matching white sweaters and two boys, their feet tan from the late summer
sun, stood at the bow. The mother and father sat at the stern, staring at him. It was the
family. An unexpected burst of goodwill swelled in Stellan’s chest and he called out,
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“Hello!” but no one responded. They watched him carefully. And then they turned their
faces away from his face, as if he had never existed.
The boat glided towards the east, gracefully navigating through the spreading
archipelago of flat smooth rocks butting out of the sea. Stellan followed their mast cutting
into the scarlet-streaked sky until he could no longer see it.
In the setting sun the rocks were aflame, a fiery pink.

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If I Had Glass Hands and Glass Feet

Somewhere, in South America, nestled in one of the Argentinean provinces, in
one of the less fortunate neighborhoods of the city Corrientes, along the eastern shores of
the Parana river, lived a boy named Vidrio. For as long as he could remember, he had
been a student at the Royal Academy For Pick-Pockets. The school was located in a
crumbling church at the end of a forgotten street. Vidrio still remembers the way the dirty
sunlight slanted in through the windows before mass, like a beautiful whore bending
down to kiss his cheek, and how Father Tomasso, before the day began, thanked His
Holiness, lowering his balding head in supplication. Father Tomasso often said, in
passing, almost as if humming the line under his breath, that he was a man without faith,
yet haunted by God. “Vidrio,” he would muse, rummaging through his pockets to give
the boy a coin, “What do you think of that, eh?” But Father Tomasso did not want an
answer; he was still lingering on one of His large thighs, relishing the satiny silk of God’s
white robes gathering under his palms. Or at least, this was how Vidrio imagined it must
feel, when God the Father finally embraced you, and forgave you, for everything, even
for masturbating to an old photograph of your mother, when she was young and beautiful.
But that photograph was taken before he was born, and he never knew his mother, so
what difference did it make?
When Father Tomasso said this thing about being haunted by God, his eyes, a
glassy brown, would pool up and for an instant, he looked like the small boy he once was,
before the advent of his bushy eyebrows and distended belly: delicate, dreamy, distracted.
And this was the way Vidrio looked most of the time, until Father Tomasso would smack
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the back of his head (the encrusted rings often drew blood), barking, “Wake up! This is
not a school for dreaming. This is a school for extraction!”
The boys and girls, all thirty of them, between the ages of five and fifteen, had
started coming here before they had even taken their first sip of aguardiente. Their
mothers and aunts and grandmothers had waited anxiously in line, child in hand, for an
interview with Father Tomasso. Vidrio remembers his own grandmother, his mother’s
mother, clenching his hand tightly until the sweat gathered between their two palms. She
had worn her tightest acid-washed jeans and glared up at the overcast June sky, as if
reprimanding God. “Vidrio,” she had said, her voice raspy from too many Pall Malls,
“Show him you’re a good boy, okay?” When Vidrio did not respond, contemplating the
column of ants traveling alongside the brick wall, marching towards an apple core,
Adella shook her head again and sighed, Dios Mio. He was only four years old, but
convinced of his early signs of talent, Adella had insisted Father Tomasso take a look at
the boy.
Behind his desk, in a large drafty administrative room with stained glass
windows, Father Tomasso demanded, “What can he do?” His right hand gripped a
Rubick’s cube. It was known that Father Tomasso had a weakness for Rubick’s cubes. He
always had to have one nearby, and often pronounced, after boring one of his pudgy
fingers into his temple, that they were good for the mind. Kept him as sharp as a razor.
Vidrio could see that Father Tomasso was one square away from completing the puzzle; a
sea of green squares with only one white square remaining.
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Adella took a small step forward, poised in her fake snakeskin stilettos. She had
taken them out of the tissue-lined shoebox this morning. Father Tomasso took in her
womanly figure, and his eyes flickered with faint appreciation.
She unfolded her palms to the coffered ceiling. Vidrio looked up, half-expecting
an angel to descend from the ornate plaster.
“He is small. He is agile. And very fast when running. He can leap from one roof
to the next without falling, even in rain. And he can read and write. Take dictation for
you, like a real secretary.”
He motioned for Vidrio to step before the desk. He told him to turn around, with
his arms straight out, and to do fifty jumping jacks. Vidrio did just that. Then he asked
Vidrio to touch his toes. Vidrio complied, bending his small body in half. His cheeks
were molting red, but otherwise, he exhibited no signs of effort.
Father Tomasso leaned forward, grinning. “Now. How about a one-handed
cartwheel?”
Vidrio shot a quick glance at Adella, who looked as if she might cry.
He puffed out his chest, and decided he would do it, even if he broke his arm,
even if he had no idea how.
“Wait!” Father Tomasso shouted, emitting a gust of whiskey-cigar breath, “I was
only kidding!” His eyes danced wildly, before he burst into howling laughter.
Adella let out an odd high-pitched yelp.
Vidrio stared at the two adults, uncertain if he had pleased them.
“Take one, and bring him back tomorrow.” Father Tomasso gestured towards a
waterlogged cardboard box to the right of his desk, which was stuffed with navy blue and
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white uniforms from St. Jude’s Cathedral School. St. Jude’s was the best Catholic school
in the city, located in the richest neighborhood of Corrientes, where the jacarandas were
in perennial bloom, and oranges hung heavily from tree branches behind stone walls, and
the air smelled as sweet as those bars of jasmine soap wrapped in gold threaded paper
that rich women placed in their creamy marble guest bathrooms. This neighborhood
loomed on the other side the river, and you had to cross Belgrano Bridge to get to it.
The next day, Vidrio began at the Royal Academy for Pick-Pockets.
There were six rules:
1. Always wear your uniform
2. Never make eye contact
3. If you make a run for it, don’t look back
4. Work alone or in pairs
5. Stay away from Belgrano Bridge
6. Move as if you had glass hands and glass feet

Because Vidrio was so young at the time, Pampa assisted him at first. Pampa was
five years older than Vidrio, and he knew quite a lot about how to extract treasures from
people’s pockets. Pampa’s real name was not Pampa, but he insisted on being called
Pampa because he said his father was a rancher in Las Pampas and someday, he would
join his father in those flat fertile lands where cattle roamed freely. Pampa would always
add, with a big grin, that there were also hundreds of honey factories in Las Pampas.
Then he would lick his little fingers one by one, and say, “I swear on your mother’s grave
Vidrio, the honey tastes so good and sweet—better than dulce de leche! Better than
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mazzamorra! Better than bolas de fraile!” When Vidrio would begin to lick his own
fingers, Pampa violently tore Vidrio’s hand away from his mouth and cried, “What did I
tell you? I’m the only one who can taste it!”
At times, Pampa was also generous. He let Vidrio keep his earnings in a pelt
made of otter. The fur was dry and brittle by now, but it was one of Pampa’s dearest
possessions. He boasted about how he had killed the otter on the banks of the river with a
bb gun, but Vidrio suspected that Pampa had stolen it from one of the stalls in the
marketplace, where several other identical otter pelts hung every Saturday.
Over the next seven years, Vidrio remained lithe and agile and quick. His
earnings increased and this pleased Father Tomasso. Vidrio slipped off rings and watches
and necklaces without women even noticing; he moved as if he had glass hands and glass
feet, and sometimes, he even thought he would wake up the next morning, in his dusty
cot off of his grandmother’s kitchen, to discover that his hands and feet had been
transformed into thinly spun glass appendages. But this did not happen. Once he gave his
grandmother a sapphire ring that he had absconded from a fat Portuguese woman who
kept pointing at the towering statue of a solider atop his horse. Her other arm hung
loosely, unconsciously, from her body, and Vidrio saw the gleaming blue-black stone on
her fourth finger, just waiting to be plucked. Her husband took multiple snapshots of the
unremarkable statue. Vidro could see the woman had applied an ample amount of sun
screen to her skin; the faint sheen of the white lotion shimmered in the mid-afternoon
sun. And that made it even easier, as there was hardly any friction between her skin and
the gold band when he slid it off. And yet, Vidrio carried a small vile of Vaseline in his
otter pouch if the air happened to turn dry, which often occurred in the spring. Adella
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discovered the Vaseline one afternoon at the end of January. It was the height of summer
and carnival was coming next month. The sun felt especially fierce that day, and Adella
just had pulled down the wooden shades in a fit of frustration. “It’s burning in here,” she
yelled to no one in particular. She was hunting for her garnet colored nail polish. The
apartment was warm and dark and Vidrio calmly watched his grandmother’s frenetic
figure tossing up sheets and pillows and even pulling a lampshade off a lamp. She
stormed through the kitchen, heading for his cot. It was the only corner of the apartment
Vidrio could call his own. His otter pouch was tucked half-way under his pillow. She
pulled it out by the tail and emptied its contents. Crumpled bills, coins, a stray shoelace,
the faded photograph of her daughter, and then the small tube of Vaseline fell onto the
starched sheets.
“Vidrio,” she demanded, “What is this for?” She pinched the Vaseline tube
between her thumb and index finger. When he hesitated, her face contorted into a
grimace. In a cruel flash, Vidrio realized that she was an ugly woman. No wonder Father
Tomasso had never asked her out, despite her efforts.
“Vidro! I’m talking to you.”
Her large mouth distracted him.
“It’s for when the air is dry, and…”
“Dios Mio! Spare me the details.” She shook her dyed black hair and tossed the
tube into the trash next to the sink. On the stove, a pot of lamb stew bubbled over the rim.
She swore and turned down the flame, hunching over so that Vidrio saw her lace
underwear riding up her lower back.
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Pampa had already informed him how good it could feel, in the sun, on the rocks
of the river, Vaseline in one hand, the clear water lapping at your feet. “Close your eyes
and imagine Consuela or Lupe,” he had said, naming the two beauties of the pickpocket
academy. And Vaseline was far cleaner than cutting a small hole into a raw chicken’s
neck. But Vidrio feared losing his eyesight. “Look,” Pampa had said, grinning, “my eyes
are better than ever.” His black irises were as sharp and pointed as darts. And despite his
fear of going blind, Vidro was approaching his thirteenth year. Certain needs had begun
to press down on him with such force sometimes he felt as if it was not humanly possible
to feel this much desire and have nowhere to put it.
The kitchen fan spun furiously from the ceiling, slicing through the thick lamb-
infused air. Vidrio swallowed hard and thought about how to retrieve the Vaseline tube
without Adella noticing. She was still leaning over the stove, bringing a wooden spoon to
her lips. “Hmmm,” she mumbled appreciatively. He would have to wait for her to go out.
He contemplated the curve of the trash bin, and its heavy lid. Surely he had executed
much more complicated thefts. But she was irritated and unpredictable; the two qualities
most feared by pickpockets. Just as he leaned his torso forward, his palms itching for the
abandoned tube, she spun around and said, “Vidro. Hand me two bowls. I made it extra
spicy, just for you.” And so he sat down with her and they ate.
A few days later, around dusk, Vidrio was finishing his rounds. Pampa was
working a few blocks away, past the pastel colored liquor shop with the broken neon
sign. Vidrio waited for Pampa in the small park opposite the liquor store. He glanced up
at the clouds, which appeared as if they were lit from the inside with a flame, the carmine
pink creeping into the light grayness. The summer seemed endless, the humid January
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days lazy and imprecise. He sat at the base of an old colonial statue, tracing the hoof of a
horse, thinking about how he could have easily swiped a gringo’s wallet from his back
pocket today inside the cool quiet of Santa Maria’s. But his heart had not been in it, and
the few times he had been unsuccessful in his career was due to a lack of conviction.
Father Tommaso had given a sermon on the subject two weeks ago, as a result of lower
than usual returns. He had said, leaning over the pulpit, his red silk shirt stained with
sweat, that passion was the key to everything. His voice, hoarse and thick, reverberated in
Vidro’s mind; “You must believe in the moving object of your desire. Nurture it, feed it,
give yourself over to it. This faith will ensure your success.”
Tracing the horse’s stone hoof, Vidrio heard a light skipping. His head jerked
upwards, and at first, he thought it was an apparition; a saint walking under the jacaranda
trees, her dark hair plaited and showered with small lavender petals, like a veil of fine
lace. Her eyes were trained on the slow and steady movement of her paten leather Mary
Janes wading through the path strewn with petals. She was singing under her breath, a
familiar yet strange song; a nursery rhyme about a black cat that got caught stealing
rubies from a princess. She was heading directly towards him. The light took on a silvery
tinge. The air in his chest reduced to nothing, and when she gazed upwards, her brown
eyes liquid and bottomless, he felt as if he had forgotten how to breathe. She seemed to
be focusing on a point in the distance, at some invisible object, which held her attention
intensely. He marveled at her smooth brow, at the shimmer of sweat across it, at her
perfectly curved earlobes, which cushioned red stones the color of blood.
And then, the awful sound of another voice intercepted. A woman’s worried call.
“Isabella. Come here.”
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In an instant, she turned away from him and put her hands on her hips. Her legs,
long and coltish, were brown from the sun. “I’m nearly there.”
“We’re leaving,” the woman called from the other end of the path. Isabella
clenched her fists. Her hands were impossibly small and dainty; ideal for slipping items
out of people’s pockets, for sliding a flattened palm through an open car window, for
deftly undoing a clasp around a woman’s neck, for manipulating a keyhole. Vidrio fell in
love with her hands.
“No,” Isabella said, kicking up dust.
Pampa ran towards the statue, out of breath, singing Vidrio’s name. He skidded
on the dirt path strewn with jacaranda petals and waved a fedora in his hand. “Made in
Italy. Plucked clean off an old man’s head.”
The woman, it seemed she was Isabella’s nanny judging from her thick-soled
loafers, and her nurse-like bearing, frowned at the boy. Isabella was about to turn back
around when Vidrio dashed behind the statue. He imagined how Pampa must look to
Isabella and her nanny, in his dusty old sneakers without laces, torn jean shorts, and faded
t-shirt with the arms cut off. A street urchin, a kid from the ghetto, a thief—the way
Vidrio also looked. They were not wearing uniforms because today was Sunday, the day
the uniforms were washed and hung out to dry. They were not allowed to work today
either, but Pampa could not resist certain objects, fedoras being one of them, along with
cufflinks, silk cravats, and gold plated cigarette cases. Pampa imagined his father
possessed these items, when in reality, his father was one of the drunks who played
checkers on San Juan street for small change. But this did not matter. Vidrio loved
Pampa’s mythical father almost as much as Pampa did.
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“Pampa,” Vidrio pleaded from behind the statue in a violent whisper, “Shut up.”
Pampa grinned at Isabella and her nanny; he employed his most wily and
charming grin. Vidro cringed from behind the cool stone. He could only imagine the
disgust on their faces. The nanny emitted a few tense words, lowering her voice, and
Isabella followed her out of the park.
The sky was violet. A pale crescent moon shone behind the tree branches. Vidrio
leaned against the statue inhaling short shallow breaths.
Pampa twirled the fedora on his index finger. “What’s with you?”
Vidrio’s eyes were shining. “I have just seen an angel covered in jacaranda
petals.”
“At first I thought she was one of us.”
“One of us?” Vidrio asked faintly.
“Didn’t you see?” Pampa jumped onto the statue, hanging triumphantly from the
horse’s neck. “She was wearing a St. Jude’s uniform!” And then he swung his skinny
legs into the air, landing on two feet.
Vidrio gazed at the copper domed church of St. Jude’s, which stood on the other
side of the river, in La Resistencia, the wealthiest neighborhood of Corrientes, across the
Belgrano Bridge.
Night fell.
Pampa took Vidro by the arm and they walked back to the academy. Every few
blocks Pampa would nudge his sharp elbow into Vidrio’s side and say, “Isabella. Just like
the fucking queen of Spain.”
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Vidrio remained silent. He gathered up the image of her covered in jacaranda
petals, and hoarded it as if he was folding layers of the finest silk around him like a
cocoon. When Pampa laughed his wicked wet laugh, Vidrio focused on the stars lighting
up the gray-black sky, those ancient flames that had always been there.
When they rounded the corner, up ahead in front of the academy, Father Tomasso
was opening the door of his Cadillac for a lady friend. He murmured something into her
ear and she laughed, before her legs disappeared into the car. Father Tomasso grinned,
saluting the two boys as he strode over to the driver’s side.
“The old bastard,” Pampa snorted.
The Cadillac sped off to the sound of samba crying out of the radio.
In a flash, Vidrio remembered how on her left wrist, Isabella had been wearing a
thin gold bracelet with a hanging pendant of the Virgin on it.
This was the first thing he stole.
The next morning, he crossed Belgrano Bridge, and made his way into La
Resistencia, constantly in fear that someone would point and yell out that he did not
belong here. He walked quickly along the sidewalks, which were well paved, nearly
gleaming, if concrete could gleam. High pointed gates shrouded in bougainvillea
obscured his view of the white-washed villas behind them. Cypress trees swayed gently
in the wind. The air smelled of perfume; a buttery moneyed scent. People on the street
looked bored and listless. They walked slowly, with satisfaction. The older women’s
faces were pulled tight, as if the wind blew back their extra skin. The hue of their skin
matched the soft tan of their leather handbags. One woman’s nails were painted an
eggshell pink. It dawned on Vidrio that the women did not wear the bright oranges and
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pinks that his grandmother wore. No one was screaming. Music did not pour out of
windows. Even the wrought iron trash bins stationed at every other corner had a clean
look to them. Vidrio sniffed the air and the absence of cooking food struck him as odd,
almost barren. It was as if the streets and the buildings and the people had been covered
by a thick soft cloth, a velvety muteness.
At St. Jude’s Cathedral School students ran out in waves of navy and white for
recess. He watched for Isabella from behind the bars. Sweat streamed down the sides of
his torso when he saw her: she threw her head back and gasped at something a boy said.
Her hair fell in waves around her face, like the way the ocean stirred at night, thick and
black and full of expectation.
When school let out, he followed behind her group of friends until they went into
an ice cream parlor. They tasted every flavor. The girl behind the counter blew wisps of
hair out of her face. When Isabella closed her eyes as she tasted the pistachio, he quickly
slipped off her bracelet. The rush of the theft sharpened his senses. He heard Isabella’s
tongue running over the small wooden spoon, and then the click of the discarded spoon
against the paper cup on the counter when she asked to try the hazelnut. He inhaled the
coconut soap she must have used to lather her shoulder blades. He imagined tasting the
tiny rivulets of salty sweat gathering at the backs of her knees, right along the elastic rim
of her nylon socks. The girls spoke in a flurry of high-pitched tones, breathy and
vibrating with a faint hysteria over ice cream, and someone’s birthday party, and Latin
homework. Vidrio felt his head lighten. Isabella’s hair blurred into a velvety curtain of
dark.
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He slowly backed away, clenching the bracelet in his fist, and then, as the blood
flooded into his temples, he bolted for the door just as Isabella asked, leaning her body
against the glass casing, “Don’t you have vanilla bean?”
He stole something from her every day. He laid out her possessions on his pillow
at night, and traced the curves of her ivory comb, her elephant keychain, her pinky ring
inlaid with mother of pearl, the bracelet with the Virgin Mary, and the cherished lock of
her hair that he had snipped off from the end of her thick plait. The objects, illuminated
by the moonlight flooding in through the window next to his cot, looked ghostly and
surreal against the square pillow. Then, after admiring them, he would place each object
back into a silk pouch he had filched from Adella.
Every morning Vidrio could be seen running across Belgrano bridge, and then, in
the late afternoons, walking slowly home when the sun was red. His grandmother fussed
over him at the dinner table. She demanded to know where his appetite had gone. Vidrio
would shrug, his glassy eyes more abstracted than usual.
“La Resistencia rat!” Pampa would shout when he saw Vidrio on the streets. And
then he would jostle up next to him and ask if he had gotten into Isabella’s pants. Vidrio
shook his head. “Kissed?” Still no. “Held hands?”
“Nothing,” Vidrio said, all the while fingering under his vest his most recent
acquisition, one of her pearl earrings.
At night, he lay awake, listening to his heart thump through his ribcage, planning
what he would steal from her tomorrow. In the pale morning, he awoke from his
dreamless state, his eyes burning, his head feeling as tiny as a pin inside of his swimming
brain. He numbly passed through his daily exercises at the academy, and Adella’s
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nagging, until, in the afternoon, he saw Isabella again. And then, all the blood and energy
rushed back into his skin. His eyes felt sharp and quick. His chest expanded. He became
painfully alert, readying himself for theft.
Father Tomasso pulled him into his office one morning after mass, and asked him
what was wrong.
Vidrio stared listlessly at the miniature Rubix cube hanging from his strand of
rosary beads. All the colored squares were jumbled. “Nothing’s wrong.”
The stained glass windows threw competing shades of violet and emerald across
Father Tomasso’s face. “Don’t lie. I see you scurrying back and forth across Belgrano
Bridge. Your returns are down. In the last ten days, you have only brought in one car
radio, and a pearl necklace, which was a fake by the way.” He sighed, lighting a cigar.
“What are you doing in La Resistencia?”
Vidrio stammered, “Planning a heist.”
Father Tomasso narrowed his bloodshot eyes. “Really?”
Vidrio nodded, praying Father Tomasso would not detect the falsity of such a
story, that he did not suspect the real reason: Isabella. Her name vibrated under his
tongue. He almost said it out loud.
After a long pause, during which Father Tomasso scrutinized the boy, to see if he
would crack under the pressure of his gaze, he sunk back into his creaking swivel chair
and said, “You need to deliver. Soon.”
Vidrio softly replied, “I know.”
“And eat something!” Father Tomasso yelled before waving him out.
In the hall, Pampa took Vidrio by the shoulders. “You in trouble?”
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Vidrio blinked, his eyes watery and unfocused.
Pampa shook him. “You might get kicked out of the academy. And then what?”
On Pampa’s lower lip a layer of milk had dried into a white crusty film. “A trash
collector. That’s what you’ll become.” Bare-chested men, sweating and humping heaps
of trash piled onto piecemeal carts which they pulled through the streets late at night, the
constant scavenging while bathed in the scent of dirt and urine and rotten food, working
through the pre dawn hours—Pampa shook his head mournfully. “Not that,” he
whispered.
“I don’t care,” Vidrio said, already envisioning the orange trees lining the streets
leading up to St. Jude’s, and the sensation of his chest pressed against the wrought iron
gate, waiting, waiting.
When he went to bed that night, a wet chill pervaded the air. The window next to
his cot had been cracked open. Adella had been complaining earlier about the humidity,
and Vidrio thought she might have opened it in a fit of exasperation. Now the apartment
was quiet and dark and the only light came from a bare bulb dangling in the kitchen. He
kneeled on top of his bed, his skinned knees facing the pillow, in preparation for his
nightly ritual. Fervently, he lifted up the pillow, only to discover the blank whiteness of
the sheets. The black silk pouch, with Isabella’s objects inside of it, was gone. Vidrio
doubled over, moaning into the mattress, his body shaking.
At first light, he went hunting. He ran through the streets, scouring trashcans,
banging car windows with his fists, catching his breath in empty parking lots, the
pavement a shade darker from the recent rain. The morning sounds of convalescing
pigeons and old cars, of busses zooming past and the crackling telephone wires overhead
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merged into a numbing cacophony. He nearly slipped on some dog shit, and as he caught
himself, Vidrio saw, on the next block, the moving back of Pampa’s starched blue shirt,
and that red bandana tied around his neck, Pampa’s new trademark. Pampa walked
jauntily past the boarded up shops, munching on an alfajore. He was oblivious to the
dead run behind him, until Vidro flung his arms around Pampa’s neck. Pampa bucked,
bending forward and back, making exaggerated chocking sounds. Vidrio dug his nails
into Pampa’s neck, drawing thin lines of blood. “Where is it,” he breathed.
“Get off me!” Pampa cried, but Vidrio only dug his nails deeper into Pampa’s
neck.
“Where is it?” Vidrio asked again, his voice a low mutter.
“I took it for your own good.”
Vidrio pulled the red bandana tightly against Pampa’s Adam’s apple.
Pampa tried to speak, but he could not.
“Tell me where you’ve taken it,” he began, loosening the bandana slightly. Pampa
inhaled big gulping breaths of air and then he explained how he had stolen the pouch
yesterday afternoon, and sold off all of Isabella’s things on the black market for a high
sum. Then he had delivered Father Tomasso the mandatory sixty percent from the sale.
“Father Tomasso said,” Pampa was regaining his composure, “he said that he always
knew you would come through, in the end.” Pampa produced a worn manila envelope.
He thumped it against Vidrio’s chest. “Here’s your forty percent.”
Vidrio threw it into a puddle a few feet away.
“It’s yours,” Pampa yelled, retrieving the envelope, shaking it dry.
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Vidrio walked away, his gaze fixed on the flickering streetlamps that were
shutting off, one by one, in the early morning light. “Go see your father with it. He
doesn’t even exist.”
Vidrio wandered the streets until nightfall. He walked aimlessly, without
intention, in disbelief over what had happened, and yet he knew that tonight, underneath
his pillow, there would be nothing there. Nothing, he thought, bumping shoulders with an
older man. When his hand skimmed a woman’s purse strap, he did not experience the
slightest urge to slip it off her shoulder. A sharpness dissipated in his chest; a helpless
weakening. Years later, he would recognize that feeling as the dull ache that followed the
end of a love affair, but he felt it for the first time now, and it was an irreversible,
deadening pain.
The last summer days of February dwindled. His grandmother made her lamb
stew again. She closed the heavy wooden shutters at night to keep out the damp chill of
the wind. In the dark, Vidrio lay motionless, his hands folded over his chest, staring at
nothing. When morning came, he could not bear to begin the day, with its pale yellow
insistence that he do just that. He preferred the nested darkness of the predawn hours,
when he dreamed of Isabella; in these dreams, she returned to him, with the same
vividness as when he had first seen her, shrouded in Jacaranda petals.
Less and less tourists came to Corrientes during the winter months. Father
Tomasso gave sermons full of emotive gestures. He waved an unlit cigar in the air,
emphasizing the power of thinking outside the box. “There is opportunity in a lack of
opportunity,” he stated. His face, swollen and discolored, betrayed the hard times that had
fallen on the academy. Pampa convinced Vidrio to travel down south to El Calafate, to
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where rich Americans went to see the glaciers. “Big blocks of ice, and they think they’ve
found some kind of secret.”
The two young men made preparations to leave. Adella alternately bemoaned that
he was abandoning her, while fluttering about the apartment with a girlish excitement
over his impending voyage. She cried and yelled at him within a span of minutes.
In the final days before his departure, Vidrio found Isabella’s bracelet with the
charm of the Virgin. It was first item he had taken from her. The bracelet was resting next
to his plate on the dinner table, carefully aligned with the spoon and the fork. When he
first saw the thin gold line glinting under the coarse kitchen light, he caught his breath.
He asked Adella where it came from, but she scolded him for being so careless as to
leave such a valuable piece lying around. As he moved through his day, he felt as if
someone was watching him from a roof top patio, through a one-way mirrored window,
from a cab careening past. He went to the academy, to pay his respects to Father
Tomasso. Inside his office, Father Tomasso recalled the day he had met Vidrio. “You
have talent,” he said, stuffing Vidrio’s pockets with cigars and crumpled bills. “Glass
hands and glass feet.” He kissed Vidrio on each cheek, his rough stubble a familiar yet
irritating sensation. Vidrio noticed how Father Tomasso had aged. His eyelids sagged.
His lips looked a little blue. His chest caved inward.
When he left the academy, on the bottom step stood Isabella’s elephant keychain.
He bent over and picked it up, bringing the elephant’s back, which was inlaid with
semiprecious stones, to his lips. He smelled her in the air: vanilla bean ice cream, freshly
cut oranges, and jacaranda trees in full bloom. Vidrio raced down the street, his arms
pumping, his chest tight and frantic, thinking she might have just turned the corner, that
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he could catch her. But when he reached the end of the street, which opened up into a
congested roundabout, he stopped, confused by the red and green lumbering buses, the
exhaust blooming into his face, the waves of people waiting to cross. A few blocks away
a marching band celebrated a distant victory. In front of him, a car pulled up and a
woman got out, slamming the door. The mouth of her purse hung open. Vidrio could
have easily swiped her pocketbook, but he didn’t move, lost to his thoughts. The man at
the wheel yelled after her, and then drove off. Vidrio leaned against the streetlamp,
watching the old rusted Ford Falcon loose itself in the dense traffic. There was only one
other place to go.
In the small park across from the liquor store, where the statue of the unnamed
solider reigned victorious, Vidrio waited for her. He was nervous and sweating, his white
shirt drenched. The park was deserted, save for a few cats circling for food. He could
wait on one of the benches lining the path, but he decided to sit at the base of the statue,
for luck, as if replicating every detail of their first encounter would bring her closer to
him. But when he neared the statue, he saw the outline of certain familiar objects
arranged around its base: the ivory comb, the pinky ring that had fit on such a small
delicate finger, the precious lock of her hair.
He waited until dusk, until the pale half moon appeared in the overcast sky, until
he imagined she moved towards him in a veil of jacaranda petals. He would finally touch
her hair, her face, and her perfectly small hands, and he would not take anything from
her.

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A Sexual History

After that night, I skulked around the phone, monitoring its rings, wondering if
Lorenzo would call, but at the same time, pretending not to care. Fay knew that I was
waiting to hear from him, or at least hoping to, and she told me, rolling her eyes, that he
was no big deal.
“No big deal?” I said, sitting crossed-legged on her bed while she sewed the
ribbons onto her pointe shoe—long streams of satiny pink.
“Yeah,” Fay said, glancing up at me from the floor, a silver thimble on her thumb.
Alanis Morisette played softly in the background from Fay’s portable CD player,
singing about it being so ironic, having rain on your wedding day, and meeting your ex-
lover’s lovely wife.
“You certainly didn’t feel that way when you met Andy.”
Fay sighed. “That’s true, but…”
“But what?” I flipped through the pages of my art history book: Women in the
Greco-Roman World, finding my place, skimming the top of the page: Marriage, in
Greek society, was under male control, orchestrated through oikos, heads, whereas
defloration proved more ambiguous, sometimes occurring through male control (rape)
or through female control (seduction).
“If you hadn’t met me, I wouldn’t have introduced you to Lorenzo, and then you
wouldn’t even be obsessing right now,” Fay said, waving her pointe shoe in the air.
“Because of your nude English professor, you changed into my art history class. You sat
down in my row.”
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“Next to you,” I said, remembering how Professor Styne had accosted me in the
woman’s locker room. I had just finished laps in the gym pool, and still in my wet
bathing suit, standing in the locker area, Professor Styne jauntily approached. She began
a normal conversation about Jane Eyre, in the nude. I assumed she would change into her
bathing suit, or into something, but she kept talking, stark naked, her sagging breasts and
extremely bushy pubic hair stridently on display. I kept trying to look elsewhere, but her
nakedness refused to be ignored; there was nowhere else to look. Styne went on,
discussing the insane woman locked in the attic, and how this woman could be
interpreted as a symbol for the post-colonial subject, the subaltern. At that moment, I
decided against majoring in English. Instead I chose art history, with a minor in
comparative religion. The first day of Introduction to Western Religions, the professor
had leaned over his podium and said that we should read the Old Testament as if it was a
love letter, from our beloved, because every detail, every turn of phrase, comma, and
pause, meant something, and that was how we read a letter from a lover, was it not?
Likening love to a religious experience made sense because I thought falling in love
should feel religious, numinous, a move beyond one’s metaphysical limits. I thought it
should feel like an annihilation of the self, blown into the violet ether, into a rich dense
realm of possibility. And so, Professor Finnerman, in his hand-woven kippah and wire-
rimmed glasses, confirmed what I had always thought to be true.

The next song came on about trying to be perfect but fucking up anyway. Fay
asked if I wanted to listen to Fiona Apple instead.
I smoothed down the pages of my book. “No, I like this song.”
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“Anyway, you always have a boyfriend,” Fay reminded me, in her maternal way.
“When was the last time you didn’t?”
“The past few months have been uneventful,” I paused, closing the book. It was
impossible to concentrate on the fine print. “I’m doing field work.”
“Field work?” Fay threaded another needle.
“You know, we should be collecting data to figure out what we like, or don’t.” I
didn’t tell Fay that this was my mother’s theory, and she wasn’t the most reassuring
model. According to her, there was no use trying to find the “one” because there was no
real “one,” but a series of ones, resulting in four marriages at this point. Her current
husband developed industrial parks in Orange County, and had a passion for bird
watching.
“I love Andy,” Fay said, expertly winding the ribbon around each pointe shoe,
and placing the shoes back into their cardboard box, lined with tissue paper. “I wouldn’t
want to be with anyone else.”
“You’re lucky,” I paused, “I guess.”

Men from Europe, especially the warmer countries, had always attracted me,
probably because I had grown up wanting to live in Italy or Spain—I was convinced that
life there was inherently better than life in Los Angeles. At fifteen, I went to Cadiz, the
southern most point of Spain, for a summer abroad program to learn Spanish. I lived with
a family who housed a turtle in the bathroom. Tortuga was his name, and he perpetually
hid behind the toilet. Their apartment smelled of eggs, onions and chorizo. My roommate
was a girl from New York with enormous breasts, which I envied, and she was used to
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having boyfriends. She had already reached second base. After taking a cursory Spanish
class in the morning, we went to the beach in the afternoon, and then at night, along the
ocean, there were various clubs and bars. The nights were hot and humid. The outdoor
clubs played techno music, and served sangria in little white paper cups. The rock of
Gibralter loomed across the sea, hinting of North Africa. I met Danni, a short Spanish
man with dark sorrowful eyes, at one of these clubs. He was strumming on his guitar,
singing softly about the sea, el mar. He always wore a pink polo shirt with jeans and no
shoes, but his feet were tan and clean. His brown chest bloomed through the unbuttoned
buttons of his shirt, and a gold chain flashed between the opening. Later I saw the
crucifix that hung from it. It was not a simple or subtle cross, but one with the body of
Christ carved in detail, complete with the loincloth over his groin. But I had loved the
gold against his tan, religion against sex. At twenty-five, he lived with his mother and
worked as a mechanic. He fixed motorbikes and scooters. We spoke in Spanish, with
great brooding silences in between, which I thought were romantic and monumental. He
would stare at me and smile shyly, and then we would resume kissing. He had given me
my first real kiss under a bloated moon. I had leaned against a dirty stucco wall that
separated the beach from the sidewalk and he leaned into me, his arms wrapped around
my waist, his pelvis pressing into mine. The air smelled of sunscreen mixed with
coconut, and fried fish from the restaurant down the street. His warm breath, buttery and
dark, murmured Spanish sentences into my ear, which I half-understood. I let my head
fall back, my face bathed by the night. His hands spread across my back, and he kissed
me again, starting at the base of my throat, and moving along my jaw, and then wedding
his mouth with mine. He tasted like beer and salt. Later, at eleven o’clock, he returned me
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to the family’s apartment on his motorbike. I rode on the back of it without a helmet, and
glanced up at the stars, hugging my arms around his waist, under his shirt, where his skin
still retained the sun’s heat. One night, during our ten-minute ride from the white stucco
wall where we sat and kissed, back to the apartment, he asked me to marry him.
Not wanting to hurt his feelings, I didn’t say no outright, but explained that my
father expected me back home at the end of the summer, that I had come here to learn
Spanish. He didn’t understand the concept of language immersion. He only knew that he
wanted me, and that we had spent long hours kissing against walls and under porticos,
each night getting closer to the question of sex. Last night his fingers had skimmed the
outer edges of my cotton underwear. He had caressed my inner thigh, his hand moving
under my jean miniskirt for over an hour.
“Stay here with me. I’ll take care of you. We’ll live with my mother.”
“College,” I said into the wind. He didn’t know about the admissions process and
scoring high on the SAT, or how this language program was designed to look good on
my college application, attesting to fluency in Spanish.
“I have a good job,” he explained and then went on to describe what our life could
be like here, in Cadiz, in this seaside provincial town. The beach most days, the sea and
paella—his mother would teach me how to make it. I saw myself in a white wedding
dress and net veil, and the sugary wafer dissolving on my tongue, and embracing the
Virgin Mary, but after that, a blank.
“I’ll come back to Cadiz next summer, to see you again,” I offered, wanting to
believe this would happen, and knowing it would not.
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Despite his visions of a white wedding, he lost patience. On my last night in
Cadiz, he showed me his penis. He had taken me to another wall, a different one made of
small irregular stones. The wall cut down the beach, stretching from the boardwalk to the
shore. It was windy, blowing sand into our hair, the summer nearly finished in these last
days of August. The clubs with their techno music sounded far away, and no one was
around. All I saw was the crashing shoreline, and the distant lights of the town. Tall
blocks of ugly apartment buildings stood across the street, but all the windows were dark.
We started to kiss. I thought that maybe tonight I would let him feel me up, as my
roommate had suggested. “Then you’ll be at second base,” she had said, “same as me.” I
could enter eleventh grade knowing I had gotten that far, but then he started speaking
quickly in Spanish. He repeated, Te quiero, te quiero.
“I love you too,” I said, putting my arms around his warm neck. I closed my eyes,
remembering that the instructor had said te quiero could mean one of two things: I love
you, or I want you. For a quick second he removed his hands from my waist, and when I
opened my eyes, he stood in front of me, feet firmly planted in the sand, with his jeans
bunched up around his ankles, his white jock strap also down there, and his bare
unadorned penis erect in the wind. I screamed and ran in the opposite direction of the
penis. All I could think about while I made my way across the sand, towards the lights
and music, was how horribly long, pink and skinny it was. The flesh color reminded me
of a new borne. It was revolting. I had no idea how such a thing would even fit. I had
never seen a penis aimed like that; taunt, stretched out, and brutal. The next day, the
program ended and I left Spain, and Danni, behind.
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After Spain, two years passed without any notice from boys. Until Janeck spotted
me eating lunch alone under the oak trees at school. He marched right up and asked for
my phone number. He was from Romania and always commented on the beauty of
Romanian girls, but said they had nothing in their country; no lipstick, eyeliner, nail
polish or bleach—“so they look like shit,” he reasoned, “they don’t have what you have.”
He routinely brought a long stemmed red rose to the front door every Saturday night
when he came to pick me up, after the spiked black gates electronically opened, allowing
him into the half-moon driveway. We went to an action movie of his choice followed by
dinner: the agenda never deviated. Afterwards, we necked in the backseat of his
burgundy Buick in the middle of a deserted parking lot overlooking the blurred lights of
Hollywood. I didn’t like his lips. They were dry, like lizard skin, but I relented, because I
thought it was possible to convince myself into liking him. Janeck even tried to persuade
me to rub his cum into my face. He said it would create a glowing complexion because of
all the proteins.
Freshman year at Vassar, Michael Siskund took my virginity on one of those
pitiful single dorm beds, the sheets coarse and white, the springs creaking beneath us. A
Jewish boy from the suburbs of Boston, he wanted to be Chinese. He didn’t eat anything
other than white rice steamed with a rice cooker in his dorm room, baked skinless
chicken breasts, and raw broccoli. We went to ASA meetings (The Asian Student
Alliance) held in the recreation room of the multicultural house, sitting in a circle with his
Asian friends, toasting to Asian power over multiple shots of vodka. He wore t-shirts
with the ASA logo on them, and moved to Nanjing to study. I visited him there over
winter break, and ate an abundance of sweet potatoes sold on the street, and oatmeal
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cooked with hot water in the hostel. I cried when we went to the Great Wall because it
was too cold to walk. My feet had frozen inside my black Converse high-tops. Each step
sent pain through my toes. He said I didn’t have any appreciation for Chinese history, for
the awesomeness of their army. I said he was probably right.
John Mellors followed. John was a year above me at Vassar. He wanted to be in
the FBI. A French major, with a minor in Religion, he spoke perfect French, wore khakis
and a tie to class, and honored his South Carolinian roots of gentlemanliness and charm,
which really turned out to entail masochism and violent tendencies. I should have
gathered this when he threw his desk chair against the wall of his dorm room, angry that
we had missed the nine o’clock showing of Fight Club at the Fishkill Cinema complex.
The swivel chair left a dent in the wall, and I said he might have to pay for damages.
We spent most of fall semester hiding out in his dorm room. I came there in
between classes and we fucked with the lights out, in the middle of the day, the radiator
turned to the highest dial, blasting stale heat. He was slender and warm, and slipping into
bed with him felt like dipping into a dark pool of water where you can’t see the bottom.
Violence crept into the edges of things, a certain feeling that I might have gone too far
with him, but I liked that. As the semester drew to a close, he clung to me more fiercely
because I was leaving. After lunch on a frigid December day, during finals week, we
were intertwined in his sleeping bag on his dorm room floor. We had begun to favor the
dark hole of the army green sleeping bag to his bed. And John said it brought us as close
as we could physically get, our bodies mashed up against each other. We breathed each
other’s air. I told him that he smelled of warm milk and almonds, and that I might love
him. He closed his eyes when I said these things, because then the words were more
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distilled in his mind that way. I promised to think of him always and write every day
when I went away, to study in Padova, Italy, next semester. When I said this, real tears
sprung from my eyes, but I knew the tears were part of a performance. I didn’t feel that
sad because I knew that in Italy, I would want an Italian boyfriend. Almost every
American girl who studied in Italy for a semester had this plan too, and I was no
different. Growing up, I insisted on framing a certain photograph. It hung on my bedroom
wall all through high school, and I would often stare at it longingly. It was a famous
black-and-white photograph by Ruth Orkin called “An American Girl in Italy, 1951.”
With her hair tied back in a ribbon, a group of Italian men watched her as she walked past
them. But her eyes stared down at the cobblestones, out of shame. But also pleasure, I
had always suspected. She’s wearing these leather sandals. I wanted a pair of the same
sandals, and I wanted to wear a full skirt and have men stare at me just as savagely. I
wanted to feel their Mediterranean desire on my skin, along with the sound of Vespas
speeding past, the air heavy with oranges and garlic, and the ancient stones underfoot.
My cheeks would also burn, exposed to such naked male desire, the shame running up
my neck and blooming into my face. I would hear their catcalls and low whistles. Maybe
I would distractedly brush a stray hair away from my face, or run my hand over the nape
of my neck, skimming off a fine sheen of sweat. As I rounded the corner, leaving the men
behind, the fear and pleasure of their eyes still watching me would surge into my chest,
my body alight and humming.
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And John did not belong in this picture.

Once I arrived in Italy, I didn’t write. Or call. Or anything. My mind discarded
John, as if he had never existed. But one day, after being in Padova for a few months, I
called him at Vassar, out of guilt, hoping enough time had passed, and he had forgotten
me. His machine picked up. His voice, trembling and faint, recited: “If this is Laura
Hershon, I want you to know that I haven’t eaten in two months. You’ve ruined my life.”
The machine beeped. Silence. I hung up, a cold sweat showering my chest. I was a
coward and a liar. But I thought it would end there. I thought about writing him a “dear
John letter,” but realized this was impossible, given that his name unfortunately happened
to be John. Two weeks passed. I willed myself to forget about the frightful recording on
his machine, thinking it was a sophomoric claim for attention. But I dared not call back,
to check. Then one morning in class, the teacher lecturing slowly in Italian about an
Antonioni film, about the symbolism of a goat and the full moon, one of the program
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administrators interrupted with a note. She handed me the piece of paper, folded over
twice. It read: “A young man is wait for your downstairs, with many roses. His name is
John.” I stared at the note. I read it over twice, three times. It still read the same thing. My
friend, George, followed me out into the hallway. I thought I was going to be sick. “Is
there anything I can do?” he asked, his uni-brow arching into a concerned upward curve.
I shook my head, morose. “No,” I said. “There’s nothing you can do.”
John waited for me across the street from the university, dressed in a beige linen
suit, complete with a silk tie, and shined leather loafers. He held a massive bouquet of red
roses, the color of blood I thought, in one hand, partially obscuring his face. He lowered
the bouquet and called out my name. “Laura,” he said. “We need to talk.”
I thought I owed him at least a few days in Italy, after he had come so far and I
had treated him so badly. He wanted to go to Venice. I agreed. We pretended to be lovers
again, even though I said it was over. He didn’t care. He just wanted to experience these
few days with me as if nothing had changed. “Please, just let me have this one small
thing.” I let him have it. On a gondola—he paid 100 dollars for a thirty-minute ride
through the main canals, 100 dollars I knew he didn’t have—he said he loved me and
would always love me. Leaning back against the cushions, I smiled an enigmatic Mona
Lisa smile, knowing that at this angle, the sun was glinting off my blond highlights. The
slick surface of the water reflected the grand palazzos of Venice, where nobility had
reigned. I let my fingers glide through the filthy water.
John left and we agreed it was for the best to go our separate ways. Problem
solved. George resumed his rightful place, and didn’t ask any questions about Venice. He
was good at not asking questions. But then the situation worsened. I started getting
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letters, handwritten in John’s tiny intricate scrawl, proclaiming his undying love for me.
He used nature imagery and clichés: “My love is as intense as a waterfall, crashing onto
the black rocks.” The letters grew darker and violent. I started receiving two a day, sent
from Poughkeepsie to Padova, via airmail. “I want to cut my heart out and eat it. I want
you to eat it too. I want to smear your face into the dirt, until you can’t breathe. I feel like
dying. No—like flying, as high as an eagle, above your grave.”
In the white sunlight of Northern Italy, standing inside a glass phone booth off the
main piazza, I called my father in a panic. I told him about John and his letters, about
how afraid I felt. Two days later I was speaking to an FBI agent over the same pay phone.
My father had contacted the head of Warner Brother’s security, a man named Max Fisk
who fondly referred to my father as “the chief.” Max had a contact at the Los Angeles
FBI Bureau. This contact, a man who identified himself as Simon, had read the Xeroxed
copies of John’s letters that I had sent to my father via FedEx. His voice, mechanical and
dry and implicitly sinister, sounded worse than John, or anyone else for that matter. “On a
scale of one to ten, you’re at a seven,” he said, his shallow breath vibrating over the line.
“A seven?” I repeated, close to hysterics. “Meaning that 10 is the most dangerous
and 1 is the least?”
“Correct.”
I gripped the receiver, my knuckles white. “What do I do now?”
“Don’t respond to any of his letters. Don’t do anything. Eventually he will stop if
he has nothing to go on.” The line went dead. The letters tapered off. I received fewer and
fewer until they stopped coming altogether. I thought about how John wanted to join the
FBI after college, how this was his dream, and I had ruined that too.
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George had been there through the John debacle, standing resolutely by my side
when I spoke to the FBI officer. He was there as I carried John’s letters and threw them
into the trashcan on the far side of the piazza, too afraid to open anymore of them.
George proclaimed to be a handwriting expert and could tell how dangerous John was
from examining his writing. “It’s not so bad,” George comforted me, his voice soft and
lilting.
After the program ended, we headed to Sicily. George was all angular edges, with
his beautiful mouth, which naturally rested in a pout. Old men traveling on trains, sitting
across from us as endless dry fields flitted by, commented, in their raspy voices, that we
must be brother and sister. Fratelli, they said. The old men puffed knowingly on their
cigars, their eyes bright. We smiled and nodded, but it was closer to the truth than they
knew. George refused to have sex. He explained that he wanted to preserve his virginity
because he was strictly Catholic. “I’m waiting for my future wife,” he had said. I had
only found out he was a virgin in Taormina. We were sitting on a bench in the piazza
sharing a bottle of red wine. I broke a piece of ciabatta bread in half and gave him some. I
was talking about how in college, I had lost my virginity within the first few months. “By
sophomore year, everyone’s done it,” I had said. It was a warm night and we had kicked
off our sandals, our bare feet resting on the flat stones. Once every few minutes the edge
of my foot touched his. George stared down at his bread, contemplating the crust. Then
he started to methodically tear it off, but I said, “Give it to me. I love the crust.”
He blurted out, “I’m a virgin.”
I stared at him dumbly. “But don’t you want to?”
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He didn’t dare look at me, but focused on the simple white church on the other
side of the piazza. Old women and children were slowly walking away from the open
church doors. Evening mass had ended a few moments ago. George had wanted to go, but
I had convinced him that wine, bread and taleggio cheese would be more enjoyable. Now
I felt guilty eating the cheese. It stuck in my throat. I coughed and George quickly
slapped my back, to dislodge the cheese. But the moment I swallowed, his hand flew off
my skin, as if my very being threatened his purity.
We traveled for the rest of the month like brother and sister. I did not try to seduce
him, even though I sometimes wanted to. His arms were beautiful, his skin light brown
from the sun. Once the sight of his hands against a white tablecloth nearly made me want
to take hold of them, and force his hands over the parts of my body he avoided—my
breasts, my neck, my lower back, my thighs. Sometimes he rested his head against my
shoulder on the train, our skin dusty and heated, our backpacks stacked up on the
opposite seat. I stroked his hair as he slept. Then he would wake up and sleepily ask if I
wanted a sip of water from his canteen. At night we shared a room and from my bed I
watched his long immovable form outlined under the sheets. He never stirred. Maybe I
was just not attractive enough, or sexy enough, to sway his principles. Once, while
circling the ruins of a Roman temple in Syracuse, I sat down on a broken off pillar and
wept. George leaned on his haunches, taking my hands in his. For a moment, he looked
like a grasshopper with his long legs jutting out from under him. “What’s going on?” he
asked, his face close to mine.
“You don’t think I’m beautiful.”
“Laura. That’s not true.”
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“If you thought so, you would want me.” I searched his face. I didn’t believe that
religion could ever stop a man and a woman, together in Italy, from feeling desire and
acting on it. “Why don’t you want me?” I cried. “This is the temple of Aphrodite—the
goddess of love and beauty.” I took my sleeve, blotting my eyes. “And sex.” He didn’t
say anything. A group of Spanish tourists flashed their cameras at the statue of Aphrodite.
Her head was missing. The tour leader pointed out, in a flutter of melodious sentences,
the curve of her arm, the softness of the line.
“Humans aren’t built to resist these things,” I added, staring at headless
Aphrodite.
The sun beat down on us. My face felt sweaty, streaked with tears and mascara. I
glanced down at my tan legs. “It’s probably my thighs. You probably think they’re too
big. Especially towards the top.”
He pursed his lips. After a long pause, he said, “It’s something I can’t explain, not
even to myself. But it’s not you.”
I cupped his neck. His hair, which had grown long, felt as fine as silk.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have pushed you.”
“It’s okay.” He managed a weak smile. “Your thighs are beautiful.”
We ended up, after circling Sicily, moving north, taking the ferry from Naples to
Capri. We hiked to the upper part of the island, called Anacapri, rugged and less
inhabited, and found a sweeping white villa that had belonged to Axel Montefiore, a
Swedish aristocrat who was also the veterinarian to the Queen of England. It was open to
visitors. We wandered through the white-washed colonnaded hallways—cypress tress
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flashed by on either side. Dogs lounged on the warm stones, their smooth tan bodies
stretched out, taking in the sun.
The summer ended. September, and the start of my last year at Vassar was not far
off. George stayed on, to build sets for the Venice Biennale. We said goodbye on the
steps of the stone cathedral in the center of Padova, looking out onto the piazza where we
had enjoyed camparis and toasted sandwiches, where I had often imagined how his lips
would feel to kiss.

I returned to Vassar for senior year and stuck a series of Edward Hopper postcards
up on my window; scenes of isolation and women thinking alone. My favorite was one of
a young woman naked, sitting upright on her bed as the sun shone in on her through the
window. She was alone but seemed at peace with being alone, her white body bathed in
gold light.
And now, lying on Fay’s bed waiting for Lorenzo to call, I stared out the window,
thinking about the loneliness of not loving someone. The cold afternoon blanketed the
spidery trees, the sky a radiant blue, before it tipped into purple. Fay had gone to do
laundry, toting an enormous nylon bag down to the basement. I stared at the opposite
wall: a photo of us in the ballet studio during rehearsal for last year’s spring dance
performance. We performed Firebird, by Balanchine, a stark and exacting choreography.
My arm over her bony shoulders, we smiled brightly for the camera, our hair in tight
buns, our heads cocked in the same direction, to the right.
Fay and I lived in a house off-campus with Katherine, who had the upper floor. I
could tell by her precise movements that she was in the kitchen; the hard twist of the
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pepper grinder, the quick whisking of eggs in a bowl, and Nina Simone belting out lyrics
of loss. She loved Nina, Sarah Vaughn, and Billie Holiday. “They really express what
women go through; pain, betrayal, suffering from the ‘other woman syndrome,’” she had
said with conviction.
But now, waiting for a phone call from a man, Nina understood this urgency. My
lungs felt emptied of air, my chest tight. I climbed the stairs and sat down at the kitchen
table, watching Katherine slice a tomato into four perfect quarters. She slid them off the
cutting board with the edge of the stainless steel knife, into the salad. She didn’t waste
time with unnecessary movements. Everything in her room had a place. I especially loved
the black onyx rosary beads hanging from her mirror. I had always wanted to be Catholic
and for most of my childhood I thought I was. Before my parents divorced, they had hung
a St. Christopher around my neck; the pendant was gold and circular and had an etching
of a long Eldorado Cadillac, which meant safe travel. It only came out later that I was
Jewish, when my father, after the divorce, started dating Silvia Blum, an orthodox Jewish
woman who taught me about Queen Esther and Purim, dressing me in gray woolen
dresses and black patent leather Mary Janes for temple on Saturdays. Being Jewish meant
not having milk with meat at dinner, turning off the lights Friday night and staying home
Saturdays with nothing to do until sundown. It meant not having a Christmas tree, with
the lovely fake pearls strung along the branches. My mother hated how I was becoming a
Jew. She had traded it in long ago for depth psychology, the hot springs of Big Sur, for
Iyengar yoga and enemas administered at regular intervals, for Joseph Campbell, and the
siren beauty of Lakshmi. When I boasted about Sylvia’s potato pancakes and the
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possibility of going to Hebrew school, my mother said that institutional religion didn’t
work anymore.
In the midst of Torah readings and blessing the challah every Friday night, my St.
Christopher had become a condemned object. Upon Sylvia’s request, I wasn’t allowed to
wear it. Because I had forsaken the pendant, while being driven from Beverly Hills to
Malibu every other week, I feared a car would hit us on the curvy roads. And I missed the
velvety aesthetics of Catholicism; the icons and incense, the way churches smelled of a
match just lit, the solemn stoniness settling over the pews. A saint existed for every kind
of crisis, implying that it was okay, even expected, to rely on them.

The smell of tofu sautéed with garlic brought me back to this dining room table,
and to Katherine standing over the stove in the kitchen, spoon in hand. “What’s wrong?”
she asked, breaking the silence. She transferred the frying pan to an unlit burner. Then
she started to prepare the salad, bringing the large wooden bowl over to the table. Her
ice-blue eyes rested on my face while she grated carrots over the lettuce leaves in sharp
jagged movements. She had been cast as Lady Macbeth for this semester’s production.
The role was beginning to rub off.
I shrugged, peeling off layers of old polish from my nails. “Nothing.” I was still
thinking about that St. Christopher I had lost.
“You don’t usually stare into space,” she said in her biting tone, but I loved it.
“Well, that guy I met over the weekend? Fay said he asked Andy for my number.
But I don’t know if he will call. I can’t stop thinking about it.”
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“You can stop,” she said, pulling saran wrap tightly over the top of the salad
bowl. “You have a choice. In everything.”
Katherine had a habit of making definitive statements. It always annoyed me how
she thought in absolute terms, whereas I didn’t believe in absolutes—I saw reality as a
diaphanous landscape, shifting in shape and color.
“So what’s the deal with Saturday night guy? Lorenzo, right?” Katherine asked.
“I hardly know him,” I said, stealing a glance at her.
She leaned into the refrigerator, placing the wrapped salad bowl between the
orange juice and the cereal. Her voice muffled, she replied, “You go in for the Byronic
hero type.” Through her thin white shirt, I could count the vertebrae marching up her
spine, like a train track. She was only eating brown rice and tofu at the moment, because
she said on film you automatically gain ten pounds. On campus, borderline anorexia was
as common as a winter cold; we had all caught it, some of us worse than others.
“Can we throw this out? It’s been here for weeks.” She held up the Honey Nut
Cheerios. Before I had a chance to answer, she dumped it into the trash. She sat down at
the table, her hands resting in front of her, the gold signet ring on her fourth finger
glinting. It was a family ring, from her grandparents in San Francisco, the founders of
Ghirardelli chocolate.
“So if this guy comes up here and you decide to fall in love with him, I’ll be left
behind. That’s how it will go.”
“Come on,” I said, putting my hand over hers, “Don’t be so dramatic.”
“No more trips to the city, eating at Lupa, shopping at Barneys, seeing plays. No
one else can afford to do that with me,” she said mournfully, staring off into the wooded
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hills. It was true. My father, who had produced over fifty films, had not enforced much
discipline when it came to money, and I spent it carelessly on expensive jeans and nice
underwear, on Dean and Deluca condiments: stuffed olives, Adriatic fig spread, truffle
oil, on cashmere earmuffs and on multiple glasses of wine at the tapas bar in Rockefeller
Center.
After a Saturday in the city, Katherine and I would catch the last train back to
Poughkeepsie, the 11:54 p.m. We would consider our bounty, spreading it out before us
on the seat: eye shadow, in an olive green shimmery shade labeled “Holly Golightly,”
miniature lip-glosses that smelled like sorbet, shower gel called “Grace.” Or we discussed
what we wanted to become, the dark Hudson River running alongside the train. Katherine
would be a famous actress for the stage. She knew the whole of Strindberg’s Miss Julie
by heart. She was going to try out for the Wooster Group in a few weeks. I had told her
that I wanted to curate. But then I would have to go to grad school for that, and learn at
least two other languages—German and French. I already knew Italian. Maybe
publishing would be easier, I had wondered. I didn’t know.
Katherine shook her head ferociously and said, “You must choose one passion
and stick to it.”
I had argued with her, and said that she always made these declarative statements.
“But it has to feel that important,” she had said, her eyes flashing. At the moment she was
dating a Greek girl, Irena, who was playing Duncan in the all female cast. They read all
the French feminist writers and planned to go to Greece next summer, to visit Irena’s
native island. Katherine believed in sisterly devotion, in its warmth and safety. She
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reminded me of the huntress Diana, who when spied upon by Acteon, set his own hounds
on him.
Sometimes, instead of going back to Vassar, we split the cost of a room at the W
Hotel on Lexington. Two perfect twin beds side by side, with the nightstand in the
middle. We talked into the darkness about everything: about The Hassler Hotel in Rome
at the top of the Spanish Steps, about how to make gnocchi, it should be light, lighter than
air Katherine stressed, about our mothers getting various surgical procedures to keep their
youth, about how Katherine hated nylons because she thought they were yet another
device invented by men to control women, about what we would order for breakfast in
the morning. Katherine wanted a soft-boiled egg on whole-wheat toast with strawberry
jam. “Lightly toasted,” she added dreamily.
I talked about falling in love, a favorite subject of mine. “I want to fall in love to
the point of decimation, to the point where you can’t eat or breathe or sleep.”
Katherine sighed, rapidly losing interest.
“To the point of utter consummation.” I stared at the large glass window on the
far side of the room. Towers and lights illuminated the night sky. I thought he might be
out there in the city somewhere, walking around with my future in his pocket.

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This May Hurt

On a dead hot Saturday at the end of August, we drove north on the 405 towards
the San Fernando Valley. Burnt brown hills rose up on either side of the concrete
freeway. The air conditioning was on full blast. The sky, a burnished blue, promised a
warm dry night with the Santa Anna winds blowing in from the east. I licked my lower
lip. It was already chapped, despite previous and repeated applications of lip balm.
Stretching out my arms, I wondered it I would get cold tonight. We were on our way to
Matt and Gracie’s wedding in Valley Village.
“Do you think,” I asked, distracted by a woman in the next car eating a
tremendous hot dog, “I’ll need it?” I motioned towards the black cashmere throw resting
across my lap.
“Take it if you want,” Carl said, turning onto the 101.
We were getting deeper into the valley, departing from the cool blue of Santa
Monica, where we lived. The car thermometer read 101 degrees. Little beads of clear
sweat gathered between my breasts. My dress, a black halter-neck cotton affair with an
exceptionally low back, was probably inappropriate, but I wanted to wear it.
Leaning my head against the hot glass of the car window, I said, “I hope they
don’t serve Indian food.” Matt and Gracie were throwing an Indian themed wedding,
complete with a Taj Mahal backdrop in front of which each couple would be instructed to
pose for a picture. But there would also be Moroccan elements to the evening, as Gracie
had explained, with oversized pillows inside various tents, low tables, hookahs, Oriental
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rugs thrown over the concrete next to the pool, tea lights, wrought-iron lanterns, incense,
and red and yellow rose petals. Matt and Gracie were neither Indian nor Moroccan.
“You only hate Indian food because it makes you gain weight,” Carl reminded
me.
“All the sodium causes water retention,” I added.
“What can you do?” he said. It wasn’t a question, but a resignation. Other lines
we often echoed in defeat: that’s life, so be it, what’s done is done, everything is relative,
and our all-time favorite, it is what it is, which had a particular finite gloominess to it.
Carl glanced distractedly out the window. “Anna and Dean will probably be
there.”
I bolted upright. “What?”
The late afternoon sun hit Carl’s silver cufflinks.
“Dean and Matt developed that show for Fox together, so he probably invited
him.”
I threw up my hands, palms open in supplication, about to make some defiant
statement, but then I sunk back into the seat. “Get ready to play the game.”
We exited the freeway and were now on surface streets.
The game meant appearing to like people we hated. And we hated Anna and
Dean, our couple nemesis. Dean was more successful than Carl. They were both
television producers, but Dean produced a wildly popular faux-reality TV show about
murders committed during destination weddings on tropical islands. The bride would
inevitably get killed in some brutal fashion: hung by her veil in the bathroom, choked by
a shard of crystal from a wineglass, knifed in the back while fastening a satin garter belt
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to her perfectly toned thigh. That sort of thing. And Anna reminded me of a cold silvery
fish with these large glassy gray eyes that peered right through my breastbone, as if she
could immediately detect all of my velvety anxieties. She always asked me how the book
was going, as some kind of evil revenge. Every time I replied, “It’s going great,” when in
truth, I had not looked at the manuscript in over six months. I was writing a book about
the Golden Age of Hollywood, which actually wasn’t so golden.
Carl stopped at a red light. He ran a hand through his hair and then he stared
savagely at the dirty windshield. “What if we don’t play the fucking game.”
A bold move, since Carl and I always surrendered to the game, often bemoaning
this later, after a party, when we were drunk and spent and crumpled, flattened against
our living room couch, retracing our hypocrisy in the safety of the warm quiet darkness.
“God, remember how you hugged Lloyd and said how much you loved his last film?”
Carl would remind me and I would sadly nod, because we’d both hated his film about a
pack of housewives who’d turned into vampires. Or I would recount, staring at our
distorted reflections in the blank TV screen, how Carl had obsequiously ran to fetch the
head of HBO Films, a slight blond in formidable high black boots, a glass of Chardonnay
with two ice cubes—she had repeated that twice—about wanting the two ice cubes. And I
had winced at Carl’s powerlessness in that moment (everyone else had noticed it too,
with held breath), and I thought how being nice, especially too nice, is a bad thing, that it
gets you nowhere in this wasteland; it is a sign of weakness and submission. Only the
cruel and beautiful win here.
I considered the crisp dead leaves stuck under the windshield wipers, thinking
back on that particularly depressing night. “Is there an alternative, to playing the game?”
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The light changed. Carl accelerated more than he needed to. I gripped the door
handle, vaguely thrilled.
“We kill Dean and Anna.”
“How?”
We sped by a concrete mini mall painted a fleshy pink. Fichus trees lined the
suburban streets. The sun beat down on the concrete sidewalks. No one was around.
Before he could answer, I said, “I’ll gun them down with a berretta tomcat.” My
mother owed one, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a present from my father from before they
split up. She still kept it in the glove compartment of her car. “It would fit nicely in this.”
I waved my oblong leather clutch in the air.
Carl shook his head. “People will hear the gunshots.”
And then Carl carefully explained how we would lure Dean and Anna back to our
car, asking them to help us carry the wedding present, which was very big and heavy. In
truth, we had not bought them a present yet. Carl continued: we would open the trunk,
pretending to get the present, but instead we would take out two baseball bats (the
aluminum kind, which are easier to clean), and beat them. I pictured Anna’s two front
teeth, which were always white and pearly (I wondered if she applied Vaseline to her
teeth to make them more shiny) broken off from a good strong swing of the bat, the little
broken white bits hanging from her bloody gums. Anna would try to run away from me,
but I would pursue her until she fell, her high heel catching on the hem of her dress,
facedown into someone’s well-watered front lawn. I would use this opportunity to
repeatedly smash the intersection of where her head connected to her long delicate neck,
imagining how the little bones would crack and crush.
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In the meantime, behind the car Carl would be bashing Dean’s head into a lumpy
pulp. “But first I would have a few words with him,” Carl said, swerving onto Poinsettia
Drive. We were almost there. “I would say: you’re a disingenuous phony, and your show
sucks, and you never introduced me to Weisman, and you like to think you’re such a nice
guy and that everyone likes you, when you’re a backstabbing bastard. Then wham, I
would take that first crack at his skull.” Carl sighed, scanning the street for a parking
spot.
Carl’s breath had become shallower. He pulled into a space a few blocks away,
under the shade of a sycamore tree. We sat a moment in the car, relishing the stillness.
I gently placed my hand on the back of his neck, massaging the tightened tendons
there. “And then what?”
He turned to me, his face slightly flushed.
“You can’t just leave it at that, with one crack to his head.” I pulled him towards
me, and kissed him.
Carl whispered, “It doesn’t end there.” And then he told me how after the first
crack, Dean would stumble back a bit, surprised, confused, touching the bloody spot on
the side of his head. And before Dean would have time to respond, Carl would take
another hit at him, on the exact same spot to worsen the initial blow, and then drag him
behind the thick green hedge lining the neighbor’s house, and continue to beat his face in
until Dean’s face no longer looked like Dean’s face, but like some malformed stranger.
Blood would pour from his ears, his nose and mouth, and he would be mumbling
dreamlike words of mercy. His thin shiny eyelids would flutter maniacally, opening and
closing, trying to glimpse at what was coming next.
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My palm cupped the back of Carl’s warm neck. “That’s good.”
He didn’t look at me, but straight ahead, as if still imagining it. “I know.”
“And afterwards,” I added, “you’d change into the spare shirt hanging in the back
of the car—the blue and white checked one— and spray a few sprints of lemony-lime
aftershave on either side of your collar.” I squeezed his thigh. He grinned. We got out of
the car and made our way towards the house.
We walked into the carpeted entryway, which opened up into the living room,
where the gifts had collected in mountainous piles. Through the sliding glass door, people
drank mimosas around the pool under a low canopy of magenta gauze. The bride, in a
fifties-inspired polka dot dress, waved a swan-like hand as she summoned distant
relatives. The groom nervously lifted up one of the tin covers to the catered food, eyeing
the flaky samosas. Two piñatas, one bride and one groom filled with candy, hung
languidly from a tree, waiting to be hit.
I caught my breath when I saw the baseball bats, wooden ones, propped up
against the tree, just asking us to use them. Carl saw them too. He breathed into my neck,
“Tell me when.”
Heat surged through my body. “I need a drink first.”
We headed for the bar, but from an unexpected angle Dean swaggered up to Carl
and threw an amiable arm around his neck, raising his pomegranate martini. “Hey,
Buddy. It’s been too long.”
Carl started to answer, but Dean cut in, “It’s been too long, really!” Then he
squeezed Carl’s shoulder. “How’s work treating you?” He grinned, but his eyes scanned
Carl’s face for cracks.
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Carl said work was fantastic. I thought about the shape of Dean’s head, his low
hairline, his crisp white shirt. I imagined that shirt soaked in blood. Carl flashed me a
look. For a moment, our pinky fingers touched. I wanted to grab his hand and press it
against me.
Anna falling headlong into the grassy front lawn, followed by the crack of my bat
against her shiny brown locks did not fade as I embraced her next, after which she pulled
back to look at me with those glassy gray eyes, asking, “How are you?” and then after a
calculated pause, “How’s the book going?”
I squeezed her small white shoulder and smiled. “It’s going splendidly.”

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Capri

We moved to New York the weekend after graduation, in the beginning of June.
Dusty, old and out of the way, the three-bedroom walk-up on 81
st
and York was what
they called a “railroad” apartment. I got the largest bedroom by chance of a coin toss, Fay
the second largest, and Katherine had to settle for the room without windows. It used to
be a closet, it was that small, but she said she didn’t care, because she’d be acting or
working all the time anyway. And she said an artist had to understand struggle. We all
agreed that the exposed brick wall in the living room was chic, possibly verging on
bohemian. But the apartment was empty and we needed furniture. For dinner we sat on
beach towels and ate Chinese food out of little take-out boxes and Katherine, waving her
chop sticks in the air, said this was the beginning of it all, the beginning of our real lives,
as real people. “This is it, you guys,” she would say, widening her eyes. And then I would
tease, “Are you done with your monologue yet, because I’m wondering how much an air-
conditioner might cost, to get it installed.” At night we heard the couple above us, two
women, fight. They threw heavy things. I imagined a pair of combat boots. In the
morning, the syrupy sweetness of French toast wafted from their kitchen window into
ours. But as we unpacked, and Fay held up a mug, the handle had broken off, asking,
“Stay or go?” and I shouted “Go!” as she dumped it into the trash, even as Katherine
tested five different paint swatches on the kitchen wall, which all looked the same hue of
poppy red, every time I paused for a moment, a sharp sting of nervousness and pleasure
hit me: in exactly six days, I would see Lorenzo again. The thought sent my mind reeling:
would it feel different, or the same? Would we remember how to kiss each other? Or
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would it be incredibly awkward and instantly obvious that we no longer had what we
thought we had in New York, in the glory days of the spherical clock?
“This shade is totally different,” Katherine said, fanning herself with a Chinese
paper fan. “Don’t you think?”
“Definitely,” I replied, remembering Lorenzo’s broken expression on that train
platform the night we said goodbye, or the way one touch of his hand on my shoulder in a
crowded room meant: let’s blow this joint, or the softness that crept into his eyes after the
workday’s residue had worn off, and he was himself again. And how, after a few days
apart, we were desperate to inhabit each other again, a mutual violation, skin smashing
skin, and how I bit his lower lip, almost hard enough to draw blood, which happened
once, by accident.
“Or is this one better, maybe?” Katherine wondered, interrupting my thoughts.
She tapped her finger against an identical shade of poppy. I titled my head to the side,
thinking about how last night, under the covers in bed, the cordless phone pressed to my
ear, Lorenzo and I had whispered to each other, and even though he didn’t have to
whisper, he whispered, because I was whispering. I didn’t want to wake up Katherine,
whose room was right next to mine.
“What are you wearing right now?” he had asked.
I looked down at myself, disappointed. “Underwear. And a white t-shirt.”
“What kind of underwear?”
This was when I decided to improve upon the facts. “Black. Lace. Almost see-
through.”
“Uh-huh. And what else?”
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“What do you mean what else?”
“I mean, are your nipples hard?”
I muffled a laugh into the pillow, pressing the cordless phone against the mattress.
And then I asked, “What kind of question is that?”
“I’m just trying to picture you, that’s all.”
I sighed. “Okay.”
“So, why don’t you try touching yourself.”
I shifted positions, feeling inordinately foolish. I fingered the edge of my cotton
underwear.
“Are you doing it?”
“Yeah,” I lied.
“How does it feel?”
“This is silly,” I said, almost erupting into laughter again. “I’m too embarrassed.”
Then we both started cracking up. My eyes watered with effort to keep from
laughing, my pillow partially soaked with tears, until all we heard on either end of the
line were the hoarse intakes of breath. I think I fell asleep with a dumb smile on my face,
the cordless phone cradled in the crook of my neck, with my hand wedged between my
thighs.

The morning I left for London, I received a rejection letter from the Greco-Roman
curatorial department at the Met for an entry-level job I had applied for over one month
ago. Actually, I’d forgotten about this job prospect in the whirl of graduation and missing
Lorenzo, until I opened up the cream colored envelope. I crumpled the rejection letter
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into my fist. It didn’t crumple well, as they had used thick, expensive paper. “Who
cares,” I thought, “I’m going to London anyway.” And I pretended as if I had never read
the rejection letter, as if it didn’t exist.
Upon decent into London, the stewardess announced twenty minutes until
landing. I bolted into the bathroom, to check my makeup and brush my teeth. The
emergency light lit up, but I ignored it. All night I hadn’t slept, my forehead pressed to
the little window, imagining what it would be like, to see Lorenzo. There was the idyllic
airport-scene moment: he would have flowers, and an instantaneous understanding would
flow freely between us; we would finish each other’s sentences and then stare in
amazement into each other’s eyes. Or. We would kiss awkwardly and realize, with
increasing dread, that there was nothing much to say. And then what? My palms began to
sweat. Jesus, I said to myself, cringing at the mirror’s reflection. Calm down. That’s not
going to happen. My hand shook slightly as I applied mascara, leaning in close, so close
that the ends of my eyelashes brushed up against the mirror, leaving black markings on
the glass. The plane dipped. I steadied myself against the walls.
At customs the guards didn’t stop me but signaled to keep moving. I almost
wished they’d held me back a minute, to prolong the inevitable reunion. I could hardly
breathe. I walked down the long hallway surrounded by other arriving passengers. I
scanned the crowd, but didn’t see him. The multiplying faces were overwhelming; I
couldn’t look anymore. I kept my head down, pushing the cart in front of me. I looked up
once more and Lorenzo filled my field of vision, planted at the crowd’s edge, as if he’d
been watching me all along. He broke into a relieved smile. I pushed the cart faster,
blushing and sweating, fixing a stray hair behind my ear. This was no longer an airport
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with guard dogs, bright lights, women with children and old men waiting for their
daughters—only Lorenzo existed in his trademark cashmere overcoat, opening his arms,
as if I had come home to him, returning to the place in the story where we’d left off, on
that subway station platform one early evening in New York at the end of spring. The
cart careened to the left when he pulled me into his chest. Immediately his scent, a
mixture of Armani cologne and lime, fired off moments of him I had forgotten or buried;
the light playing on his face when he woke up, the cigarette-vodka scent inside clubs late
at night, the violet evening when we would leave Grand Central after meeting under the
spherical clock and walk, arm and arm, out of the station. I buried my face in his starched
ironed shirt, pressing my fingers into his arms, as if he might not be real. Planes landing,
and announcements intoning over intercoms to please proceed to gate B1, I didn’t notice.
I looked up into his face. “I never want to leave you again.”
He gripped my waist and then my hips and thighs. “I’ll never let you go,” he
murmured into my hair.

He lived in South Kensington, in a towering brick apartment building with stone
steps leading up to a wrought-iron door encased in glass. Through the door I glimpsed a
carpeted lobby and an old-fashioned elevator off to the right. A lush square stood across
the street enclosed by a tall black fence. Willow trees towered above the pointed gate and
between the bars, roses bloomed.
Unlocking his front door, Lorenzo said, “After you.” I tentatively made my way
down the hallway with thick cream carpeting. The bathroom was off to the right, also
carpeted. Then the apartment opened up into the living room. A crystal chandelier was
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suspended over the walnut dining table. An oil painting of a deceased earl, white-haired
and in military dress, hung above the floral couch. His face bore a supercilious
expression, as if he would be the judge of all that passed inside these rooms. A gilded
mirror on the opposite wall of the earl meant that you could see him even when you
weren’t looking at the painting. Around the corner from the dining table was a miniature
kitchen, about five feet by five feet, with a window viewing the square. I wondered if I
could live here, with him. If that was the plan.
“What do you think?” he asked, standing in the middle of the living room,
searching my face.
“It’s very,” I paused, deciding how to describe it, “cozy.”
“Really? You like it?”
“Sure,” I said, pulling back one of the heavy floral curtains.
“I had the place especially cleaned yesterday. Look how nice the bed is.” He
motioned towards the white frilly bedspread with multiple pillows propped up along the
headboard. “I kind of like the old sophisticated feel of the place, you know?”
In the bedroom light filtered onto the bed. I looked out the window, at the lush
green square, and imagined reading or having a picnic down there. Lorenzo came up
behind me, kissing my neck. I laughed nervously. “Do you think it’s awful, my hair?”
He smoothed it down. “I like it. It shows off your long neck.”
He squeezed my hand, and pulled me towards the bed.
I hesitated, worried that I smelled of stale plane air, of airports and travel. “Maybe
I should shower first.”
“Afterwards,” he grinned, sliding under the covers. “Get in here.”
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Our bodies pressed together. His chest rose up before me. The room took on a
more malleable light; golden yellows and ambers. My head was heavy, as if filled with an
ocean. We swam through minutes marked by breath and skin and bone. I crushed my face
into his chest, inhaling. “I missed you,” I whispered, breathing in, holding his scent in my
nose, in my mouth, not wanting to breathe out.
“I bet I missed you more.”
I took his skin between my teeth, as if to bite down, holding part of his shoulder
in my mouth. We laughed and he pulled away, examining his shoulder. “You left bite
marks.”
“Good,” I said.
Afterwards, we slept. It felt indulgent and careless to sleep in the middle of the
day, rising to the sound of traffic outside a few hours later. I was so hungry my head hurt,
but he didn’t have anything in his mini fridge except for some Wonder Bread, mold
beginning to eat away at the slices, and a jar of Skippy peanut butter. He left to get food
across the street, and I started peaking through his stuff, just for the hell of it. His suit
pockets held handfuls of loose change. I emptied them and put the pounds and crumpled
bills into a cup next to the bed, which was already half full with stray buttons, coins, and
ballpoint pens. Underneath the cup was a pile of receipts, mainly from the drycleaner and
expensive restaurants. Under the dusty bed-skirt, week-old Financial Times were
scattered, along with a shoehorn and a wine glass tipped over on its side next to a
shoebox. I pulled out the box. Inside were photographs of us in New York City, taken in
bars, a few outside his apartment, and one of me standing in front of the East River at
night. The photo was dark and out of focus, but you could tell I was sad, managing a half
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smile, my arms crossed over my chest. It was taken the night before he left, and I was
already imagining the hollowness of his leaving. Underneath the photographs: a plastic
baggy filled with hashish accompanied by a wooden pipe and a book of matches. I slid
the box under the bed when the front door unlocked.
“Hey, I’m back,” he said, holding two paper bags filled with muffins. In the other
hand he carried a cardboard crate with two black coffees. “Here you are,” he said, placing
the items onto the bedspread. I peeked inside one of the bags. “Wow. Poppy seed. How
did you know that’s my favorite?”
He shrugged. “I know a few things.” He bit into his chocolate muffin, clenching
my foot in his hand at the same time. Dark crumbs fell onto the white bedspread. I
wanted to brush them off, so the crumbs would not get under the covers. Then we would
feel crumbs against our skin, crushing them into the sheets, smudging chocolate.
He hummed an old Beach Boy’s song between bites; God only knows what I’d be
without you. He loved the 60’s because his parents had lived in Berkeley then, his father a
professor at the university, and Lorenzo had been conceived there, and in whimsical
moments, he believed that he carried bits of California in his blood. The fact I was from
California upheld, in Lorenzo’s mind, more evidence that our paths were bound to cross.
After I took a shower, a towel wrapped around my body, I head Lorenzo talking
in the kitchen. I wondered if he was on the phone. “Enzo?” I called out.
He paced the small square kitchen, smoking a cigarette, stubbing it out in the sink,
and instantly relighting another one. Then he started up again. “You just never know
what some bastard is going to pull, so you always have to be on guard. Alex Chesterton,
for example, might pose a threat, especially because he’s been assigned twice as many
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projects in the past month. But then again, I was the one who said we should make a
higher bid, and we got it, whereas he wanted to lowball it, and I know Mr. Soran noticed
how I set up that deal; it went through without a hitch…”
“Enzo?” I asked, stopping in the doorway of the kitchen.
He stared at me for a suspended moment, as if I was unrecognizable. The he
blinked.
“You okay?” I leaned into the doorframe.
“Yeah, I was just going over some things in my head, work stuff.”
“You were talking to yourself.”
“Oh,” he replied, a little uncomfortable. He lit another cigarette, inhaling, holding
the smoke in his lungs before letting it out. “I go over strategies, like a plan of attack. I
was just thinking things through. Out loud.”
I touched his shoulder. “It’s okay.”
He nodded, assuming a philosophical gaze. “I’m really glad that you,” he paused,
“that you get me. I need a partner who understands what I’m going through at work, who
doesn’t look upon it as a weakness.” He pulled me into his chest. “Thank you,” he sighed
into my hair. I hugged him tighter. “We’re a team,” he said, more to himself than to me.

We stood, his hands fastened around my waist, on a ferry with the white foam of
the ocean splashing on both sides of the boat, on our way to Capri. “Surprise!” he had
said late last night after dinner, when he told me to look inside the pages of my book. I
was reading about Stendhal, his theory on love and the crystallization process. Between
chapter 4 and 5 were two tickets on Air Italia from London to Naples. “And then we’ll
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take,” Lorenzo had said, walking towards me, grinning wildly, “the ferry from Naples to
Capri. It leaves every hour. My parents have a little place there, overlooking the sea.”
On the ferry, I put my hands over his hands, which were still folded over my
waist, and clenched them for a moment, as the island came closer and closer. Finally, I
was experiencing Italy with an Italian man. The last time I had been in Capri, George and
I had stayed in a little pension, each in our own twin bed. I decided that I had never really
been here, at least not the way I should have been, so this was the first time.
Early afternoon, the harbor shone with light and color; blue fishing boats, red
convertible taxis and striped awnings. The town rose above us, built into the mountain.
The plants reminded me of home: bougainvillea grew on either side of the narrow roads,
brushing the top of the taxi, brushing my bare arms, the deep magenta reaching outwards,
as if to touch us. The taxi climbed the mountain, the sea dropping below, a shimmering
blue. Sun covered my shoulders, a warm cupping heat. I told Lorenzo that I wanted to
dive into the sea immediately, and eat strachiatella ice cream, and wander in and out of
piazzas and swim in the blue grotto—yes, yes, and yes, he said to all of these things. “I’m
so happy to see you so happy,” he smiled, a smile as light as the sun. Cypress trees
flashed by and I inhaled the magnificence of the place, as if all these colors tunneled
directly into my chest, breaking and liquefying.

We went to the beach and paid too much money to sit, for the afternoon, on two
blue chaise lounges. But Lorenzo insisted that it didn’t matter how much money he spent
when he was with me.
“Why not?” I asked, leaning back into the chaise lounge.
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“Because it doesn’t.”
I grinned. “Sounds nice.”
“And because,” Lorenzo abandoned his chaise lounge for mine, nestling up to me,
“I want to give you everything.”
“Diamonds and rubies and emeralds and sapphires,” I waved my sunglasses in the
air. “And,” I got up and straddled him, “What else will you give me?”
Through his sunglasses, his eyes laughed.
“What else?” I cupped my hands under his arms.
“Don’t you dare.”
I dug my fingers into his armpits.
“What else?” I repeated, and then I suddenly tickled his sides, my fingers like
spiders. He howled, as if in pain. “Stop,” he panted, “Please. Stop.”
“You never answered the question.”
He twisted and squirmed and tried to escape my grasp. Children, in twos and
threes, holding hands, ran to the ocean’s edge and then ran back up again. Their screams
intermingled with ours. I paused, giving him a rest.
“Okay, okay. I will give you,” he breathed in deeply, “I will give you my love.
Forever.”
I kissed him for a long time afterwards, my hair falling over his face, creating a
shady place where only we existed. He tasted like salt and sweat and the sea.
Nearby, a woman in a black bathing suit sat on a blanket with her family. She cut
a peach into four quarters. The peach, a little silver bowl filled with other fruits, her two
children, who ran away laughing, and dived into the sea off the black rocks, the fine
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white sand; I snatched this image. I swallowed it. The woman and her husband watched
their blond-brown children drop into the ocean and come back up again, their hair
plastered to their heads. They watched them tenderly, conferring with each other. She
passed him an apricot. He cupped it in the palm of his hand before taking a bite.
I turned onto my side, swinging a leg over Lorenzo’s waist. “The family over
there—they are so beautiful. But not in a look we’re so perfect way, just in a sweet
familial way.” My eyes swelled. Maybe it was the heat and the sun, or the glare of light
on the water—I looked down at the sand. “It’s possible, maybe, to have that.”
He stroked my face. “It is. You’ll see.” And then he took my hand. We ran
towards the sea. Hand in hand, we jumped off the hot rocks. Underwater, we still held
hands. Coming back up, he pulled me towards him. We hung onto the little ladder that
led back up to the rocks. I blinked, the salt water stinging, mixed with sunscreen.
Weightless, I wrapped my legs around his waist.
“So how many children should we have,” he joked, his eyelashes wet and dark.
“Two,” I said.
And I would feed Lorenzo fruit on the beach and watch our children run into the
sea.
He gripped the metal ladder and pulled himself out of the water. Standing over me
on the rocks, water dripping down his legs, he called out, “You’re a beautiful mermaid.”
I glided away, blew him a kiss, and then arched backwards, curling under the
blue-green water.

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That night at dinner, our skin warm and smelling of salt water and sun, he ordered
a bottle of champagne. “To celebrate,” Lorenzo said, smiling enigmatically. The
restaurant overlooked the sea and all the lights from the port of Naples twinkled across
the black water. The place was packed with Italians smoking and drinking and laughing.
Lorenzo said Italians love summer, and with the season starting, everyone felt happy.
People made toasts sporadically for no apparent reason. Women wore dresses with low
backs and plunging necklines—tan skin against gold jewelry. Andrea Bocelli sung
through the loudspeakers and I said, “Remember—when I first came to your apartment in
the city? We made out to Bocelli.”
“I remember everything,” he said, recalling how I had worn a blue silk skirt and
black sheer pantyhose—how I had left the pantyhose at his apartment, marking my
territory.
“Did you ever find my pashmina? The lavender one? I think I left it in your old
apartment in New York.”
He stared into his limoncello. I had already swallowed mine down, the sugary bite
of lemon and sugar still on my tongue.
“It’s in London. I think it got packed up with my other things somehow.”
London—the annunciation of that word made all this summary loveliness, the
limoncello, the peach in the silver bowl, the green sundress dress I wore right now, fall
away. We were leaving Capri tomorrow morning; taking the ferry back to Naples. Naples
to London. London to New York. And then I would be back in the city, in the apartment
on 81
st
and York, scheduling times to talk on the phone with him, sitting on the fire
escape outside my bedroom window, staring at the Ginkgo tree.
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I attempted to eat the dessert, torta de mele, which the waiter had just placed
down in the center of our table. I could not taste the apples.
“I know what you’re thinking.” Lorenzo blocked my fork with his, like a sword
fight.
I stabbed another piece of apple tart but then put down my fork. “I don’t want to
go back tomorrow. The worst thing is that I’m thinking about it now; I’m missing you,
and anticipating how awful it will feel to board the plane.” I looked away, into the blue
smoke of a cigarette that a woman waved in the air. “I shouldn’t be thinking about
tomorrow, now. Because then we lose the now.”
Lorenzo dropped a bunch of lire on the table. “Come on, let’s go.”
Outside, we stood in front of the white-washed church overlooking the main
piazza, and beyond that, Lorenzo pointed to the Queen’s necklace—that’s what he called
the curve of lights across the bay. And then he lightly traced the curve of my collarbone,
and said that someday, we would be together, like the family on the beach. I nodded,
hugging myself. The night carried an unexpected coolness. Lorenzo hung his blazer over
my shoulders.
“Won’t you be cold?”
“No,” he said. His body shivered underneath his thin white shirt.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Listen, Laura,” he took my hand. “Listen to me for a moment.” His hand was
unsteady, his palm gathering sweat. Behind his head the stars, a peppering of pointed
brilliance, filled the sky.
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He took a deep breath, and looked at me strangely, almost beseechingly. For an
instant, I worried that I had made too much out of leaving tomorrow, that I had brought
the evening down, that I had ruined it. I was about to apologize, when suddenly, Lorenzo
came down on one knee, the other leg splayed out awkwardly behind him. I wondered if
his knee hurt against the concrete; I wondered why he was kneeling. He took out a small
velvet box from his trouser pocket. Opening it, a diamond gleamed in the dark casing.
“Laura Hershon, will you marry me?”
My chest contracted and expanded; miniature bursts sounding off under my ribs.
This was what I wanted, wasn’t it? But it was too soon, too soon…did it always feel that
way? He was waiting. I had already taken too long to answer—say yes, I told myself. Say
yes, this is what you want. This is the beginning of everything, of your real life. Say yes.
“Yes,” I said.

That night, in the bedroom, the curtain open to the breeze, we made plans. In the
morning, we would call my father and tell him about our engagement. I would return to
New York and inform Katherine and Fay I was moving to London. Until they found
someone to rent my room, Lorenzo would pay the difference. My cheek pressed to his
chest, his hand in my hair, I didn’t tell him about wanting to go to Columbia. This was
more important; this was the beginning of real life. I had always wanted to live in
Europe—New York was one thing, but London was a giant exhilarating leap into the
unknown. But what would my father say? And Katherine? My mother, at least, would not
judge me. I could get married and divorced within a week and in response, she would
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philosophize on the inevitability of impermanence, on how we are not monogamous
creatures anyway.
Shifting positions, I sat up in bed, hugging my knees into my chest, the thin sheet
creating a mountain of white over my bent legs. “I’m a little afraid,” I admitted into the
darkness. With the sliding glass door half-open, the gauzy curtain lifted and fell from the
faint wind coming in off the sea.
“Are you making the brown paper bag face right now?” he joked, squeezing my
ankle.
“Maybe.”
“We’re in love and we want to get married; what could possibly be wrong with
that?”
“Nothing,” I whispered. On my finger, the ring band felt loose.

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Goodbye to All That

It was ending with Jeremy, but I wailed against it, like a blind man trying to see.
And when I teetered on the edge of my breaking point, due to no word for days or
canceled plans, Jeremy would speedily reappear, apologizing profusely, winning me over
for a few days, but then lapsing again, disappearing as if he owed me nothing. The cycle
went on like this. I held on, tenaciously, stupidly. After all, wasn’t he why I had
sacrificed everything? Wasn’t he the reason I met Alistair Hunter for the second time
yesterday morning, in that awful air-conditioned conference room? Wasn’t Jeremy the
reason Freya, Lorenzo’s mother, had called me at work today? Lorenzo had lost too much
weight. Wasn’t there anything I could do? Didn’t I still love him? She knew he could be
difficult, but in the end, his heart was good. He was back in London now. Would I see
him? She was hysterical, her voice skipping over her own breath. “I love him, but I’m not
in love with him anymore,” I said, boring my fist into the side of my head. “But can’t you
try again?” she wondered. “Isn’t there any hope left?” A long pause. I did not answer—
my voice folded once, twice, three times, under my throat. It hurt to swallow. We
monitored our breath over the line. And then, as if it had dawned on her for the first time,
she said, “Unless you have someone else.” Quickly, too quickly, I reassured her that I did
not have anyone else. And I rationalized that, sometimes, people fall out of love. Like a
magician, I spun this tale of Lorenzo and I, that we were these unfortunate sad people.
“Fall out of love,” she stated, knowing this was not the case. Yes, I repeated, fall out of
love, as if love was a tremendous colander, with dangerous holes. I talked in and around
the knowledge we both knew: there was someone else. But I kept talking, past the point I
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should have. I should have just shut up. The sentences grew tighter and tighter, the truth
humming beneath them.
Quietly, Freya said, “Goodbye Laura.”
Families were now involved. It was bigger than us, bigger than a man and a
woman, bigger than that fluttering here-and-now Jeremy had promised without making
any promises, which I had believed, knowing full well that I should not have believed
him.
Around this time, I reapplied to Columbia for art history. My father had started
talking about New York, about Columbia, and coming home in the summers. I told him I
didn’t know if I had even gotten into Columbia yet. But he was unfazed—the important
thing was leaving London. “You can pick up right where you left off,” he said over the
phone.
“Dad—you act as if I’ve been asleep for a year and a half.” But after I said it, I
realized how this could be true.
Claire was moving back to New York. It felt like the end of an era. The London
era, we called it. And at the end of an era, you bump into old ghosts. I saw Stefano at the
Hummingbird Bakery on King’s Road. Jeremy was in the bathroom; I willed him to take
his time. The conversation was short and awkward. Stefano would not look at me, his
head oddly bent, as if avoiding a low hanging ceiling. He had just returned from Brazil.
His tan contrasted his pink polo shirt. “Punta del Este sounds amazing,” I had said,
wondering if Lorenzo had gone too, but I could not ask that. I wanted to, but I couldn’t.
Instead I said, “How’s Fiona?”
Stefano nodded. “Good.”
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“That’s good,” I repeated dumbly.
He left right as Jeremy emerged from the hall leading to the bathrooms. Stefano
looked at Jeremy, and then at me while I pretended to examine my watch.
Only once, I saw Lorenzo. Claire and I had gone to dinner, her farewell dinner at
this new trendy pub called Bumpkin. She was moving to Brooklyn with Martin. We
shared a bottle of pinot noir and drank it too fast. Half-way through our beet salads,
Claire said, “Don’t look now, but Lorenzo just walked in.”
“What should I do?” Panicked, I stared into her face.
Her eyes were wide. She squeezed my arm.
I felt my face flush with heat. “I could always duck. Under the table. Right now.”
“Don’t do that.” Without taking her eyes off mine, she said, “I think he went up
stairs. I think it’s safe.” And when I looked, I saw Lorenzo’s back, his broad shoulders,
his dark blazer, ascending the stairs to the second level of the restaurant. Then his jeans.
Then his black leather loafers. And then he was gone.
Claire’s hand still gripped my arm. “You okay?”
I nodded slowly, staring at the red-carpeted stairs.

A week passed without a word from Jeremy. No emails. No calls. Not even a text
message. At work, I had emailed him, a short: Hey—I miss you. What are you doing
later? He didn’t reply. From across the office, I watched him talk on the phone, humming
along with his work, as if I didn’t exist. As if I had never existed. He was trying to break
up with me without breaking up with me; I wasn’t worth the words, the breath, or the
energy. He acted busier than usual, dashing in and out for long lunches, leaving early to
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meet authors, or working late. I wondered if he was seeing Lucinda, or another woman.
Probably. He was probably chasing an entire battalion of women, and I wasn’t one of
them anymore.
On Friday evening I finally called him. I had nothing to lose, at this point. When
he answered I said, “I don’t understand what you want.”
“Hello darling, and how are you?” he joked.
I considered throwing the cell phone against the bedroom window.
After a pause, he sighed. “Sweetheart, I know. I’m sorry. For everything. For
being me. I can’t stand myself.”
I stared out at the dull gray buildings across the way.
“Patience. Will you try and have some?”
“Patience?”
“I loathe myself.” His voice dropped an octave. “I miss you terribly. I’m
suffocating here, bent over this damn manuscript. When will you come round?” These
words he used were triggers, cues, for desire. Come live with me and be my love. You’re
the most beautiful girl in the world, missing you already, missing you like crazy, but not
love. Never love.
I went to his apartment that night. Jeremy answered the door in a muslin kurta,
like some kind of abstinent monk, barefoot, clean-shaven.
“Hi.” I gripped the doorframe.
He held out his hand. “Come.”
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Tarrega’s Recuerdos de al Alhambra strummed in the background, a doleful
Spanish guitar. I had donned my breakup high heels, spiked four-inchers. My vampish
efforts seemed like a joke now, as I still yearned for what I was about to leave.
“I didn’t know if you would come.” He sat down cross-legged on the rug. I sat
down too, awkward in high heels and tight jeans. His cheeks were flushed and his eyes
glazed. He had been fasting for Ramadan. With the sun dipping, he bit into a dried date,
the first thing he’d eaten since daybreak.
I traced my spiked heel with my pinky finger.
“Those could kill me.”
“I bought them yesterday. Retail therapy, I guess.” I could still pretend
everything was okay between us. The thought sickened and cheered me. “You probably
know why I’m here.”
“I figured as much.” He bowed his head.
The old obsession pounded in my chest. I almost touched his face, tracing the
angular slope of his jaw. I clenched my hands into fists. “You drop out of my life. For
days. And days. And then you’re back, stronger than ever. I can’t do it anymore.”
He valiantly tried to explain his part of it, how he has always been like this, that
his family expected his absences; that he needed time to disappear. “I envy you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“No, I do. You don’t understand. I want to be unmoored. I want to escape my life
here, my family. It’s stifling. You have gotten away, lived abroad. You were brave to do
it. I want to move to Cairo and write for a paper over there, start something important.
But I’m still here, you see? And I get terribly depressed in these periods of inactivity, and
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I can’t see anyone. I’ve always had this irresistible urge to destroy myself, all my life.
And to get away.” He paused, clasping my ankle. “Do you think you could wait for me? I
mean, when this happens, could you wait until I come back around?” He searched my
face, thinking I would agree to this part-time version of a relationship, that I was naïve
enough, or desperate enough, to consider it.
“You’re really leaving me?” he asked, his blue eyes shinning.
I forced a smile. “If that’s the story you want to tell yourself, yeah, I’m leaving
you.”
He had the French windows open to the dark sky. The air was thick and humid
from the recent rain.
He kissed me, but my lips felt numb.
“Let’s forgive each other,” he said huskily.
I pulled back, realizing that I had no reason to stay here—in his apartment, or in
London.
“Columbia said yes.” Columbia had not said yes. Yet. But he did not deserve to
know that. “And I’m moving back to New York.”
“I see.” His anger went quiet and streamlined. He stared down at his white gown.
I looked through the windows, at the heavy night, fighting the urge to feel sorry
for him, to take his hand and kiss it. I almost said that I had left him not because I wanted
to, but because he was going to leave me, sooner or later. I beat him to it and now that I
had, he felt jilted. I had foiled his usual victorious stance. The phrase effortless
superiority came to mind. He had once told me, rather shamelessly, that it was his public
school’s motto. I had asked, “For what?” and he had replied, “For everything.”
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Jeremy pulled out a cigarette and lit it. “I wish you all the best. I’m sure you’ll be
happy, with whomever.” He exhaled a shapeless puff, as if that was how he saw me. A
puff of smoke that never was. A story that never happened. He didn’t fight, beg, or
summon his infamous powers of persuasion. He let me go as easily as I had come into his
life. It was that effortless.
I left him standing in the middle of his living room, barefoot in his white robe, his
Moroccan cushions spread about the floor, his dates in their bowls, his incense burning. I
hailed a cab in the rain. Before opening the car door, I looked up. The lights were still on
in his flat, a golden yellow. I held my breath, wondering if he might appear by the
window, his faint form visible from here, for just a moment. I quickly slid into the cab
and slammed the door. Central London flitted by. Piccadilly. Charring Cross Road. It was
late. I realized how hollow and vast a city appeared after the end of something. Rain fell,
streaking the window, leaving a delicate pattern across the glass, like the footprints of a
baby bird.
When we neared the park, I told the driver I would get out here. I wanted to walk
the rest of the way home. Grateful for the darkness so that no one witnessed my tears, I
inhaled the icy air mixed with salt water and I breathed in the old dark trees reaching
across the sky with their twisted limbs. Running through the blue-black park, this
beautiful hot pain that always comes after loving someone who takes every part of you,
until you don’t know who you are anymore, penetrated me. It penetrated and hurt more
than it ever would in future moments and times, because I was young and had given him
too much.

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It was almost December. The city turned inward, the air icy, and each day grew
shorter. Claire had left last week. We hugged in front of her apartment building, her
duffle bags stacked along the sidewalk as she waited for the cab. Her curls brushed my
face with their basil lemon scent, and right before the cab pulled away to take her to
Heathrow, she called out the window, “See you in New York.” I held up my hand to
wave, and then closed it, clenching air, as if I could already touch New York: the cream
colored halls of the Metropolitan, the metro card I had never used and that imaginary
messenger bag strapped across my chest as I ran up the steps of Columbia, past the iron
gates, towards the domed library. I broke my lease and told the realtor that she would
have to find someone else to live here.
A few times, I thought I saw Lorenzo again. Once, in Costa Coffee, next to the
Notting Hill tube stop, a man in a black long coat about his height sipping a coffee
startled me, until he turned around, and his beak nose confirmed he was not Lorenzo.
Another time, waiting for the light to change in a cab near Mayfair, right around the
corner from Lorenzo’s office, a blonde woman held his hand at the corner of a busy
street. They were about to cross. She laughed, tilting her neck back, and he pulled her
towards him. I thought it was definitely Lorenzo, until I saw his face: wire-rimmed
glasses and a weak mouth. In fact, he looked nothing like Lorenzo. I sunk back into the
stiff leather seat, still shocked by seeing him with someone else, even though I hadn’t.
Sabine and Mr. Mouradi organized goodbye drinks on my last day of work. It
was Friday evening and I was leaving London on Monday. Yesterday I had sent off
multiple cardboard boxes to New York. My father would meet me at the St. Regis on
Tuesday, and we would start looking for an apartment near Columbia. He had sounded
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excited over the phone. I had moved here almost a year and a half ago, but the time that
had passed felt like a stack of years, and all the days and moments were stored in my
mind as if I had already lived an entire life. I had thought about saying goodbye to
Lorenzo, about telling him I was moving away, but it seemed wiser to leave him alone.
.
When I got to the pub, everyone was drinking beer, gathered around a table in the
corner. Smoke hung in the air and the lighting made everyone’s face look slightly yellow.
Lester, the history editor with the stutter, spoke with Jeremy, trying to convince him to
apply for a fellowship at Cambridge. Sabine hailed my entrance, raising her glass. On her
third martini, she yelled, “To Laura.”
Jeremy sauntered over to the snooker table, and I thought about what he’d said
the other day, when we had met privately to say goodbye. Almost two months had passed
since I had left him standing in the middle of his living room. We sat on the dry rotting
grass near the edge of the round pond in Kensington Gardens. An usually sunny day, the
strong light made him squint. He hardly looked up from the ground when he told me
about Nathalie, a woman in her thirties, a French architect. They’d met at a holiday party
in Fulham. “But now she’s pregnant.” I realized it must have happened when we were
still together.
I tried to control my face, but it felt as if the wind had been knocked out of me, a
sharp punch in the lower abdomen. “Did you want that to happen?”
He lit a cigarette and then immediately put it out, boring it into the grass. “No.
Course not. But it happened and now I’m going to be a father. And if she’ll have me, a
husband to boot.”
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“You’re going to ask her to marry you?” I said, breathless.
“If she’ll have me.” He grinned, finally looking at me. “Anyway, I want to move
to Paris or somewhere in the Middle East for awhile, maybe start up a literary journal.
Maybe it will be Paris, then Cairo. I’ve been moored here, like a ship in the sand.”
“What about the baby?”
“She gets to have her baby, and I get to have my gap year, if you will.”
I had so many more questions I couldn’t bring myself to ask: Do you love her?
Did you ever love me? Will we see each other again? Are you moving to Paris or Cairo?
I examined the burnt yellow grass.
“Boy or girl?” I asked, shielding my eyes from the sun.
“We don’t know. It’s been just two months. We’re not telling anyone just yet.”
I hated the royal “we,” and how they properly were waiting to tell people until the
twelve week mark, our history old and buried now.
“But you see,” he continued, “Nathalie will have the baby in Geneva, where her
mother lives. That will be for the best. I’ll come visit once he’s born.”
“But you don’t know the gender yet?”
“It’s absolutely insane, I know, but last night I had this dream about a baby boy
all balled up, his little red fists hitting against a glass container, sort of an enlarged test
tube, desperately trying to get out. I feared he would break the glass and cut himself.”
In this smoky bar, I imagined his baby boy’s crinkled face, beet red from trying to
get out of the test tube, as colleagues raised their glasses, toasting another round. Jeremy
swirled on a barstool nursing a whiskey, here with the rest, to send me off. I excused
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myself for the bathroom but stopped at the bar where he sat. Jeremy took my hand in his.
“I wanted to say goodbye. One last time.”
I leaned against the bar. “Okay,” I said, trying to keep it light. “I’ll see you when I
see you.”
“Let me walk you home? We’ll leave together.”
I shook my head, in spite of how much I wanted to leave with him. “Better not.”
“We’ll cross paths again, somewhere,” he offered, his face softening.
“Sure,” I said.
“Don’t be a stranger,” Jeremy muttered, alighting my neck with a kiss, a kiss that
reminded me of the first time he had kissed me inside another girl’s bedroom, a kiss that
was full and potent and fleeting.
And then he disappeared through the smoke and music, a sliver of gray light
flooding inside the bar before the door closed behind him.

I walked home laden with a bouquet of wilting carnations from Sabine, my bag
weighing down on my shoulder. Over the past months, I had at least still seen Jeremy at
the office, and knew what he was wearing; the same wrinkled Oxford shirts and olive
khakis, and I’d heard the sound of his voice when he spoke on the phone, sonorously
convincing someone of something impossible. I still knew what he ate for lunch: egg
salad sandwiches, and when he took his cigarette break—4:30 p.m. But I would not see
him tomorrow, or the day after. I might never see him again. Walking through the
gloaming dusk, images of him grew fainter, receding into the muddy area of the mind. I
retrieved scenes: the time he bought me pajamas on Savile Row, pressed and striped, with
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buttons up the front, and when we took a bath together, Nina Simone’s voice flooding the
steamed up bathroom, votive candles lining the tub, flickering to the sound of her pain,
and when I sat in his mother’s sitting room, with the rose-colored walls, the air infused
with coriander and vodka, and I had stared into his eyes, never so ready to sacrifice
myself as then.
When I got back to my flat, evening was falling, the violet sky signaling the last
bits of light. I didn’t turn on the lights but just watched the heavy purple fill up the living
room windows. I leaned against the desk, taking in the last few things I still had to pack.
The wind-up toy nun from Jeremy stood on the mantel, forever ready to spurt sparks. The
books he’d given me were propped up on the bookshelf, each one inscribed with a note I
used to pour over and cherish, trying so hard to find more meaning in it than he’d
intended. A pepper plant from Claire, hoping the red color would brighten this place, still
stood on the kitchen windowsill, the soil as dry as sand by now. And on top of the
sweaters folded into the duffle bag, one sweater was by far the saddest; the pink cashmere
one I’d worn to the King’s Road court house the day Lorenzo and I got married. I wore it
with a gray pencil skirt that I’ve since thrown out, but I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of
the sweater.
I spent the weekend packing up a few last things, filling up a trash bag with what I
wouldn’t take; an old pair of boots, torn ballet tights, lined notebooks filled with to-do
lists, a fistful of receipts. The things from Jeremy were piled on the desk, and I had
decided to take them. In some ways, those objects reminded me of a former version of
myself and I laughed, remembering how Jeremy had said the same thing about the
photograph of the Nordic woman in his room, but I hadn’t understood him then, because
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even a woman in a photograph from five years ago, a woman he no longer knew, made
me jealous.
For breaks I went out for coffee, and walking along the rain dotted sidewalks, I
breathed in the winter air, already feeling nostalgia for certain places I passed—the
flower shop on the corner of Notting Hill Gate where Jeremy had bought me white lilies,
a scent I might always associate with him, and all the small gardens enclosed by wrought
iron fences reminded me of the one in Earls Court where Lorenzo and I had first lived,
and I had wondered when we’d ever get the keys to it, or the drycleaner on Gloucester
Road where I used to pick up and drop off bundles of Lorenzo’s shirts, shirts filled with
him—a clean crisp scent. From the street I looked into the shop and the same woman, her
hair high in a tight bun, still worked there, sorting through shirts, holding them up by the
collar. Walking on, I took a sip of coffee, thinking how the places I’d frequented so
regularly would hum on, the great buzz and whirl of the city unstoppable.
By late Sunday afternoon I’d finished packing. The day had been laden with
heavy clouds, but a pale light broke through, sending little beams of weak sun across the
living room carpet. Before it got dark, I decided to walk in the park one last time and
grabbed an old sweater out of one of the duffle bags. The wind carried stray pieces of
trash along the sidewalk and whipped my hair into a dark mass of tangled strands. Our
old building, the one Lorenzo and I had lived in, rose up above the other buildings,
columnar and white with many windows. It stood on the other end of the park and when I
saw it, I breathed in sharply.
As I walked down one of the many paths I had walked so many times, with thick
hedges on either side, I saw Lorenzo circling the gilded Albert memorial, resting on the
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marble steps and then getting up to thrust his hands into his coat pockets, a lone figure
against the wide reaching trees. I was about to call out to him, but my voice caught in my
throat and I felt unsure if I should. But I couldn’t just pretend I hadn’t seen him, and as I
got closer, my breath became shallow, my heart accelerating. His back was to me, and he
pulled his coat closer, winding his gray cashmere scarf around his neck, the scarf I had
given him for Christmas last year.
“Lorenzo,” I called out, my hand frozen in a half-wave. He turned around,
startled. Then he stood there for a few moments, before breaking into a strained smile.
“Laura. What are you doing here?”
“I saw you and I thought…”
“Where are you going?” he asked, walking towards me in brusque steps.
I motioned to the trees. “I’m just getting some air.” The sky behind him had
turned a purple-blue, the color of plums. “You know, air is good.”
He smiled “Yeah, air is good.” His face looked thinner and light shadows played
under his eyes, in the faint depressions there. I sucked in the damp air to gain breath, to
calm the nervous pace of my heart. “It’s crazy running into you like this. I thought about
calling you, but I thought it was better to just leave you alone, after everything. I wanted
to say goodbye, I just didn’t really know how, exactly.” I was about to go on, the words
spilling out at a fast clip, but he took my hand and his familiar touch silenced me.
“Let’s walk,” he said, offering his arm.
We strolled along the horse path, the darkening sky spread out before us, the
sounds of High Street Kensington faintly reverberating through the hedges and trees. I
felt the softness of his black cashmere coat underneath my fingertips and in a flash of
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hope, I wondered if he didn’t entirely hate me for what had happened. But as we turned
the corner, I caught a glimpse of his face—it was so much thinner, and his coat hung
loosely on his frame, and I knew he had not eaten much these last few months, and I felt
the words bubbling up again from my throat—breathless and ingratiating words. “I’m
sorry, I’m so sorry, you must hate me. You must want to kill me after what I did to you.”
I went on wildly, my body humming with apology. “I mean, I can’t even imagine. And
I’m a mess right now. Of all nights to bump into you, I’m wearing this old sweater,” I
touched my face, “and no makeup.” I laughed nervously. I pictured the engagement ring
nestled in the velvet, glinting in the dark. He held my arm close to his side. The warmth
of his body seeped into mine, and my body unfurled, languid and soft.
Lorenzo touched my cheek. “Stop apologizing. It’s over and done with. We’re
here now. Okay?”
“Really?” I asked.
His eyes settled on my face. “Really.”
It was night, and we shivered against the wind. He drew his coat closer, covering
me with part of it. His breath was sharp and slightly sour from not eating all day. I knew
his routine; he could go all day without food and then suddenly realize he was starving.
“You probably haven’t eaten anything today.”
He shook his head, his teeth clattering.
I placed my hand on the back of his neck. “You should take better care of
yourself.”
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“You used to do that.” And then he shrugged, laughing to himself, as if he
couldn’t believe how we ended up here in the park, two strangers. “We’re both hungry.
What do you say to some dinner?”
We went to one of our regular spots, the mediocre Italian restaurant on Fulham
Road, and drank the same wine we had always ordered, a dry white, our fingertips
touching across the tablecloth, reaching between the long stems of the wine glasses. He
admitted that he had seen me once, about a month ago, on Brompton Road. “You had
stopped in front of a store window, looking at a pair of shoes. I only caught a glimpse of
your face, before you turned away. Did you know I was there?”
I shook my head.
“Did you ever see me?” he asked.
“At Bumpkin, in Notting Hill. But I only saw your back moving up the stairs, to
the second floor.”
He put out his cigarette in the bird-shaped ashtray, having already gone through
half a pack. “It was weird. Even after you left, I still wanted to see you. When I got back
from Rome, even though I knew you would be gone, I was shocked to find the closets
empty of all your clothes, with just the hangers hanging inside the closet. Sometimes I
rollerbladed around the park, hoping to run into you, but I only saw you that one time.”
I looked down at my plate. “I thought you hated me.”
“No,” he said, tenderly. “Never.” After a heavy pause he ventured, “How long
ago did things end, with him?”
“A while ago.”
“How long exactly?”
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“About two months.” I glanced up at him, expecting disgust, but he only looked
sad.
Afterwards, he suggested that I come with him to our old flat. He had a stack of
my mail that he kept in the top drawer of the armoire. And a few other things: a black silk
head band, a gold bracelet, a pair of old ballet shoes. He had kept these items safe, in the
same drawer with the mail. Entering the place felt a little creepy. Nothing had changed,
except his rearrangement of the living room furniture.
“Can I get you anything? A glass of wine?” Lorenzo asked. We stood in the
kitchen for a moment too long, unsure of what to do.
“No, thank you,” I answered, sitting down on the couch. Our old couch. He wore
a white t-shirt and jeans. Through the t-shirt the contours of his ribcage were visible. We
were both thinner, more angular, our elbows and cheekbones sharper.
“You look good,” he remarked.
I shrugged. “Thanks. You lost some weight?”
He nodded, breaking into a smile. “Yeah. At first my mom kept trying to feed me,
but by the time I left my parents decided I looked better this way, that I should try and
keep the weight off. And I was like, thanks guys. Thanks for the compliment.”
“That’s sort of funny,” I said.
He sat down, careful to leave the correct amount of space between us, about three
feet.
“I didn’t tell my parents about what you did.”
“Oh.” It felt like having the wind knocked out of my lungs.
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He continued, “The reason being, I don’t want them to think badly of you. I’m
still protecting you.”
“That’s really,” I searched for the right word, “nice?” I hugged a pillow to my
chest. “I mean, thank you. You didn’t have to do that. I don’t deserve it. I understand if
you tell everyone everything. Go ahead, smear me.”
“Smear you?”
“You know, like a big smear campaign.”
We laughed, uncomfortable.
He shook his head. “You don’t understand. I don’t want to tell anyone.” He
reached for my hand. “Stay tonight.”
I shifted on the couch. “Listen, there’s something I have to tell you. I’m leaving
tomorrow. I was going to tell you before, but we were having such a nice time at dinner, I
didn’t want to spoil it.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m moving back to New York. I’m going to graduate school, to Columbia, I
think.”
“Like your father wanted.”
I sighed. “No. Like I wanted.”
“He never liked me,” he said.
I smiled. “That’s true.”
He leaned forward, as if about to tell me a secret. For an instant, the movement
reminded me of when we first met, when we went to that club in Soho and we leaned into
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each other on the suede ottomans. “Stay, just for tonight,” he paused. “You can’t hurt me
more than you already have.”
I looked away, my face burning. The proposal glittered and beckoned.
He touched my shoulder. He looked like his old self, confident and strong, before
everything got contaminated.
“Okay,” I said. “One night.”
I walked through the rooms, searching for old ghosts. When I poked my head into
the darkened bedroom, Lorenzo admitted that he had another girl over once, after I left.
He said he had cooked her pasta with pesto and they ate at the dining room table. I stared
at the bed, trying to figure out if I felt relieved or jealous. “But then in the morning, I
couldn’t stand the thought of having breakfast with her. I wanted her to go.” And of
course that’s what I wanted to hear. She was from Manchester and had bleached blonde
hair, but she was nice, he reminded me, and very impressed with the apartment and his
job, and I knew he meant to say that I was not grateful enough, that I took him for
granted. He had once said that it was too bad I came from a wealthy family, because if
that wasn’t the case, I would have appreciated him more, for what he could offer. He had
sounded full of remorse, as if he truly believed material conditions would have held us
together.
I made up the bed, and he helped. The sheet lightly floated in the air before it
settled onto the mattress. Tucking in the corners, he said, “I remember this poem about
when two lovers have parted. It’s something like, ‘when we two parted, in silence and
tears’…ah, I can’t remember the rest. It’s by Petrarch. The poem reminded me of us.”
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“Petrarch?” Petrarch was my secret, tied to the first time Jeremy had emailed me,
when he wrote: Shall I write you a Shakespearian or Petrarchan sonnet? Petrarch
marked the beginning of everything. “How do you know about Petrarch?” I put my hands
on my hips.
He faced me squarely from across the bed. “I’m not entirely illiterate, just because
I’m in finance.”
“But that’s such a specific reference. I only wondered how you knew…”
“I know some things,” he said, smiling, thinking that he had impressed me when
he only reminded me of Jeremy.
In our old bed he tried to make love to me, as if that single act would prove I
belonged to him again. “Come on,” he whispered into the dark, “I’m not just anyone you
came home with.”
I touched his face, regretting the bedroom, and the sheets with our bodies under
them. “I can’t.”
“Let’s try this again. Don’t you think we deserve a second chance?”
My voice parted the darkness. “I don’t know.” I turned onto my side, the pillow
familiar with the scent of him and looked into his face.
“Tell me,” he began gently, “tell me everything.” I could see his eyes clearly,
waiting for me to begin. Our reunion would not be complete without a total confession of
what I had done.
“I have to know everything,” he whispered, “everything that happened while you
were with me, living in this house, because I’m partly to blame too.”
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I recounted every detail of the betrayal in the dark cloistered sheets. It was the
confession I had always longed for and always dreaded, the confession I had wanted to
pour into the black box, with the priestly listener on the other side of screen. “When did
you first sleep with him?” he asked. “Where was I during that time? How did it happen?”
For as much as I had lied before, I did not spare one truth. Yes—I went to Southside after
breakfast with Stefano and Fiona that Saturday in the middle of August. That was when I
first slept with him, inside his small room on the top floor; the bathtub had clawed feet;
we drank champagne on a blanket in the garden first. Yes, the orange smell you loved so
much was actually him, and we had been drinking in his mother’s sitting room with the
rose colored walls. Yes, he came to my ballet studio and watched me dance through the
small dirty windows facing the street. Yes, we met before work in the early morning, in
front of the Peter Pan fountain in the park, while you slept. And I even met his parents
once, while you were playing squash with Stefano; his mother didn’t like me very much.
Lorenzo blinked in the darkness, consuming my faithlessness, no longer having to
rely on his imagination for the details. “How did it start?” he asked. I had turned onto my
back, my hands folded over my chest. “It all started with a lunch, with white wine and
rolled up shirt sleeves, in the beginning of last summer.”
It was an illusion really, that somehow, by telling him all this, I had been
exorcized of those dreamy memories of Jeremy in Hyde Park, of Turkish delights and
vodka, and that now, we could start over, in the purified atmosphere after the purge,
turning the spherical clock back, farther back, to when I first moved here, and we lived in
Earls Court, to how I used to pick up his shirts at the drycleaner, and wait for him to
come home. But I knew, as I rested my head on his heart, listening to the blood circling
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and recycling and pumping it out to the rest of his body, that those demons, and that
adultery, would remain in my skin, a breath away, a dark jewel, forever.
The next morning before he left, I sensed him standing over the bed, and then he
reached down, stroking my cheek with the back of his hand. Deftly, he placed a soft kiss
on my forehead.
After the front door closed, I lay there, motionless, staring at the ceiling,
wondering what I’d done. I looked at the clock. It was already 9:15. Lorenzo was in a cab
by now, on his way to work. My bags were packed for New York, in my flat across the
park. The plane would take off in two hours. I remembered last night, how we’d talked
about giving us another chance, how I’d put my head on his chest and felt his heart gently
pulsing against my cheek, how he ran his fingers through my hair in the calming way that
I loved, but a frantic thumping in my chest propelled me up. I found my jeans and shoes
on the carpet. I dressed quickly, feeling slightly sick to my stomach, knowing another life
waited for me to begin it; one that did not involve Jeremy, Lorenzo, or London.
There wasn’t time to go back to my flat and get my bags. I would have to leave
with just my wallet and passport, like the kinds of movies my dad made, about men
walking off planes in white suits and Panama hats, narrowly escaping their crimes,
arriving in some tropical climate. Audiences always loved those endings.
I waited on the corner for a cab, waving for one to stop. After five agonizing
minutes, a black cab finally pulled up and when I told the driver Heathrow, he hesitated.
His fingers drummed the steering wheel.
“Please. I’ll miss my flight if I don’t leave now.”
“Okay. Get in.”
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I sunk into the leather seat. London passed by like a film on fast forward; Hyde
Park lined with old green trees, the gilded Albert memorial where I’d found Lorenzo last
night, the white Georgian townhouses, beautiful at first, now appeared monotonous.
Vicarage Gate, where my own flat was, where Jeremy spent stolen nights and the
melancholic mornings when he left without explanation. And then there were all the
places I couldn’t see from the window: the pub in Islington where I had first met Claire
and we both silently wondered if we would be friends, and the corner of the park where
Jeremy and I had first gone, drinking elderflower juice and talking about the clouds, and
how he had taken off his shirt and the sight of his skin was painful, because I had wanted
him so much. And the basement of that Greek restaurant, where I had told Jeremy I loved
him, without expecting anything in return. I breathed in sharply; my chest felt tight, as if
made of glass, a thin sheet of delicate glass.
Inside the terminal I searched for the right check-in desk. Everything appeared
confusing, a jumble of people, luggage, screaming children, flight attendants in their
pencil skirts and matching jackets, automated check-in machines, a droning voice
announcing the last call to Paris. I found the right desk, checked in, showed my passport,
which didn’t look like me anymore. They asked me if I wanted the aisle or the window. I
said I didn’t care.
She handed me the boarding pass, reciting the gate number and said there wasn’t
much time. “I would go now,” she warned without looking up.
I weaved through the duty-free area, the lights shining hotly, pop music pulsing
among the many trinkets and cluttered merchandise. Reaching the blue-carpeted hallway
leading to the gate, I felt incredibly light, my feet moving fast, my arms swinging. Pre-
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boarding had already started at the gate. A cluster of payphones stood nearby. My
stomach catapulted into my throat as I dialed Lorenzo’s work number. An Indian woman
sitting nearby rearranged her sari, the color of fire. A teenage boy listened to his
Walkman on surround sound headphones, engrossed in a racecar magazine. I asked for
Lorenzo Orestini, as if pronouncing a stranger’s name. The receptionist connected me
with a polite, “One moment please.” I was a coward, hoping he’d be in a meeting, so I
could leave a message, apologetic but firm, explaining my departure.
Lorenzo answered, “Hey. What’s up?”
“I’m at the airport,” I blurted out.
“What?”
“I have to leave. I’m sorry.”
“Wait—I’ll come get you. Stay with me for another week. See how things go—
you don’t have to leave today.”
I breathed in deeply. “I want to go.”
“Don’t. Do. This.”
The Indian woman rose gracefully, folding her sari over her shoulder. She glided
towards the gate. They announced general boarding.
He tried to bargain with me, to reason, to make me understand that I was making
a huge mistake because what we had was worth saving. It would only take thirty minutes
if he left the office now and jumped on the Heathrow Express. Part of me almost relented
when he said, “Don’t you think you owe us this much, after everything? Don’t you think
we deserve a second chance?” I leaned into the phone booth, focusing on the people
boarding the plane to stop myself from crying; the teenage boy still listened to his
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Walkman, swaggering to the gate with his oversized jeans cinched half-way down his
waist. A family, the children dressed in bright colors, anxiously consulted their seat
numbers. The little girl stared at me because I had started to cry.
I gulped down a breath, afraid of what I was about to say, knowing it was the only
thing I could say. “I’m sorry, for everything. But I can’t stay here. I have to leave.” I held
the receiver away from my ear because I thought he might start yelling, but when I
listened for this I only heard silence, as cold as a rushing river filtering through the phone
line. Slowly, carefully, I hung up.
I handed them my boarding pass. They let me through. I still thought someone
might try to stop me. But no one did. I walked down the dimly lit connecting tunnel to the
aircraft, clutching the thin piece of paper indicating my seat number. The stewardesses
greeted me at the entrance of the plane, angelic and blonde, directing me down the aisle.
I collapsed into the seat and pressed my forehead against the window. The
warning lights lit up, shining red. The captain’s smooth voice assured a safe journey with
mild turbulence. The lights dimmed. The plane rolled forward, gliding along the runway.
I gripped the metal armrests, always afraid of take-off. The aircraft gathered speed, lifting
upwards at a sharp angle. I studied the landscape below: the steaming dense city, growing
smaller and smaller. Jeremy existed somewhere down there, and so did Lorenzo.
The window opened up into blankets of green, the far-reaching countryside, the
brown hills and undulating fields, leaving London behind, a speck of smoke and gray
matter.
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What He Was Like

Nadia works at the convenience store a block away from my house. They sell
anything from Vaseline to Saltines, bruised apples and floss. I mostly go there for stamps,
quarters and Cascade. Nadia is from north India and she has two teenage sons and one
daughter, away at college. She praises the daughter and curses the sons. She says her sons
are slow. Her daughter, on the other hand, is studious and diligent and always tries to
please. “Similar to you,” she adds.
I stop by the store maybe once a week, sometimes twice. Nadia has taken a liking
to me. She usually comments on my appearance, which at first made me uncomfortable
but now I have gotten used to it and I realize it’s just something she does. Scrutinizing
my face, she will say that I look tired, or that I have lost weight. I tell her that I always
look tired. Once she asked me about my eyebrows because she liked the shape. Another
time she wondered about the small blonde hairs on my upper lip. “How do you get rid of
them?” she wondered from behind the counter. Yesterday when I ran into the store for a
bottle of water, dressed in black jeans and a white button down shirt for teaching, Nadia
raised her eyebrows, impressed, and told me I should wear makeup more often. “You
look better today,” she said, pinching her cheeks. “More color.”
Oftentimes it seems as if she is squinting into the sun, her own long shapely
eyebrows drawn together. Her skin reminds me of how tea looks when clouded with
milk. A few gray hairs glint in her light brown hair, which she has recently cut because
she says it’s easier this way. I ask if her husband liked her long hair better, but she laughs
bitterly and says he doesn’t care at all. I only ask this because my husband prefers long
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hair to short and was disappointed when I cut it off last summer. Since then, my hair has
grown back, longer than it ever was, past my shoulder blades.
Nadia’s husband sporadically appears in a gray BMW with tinted windows. He
owns the store. On an odd Tuesday morning or late Friday afternoon, he’ll pull up to the
curb and check things out. He has salt and pepper hair and a beard trimmed close to his
face. She will argue with him about not having enough inventory. He will cajole her into
covering another shift. I imagine they also fight behind closed doors because Nadia has
said that she hates her life. She tells me this casually, ripping off a neat line of ten stamps
from the roll. The coiled up little American flags are released into my open palm. Her
sons are stupid and she must help them with their homework every night after working
here all day. If not, they will never get into college. Behind her, miniature bottles of
Purell gleam on the shelf, along with new toothbrushes and disposable razors. Her sons
are twins and I have seen one of them riding his bicycle down Lincoln Blvd, dangerously
weaving in and out of traffic, his t-shirt billowing in the wind. She constantly tells me not
to have children because children will ruin my life. “No more movies, no more vacations,
no more anything. All your freedom, gone! I work here day and night to send my
daughter to college in Canada. It costs fifty thousand dollars a year.” I nod, wondering
why her daughter is in Canada. The cash register opens, signaled by that high-pitched
ring. Instead, she advises a dog is better than a child. She allows my dog into the store
even though dogs aren’t allowed. My dog sniffs at all the candy bars and packaged nuts,
leaving a slight trail of saliva on the plastic wrappings.

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When I got pregnant I felt nervous about going into her store. Especially since I
knew I was having a son. But I finally forced myself to go there because we were in dire
need of milk and paper towels one morning, and when she saw my protruding stomach
she was solicitous and asked if my hair had grown thicker, if my skin had stayed clear, if
I felt sluggish? When I answered each question, I wondered if she secretly thought that
my life was ending. Nonetheless she pressed a special ginger drink from Australia into
my palm for nausea. The dark brown bottle felt cool to the touch.
Walking home, I ran my palm along the honeysuckle hedges, the white flowers
nestled in the green, giving off a sweet puckered scent. It was the height of summer and
the Jacaranda trees were shedding their lavender petals, crying violet. Bouganvilla
sprouted erratically over walls and fences, bursts of magenta and faded orange. I walked
up the hill, noticing my shortness of breath, which I had also noticed a few days ago in
ballet class during the barre exercises. I placed a hand on my stomach, and felt the
heaviness there.
I could see my next door neighbor standing outside on her porch, fussing with her
potted plants, all succulents, her white hair in a wispy bun. She never leaves her house
and on rainy days the smell of cat piss emanates through her screen door. She has lived
on this street for forty years with her husband who has gray skin and gray hair and does
not speak. He is eternally busy in their garage tinkering with a vintage car that seems
irreparable. When we first moved here three years ago, she used to stare at us through her
living room window. When we ate dinner, and I passed the salad, I’d catch a glimpse of
her ghostly face peering through the darkened window. Once she took a photograph of
us, the flash reflecting off the glass and I screamed, which my husband thought
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unnecessarily dramatic. When my husband confronted her, she explained in a lilting little
girl’s voice that she was only taking a Polaroid of her cat. After that we hung curtains in
the living room and planted more Ficus trees along the border of our property.
As I approached my house, she turned around and the sight of her high forehead,
a great expanse of white papery skin, startled me. She fixed her eyes on my face and
dropped her rake. The clang of it against the cement sent my heart into a frantic throb, as
if someone could see it beating under my shirt. I hurried inside, closing the front gate
behind me, relieved to find myself safe in our sequestered front yard, enclosed by thick
Ficus trees. But I was sweating, and in an instant, I remembered a dream from last night.
I looked into the old woman’s attic, as if the roof of her house had been lifted off. An
empty baby crib stood in the middle of the room with faded newspapers scattered on the
floor. The crib was old and made of dark wood, cushioned with a few dirty blankets and
bats flew in and out of a broken window. A mobile hung lopsided from the ceiling,
circling over the crib. The dreamscape was bathed in monochromatic light; all muted
sepia hues as if I was examining an ancient photograph. I wondered where the baby was,
and even now, the dream hung in the air as I tried to calm down and reassure myself that
this was real life, here in the garden with our nice garden furniture made of weathered
teak. The lone table and two chairs planted on the far side of the yard was where my
husband and I sometimes drank coffee. Yesterday, sitting there, we’d shared raspberries
straight from the carton. This was real. The dream wasn’t.

A week later we found an enormous spider hanging from the carport, dangling
from its web as nimble as an acrobat. The spider was light brown and furry and as large
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as my outstretched hand. Standing in front of it with our arms crossed over our chests, we
debated what to do. I worried that the spider would make its way into the house and hide
in some dark corner, and when the baby was born, the spider might creep into his crib,
and kill him.
“What do you think?” my husband asked.
“Kill it.”
But I knew he felt bad about killing insects. He always let spiders and bees go
free, ferrying them carefully out of the house in a wad of toilet paper, depositing them
into the potted aloe plants.
He looked at the spider wistfully, his hands deep into his pockets. The spider
slowly began to lower itself down and then stopped at eyelevel.
“If it’s poisonous then it’ll be loose, running around,” I said, convincing him to
get a can of Raid. He sprayed the spider until it became weak and fell from its web. Then
he smashed the spider with a large rock from our garden, to make sure it was dead.
That day, while I was explaining the Russian scorched earth policy to my class, I
stopped feeling him move. It must be the heat, I thought, and he’s probably just resting. I
pictured him with his little baby legs crossed, hands behind his head, as if he was at the
beach taking a break. After dinner I thought I felt him moving again while we watched
TV in bed, a stupid romantic comedy about a house-sitter and her search for the owner’s
Standard Poodle. Of course the woman finds the Poodle and in the process, falls in love
with a landscape architect.
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Early the next morning, I went to the doctor. “Just to make sure everything’s
fine,” my husband said, kissing me lightly on the mouth. “Because I’m sure it is,” he
added.
“Yes,” I said, buoyed by his optimism, “of course.”

I lay on the examining table. The nurse had already tried to find a heartbeat, but
she seemed unfamiliar with the Doppler machine and I internally criticized her lack of
skill, for the way she nervously fumbled around my abdomen, moving the Doppler from
one side of the stomach, and then to the other. She just doesn’t know what she’s doing, I
thought. Then my doctor walked in and she looked concerned, impatiently taking the
Doppler from the nurse. She said, “You should have come earlier.” Earlier than what? I
wanted to say, but didn’t, cowed by her voice. I remember staring at her silk wrap dress,
a paisley print against navy blue. I almost said I liked her dress but for some reason
decided against it because by that time she too was fumbling with the Doppler and it
didn’t seem appropriate to compliment her dress. I remember thinking that she wasn’t
wearing her white coat because she had just come into the office, and her hair, freshly
washed, was slightly wet. I remember the ghostly sound of the swish of my blood coming
through the Doppler and nothing else. It sounded as if someone was whistling through the
skeletal shells of bombed out buildings. And then she quickly said she would do a
sonogram. I nodded, feeling reassured by the word sonogram, as if this would all be
cleared up in a minute. I remember wondering why she wasn’t saying anything, and why
her unwavering eyes, a light blue, kept staring at the screen in front of her where she had
the image of the baby up. The screen was behind my right shoulder. I remember thinking
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that I didn’t even have to ask her what was wrong. I already knew from her face, a face
stripped down to its bare elements as if blinded by the sun, rendering her mute. After a
pause, she looked away and said, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I cannot imagine, I’m
sorry.” I heard myself say, “Is he gone?” She nodded. Then she left the room, saying
she’d be right back, and before the door closed I heard her curse Jesus fucking Christ. I
sat there, my legs dangling off the examining table, the white thin paper crinkled under
my thighs, and I couldn’t believe this was really real but I knew it was real and I knew
that I would have to call my husband very soon, the cell phone was in my hand, and I
would tell him what happened and then it would be real for him too and the more people
who knew the more real this would be and the less real everything that came before this
would become.

Afterwards, I avoided going to Nadia’s store because she would be another person
I’d have to explain it to. Some people cried when they saw me. Some people acted as if
nothing had changed. My close friend Laura brought me muffins and peaches and jam all
in carefully wrapped parcels and listened to me tell the story of how I’d lost him, of how
kind the nurses had been on the labor delivery floor, of how we were planning to scatter
his ashes off Point Dune in Malibu but we couldn’t bring ourselves to let him go yet, as if
keeping him in a little box in the bedroom bookcase that also housed The Trial and
Civilization and Its Discontents was a comfort. When I was strong enough to return to
ballet class, one woman congratulated me on having my baby, unaware that I’d lost him.
Another woman commented that at least I’d lost the weight quickly. I wanted to punch
her in the face.
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When I finally walked into Nadia’s store, she immediately knew what had
happened, and so she wasn’t shocked, and I was grateful for this. The last time Nadia had
seen me I was twenty-seven weeks, just a few days before. I thought about her two sons,
and how they displeased her but at least she knew them as living breathing creatures, as
entities outside of herself. Before she said anything, I blurted out, “The doctors don’t
know what happened. They’re doing tests.” I didn’t feel like telling her the details: that
the autopsy results came back inconclusive and all the usual reasons, such as a cord
accident, chromosomal or genetic abnormalities, an undetected infection or a lack of
amniotic fluid, did not happen. The doctors kept saying that finding nothing was better
than something, because if they found something than there would be an issue to treat, a
complication next time around. And I kept correcting them, saying if there’s a next time
because we don’t know if there will be. Nobody knows that. Nobody knows anything.
Nadia pursed her lips, nodding sadly. And then she rung me up for toothpaste and
stamps, stamps I needed for all the thank you cards, thanking people for the white lilies
and orchids and roses they had sent in elaborate displays, which had filled our living
room. Giving me change, she carefully asked, “Are you okay?” Through her fingers,
pennies and dimes slid into my hand.
I don’t know why I told her this next thing, which I’d been turning over in my
mind for weeks. I’d been thinking about that dream, my neighbor’s attic with the empty
crib. “I think my neighbor gave me the evil eye. She stared at me right before this
happened and maybe she willed it.”
Nadia smiled wanly. “You are an educated woman. You shouldn’t think such
things. It is not your kind of thinking. In my country, we believe this, but not here.” She
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shook her head, somewhat amazed. “In my country, if something goes wrong with the
pregnancy it is always the woman’s fault. They blame her for going out too late, for not
wearing warm enough clothes, for sleeping too little, for not taking all the precautions.
Even for attracting the evil eye, they say she should have stayed inside more, at home.”
She paused, considering what to say next. Her face looked as pale and full as the
moon. “You think the way they do in India. Backwards.”
I considered this. Recently, I’d hung a ceramic turquoise eye from Turkey on our
front door to ward off evil spirits, and I tried to purify the house with white sage, the thin
blue smoke filling every room until the smoke detector went off. And now I wanted to
move to a different house, to get away from the old neighbors because sometimes I really
believe they took him from me, like in a fairy tale. My husband keeps repeating that the
neighbors have nothing to do with it, and that I shouldn’t nurture such unhealthy
thoughts. He speaks to me as if I am a small child, or someone who is quietly losing her
mind.
“Meet me for tea?” Nadia called out as I was leaving the store.
I only ever saw her here, the cash register a familiar and comforting fixture, which
seemed to facilitate our conversations. I couldn’t imagine her anywhere else. “Okay,” I
managed.
She smiled. “ Tomorrow, one o’clock. Come to my house. It’s just around the
corner. With the green gate on Marine.”

A black and white cat treaded silently through her front yard, jumping gracefully
onto the green gate and then off again, disappearing into the birds of paradise, the flame-
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like beaks beckoning. As I opened the gate, I wondered if he was Nadia’s cat, but the cat
was collarless and Nadia seemed too conscientious to let a pet roam free. The gray BMW
wasn’t in the driveway and the house seemed quiet. Standing in front of the door, I felt
strangely nervous, and through the peephole, I wondered if she could already see me.
Before I knocked, the door opened and Nadia stepped out of the darkened entryway
wearing something around her head, almost like a bandage. As the door opened wider I
realized it was a belt usually attached to a terrycloth robe. It was tied around her head,
resting there like a laurel wreath. “So glad you came,” she said, and I followed her into
the hallway. I expected to smell cumin or coriander or some other spice but instead the
house carried a musty scent. She had all the windows open to generate a cross breeze, but
it was still stifling and leading me into the living room, she complained about the heat
and pointed to her head, explaining that’s why she was wearing the terrycloth sash,
because it was cooling, which seemed entirely implausible but I didn’t have the energy to
ask more about this.
We sat down on the leather couch and she closed her eyes for a minute, pressing
her knuckles into her temples. “Pressure points,” she said with her eyes still closed. I
nodded, taking in the blue skinned Vishnu caught in a graceful pose, his four arms
fanning out from his body. She had placed him next to a potted plant, an angel ivory ring
topiary, its foliage trimmed into a tidy green orb. A tepid breeze blew in and she opened
her eyes, gazing at me intently for a second before pouring us some iced green tea that
had been placed on the coffee table. Fresh mint leaves floated among the ice chunks.
When the tea was poured she settled back into the couch and I fingered the tassel of an
oversized pillow.
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“I know these are very personal things to speak of,” she paused, “but it is much
worse to be alone in these matters.”
Her house was so quiet and still, I thought I heard the red numerals of the digital
clock change from 1:07 to 1:08. I swallowed, feeling a tough lump gathering in my
throat, and to stop my eyes from watering, I focused on the long beaded earring dangling
from her ear. The beads were dark red, maybe coral.
“I lost my first son too. I was nine months pregnant—it happened on my due
date—when they took my vitals at the hospital, and checked for the baby’s heartbeat,
there was nothing.” She glanced at me and then quickly looked down into her tea,
studying a floating mint leaf.
“Oh,” I said, “I’m so sorry.” I stared at my nails, which were torn and bitten down
and realized why I’d been invited to tea, because now I was part of this universal world-
wide group, the childless mother’s group.
She touched the terrycloth band around her head and feeling that it was in place,
she continued, “And like you, they never found out what happened. I remember his
lips—so red—but otherwise he looked perfect.”
“Do you ever feel him—around?” I asked this because I’ve heard of people
feeling the presence of loved ones after they’ve died. I have not felt my son around at all
and it makes me think that he is too far away, or that I was a poor mother to him, even in
death. Possibly if I had been a better mother, with a keener sense of intuition, I would
know it if he came to visit. The other thought is that nothing follows after death but a
great yawning darkness.
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Nadia’s eyes lit up and she leaned forward, pressing the tips of her fingers
together. “Oh, yes. He gives me little signs. Yesterday I started a novel.” She told me the
title and asked if I knew it.
I shook my head.
“Guess what the main character’s name is? Aanand. Same name as my son. A
sign, you see. And in the book he was just as playful and mischievous as my son, because
my son was always moving around like a fish, poking my ribs with his toes, making me
laugh in the middle of serious conversations.”
“Aanand,” I said, and this made Nadia smile. My husband and I cannot say the
name of our son. It is too painful even to say “him” or “he” let alone the name we’d
picked. Instead we say, “When the accident happened” or “When September came.”
“So.” Nadia’s voice dropped. “Tell me. What was he like?”
I couldn’t speak because there was so much pressure in my mouth, in the place
where words form; a blankness funneled down my throat like sand. I turned up my palms,
as if to say: I only knew what I thought he might be like, a blurry forecast of a boy. I
swallowed hard, the sand thickening and looked up at her. Her eyes were liquid and
malleable, as if she yearned to enter into the fantasy realm where dead sons were
suddenly alive enough to speak of in material terms.
“Well,” I said, trying to catch my breath but feeling as if someone had shoveled
even more sand down my throat, burying me. I thought about telling her how I had
played Brahms for him and how I had always stood close to the piano in ballet class so he
could hear the Russian pianist play Chopin nocturnes as I demi-plied and eleved, and how
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I had often imagined him as fluid and strong as Nureyev but I had hoped he would play
basketball.
“I,” I caught myself. She wanted to know about him, not me.
“He,” I tried again. I didn’t know how I could ever explain him to me.

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i
Angela Kershaw, “Finding Irene Nemirovsky,” French Cultural Studies 18 (2007): 61.
ii
Woman of Letters: Irene Némirovsky and Suite Francaise Eds. Olivier Corpet and
Garrett White (New York: Five Ties, 2008) 102.
iii
Myriam Anissimov, Preface to the French edition, Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky
(New York: Knopf, 2008) 428.
iv
Jonathan Weiss, Irene Nemirovsky: Her life and Works, (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2007) 158.
v
Hannah Arendt, introduction, Illuminations by Walter Benjamin, trans. Harry Zohn
(New York: Schocken 2007) 29.
vi
Alain Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew, trans. Kevin O’Neill and David Suchoff
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994) 83.
vii
Arendt, introduction, Illuminations by Walter Benjamin, 30.
viii
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1968) 66.
ix
Arendt, Totalitarianism, 66-67.
x
Finkielkraut 74.
xi
Arendt, introduction, Illuminations by Walter Benjamin, 36.
xii
Arendt, introduction, Illuminations by Walter Benjamin, 37.
xiii
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books,
2007) 257.
xiv
Arendt, introduction, Illuminations, 38.
xv
Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1996) 11.
xvi
Brenner 3.
xvii
quoted in Brenner 4.
xviii
quoted in Brenner 2.
xix
quoted in Brenner 11.
xx
Brenner 4.
xxi
Barry Rubin, Assimilation and Its Discontents (New York: Random House, 1995) xv.
xxii
Steven Aschheim, In Times of Crisis: Essays on European Culture, Germans, and
Jews (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001) 67.
xxiii
Otto Weininger, Sex and Character (New York: A.L.Burt Company) 303.
xxiv
Weininger 303.
xxv
Weininger 305.
xxvi
George Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College
Press, 1985) 3.
xxvii
Mosse 3.
xxviii
Mosse 7.
xxix
Weininger 308.
xxx
Weininger 311.
xxxi
Weininger 312.
xxxii
Shulamit Volkov, Germans, Jews and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) 163.
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xxxiii
Volkov 164.
xxxiv
Volkov 164.
xxxv
Weininger 312.
xxxvi
Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, eds., The Jew in the Modern World: A
Documentary History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980) 236.
xxxvii
Steven E. Aschheim, Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2001) 11.
xxxviii
Steven Aschheim, Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer: Intimate Chronicles in Turbulent
Times (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001) 11.
xxxix
Weininger 313.
xl
Weininger 311.
xli
Weininger 323-324.
xlii
Weininger 320.
xliii
Quoted in Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, “Generation and the Ground of
Jewish Identity,” Critical Inquiry Vol. 19, No. 4 (1993): 700.
xliv
Brenner 12.
xlv
Weininger 321.
xlvi
Weininger 323.
xlvii
Michael Walzer, preface, Anti-Semite and Jew by Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. George J.
Becker (New York: Schocken Books, 1948) xiii.
xlviii
Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, trans. George J. Becker (New York: Schocken
Books, 1948) 66.
xlix
Walzer xiv.
l
Sartre 67.
li
Sartre 69.
lii
Weininger 322.
liii
Weininger 323.
liv
Weininger 330.
lv
Samuel Moyn, “German Jewry and the Question of Identity Historiography and
Theory,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 41(1996) : 308.
lvi
Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin 714.
lvii
Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin 721.
lviii
Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin 723.
lix
Aschheim, In Times of Crisis 72.
lx
Franz Rosenzweig, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, ed. Nahum Glatzer
(Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998) 216.
lxi
Peter Eli Gordon and Michael Morgan, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Modern
Jewish Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) 127.
lxii
Gordon 127.
lxiii
quoted in Gordon 127.
lxiv
Paul Mendes-Flohr, foreword, Franz Rosenweig: His Life and Thought xiv.
lxv
Rosenzweig 214-215.
lxvi
Rosenzweig 215.
lxvii
Rosenzweig 215.
lxviii
Rosenzweig 215-216.
Landau

245

lxix
Rosenzweig 217.
lxx
Rosenzweig 218.
lxxi
Rosenzweig 221.
lxxii
Rosenzweig 222-223.
lxxiii
Rosenzweig 223.
lxxiv
Rosenzweig 222.
lxxv
Butler quoted in Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin 720.
lxxvi
Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin 697.
lxxvii
Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin 707.
lxxviii
Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin 714.
lxxix
Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin 720.
lxxx
Alain Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew trans. Kevin O’Neill and David Suchoff
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994) 165.
lxxxi
Finkielkraut 165.
lxxxii
Finkielkraut 169.
lxxxiii
Joseph Roth, Report from a Parisian Paradise, trans. Michael Hoffmann (New York:
W.W. Norton, 2004) 13.
lxxxiv
Roth 145.
lxxxv
Roth 146.
lxxxvi
Roth 147.
lxxxvii
Michael Hofmann, introduction, Report from a Parisian Paradise by Joseph Roth, 16.
lxxxviii
Roth 140-141.
lxxxix
Roth 140.
xc
Ibid.
xci
Jonathan Weiss, Irene Nemirovsky: Her life and Works (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2007) 28.
xcii
Weiss 33.
xciii
Irene Nemirovsky, All Our Worldly Goods, trans. Sandra Smith (London: Chatto &
Windus, 2008) 1.
xciv
Ibid
xcv
Nemirovsky, All Our Worldly Goods 2.
xcvi
Nemirovsky, All Our Worldly Goods 4.
xcvii
Nemirovsky, All Our Worldly Goods 7.
xcviii
Ibid.
xcix
Weiss 27.
c
Olivier Corpet and Garrett White, eds. Woman of Letters: Irene Nemirovsky and Suite
Francaise (New York: Five Ties Publishing, Inc., 2008) 61.
ci
Weiss 26.
cii
Weiss 31.
ciii
Weiss 32.
civ
Nemirovsky quoted in Weiss 32.
cv
Ibid.
cvi
Nemirovsky, All Our Worldly Goods 18-19.
cvii
Weiss 34.
cviii
Irene Nemirovsky, David Golder, trans. Sandra Smith (New York: Knopf, 2008) 88.
Landau

246

cix
Ibid.
cx
Nemirovsky, David Golder 136.
cxi
Nemirovsky, All Our Worldly Goods 204.
cxii
Claire Messud, introduction, David Golder xiv.
cxiii
Ibid.
cxiv
ibid.
cxv
Nemirovsky quoted in Weiss 34
cxvi
Nemirovsky, All Our Worldly Goods 197-198.
cxvii
Nemirovsky, All Our Worldly Goods 200-201.
cxviii
Weiss 128.
cxix
Jonathan Weiss explains how the Epstein’s choice of Issy-L’Eveque was somewhat
odd given how they could have easily gone to places where they had previously spent
vacations, such as Nice, the Vosges mountains, or the Basque country. Why, he asks,
“did they not take refuge in Italian controlled Nice or in Hendaye, for example, only a
few kilometers from the Spanish border, which they could have traversed if they needed
to? Irene had spent her summer vacation of 1939 in Hendaye” (108). The reason seems to
be that Issy-L’Eveque was the hometown of Irene’s nurse, Cecile Michaud, who she had
engaged to care for her daughters, and Irene sent her children to the Michauds as soon as
war was declared, while she and her husband stayed in Paris. But then in June of 1940,
during the German offensive, Irene and Michel decided to join their daughters in Issy-
L’Eveque and not return to Paris. This still begs the question why Irene and her family
did not then move to a more suitable location, where they could have escaped more
easily.
cxx
Angela Kershaw, “Finding Irene Nemirovsky,” French Cultural Studies 18 (2007): 63.
cxxi
Weiss 133.
cxxii
Ibid.
cxxiii
Susan Rubin Suleiman and Christie McDonald, Eds. French Global: A New
Approach to Literary History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010) 479.
cxxiv
Michael Hofmann, introduction, Report from a Parisian Paradise 18.
cxxv
Roth, Report from a Parisian Paradise 109.
cxxvi
Roth, Report from a Parisian Paradise 18.
cxxvii
Hofmann, introduction, Report from a Parisian Paradise 19.
cxxviii
Roth, Report from a Parisian Paradise 109.
cxxix
Joseph Roth, A Life in Letters, Ed. And translated by Michael Hofmann (New York:
W.W. Norton & Company, 2012) 237.
cxxx
Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt, The Life of Irene Nemirovsky: 1903-1942
(New York: Knopf, 2010) 279.
cxxxi
Nadia Malinovich, French and Jewish: Culture and the Politics of Identity in Early-
Twentieth Century France (New York: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008)
160.
cxxxii
Ibid.
cxxxiii
Malinovich 160.
cxxxiv
Weiss 96.
cxxxv
Louis Begley, Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2010) 70.
Landau

247

cxxxvi
Ibid
cxxxvii
Ibid.
cxxxviii
Begley 71.
cxxxix
Ibid.
cxl
Malinovich 109.
cxli
Maurice Samuels, “Jews and the Construction of French Identity from Balzac to
Proust,” French Global, Eds. Susan Rubin Suleiman and Christie McDonald 405.
cxlii
Ibid
cxliii
ibid.
cxliv
Begley 72.
cxlv
Blum quoted in Begley 73-74.
cxlvi
Malinovich 94.
cxlvii
Malinovich 92.
cxlviii
Weiss 23.
cxlix
Ibid.
cl
Weiss 9.
cli
Nemirovsky quoted in Weiss 15.
clii
Ibid
cliii
Susan Rubin Suleiman, “Choosing French: Language, Foreigness, and the Canon
(Beckett/Nemirovsky) in French Global:A New Approach to Literary History Eds.
Christie McDonald and Susan Suleiman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010)
480.
cliv
Ibid
clv
Weiss 24.
clvi
Ibid.
clvii
Suleiman, “Choosing French” 480.
clviii
Weiss 43.
clix
Kershaw 66.
clx
Ibid.
clxi
Malinovich 162.
clxii
Malinovich 163.
clxiii
Malinovich 164.
clxiv
Malinovich 182.
clxv
Ibid.
clxvi
Susan Rubin Suleiman,“Irene Nemirovsky and the ‘Jewish Question’ in Interwar
France” Yale French Studies 121 (31 October 2012): 6.
clxvii
Ibid.
clxviii
Meyer quoted in Malinovich 183.
clxix
Nemirovsky quoted in Malinovich 184.
clxx
Weiss 54.
clxxi
Nemirovsky quoted in Weiss 57.
clxxii
Ibid.
clxxiii
Nemirovsky quoted in Weiss 57.
clxxiv
Naomi Price, “Out of the ghetto,” review of The Dogs and the Wolves, The Times
Literary Supplement (30 October 2009):21.
Landau

248

clxxv
Maurice Samuels, French Global 405.
clxxvi
Nemirovsky, David Golder 6.
clxxvii
My emphasis, ibid.
clxxviii
Nemirovsky, David Golder 26.
clxxix
Nemirovsky, David Golder 42.
clxxx
Nemirovsky, David Golder 45.
clxxxi
Nemirovsky, David Golder 50.
clxxxii
Nemirovsky, David Golder 103.
clxxxiii
Nemirovsky, David Golder 104.
clxxxiv
Nemirovsky, David Golder 106.
clxxxv
The “stabbed in the back” myth which circulated in Germany during and after World
War I is the notion that the German Army did not lose the war but was instead betrayed
by the civilians on the home front, especially Jews, socialists, and Bolsheviks.
clxxxvi
Nemirovsky, David Golder 108.
clxxxvii
Nemirovsky, David Golder 109.
clxxxviii
Ibid.
clxxxix
Nemirovsky, David Golder 132.
cxc
Kershaw 73.
cxci
Nemirovsky, David Golder 135.
cxcii
Nemirovsky, David Golder 138.
cxciii
Nemirovsky, David Golder 140.
cxciv
Nemirovsky, David Golder 142.
cxcv
Specifically, Carl Gustav Carus (1789-1869), a German anatomist and Romantic
painter had developed a system in which all external features were signs of internal
characteristics—aesthetics had now defeated science; subjectivity had overcome
scientific objectivity and racial stereotypes were solidified by attaching internal qualities
to external physical features. Carus’ theories, among others developed in the 19
th
century,
greatly influenced early 20
th
century discourse on the nature of Jewish identity.
cxcvi
Ruth Franklin, “Scandale Francaise,” The New Republic (January 30, 2008): 6.
cxcvii
ibid.
cxcviii
Malinovich 186.
cxcix
Ibid.
cc
Malinovich 187.
cci
Irene Nemirovsky, David Golder 30.
ccii
Nemirovsky, David Golder 38.
cciii
Nemirovsky 104.
cciv
Nemirovsky 104.
ccv
Nemirovsky 42.
ccvi
Nemirovsky 34.
ccvii
Prazan quoted in Kershaw 71-72.
ccviii
Maurice Samuels, “Jews and the Construction of French Identity from Balzac to
Proust,” in French Global Ed. Susan Suleiman and Christie McDonald (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2010) 407.
ccix
Nemirovsky, David Golder 23.
ccx
Nemirovsky, David Golder 116.
Landau

249

ccxi
Nemirovsky, David Golder 117.
ccxii
Nemirovsky, David Golder 30.
ccxiii
Gourfinkel quoted in Malinovich 184.
ccxiv
Nemirovsky quoted in Weiss 47.
ccxv
Nemirovksy, The Wine of Solitude, trans. Sandra Smith (New York: Vintage
International, 2011) 84.
ccxvi
Nemirovsky, The Wine of Solitude 85.
ccxvii
Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt, The Life of Irene Nemirovsky, trans.
Euan Cameron (New York: Knopf, 2010) 49.
ccxviii
Weiss 53.
ccxix
Susan Suleiman, “Irene Nemirovsky and the ‘Jewish Question in Interwar France,”
Yale French Studies 121 (31 October 2012): 18.
ccxx
Ruth Franklin’s assertion, in her article “Scandale Francaise” in The New Republic,
January 30, 2008, claims that: “Nemirovsky was the very definition of a self-hating Jew.”
ccxxi
Suleiman, “Irene Nemirovsky and ‘The Jewish Question in Interwar France’,” 4.
ccxxii
Ibid.
ccxxiii
Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the
Jews (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1986) 11.
ccxxiv
Suleiman, “Irene Nemirovsky and ‘The Jewish Question in Interwar France’,” 6.
ccxxv
Suleiman, “Irene Nemirovsky and ‘The Jewish Question in Interwar France’,” 7.
ccxxvi
Suleiman, “Irene Nemirovsky and ‘The Jewish Question in Interwar France’,” 8.
ccxxvii
Suleiman, “Irene Nemirovsky and ‘The Jewish Question in Interwar France’,” 9.
ccxxviii
Lesznai quoted in Suleiman, “Jewish Question in Interwar France” 11.
ccxxix
Arendt quoted in Suleiman, “Jewish Question in Interwar France” 12.
ccxxx
Suleiman, “Jewish Question in Interwar France,” 12.
ccxxxi
Suleiman, “Jewish Question in Interwar France,” 17.
ccxxxii
Ibid.
ccxxxiii
Malinovich 111.
ccxxxiv
Malinovich 110.
ccxxxv
Livak quoted in Kershaw 70.
ccxxxvi
Kershaw 70.
ccxxxvii
Ibid.
ccxxxviii
Suleiman, “Jewish Question in Interwar France,” 17.
ccxxxix
Ibid.
ccxl
Irene Nemirovsky, The Dogs and The Wolves, trans. Sandra Smith (London:
Chatto&Windus, 2009) 1.
ccxli
Nemirovsky, Dogs and Wolves 1.
ccxlii
Nemirovsky, Dogs and Wolves 70-71.
ccxliii
Nemirovsky, Dogs and Wolves 71.
ccxliv
Ibid.
ccxlv
Nemirovsky, Dogs and Wolves 95.
ccxlvi
Nemirovsky, Dogs and Wolves 97.
ccxlvii
Nemirovsky, Dogs and Wolves 101.
ccxlviii
Nemirovsky, Dogs and Wolves 99.
ccxlix
Nemirovsky, Dogs and Wolves 105.
Landau

250

ccl
Nemirovsky, Dogs and Wolves 105-106.
ccli
Nemirovsky, Dogs and Wolves 168.
cclii
Suleiman, “Jewish Question in Interwar France,” 14.
ccliii
Suleiman, “Jewish Question in Interwar France,” 15.
ccliv
Nemirovsky quoted in Woman of Letters Eds. Olivier Corpet and Garrett White (New
York: Five Ties Press, 2008) 95.
cclv
Nemirovsky, Dogs and Wolves 152.
cclvi
Ibid.
cclvii
Philipponnat 381.
cclviii
Nemirovsky, Dogs and Wolves 3
cclix
Walter Rathenau “Hear O Israel” in The Jew in the Modern World Ed. Paul R.
Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980) 232. Walter
Rathenau (1867-1922), German-Jewish writer and statesman was foreign minister of
Germany in 1922, the first Jew to hold this position. A target of anti-Semitic attacks, he
was assassinated by right-wing youth on June 24, 1922. “Hear, O Israel!” was first
published pseudonymously in Maximilian Harden’s journal Zukunft in 1897.
cclx
Quoted in Steven Aschheim, In Times of Crisis: Essays on European Culture,
Germans, and Jews (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001) 69.
cclxi
Nemirovsky, Dogs and Wolves 86.
cclxii
Nemirovsky, Dogs and Wolves 86.
cclxiii
Nemirovsky, Dogs and Wolves 139.
cclxiv
Nemirovsky, Dogs and Wolves 146.
cclxv
The term Semite is derived from the difference between Aryan and Semitic
languages; Semitic meaning Arabic and Hebrew languages as opposed to Sanskrit.
cclxvi
Nemirovsky, Dogs and Wolves 155.
cclxvii
Nemirovsky, Dogs and Wolves 160.
cclxviii
Nemirovsky, Dogs and Wolves 159.
cclxix
Nemirovsky, Dogs and Wolves 159.
cclxx
Nemirovsky, Dogs and Wolves 161.
cclxxi
Nemirovsky, Dogs and Wolves 162.
cclxxii
Nemirovsky, Dogs and Wolves 106-107.
cclxxiii
Nemirovsky, Dogs and Wolves 121.
cclxxiv
Claire Messud, introduction, David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn, The
Courilof Affair by Irene Nemirovsky, trans. Sandra Smith (New York: Knopf, 2008) xii.
cclxxv
Alain Finkielkraut in The Imaginary Jew explains how such assimilated Jews
believed in the promise of progress and interpreted outbreaks of anti-Semitism as
examples of backwardness that would only manifest among the “illiterate where
modernity had not yet taken hold” (71). Assimilated Jews also condemned the newly
arrived Eastern European Jews as poor backward models of Jewishness ,“sinn[ing]
against the future by clinging to their communal past” making them “no better than fear-
mongering gentiles who believed Jews were the devil’s children, or thought they
poisoned wells” (72). To counteract this distasteful visibility of Jewishness, Western
Jews worked hard at becoming “irreproachable modern men themselves,” erasing their
difference for the sake of historical progress. Unfortunately, as Finkielkraut points out,
Western European Jewry was doubly mistaken given that modern anti-Semitism
Landau

251

reinstated medieval and Christian myths about Jews, carried out by progressive militants
as opposed to rabid Cossacks careening through the shtetl, and their target was precisely
the modern assimilated Jew, the Jew who erased his difference, as opposed to the Jew
who was identifiable and visible. A terribly ironic fate for these modern Jews, who put so
much faith into the dream of assimilation given that their mass extermination was not
imposed on them “in spite of their effort to assimilate, but in response to this very
attempt. The more they hid their Jewishness, the more terrifying they became to others”
(69).
cclxxvi
Nemirovsky, Dogs and Wolves 124.
cclxxvii
Nemirovsky, Dogs and Wolves 125.
cclxxviii
Nemirovsky, Dogs and Wolves 154.
cclxxix
Nemirovsky, Dogs and Wolves 193.
cclxxx
Nemirovsky, Dogs and Wolves 154.
cclxxxi
Nemirovsky, Dogs and Wolves 205.
cclxxxii
Nemirovsky, Dogs and Wolves 208-209.
cclxxxiii
Nemirovsky, Dogs and Wolves 212.
cclxxxiv
Ibid.
cclxxxv
Suleiman, “Jewish Question in Interwar France” 29.
cclxxxvi
Suleiman, “Jewish Question in Interwar France” 30.
cclxxxvii
Weiss 139.
cclxxxviii
Nemirovsky quoted in Weiss 153
cclxxxix
Myriam Anissimov, preface to French edition, Suite Francaise by Irene
Nemirovsky, trans. Sandra Smith (New York: Vintage International, 2006) 426.
ccxc
Weiss 143.
ccxci
Nemirovsky, Suite Francaise 50.
ccxcii
Nemirovsky, Suite Francaise 53.
ccxciii
Nemirovsky, Suite Francaise 161.
ccxciv
Weiss 134.
ccxcv
Nemirovsky, Suite Francaise 374.
ccxcvi
Nemirovsky quoted in Weiss 173.
ccxcvii
Zadie Smith, Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (New York: Penguin, 2009)
71.
ccxcviii
Michael Hofmann, preface, The Wandering Jews by Joseph Roth, trans. Michael
Hofmann (New York: Norton, 2001) xvii.
ccxcix
Hofmann xiv.
ccc
Hofmann xviii.
ccci
Hofmann xix.
cccii
Hofmann xviii.
ccciii
Joseph Roth, The Wandering Jews, trans. Michael Hofmann (New York: Norton,
2001) 22.
ccciv
Joseph Roth, Flight Without End, trans. David Le Vay (New York: Overlook Press,
2003) 104.
cccv
Kafka quoted in Smith 71.
cccvi
According to Max Brod, Kafka wrote this letter while vacationing at a resort in
Schelesen in November of 1919 in order to better understand his tumultuous relationship
Landau

252

with his father and clear the air between them. Despite Kafka’s intention to send the letter
to his father, his mother convinced him not to (Robertson, introduction, The
Metamorphosis and Other Stories by Franz Kafka xxx).
cccvii
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, trans. Joyce Crick (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009) 123.
cccviii
Kafka, Metamorphosis124.
cccix
Joseph Roth, The Emperor’s Tomb, trans. John Hoare (New York: Overlook Press,
2002) 41. In comparison to Nemirovsky’s obsession with solidifying Jewish physicality
as essentially weak, nervous and thin, Manes is antithetical to this stereotype as the
narrator here notes, “I saw, on the contrary, a man who in no way corresponded to my
general idea of a Jew, one who was capable of completely upsetting it. He was almost
uncannily dark and huge…There he stood, close to the door, powerful, luring, a weighty
power, his red hands clenched and hanging like two hammers” (24-25). Overemphasizing
his bulk and strength, Roth is making a point about how Jewishness is not confined to a
certain “type” of man or woman, rejecting the predominant racialist theories circulating
at the time about what a Jew was or wasn’t.
cccx
Roth, Tomb 45.
cccxi
Roth, Tomb 45.
cccxii
Roth, Tomb 45.
cccxiii
Roth, Tomb 46.
cccxiv
Roth, Tomb 47.
cccxv
Roth, Tomb 7.
cccxvi
Roth, Tomb 97.
cccxvii
Roth, Tomb 102.
cccxviii
Roth, Tomb 103.
cccxix
Roth, Tomb 154.
cccxx
Roth, Tomb 157.
cccxxi
Smith 69.
cccxxii
Smith 70.
cccxxiii
Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Everyman’s
Library, 1992) 234-235.
cccxxiv
Peter Nicholls, Modernisms (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995) 6-
7.
cccxxv
Kafka, Metamorphosis 135.
cccxxvi
Kafka, Metamorphosis 120.
cccxxvii
Kafka, Metamorphosis128.
cccxxviii
Kafka quoted in Smith 67.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Examines the question of Jewish identity and assimilation during the interwar period in the fiction of Irene Nemirovsky, as well as comparisons to Joseph Roth and Franz Kafka.

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