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GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 11.2 (2005) 265-282



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My Father and I

Jewishness, Queerness, and the Marais

My relationship with my father is a disaster.1 Let me give you an example. One day, in the fall of 1998, he and I took a little walk through the Marais, the old and emblematic Jewish neighborhood of Paris where he once lived and worked. My father, who now lives in Caen, Normandy, was visiting my sister in Paris and took the opportunity to do a little shopping at Jo Goldenberg's famous delicatessen before returning home. Since we don't get to see each other all that much anymore—I have lived in the United States since 1987—this was also an opportunity for the two of us to be together. (Whatever that means is, of course, the topic of this essay.) We were walking along the Rue Vieille du Temple. Branching off to the west is the Rue Sainte-Croix de la Bretonnerie, the heart of what has recently become an American-style gay neighborhood, rainbow flags and all, in the center of old Paris. To the east, almost facing the Rue Sainte-Croix but off by a few yards, begins the Rue des Rosiers, the cultural metonym for the French Jewish community. My father suddenly pointed to a shop window. "When I lived here," he said, "I used to work in this store. And I had a big crush on a girl who was working across the street." He said this seemingly blind to the fact that the store in question was now called the Boy Zone and sold a totally different line of clothing—tight and shiny, you know the kind. All the signs were right there in the window for him to see, but he didn't see them. At that moment he was in a different Marais, at a different time in history. In fact, during our stay in the area my father was completely unaware that the neighborhood is no longer just Jewish but also conspicuously gay. The bathhouse, the S/M store, the bookstore with its unmistakable window display, not to mention the people—none of this was immediately legible to him the way it was to me. [End Page 265]

Once I was over my inner hilarity at imagining my father selling revealing Lycra underwear to a bunch of gym queens, I started thinking that the gap between us seemed unbridgeable. Although we were walking side by side, he and I were strolling through two different spaces and two different times—I through the new gay Marais, where I would perhaps return that night for fun, and he through the old Jewish Marais, where he used to live and work in the 1950s.

But let me backtrack a little.

My father's name is Joseph Gottlieb. He was born on August 17, 1919, in Sátoraljaújhely, a medium-size regional capital in Hungary near the border with what is now Slovakia. Between nine and ten thousand Jews lived in the city, he says—25 to 30 percent of the total population. These figures may not be historically accurate, though. Before going any farther, I should clarify a few things. In telling my father's life story, I am not relying on objective historical research but on his own recollections, which I gathered in a series of taped interviews. What emerges from these recordings is highly subjective, since it is the sum of what I asked and what he volunteered, that is, what was important to me and what was important to him—all this caught up, of course, in the treacherous dynamics of a personal relationship. What did I want to know from my father? What did he want his son to know? I also paid attention to the way he assigned certain events meaning and relevance in hindsight. As he noted during one of these interviews, "Personal memories are not always personal. One embellishes, one mythifies." This remark can...

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