My Father and I: The Marais and the Queerness of Community (review)

David Caron’s My Father and I: The Marais and the Queerness of Community is a disastrous book. Let me be clear: this brilliant, insightful, and moving study of the author’s relationship with his father and the Parisian neighborhood where their Queer and Jewish identities intersect is built on Caron’s argument that disaster can be the foundation of community. With a compelling combination of personal memoir, urban history, literary analysis, and critical theory, Caron examines how the Marais neighborhood in Paris’s fourth arrondissement is haunted by the dual disasters of the Holocaust and AIDS that, in the wake of overwhelming devastation, inspired new forms of association and connection among both survivors and those that followed. Opening with the admission that “My relationship with my father was a disaster” (1), Caron simultaneously considers the disastrous histories of Queers and Jews in the Marais, where the Jewish rue des Rosiers and Queer rue Sainte-Croix de la Bretonnerie connect along the rue Vieille du Temple at the corner where, as Caron writes, “Jewish memory . . . meets a gay bar called Amnesia” (8).

Born in Hungary in 1919, David Caron’s father Joseph Gottlieb emigrated to France in 1937. At the beginning of the Second World War, he enlisted in the Foreign Legion, was captured, and spent the rest of the war as a French POW. Most of Mr. Gottlieb’s family back in Hungary was (like Elie Wiesel and his own family) deported to Auschwitz, including his parents, siblings, and many nieces and nephews, who all perished in the camps. Although he later fought in Israel’s War of Independence (1948–49) and lived in an Israeli kibbutz (1953–56), Joseph Gottlieb repeatedly returned to France, just as he had done following the Second World War, when he lived and worked in the Marais. Revisiting this neighborhood with his father in 2002, amid its mix of gay bars and Jewish restaurants, Caron wonders, “[H]ad he been in my neighborhood, or I in his?” (7), and thus initiates a detailed investigation into the history of the Marais’s Jewish and Queer communities.

From an ancient marshland on the right banks of the Seine, to the home of sixteenth-century royalty and seventeenth-century aristocracy, the Marais evolved into the Jewish and later gay “ghettos” of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that endure today alongside gentrified buildings and bourgeois boutiques, and a new influx of immigrants from China. While Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim have lived and worked in the Pletzl since at least the fourteenth century, North-African Sephardim (im)migrated to the Quartier Saint Paul following the decolonization of the Maghreb in the 1950s and 60s, and were later joined by Israeli immigrants in the 1980s. Even as other Jews settled in Parisian suburbs like Sarcelles and Créteil, the inner-city Marais retained its Jewish identity, with active synagogues on the rue Pavé and rue des Tournelles (designed by Gustave Eiffel in 1876 and Hector Guimard in 1913), as well as falafel restaurants, kosher delis, and both the Musée d’art d’histoire du Judaïsme and the Mémorial de la Shoah.

Caron concomitantly traces the history of the Queer Marais, from its first gay bars in the 1970s and flourishing gay nightlife of the 1980s to the immense growth of Gay Pride during the 1990s and 2000s. Yet, amid such celebrations of Jewish and Queer cultures in this urban neighborhood where “A Lubavitch in a long black coat walking by a group of tank-topped queens isn’t an unusual sight” (63), Caron focuses on the dual disasters of the Holocaust and AIDS. From his relationship with his father to the broader histories of anti-Semitism and homophobia in France, Caron articulates the importance of what he calls “disastrous realization: the realization of community through disaster” (159). Theorizing that “there is no community without disaster” (10), Caron examines the literary testimony of the Holocaust...