My Father and I: The Marais and the Queerness of Community

Prologue: My Father and I

Prologue: My Father and I [ 1 ] My relationship with my father was a disaster. Or at least that’s how it often felt to me. Let me give you an example. One day in the fall of 1998, my father 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 by then lived 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 didn’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. We were walking along the rue Vieille du Temple, and branching off to the west of there 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 heart of old Paris. To the east, almost facing the rue Sainte-Croix but off by no more than 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 entire stay in the area, my father was completely unaware that the neighborhood was 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. 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, my father 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 was Joseph Gottlieb. Everyone called him Jo. He was born on 17 August 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 once told me—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 emerged from these recordings was highly subjective, since it was 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 be read at several levels. For one thing, it recognizes that a degree of fictionalizing may sometimes be inseparable from the act of remembering—and indeed, my father made countless references to canonical works of literature (by Balzac and Zola, for example) in order to validate, or simply to convey or underscore, the significance of real events. But this also implies that, once told, personal memories cease to be personal; they become stories with the potential to be shared and thus...