Tout, tout de suite by Morgan Sportès (review)

attracts his attention: “Le poète exprimait en mots des angoisses qui m’étaient familières: le sentiment d’être pris dans un monde que l’on ne pouvait maîtriser, mon monde. J’étais Uri-Zvi Grinberg. L’homme emporté, c’était moi” (22). As a child, Pierre was surrounded by antiquated things and neighbors who spoke Yiddish. After his mother’s death, he restored their apartment to a 1920s ambiance, and tried to pursue what might be his Polish Jewish heritage. Plunging into the study of Yiddish, Pierre discovers the existence of Sulamita, the living memory of the Union, and possible contemporary of a grandmother he had never known. He corresponds with Sulamita, visits and befriends her. Rozier alternates, in the first person, the two protagonists’ biographies. Pierre is young, solitary, and unhappy, and Sulamita is nearly one hundred years of age. She had been a child in a wonderland of adult genius poets. Hers was a life filled with color and rich brocade. Rozier’s use of dozens of Yiddish expressions enhances the novel’s authenticity. Sulamita compares the European “Yiddishland” of the twenties to forties to Atlantis: disappeared, hidden, or buried perhaps, but filled with poetic treasures beyond Pierre’s imagination. Of course, the other relevant piece of information is that all the writers mentioned actually existed. Pierre’s viewing of a photo taken of the group plunges him into two histories: his own, with his friend Christophe, and a full exposé of the three primary writers— Grinberg, Peretz Markish, and Melekh Rawicz—spanning some five decades and as many continents, a truly picaresque adventure and summary of the height of Yiddish literature. Sulamita makes it clear that the story she tells is not another one of the Holocaust: “Je veux vous raconter comment trois jeunes gens ont laissé trace de leur existence par leur poésie, non pas comment des millions sont passés dans le trou du lavabo car cela, d’autres ne cessent de le dire” (94). Pierre finds more and more similarities between his life and that of the poets. He also learns how the three poets coming from different locales, languages, and class backgrounds found their way to Warsaw. Sulamita delves into the pogroms and the Shoah, despite saying she would not, in part because she wants to establish that Anna Janowska really is Pierre’s Jewish grandmother, executed by the Nazis. Sulamita’s story is filled with an overabundance of names, dates, numbers, places, and Judaica, so much so that sometimes the reader feels overwhelmed and lost. To some degree, the novel is long and slow, and this reviewer wonders how many readers would be interested in all the Hassidim, Talmud, and Yiddish in general mentioned. However, several examples of the poetry of the three writers are included, and are quite poignant. In addition, Sulamita’s passion for her Warsaw, even from her palace in Rome, is admirable. Pierre and Sulamita develop a friendship which is quite rare. For Pierre, the thought of losing this wealth of very human memory is unbearable. The living library she has become, for him especially after he makes the voyage to Rome, is by far the strongest feature of the novel. Finally, the friendship of the three writers defying space and time does make the novel worth the read. Santa Rosa Alliance Française (CA) Davida Brautman SPORTÈS, MORGAN. Tout, tout de suite. Paris: Fayard, 2011. ISBN 978-2-213-63434-0. Pp. 381. 20,90 a. Recipient of the Prix Interallié, which is awarded to a novel written by a 614 FRENCH REVIEW 86.3 journalist, this book recreates the 2006 kidnapping, torture, and murder of Ilan Halimi, a young Jewish man of Moroccan extraction, at the hands of an assortment of banlieusards, who were nicknamed by the press the Gang des Barbares and who consisted mainly but not exclusively of Muslim immigrants and children of immigrants. The novelistic convention allows Sportès to provide dialogue and imagine scenes, but he appears to have made this account as faithful as possible to the known facts. Although it does not gloss over the sufferings of Élie, as the victim is called here, the...