Cadaverland: Inventing a Pathology of Catastrophe for Holocaust Survival [The Limits of Medical Knowledge and Historical Memory in France]

Introduction: My French "Jewish Question"

1 I am both a citizen of France and a Jew of the Diaspora, having grown up during the Quiet Revolution in Quebec, and educated in English and French. Given the timeframe of my undergraduate university education —the explosive 1960s—I received an early exposure to certain strands in French psychoanalytic thought, that still supposedly “Jewish science” of Freud’s, as it was being reread by Lacan and differently so by Pierre Le­ gendre, two Catholic psychoanalysts and, at the time, still unknown in translation.1 Also, as the son of a Jewish mother, or as she put it, “une fran- çaise d’origine Israëlite,” who had had to wear the yellow star at the age of eighteen, I had heard since childhood her many stories about the Occupation years and its hazards; in particular, about how the French defeat of 1940 was for her the collapse of the bourgeois, assimilationist, republican ideology of the Third Republic, and an utter betrayal of the cultural world in which she had been formed.2 In my twenties, I discovered among my French cousins the same ambivalence that I had over what it means to be both French and Jewish: that is, to have grown up French in some positive sense of the word, and Jewish in some negative sense—with no religious connection to the rituals of Judaism , and yet with a lifelong identification with “being” Jewish. It took me years to realize that this is a sociological trait shared by many assimilated French Jews, often of a certain time and of the political left, and one that I n t r o d u cti o n “JewishQuestion” MyFrench C a d a v e r l a n d 2 could reverse itself suddenly, as in the subsequent transformation of some “Soixante-huitards” into Talmudists: the case of Jean-Paul Sartre’s former secretary, Benny Lévy, being one of the best known.3 Perhaps that is why Henri Raczymow writes of the post-Holocaust French Jew as dwelling “in a cloud of neurosis in which the individual cannot orient himself. He must discover his own path, but through one of the perverse tricks that history plays on us, he experiences [it as] a kind of déjà vu” (1994, 104). The research for this study, then, has been a rediscovery of déjà vu. In 2000, while I was at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and reading the Vichyantisemiticlawsofthefallof1940intheJournalofficielwherelegislative texts are published, I found myself suddenly crying as I read that Cartesian legal language of great precision, now banning the access of French Jews to work in journalism, the theater, the radio, and other media of communication (in all of which I also had worked, though of course much later). But perhaps this came closest to my understanding emotionally something of my mother’s sense of a deep betrayal. That those laws were written in French struck at the core of one’s “francité.” Writing History/Inventing History? The relation of one born in the immediate postwar generation to the Holocaust is a very particular one as a result of a displaced proximity—close enough and yet not so. It was also clear, although later in my intellectual development, that those bodies of French knowledge dealing with collective and individual psychic memory, such as history or psychoanalysis, had had great difficulty facing the implications of the French involvement in the Holocaust until about the 1980s.4 Why was this? As Dan Michman points out (2001), while it is undeniable that history and historiography (the study of how history is written) have been by far the predominant methods for the study of the Holocaust, he also remarks that the zones of historical partitioning have largely tended to replicate pre-existing patterns of national borders (438).5 At the same time, each zone of historical partitioning also comprises what Michman calls “a cultural-linguistic circle” in which the language used and the cultural context have played a paramount role that has been disregarded and/or underrecognized .6 The present study aligns itself with such a cultural and linguistic approach, although Michman underlines that French Holocaust Studies remain comparatively “still rather isolated” (465). As Laurent Dou- M y F r e n ch “ J e w ish Q u e sti o n ” 3 zou points out, French publications on the 1939 to 1945 period published between 1964...