A couple of years ago, an American Jewish resident of Paris happened one evening to be a guest in a French home where she met a prominent French Jewish lawyer, one of the leading figures in the Paris branch of the Anti-Defamation League. The American lady expressed surprise at hearing that such an organization existed at all in France. “Then why,” she exclaimed, “have you not yet taken any steps to protest against the hundreds of anti-Semitic slogans that are scrawled on the walls of the passages of the Paris métro stations?” Her French acquaintance seemed puzzled by her remarks. The very next day she took him to the swank Franklin-Roosevelt subway station on the Champs Elysées which thousands of American tourists use each week, and showed him the Jew-baiting inscriptions that defaced its walls. He was horrified. On his normal round of business, he explained, he never took the Paris métro, but went about the city in his private car.

This little incident casts light on the basic inadequacy of much recent French Jewish literature. Too often, it is written by well-to-do members of the upper bourgeoisie who erroneously assume that they speak for all those other Jews of France who must daily face the insults and humiliations which “carriage-trade” Jews are spared and may even ignore. But France is a nation where old issues do not die as long as they retain some nuisance value. The anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus era remains in the air, even today, much as the royalist issue is still no less alive in France (over a hundred years after the expulsion of the last French king) than in Italy, where the last king abdicated a bare fifteen years ago. In the atmosphere of frustration and hatred bred by the conflicts and confusions of French politics, anti-Semitism and a number of other issues which, in any other country, might long ago have become obsolete, still retain enough vitality to assume at any moment a virulent form.

Anti-Semitism did indeed assume such a form in many sections of the population under the German occupation. Even today it is almost impossible to enter a public lavatory in Paris—one of “those circular cottages,” as Djuna Barnes has called them, that grace the sidewalks of the French capital—without having to read on its walls some such remark as Mort aux Juifs (“Death to Jews”) or an equation such as Juifs: voleurs (“Jews: thieves”). Paris is now the only capital in Western Europe where you are sure to find invitations to a pogrom scrawled on the walls of almost any subway station or public toilet, and where swastikas are still chalked on the walls of buildings or on the asphalt of sidewalks. Nowhere in Western Germany—or in Austria, Holland, Belgium, or Italy—does one encounter anything of the sort, though one may come upon a few such slogans on the walls of London’s East End slums, or in French-speaking Switzerland, where many French fascists have found refuge. France thus remains the only Western European nation once dominated by Hitler that has not been thoroughly purged of this particularly obnoxious form of anti-Semitism.

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Pierre Aubery’s Milieux juifs de la France contemporaine¹ does not stoop to discuss latrinograms scrawled on what is called, in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, “a bit of tin boarding,” and neglects even to discuss any French writers who have concerned themselves with such unrefined phenomena. The failure of this book as a serious and objective sociological study can to a great extent be attributed to M. Aubery’s unwillingness to come to grips with the real facts of the situation. A professor at Duke University and the author of a study on “Jewish Attitudes in French Politics” (South Atlantic Quarterly), Aubery fails to give statistics concerning the geographical, economic, or social distribution of the Jewish population of France, its age structure, its occupational patterns, etc., etc. He limits himself to an analysis, according to the traditional literary explication de texte method, of the implications of significant passages selected from the published writings of a certain number of French Jewish authors of the past fifty years. For social, cultural, economic, and other reasons too complex to discuss here, the “native” Alsatian Jewish community and the “immigrant” East European community (mainly of Jews from former Czarist Russia and Poland) have generally been far more vocal than the other less educated or less intellectual Jewish communities of France. Aubery’s book thus gives us the false impression that an overwhelming majority of French Jews are of Alsatian, Russian, or Polish extraction. The fifty thousand or more Sephardic Jews, immigrants or children of immigrants who came from Turkey, Greece, Syria, Egypt, Bulgaria, or Rumania, are barely mentioned. At a time when as many as a thousand North African Jewish families may emigrate to metropolitan France within a single month (some thirty thousand individuals have come in the last year from Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, not counting the recent influx of close on ten thousand Egyptian refugees), Aubery never discusses the densely populated “mellahs” of Saint-Paul and Belleville in Paris, or those of Marseille and other provincial centers.

True, these North African communities have failed so far to produce any writers of their own. But Albert Memmi (whose three published works Aubery does not list in his bibliography) is a recent immigrant from Tunis to Paris, the Paris daily newspaper Combat is now owned and controlled by the Tunisian Jewish Smadja family, while two Algerian Jewish abstract painters, Atlan and Smadja, have already achieved considerable prominence in the Paris art world. These facts should indicate that there is already, in France, a milieu juif of North African origin which would deserve Professor Aubery’s attention.

As one follows his hairsplitting analysis of the published writings of the numerous members of the Bloch, Blum, Dreyfus, and Halévy families, one begins to suspect (as the author does too on page 29) that he is dealing with but a single clan, in fact with the Alsatian Jewish upper crust, the “tout Colmar,” “tout Mulhouse,” and “tout Strasbourg” which, after 1870, became part of the Third Republic’s “tout Paris,” the grand bourgeois milieu. One thus discovers that nearly all his novelists and autobiographers had been brought up to believe that anti-Semitism could not possibly exist in a democracy such as France. They generally thought themselves as purely French as any Frenchman named Dupont, Durand, Vander-meersch, Lapoujade, Schmidt, Kerouac, or Etcheverry. Most of them then experienced very suddenly the shock of discovering what Paul Goodman, in one of his best stories, has called “the facts of life”: generally at the age of puberty or in the years immediately following, they became aware of a secret difference, like a badge, invisible in their own eyes, but yellow, it seems, in the eyes of certain others. This badge, this scar, they then understood had marked them all their lives, though they might not yet have been aware of it, and they would continue to wear it as long as they remain “Français Israélites,” which is only a euphemistic definition of those French citizens who have been singled out by birth as potential victims in any sudden outburst of anti-Semitism.

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Two novels recently published in France cast further light on this subject. L’Innocent cavalier,² the first volume of an autobiographical trilogy that Nicolas Baudy, editor of COMMENTARY’S French-language counterpart, Évidences, is still writing, tells the story of a Hungarian Jewish adolescent in the hectic years which immediately succeeded the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918-1919, first under the brief regime of Count Karolyi, then under Bela Kun’s Bolshevist terror, finally under the prolonged “white” terror that followed. L’lnnocent cavalier is far more introspective and lyrical than any work of Arthur Koestler. It is as if Baudy, in a frenzy of Rousseauist confession, were trying to explain to a psychoanalyst the impact of certain historical events on his emotional life, rather than seeking to recount his own participation in these events. But Baudy’s awareness of being a Jew, even in a Hungarian liberal tradition, is far more realistic than that of most of the French authors whom Aubery quotes and analyzes. In reviewing for COMMENTARY some time ago the French-born author Roger Ikor’s scandalously bad “epic” of French Jewish life, I pointed out how much better, in this respect, were the writings of the Rumanian-born novelist Fabert. French liberalism, so Cartesian in its idealistic and theoretical approach to the problem of the Jew in contemporary life, seems to make most French-born Jewish authors quite blind to the facts which they try to explain.

Arnold Mandel’s Les vaisseaux brulés³ (“Burnt Bridges”) is a rare exception. A novel about a German Jewish intellectual who had emigrated to France shortly before the advent of the Nazi regime in his native land, then escaped to Switzerland during the German occupation of France, returned to join the Resistance, emigrated to Israel, failed to adjust there, and came back finally to France to achieve self-destruction by becoming an obsessed gambler, Les vaisseaux brulés presents to us a “Jew without Judaism” from the café-terrace ghetto of Montparnasse and Saint-Germain-des-Prés. This unpleasant new version of the Wandering Jew is intensely aware of Jewishness but without having the faintest notion of what this may mean in a positive sense. He is a member of a Chosen People, but chosen by whom, and for what purpose? His intuitive consciousness of being Jewish rests on the latrinograms of the anti-Semites rather than on the writings of the Prophets, though it does bring him back, from time to time, to reading the Scriptures in order to find out more about himself. Yet Les vaisseaux brulés, though written in a conventionally journalistic style, is a poignant novel in that Arnold Mandel has had the courage to handle, with objectivity and sympathy, an extremely unpleasant type of Jew. Frequently, this type provokes anti-Semitic reactions even among those educated Frenchmen who generally forbid themselves any expression of racial or religious prejudice. Mandel’s hero is, of course, an obvious neurotic. But his neurosis is to a great extent determined, at least in its exterior manifestations, by the tensions and frustrations of being a “Jew without Judaism.”

Claude Vigée’s recently published poem L’Été indien⁴ (followed by a journal written in poetic prose, journal de l’Été indien) reveal to us, for a change, the poise of a French writer who is a conscious, contented, and practicing Jew. A member of the faculty of Brandeis University, Claude Vigée came to the United States during the war as a refugee from a small, provincial, and somewhat conservative Jewish community in Alsace. In 1955, La corne du Grand Pardon⁵ brought us a fine and almost unique example of Jewish devotional poetry written in French. Though deeply influenced by Rilke, whom he has ably translated into French, Vigée quite early developed a poetic idiom of his own. He is now to be counted, with Alain Bosquet, among the leading representatives of an intensely personal and almost mystical kind of lyrical expression that claims as its masters, among the French poets of the older generation, Saint-John Perse, Jules Supervielle, and René Char.

Vigée’s new poems and his Journal are sometimes difficult to read. They concern themselves only obliquely, if ever, with the problems of the Jew in France. Vigée seems to be protected by his religious faith against any anxiety of the kind that Aubery discovers in most of the reluctant Jews he discusses. In this respect, Vigée is the heir of Edmond Fleg. His nature poems in particular reveal an affinity with the Hasidim of Eastern Europe, who were likewise aware of the poignant beauty of the world of God’s creatures.

No report on recent French Jewish literature would be complete without some discussion of the very controversial Paris production of Robert Brasillach’s strange play, La Reine de Césarée. Originally written in a German prisoner of war camp La Reine de Césarée is a very topical, able, and rabble-rousing rewrite of Racine’s exquisite Bérénice. When Brasillach was released by the Germans to become one of their chief propagandists in occupied Paris, no theater was willing to produce his play. Though some producers had the nerve to pretend that it was ambivalent or even favorable in its attitude toward the Jews, it was generally feared that its performance might lead to serious reprisals on the part of the Resistance. Immediately after the Liberation, Brasillach was arrested, condemned to death, and executed.

Be that as it may, the play was subsequently published as a book by a somewhat dubious small Paris publisher. In the summer of 1957, it was suddenly performed, at a dramatic festival in Avenches, in French-speaking Switzerland, where a group of neo-fascist writers publishes the Cahiers des Amis de Robert Brasillach to perpetuate the memory of the “murdered poet.” The storm which then ensued in the diminutive teacup of the Swiss-French literary and journalistic world would scarcely deserve discussion here were it not that such representative newspapers as the Journal de Genève, the Tribune de Genève, the Gazette de Lausanne, and the Liberté of Fribourg all agreed that the play was a masterpiece on the level of Sophocles and Racine, and took it upon themselves to castigate the Paris press because it had failed to recognize the genius of such a faithful disciple of Charles Maurras.

The unexpected propagandistic success of this performance in Switzerland then encouraged Brasillach’s friends to produce the play in Paris. Alice Cocea, a Rumanian-born actress, thought she might make a desperately needed come-back by playing the dubious part of the aging Jewish queen who had cast a weird spell over her young Roman conqueror. Various groups of veterans of the Resistance protested to the prefect of the Paris police, but to no avail. This official (who had forbidden the Paris production of Le Balcon, Jean Genet’s masterpiece which had already been performed at the Arts Theater Club in London) could not make up his mind to put a stop to the Paris performances of La Reine de Césarée, a play which actually provoked disorders in the theater and which no theater in Western Germany has yet stooped to perform.

Nor did the Paris press, with the exception of Le Monde, Demain, Jean-Paul Sartre in France-Observateur, and Jacques Carat in Preuves, reveal itself particularly brave or perspicacious. André Philip, in L’Express, deplored the resurgence, among those who had protested against the performance, of an obsolete spirit of vengeance, justifiable only at the time of the Liberation. The critics of Arts, Le Figaro, and L’Express discussed the play at great length, as if it were a work of art transcending all political controversy. Jean-Jacques Gautier, in Le Figaro, was wonderfully inept. A critic who has consistently taken umbrage at the innovations introduced by such new dramatists of real talent as Beckett, Adamov, Ionesco, and Dürrenmatt, Gautier became the apologist of La Reine de Césareé and assured his many readers that he had failed to detect anything offensive in its Jew-baiting dialogue.

As for the press of the extreme right, from Rivarol and Aspects de la France to Dimanche Matin and Artaban, it did its best to live up to the capital’s latrinograms. Artaban even threatened, should the play be stopped, to send its own hoodlums to throw hand grenades into the audience at the Théâtre Montparnasse, where the extremely successful French version of the Diary of Anne Frank was running.

Fortunately, La Reine de Césarée was too dull a play for its admirers to see more than once a week. After performing before almost empty houses for a while, it finally closed down. Brasillach’s play (and graffiti culled from the walls of métro stations and public toilets) might well have been added as an appendix to Aubery’s Milieux juifs de la France contemporaine.

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¹ Librairie Plon, Paris.

² Editions de la Table Ronde, Paris.

³ Calmann Lévy, Paris.

⁴ Gallimard, Paris.

⁵ Editions Pierre Seghers, Paris.