• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Well, yes and no.

Naturally, yes, insofar as, even when I’m not there, I have eyes to see and ears to hear the nasty rumblings in response to any mention of me in a public place.

And yet, at the same time, no, because through a rather strange phenomenon, I—unlike you, apparently—have never managed to think of myself as or feel like the “victim” of real “persecution.”

Few other writers are abused as much as I am.

For each of my books I receive a volley of insults that plenty of other people would find demoralizing.

As for eczema, well, if that were a criterion, I have to admit that I’m something of an expert on that as well.

The fact is that I find it terribly difficult not so much to take note of these attacks but to relate to the image of me they contain, to make it my own, to associate this reflection, hardly flattering, sometimes appalling, with my deep self or even simply my social self.

Let’s take for example the film I shot twelve years ago and which got me reading the journal of La Belle et la bête so closely. I know what has been and what continues to be said about it. When it isn’t entirely annihilated by the wags, I know that it’s said to be “trash,” an officially “impoverished” work and, according to Serge Toubiana, at the time the editor of Cahiers [du cinéma], “the worst film in the history of cinema.” I know that when it’s scheduled to be shown on television there are people who arrange a “dinner for idiots,” where the idiots are the film and its author. But how can I explain this to you? I know it but without living it. I’m aware of it but don’t ingest it. I know all about the avalanche of mud that was hurled at it when it was released, but I can’t think of myself as the maker of the most impoverished and mud-covered film in the history of cinema and I am quite capable of ending up in a situation, a debate, a meeting with friends, a business meeting where, without noticing the sneers around me, oblivious to the ridicule I’m heaping on myself through the polite embarrassment I’m provoking, I talk about it as a normal film, in fact a rather good one, almost important, and which I am proud of.

Another example, more meaningful and with greater implications, is my being Jewish. As a rule, being Jewish means having a special relationship with this subject of persecution. For most Jews, being Jewish is an automatic passport to a perception of oneself as vulnerable, at risk, never completely at home, at the mercy of anti-Semitism. I know very few Jews who don’t have in their memory some family or personal anecdote, sometimes a primal scene, that smacks of this innate familiarity with offense. But there again, that’s not the case for me. I certainly do struggle against anti-Semitism. As you know, I’m one of those people who will let nothing get through on that subject, absolutely nothing. But perhaps that’s a form of denial. Perhaps it’s a symptom of my fundamental neurosis. Perhaps it’s due to the fact that I was born in a part of the world where Jews were relatively spared. The fact is that when I’m fighting on behalf of Jews, I never have the feeling that I’m fighting for my own safety. The fact is—and please believe me—that I don’t remember, either as a child or later on, suffering either physically or mentally from the discrimination, the insults against which I protest and rebel. There are Jews who suffer; I’m a Jew who fights. There are Jews who experience their Jewishness as a voyage into the depths of desolation, a voyage to the end of the night. I’m a happy Jew, what Jean-Claude Milner* would call an “affirmative” Jew, a “Solal,”† like Albert Cohen’s, which in his vocabulary means “solar” and almost “Greek,” one who sees only glory, splendor, and light in the biblical and Talmudic memory they have inherited.

And since we’re on the subject of childhood memories, I’ll tell you one too. Like you, I’ve known those classes of polymorphous perverts that find someone to pick on, stealing his satchel, emptying his wallet, or splashing ink on his face. At Pasteur