Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [59]
I come, as I think I’ve told you, from an atheist family, which had lost its Judaism.
It wasn’t the “French-Jewish” background of the bourgeois Jews from before the war.
Nor was it the “low-profile” approach of those great republicans who in the previous generations, at a time of peace, had believed that in order to survive you had not exactly to give up but pretend to give up your origins.
In other words, it had nothing to do with the famous “Marranism,” born at the time of the Inquisition, which consisted of giving off all the possible signs of “normality” to the exterior world when necessary, while remaining internally faithful to the lessons of the fathers.
No. It was first and foremost an effect of the war. It was a direct, explicit reaction of horror at the worst things that war led to. And it was an attitude, almost a resolution, that was not too far off that of Heinrich Heine’s character who exclaims, “What? Judaism? Don’t talk to me about it, Doctor! I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy! Insults and snubs—that’s all it will get you. It’s not a religion, it’s a misfortune.” It was decided internally as well as externally, in secret as in public, that this Judaism thing was a most unfortunate matter that brought all the world’s problems in its wake and that we had to do everything we could to escape from this time.
I know this is a caricature.
I also know that my parents would not have liked to hear me put it like this.
But that was the spirit in which they returned to the world in 1945.
That was why we didn’t respect the Sabbath or any other religious feast in our house.
That was why until I was twenty-five or thirty years old, I never under any circumstances entered a synagogue.
That was why, until I was that age, I had no idea about the contents—I won’t say of the Talmud, but even of the Bible. I can’t begin to describe my father’s astonishment, his astonishment and dejection, when at the age of thirty I published Le Testament de Dieu, which was intended to be a book about the glory, the grandeur, the philosophical content of biblical literature.
What? he seemed to say. All that work, all that effort to break with the past, all that culture, those exams, the École Normale Supérieure like Pompidou, the aggrégation* like Sartre, the forging of a young Frenchman nourished by the best disciplines and the world’s best books, just to fall back, at the end (and worse—if only it was at the end—but no, this was the beginning!). His cherished son had barely had his first French hit with La Barbarie [Barbarism with a Human Face] before falling into this mishmash of superstition and archaism. All that in order to return to the hut in Mascara—how distressing, what a pity.
I’ve written books that were more scandalous.
In Le Diable en tête, I painted a portrait of the father that might have offended him.
But no.
What shocked him was Le Testament de Dieu. It’s the only one of my texts about which he—who was always one of my very first readers—never said a word to me.
As if it constituted a major and, even more so, an incomprehensible transgression in terms of the cultural redeployment program, which was basically the family project.
What I’ve just said applies to him, my father.
But it also applied, in the same way, to my mother.
In fact, her reaction had a type of innocence that made it almost more spectacular.
I remember the day—in fact, it was the day before the publication of Testament de Dieu, when Jean-Edern Hallier tried to sabotage the book by publishing an article explaining that my mother was not Jewish, so that by definition I was not either, and that this collection of pages, announced with a blaze of publicity as the return of the prodigal son to the fold, was therefore a sham.
Where did he find that story?
What could he have read to give him that harebrained idea about my pretty mother, the daughter of a practicing Jew, who was himself the son and