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By Root 820 0

I believe also the grandson of an actual rabbi and connected on the other side, through his mother, with a valiant quartet, my uncles who were humble fishermen of Béni Saf, as attached to the “Tradition” as they were to that stretch of sea, which for their entire lives constituted their horizon. They were four brothers. Their names were Moïse, Hyamine, Maclouf, and Messaoud. I can still see them from when we spent the ends of our summer holidays there, seated in the café in rue Karl Marx, which made up the ground floor of the family home and where they went, dressed in black, wearing their hats to drink their weekly anisette at the end of the Sabbath. I can assure you that for those four there was no doubt as to the ancient origin, the solidity and pride of their identity.

In short, I’ve never understood where that silly idea came from.

And given the really vicious nature of the man in question, I cannot rule out the possibility that he simply concocted this fable with the sole aim of doing me harm.

The funny thing about this story is, first of all, the proportions this rumor took on. (The great rabbi Sitruk,* who had recently been elected, thought there was cause for concern and thus gave it an unexpected echo.) And then, there was my mother’s own reaction. I decided to tell my mother, once the matter began to find its way into the community press, which she certainly didn’t read, but then, you never know …

I did so tactfully.

I took a lot of precautions before describing the nature of the offense.

In the same breath I swore that the insult would not go unavenged and that I would not rest until I got Hallier to retract his slander. (Which I had, in fact, already done by calling him out at Lipp’s, asking him to follow me down the road, and when he refused, knocking him over at his table beside the cash register, in a scandal that was pretty badly viewed and for which I was barred from Lipp’s until years later, when Mr. Cazes* died.)

I kept on like this until, from a cute face she pulled and the slightly too jaunty way she said it wasn’t such a disaster and that I’d do better to focus on the book’s publication, I understood that in what was now her world, in this value system in which a Stendhal, a Jules Romains,† or a Roger Martin du Gard‡ were worth a thousand prophets like Isaiah, it was not such a disaster to have one’s Judaism denied. Or rather, at that moment I understood that part of her, an undoubtedly secret part, unconfessed and perhaps even unbeknownst to her, was in some sense delighted …

So, to say the least, there was very little trace of Judaism.

An opaque, unreadable trace, whose code you would need to be a Champollion** of the soul to decipher—that was my situation.

At home I hardly got the type of education that predisposes you to “belief” and “faith” … that’s the first fact.

And outside of the home?

Did this methodical amnesia mean that exposure to Christianity might lead a Jewish child in the 1950s into I don’t know what temptation or substitute allegiance?

Perhaps, yes.

In fact, this has happened.

France is less of a secular country than it is said to be. It’s not so easy when you’re raised in ignorance to resist the seduction of a Christianity that has become like the air you breathe, air that, as it had to, occupied the entire void. There was Pascal, the beautiful paintings in the museums, that music by Bach and others too, of which Cioran* said that God owed everything to it: the cathedrals, the names of villages, the monuments of the national novel, virtues and sins, this “inner France,” this “national novel.” You can turn them around in as many directions as you like, but they are and will remain fundamentally Christian in essence.

And I still remember my consternation and despair as a child on the day before school broke up for the Christmas holidays, when, on the pavement in front of school, I was caught up in a joyful conversation about the presents each of us was expecting to get. Crazy with excitement, I mentioned the Teppaz pickup truck I had asked for and saw my best friend,