When Memory Comes

by Saul Friedlander

  In writing down the various aspects of my years in Montluçon I relied on the very vivid memories I had kept of that period, on letters my parents had written between September and November 1942, and on a few letters I wrote mainly after mid-1944 to Madame de Lépinay or to my grandmother in Sweden. All these letters had been returned to me over the years. Nonetheless, once again, a few details became clear only long after the memoir had been published in 1978.

  Thus I was told, years later, that my uncles’ delegate, Mr. Rosemblat (who was to become my temporary guardian until I could be reunited with one of my uncles), twice came up against a straightforward denial of my being at the seminary. Only the third time, after he showed a written order from the district préfet (governor) to have the seminary searched by the police, was I released. I wondered why the nuns had behaved in a way that didn’t fit with their generally meek spirit. Was it to ensure that I pursued my Catholic path?

  Once more, years went by until the answer became clear. A researcher discovered in French archives an instruction sent by Pius XII soon after the end of the war to the bishops of previously occupied countries (via the nuncios): Jewish children hidden in Catholic institutions were not to be released if they had been baptized and if their parents were not alive anymore; even hidden children who had not yet been baptized should not be released if the parents had not returned. Baptism, let’s remember, is a sacrament that cannot be annulled: once a Christian, forever a Christian; hence this problematic compromise. The nuns of Montluçon had to obey their bishop and the pope.

  In late 1977, my manuscript was ready. A year later, the book came out, first in French at Seuil, as usual. Did the writing of these memoirs, their publication, and their warm reception in various countries induce some sort of catharsis? Not really. Yet a move, a transformation, had accelerated. It led to a shift in priorities: from then on, the wartime past increasingly dominated my thinking. Nonetheless, it would take a difficult stay in Berlin in the mid-eighties and some fierce debates in those same years for the switch to be complete.

  The publication of the memoirs in Germany in 1978 or 1979 earned me an award, the Andreas Gryphius Prize in literature. The prize had gone to many authors I didn’t know; the previous year it had been awarded to Siegfried Lenz for his novel Deutschstunde (The German Lesson); that looked safe enough to me. The ceremony took place in Düsseldorf and, as usual, a book signing followed. With each signature, I inscribed the name of the person buying the book. It all proceeded without a hitch until I asked the name of a lady whose turn had come: “Von Papen,” she said. “Von Papen?” I asked, somewhat taken aback. “Yes,” she answered. I hesitated for a few seconds, then signed and added the usual formula: “With best wishes.” Was Franz von Papen possibly the lady’s father? He was the politician who convinced President Paul von Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as chancellor, on January 30, 1933.

  3

  In early 1977 Rabin was forced to resign for a flimsy reason; general elections followed in May. The results stunned everybody, including the winners: Menachem Begin’s Likud was victorious and Begin was appointed prime minister. A sea change had put an end to the traditional primacy of the center-left in Israeli politics. Over the years, as I mentioned, Israel’s new leader had managed to draw to his side the underprivileged “Oriental” Jews to whom he appealed and whose dignity he restored. But now, the settlements’ expansion into Palestinian territory would become the sacred mission of the new government.

  This wasn’t the end of surprises. Today, the events of the late 1970s look hardly real in view of the following decades, and yet they shook us and many others the world over: Anwar Sadat’s peace initiative, his journey to Israel, his speech to the Knesset, Begin’s brief hesitation, the birth of the Peace Now movement in Israel, the peace treaty with Egypt, later with Jordan. Returning the Sinai to Egypt, however, gave Begin’s government the credit and the time to tighten its grip on the Palestinians by accelerating the settlement policy and even to mention the possibility of annexing the West Bank (Judea and Samaria, as the region was called by the true believers and their hundreds of thousands of passive supporters). Nonetheless, although I immediately understood the motives behind Begin’s “generosity,” I preciously keep a group photograph in which I stand alongside Sadat, Begin, Goldmann, Mendès-France, Simha Flapan, and a few other members of the Israeli left. My smile is genuine.

  In 1979, the Supreme Court ordered the government to evacuate the Elon Moreh settlers (Elon Moreh was a particularly “activist” group of settlers) from land they had confiscated illegally from its Palestinian owners. The Begin government refused to comply.

  It so happened that just as the conflict between the government and the Supreme Court was taking place, a minor incident occurred: a rampage by high school youngsters in the southern city of Beersheba. Israeli television Channel One was airing a daily prime-time political debate on current controversial events after the main evening news. I was invited to participate in a discussion on “Law and Order.” I would represent the left and would face the ultra-right-wing activist Eldad Scheib. The chairman of the national lawyers’ association, whose name I forget, represented the so-called center. Yakov Achimeir, a somewhat right-wing television personality, moderated the debate. No one expected this top-rated political program to remain focused for long on the rampage of high school students in Beersheba.

  When asked to give my opinion on what should be done with the unruly youngsters, I answered that in a country in which the government refuses to obey a decision of the Supreme Court, what kind of respect for the law could one expect from high school kids? The temperature shot up. Scheib went after the leftists and from high school discipline the discussion moved to government and the Supreme Court. When my turn came again, I decided to up the ante and said that if the government pushed its illegal behavior to the point of annexing the West Bank, as many voices on the right demanded, I would favor civil disobedience, such as refusing to serve on reserve duty in the annexed territories. I added that I knew that such civil disobedience would incur punishment under the law and that such punishment should be taken into account.

  The reaction was immediate: Achimeir turned his back on me and didn’t address me again, even after the end of the program. When I came home, Hagith, who usually shared my views regarding “our” policies, told me that I was crazy to speak that way when Eli was doing his military service; my father-in-law, a very mild man who, as may be remembered, lived in the other part of the house, had come over and added, “Next time we will be wiser …” The worst, though, was the complete silence of the phone.

  The following day was overcast and rainy: typical Jerusalem winter weather. In our house the humidity penetrated into the vast living room, equipped with entirely insufficient central heating. I huddled by the fireplace but managed only to produce more smoke than fire. Silence remained unbroken as the hours went by. In the early afternoon, fifteen-year-old David came back from school. “Aba” (‘Dad’ in Hebrew), “you look sad. What’s wrong?” “Well, you know, I expressed views yesterday that nobody seems to agree with.” David put an arm around my shoulders: “Aba,” he said, “with you all the way.”

  In 1982, the Lebanon War, initiated and manipulated by Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, broke out. Begin had become a puppet in Sharon’s hands, and soon the moderate segment of public opinion understood that the wily minister had lied about the goals of the operation. Refusal to obey the summons started here and there among the reservists called up to fight in Lebanon and landed them in jail. The opposition to the war grew. Our son David was also in Lebanon. Toward the end of that unjustifiable campaign, Lebanese militiamen, “allies” of Israel, massacred hundreds of Palestinians in the refugee camps at Sabra and Shatila. Along with four hundred thousand other Israelis, I protested against the horror on Kings of Israel (today “Rabin”) Square in Tel Aviv.

  Uri Tal, my friend Uri, increasingly depressed, took his life.

  4

  Let me
backtrack to early 1978. I had been invited to spend a semester in the Department of International Relations at MIT. The chair, Eugene Skolnikoff, added a modest fellowship to my sabbatical money and asked me, in return, to teach a seminar, possibly a faculty seminar, on a topic of my choice. This was tempting, although I knew that it would be time-consuming. I had just completed my memoir; it was to come out in France in the fall of that same year. I had no new project in mind but was toying with the idea of writing a small essay about representations of apocalypse in the contemporary Western imagination; I suggested it as the theme for the seminar. A somewhat puzzled Skolnikoff agreed.

  I will not forget the first days of my stay. For some reason — probably to check the house we had rented in Belmont, to get a car, and to prepare the basics — I arrived alone, in the early days of January. Hagith, David, and Michal (Eli remained in Jerusalem to prepare for the final high school exams) stayed in New York and would join me two or three days later. The weather was grayish but not too cold. I rented a car in Cambridge and drove to the house on Center Street, Belmont; it seemed perfect. I left the car in front of the entrance and, tired from all the traveling, went to sleep. In the meantime, light snow had started falling.

  When I woke up and looked outside, I couldn’t see a thing, except for a veil of snow, blown in all directions by heavy gusts of wind. The car had disappeared and the front door was blocked. In short, I had arrived just in time to experience the worst snowstorm on record in Massachusetts history, during which all life stopped. The governor declared a state of emergency; the famous Route 128 which ran around the greater Boston area was unusable and, for the first time ever, Harvard closed its doors. The National Guard was called in to help police, firefighters, and snow-removing personnel. The mess lasted for a few days and, of course, Hagith and the children had to stay in New York.

  I wasn’t too worried, as I had bought some basic food en route to the house. Moreover, a nice young couple lived on the top floor, so that we got organized together. Ultimately, the snow stopped, the entrance was cleared, the car reappeared, the family arrived, and life returned to normal.

  At MIT, the seminar began. The topic seemed to be of interest. In any case, I had never been in charge of such a galaxy of participants, who all presented papers and attended regularly. Thus, for several weeks I enjoyed the presence of discussants such as Frank Kermode, the literary scholar from Cambridge (UK); Phil Morrison, an astrophysicist from MIT; Gerald Holton, physicist and historian of science from Harvard; Frank and Fritzie Manuel, the biographers of Newton and historians of utopias from Brandeis; the American historian Leo Marx; Gene Skolnikoff; and a few other equally eminent scholars. The seminar eventually led to a volume of essays edited by three of us and entitled Visions of Apocalypse: End or Rebirth?, published in 1985.

  During that period, I traveled several times to New York to decide between two publishers interested in acquiring the English version of my memoir. I opted for Farrar, Straus and Giroux, where I encountered a forthright acceptance of the text as it was, with its various time frames and other aspects I didn’t want to change. I met Roger Straus only once and very briefly, but found a perfect interlocutor in Aaron Asher, the literary director. Aaron was highly cultivated, very quick, very sensitive, and, as I discovered later, also an excellent pianist. His only problem was that he couldn’t work contentedly with the same publisher for any length of time, so that, for my next book — not the MIT volume but Reflections of Nazism — I moved with him to Harper and Row, later renamed HarperCollins, where I remained after he left. I will return to the main themes of Reflections of Nazism in the next part of the book.

  After Roger Straus and Aaron Asher gave me the good news, I rushed down to tell Hagith before boarding the Amtrak back to Boston. At that time, Farrar, Straus was located on Union Square, and Union Square had its problems. I noticed that in the middle of the square there were two pay phone booths. I went straight to one of them, inserted the coins, and started dialing when I heard a man’s voice behind me: “Get off that phone.” With a tilt of the head I indicated that the booth next to me was not in use. “Get off that phone!” The voice had become threatening; I turned around: the man behind me was holding a knife. I didn’t ask for any explanation, dropped the phone, and walked very quickly away, quite shaken. The reason for the threat was obvious: drugs. The man was waiting for a call at the booth from which I had started to dial. He would have used the knife and nobody would have dared to stop him. This too was New York in the late seventies.

  Apart from such minor incidents, our stay was pleasant in more ways than one: we saw plays at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge and went to concerts at Symphony Hall in Boston. Yet our most memorable musical experience occurred sometime in the early spring at Harvard’s Memorial Hall, where we attended a chamber music concert performed by Harvard students. The last piece on the program was Beethoven’s Archduke Trio. We knew that the performance would be good, but right from the outset, as the cello joined the other two instruments, both Hagith and I stared in disbelief, probably as astonished as many in the audience; the cello player belonged to another sphere. He was a student named Yo-Yo Ma. We had never heard of him.

  Otherwise, there were several movie theaters in Belmont or nearby. It is to one of these theaters that I took David to see Close Encounters of the Third Kind. For us it remains unforgettable. And, with David, I read Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit for his French class, while both children were acquiring flawless English. Only the house cat caused problems: to demonstrate its loyalty and gratitude for the good food, it would from time to time present us with a bird still half-alive held firmly in its jaws. We left in the summer, Hagith and the children back to Israel and I to Paris to get ready for the publication, in September, of the French original of my memoir, Quand vient le souvenir.

  Incidentally, during the stay in Cambridge I got acquainted and then very friendly with one of the truly brilliant young graduates of the Harvard Department of Jewish Studies, the budding public intellectual, Leon Wieseltier. I hope he won’t mind the reappearance of words from this very distant past. Already then he was a master of the hard-hitting style that characterizes him to this day. “Dear Saul,” Leon wrote in December 1978, “At last the verdict is in, and it is good: I have been elected a Junior Fellow at Harvard. For three years I will enjoy all the blandishments of membership in that deplorably elitist institution. It means that at last I will not have to worry about the material conditions of my work.” Leon also mentioned some articles he was writing and that he would send me. Then: “Now I am about to begin a long and decidedly severe piece on Edward Said’s new book [Orientalism] and on the excesses of the Palestinian position generally. That too I will send you …”

  Wieseltier’s position regarding the Palestinian issue was more pessimistic than mine. In 1979 he wrote to me: “They really do want everything. I don’t believe they will ever concede legitimacy to a Jewish state. In short, for all the obstacles presented by our side, the Palestinians present obstacles sevenfold. I think that people of our political persuasion must take care to perceive the Palestinians clearly and not invent our adversaries.”

  Would Leon or would I ultimately be right?

  In early 1983, a phone call informed me that I had been awarded the Israel Prize in history. The Israel Prize is the highest distinction granted in Israel to an Israeli; it is awarded yearly in a ceremony that takes place on the evening of Independence Day, the national holiday, in the presence of the president (Itzhak Navon in my case). The novelist Aharon Appelfeld, the political writer Haim Hefer, and the composer and singer Noemy Shemer (“Jerusalem of Gold”) were awarded the prize along with me.

  That I received the prize astonished me, be it for political reasons. I could have refused to accept it as a form of protest against the war in Lebanon and the settlements. I chose an easier way: on the morning of that Independence Day, I joined a group of like-minded demonstrators at Har Habracha (the Mount of the Blessing), in the
occupied West Bank, on the site of a planned new settlement. In the evening, I went to receive the prize. To be publicly embraced remained vital, after symbolically expressing my opposition to the ongoing policies.

  Among the sacred topics in Israeli self-perception, I particularly disliked the myth of the Sabra, of the new Jewish man and the new Jewish woman (as opposed to the Diaspora Jew), a myth celebrated in particular in a vast literature of the 1940s and 1950s. The most exalted figures of this cult were the fighters of the Palmach, the elite units of the Haganah that, indeed, contributed greatly to the military successes before and during the War of Independence. This generation of fighters, writers, and keepers of the flame considered themselves and were accepted as the crème de la crème of Israeli society, its aristocracy, somewhat like the ghetto fighters after the Shoah: the comparison was often made and the distinction between these heroes and the ordinary Jews of those and later times was almost instinctively kept. “Post-Zionism” was still a few years away.

  I started a critical discussion about myths of national memory, and specifically of Israeli national memory in my graduate seminar in Tel Aviv. The reception among the participants was mixed, as could be expected, and so it was in the large undergraduate lecture courses labeled as “an introduction to twentieth-century Western culture,” whenever I critically alluded to Israeli culture and its myths.

  In 1979, following the publication of my memoir in Hebrew, the then journalist (later historian) Idith Zertal brought up the subject of Israeli culture and Zionist mythology in a wide-ranging interview with me for Haaretz. I don’t remember how I answered Idith’s questions but, for good reason, I remember speaking of the “intellectual superficiality of the Palmach generation.” Nothing much happened, except that our neighbor from across the street, Haim Guri, one of the main poets of that generation, stopped talking to me. I regretted it, but that was to be expected, wasn’t it?