{"id":71976,"date":"2019-07-30T17:05:33","date_gmt":"2019-07-30T15:05:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=71976"},"modified":"2019-07-22T07:45:00","modified_gmt":"2019-07-22T05:45:00","slug":"30-05-37","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=71976","title":{"rendered":"A Jewish Outsider in Paris"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>Book Review
\nA Jewish Outsider in Paris<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

ROBERT SIEGEL<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n

I have been thinking about Marcel Proust and the Jews. Several weeks ago, in the doldrums of the second winter of my retirement, the memory of a friend\u2019s question about my plans to keep myself occupied, a question perhaps posed half-facetiously considering the clich\u00e9 it contained\u2014did I have a plan, such as reading Proust?\u2014came to mind and suddenly struck me as the kind of plan for which winters in retirement are most suitable, and it inspired me to plot my mental escape from that dark and unusually damp season into Belle Epoque France (roughly the period between the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914), 4,000-plus pages of it, rendered in Marcel Proust\u2019s prose, which very often consists of sentences packed with similes and digressions within digressions, sentences typically running longer than even this one. So here I am, roughly midway through the seven-volume novel whose title is now translated as\u00a0In Search of Lost Time\u00a0<\/i>(as of this writing I am in volume four,\u00a0Sodom and Gomorrah<\/i>), having prolonged the experience by reading books about Proust while advancing through his magnum opus.<\/span><\/p>\n

The narrator of\u00a0Lost Time\u00a0<\/i>is a writer, also named Marcel, whose author makes some critical distinctions between his fictional protagonist and himself. Although Proust was baptized, his mother was Jewish, born into the Weil family of bankers; the Marcel of the novels has no Jewish parent. Proust was gay (to use his preferred word, he was \u201can invert\u201d); Marcel seems to be one of the few major characters in the novel who is not. Like the real-life Proust, Marcel the fictional adolescent and young adult is a social climber of Himalayan ambition. Having wormed his way into the salons, dinners and galas of the titled aristocracy of Paris, he makes the disappointing observation that, for all their beauty and pedigree, they are a dim lot and narrow-minded to boot.<\/span><\/p>\n

Which brings us to the Jews. In the village where young Marcel\u2019s family spent summer vacations, they would walk in either of two directions, one toward the castle of the noble Guermantes family, the other past the country home of a family friend named Charles Swann. (Swann\u2019s Way\u00a0<\/i>is the title of the novel\u2019s first volume;\u00a0The Guermantes Way\u00a0<\/i>is the third.)\u00a0The Guermantes way was the way of the ancient, crumbling but still glamorous social order of the aristocracy, the France of knights-in-armor and bad days at the guillotine. Swann\u2019s way was the way of recently acquired wealth in commerce and banking, the way of the dynamic, ascendant bourgeoisie.<\/span><\/p>\n

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What makes the Jewishness of Swann important in\u00a0Lost Time<\/i>\u00a0is the backdrop of the great political issue of turn-of-the-century Paris, the Dreyfus affair.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Swann was a Jew, at least in the terms by which Proust probably saw himself as half-Jewish\u2014by ancestry, not by faith or practice. The Swanns were at least nominally Catholic but, as one society\u00a0grande dame\u00a0<\/i>says of him in Proust\u2019s novel, \u201cI know he\u2019s a convert, and even his parents and grandparents before him. But they do say converts remain more attached to their religion than anyone else, that it\u2019s all just a pretense. Is that true?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In other words, Swann bears the suspicion of being a modern-day New Christian, or\u00a0converso,\u00a0<\/i>which is how I have come to see him. We know of his Jewishness because others allude to his family background, as if hinting at generations of skeletons in the closet; as for his own view of his family\u2019s origins, Swann gives away nothing. He is the 19th-century Jew-by-genealogy\u00a0par excellence,\u00a0<\/i>who epitomizes the social class that made Paris the jewel of the Western world. He is admitted to the super-exclusive Jockey Club, a measure of acceptance at the time typically barred to Jews not named Rothschild. He is an art collector and expert, a maven to aristocrats whose palace walls and budgets exceed their knowledge of painting. Swann is based on the real-life Charles Haas, a debonair and witty Jew who was embraced in aristocratic circles as one of what Caroline Weber, in her wonderfully informative and entertaining book\u00a0Proust\u2019s Duchess<\/i>,\u00a0<\/i>calls \u201ca handful of strategically selected outsiders, a group one clubman termed \u2018a homeopathic dose of bourgeois.\u2019\u201d Having served Emperor Louis-Napoleon\u2019s government as an adviser on monuments and art, Haas went on to advise such nobles as Mme. Greffulhe, one of the three women Weber writes about as a model for Proust\u2019s fictional Duchesse de Guermantes. Weber quotes Greffulhe as saying, \u201c\u2018I love going to the Salon de Paris\u2019\u2014the annual exhibition of French academic art\u2014\u2018with Haas. He helps me figure out what my opinion is.\u2019\u201d Such were the uses of the mind in the company of the titled.<\/span><\/p>\n

Neither Proust nor the fictional Marcel has much positive to say about Jews. The narrator manages to link the two attributes that the author has shorn him of\u2014Jewish ancestry and sexual orientation\u2014into a joke about closeted \u201cSodomites\u201d: \u201c\u2026I have wanted provisionally to forestall the fatal error that would consist, just as a Zionist movement has been encouraged, in creating a sodomist movement and in rebuilding Sodom. But, no sooner arrived there, and the sodomists would be leaving the town so as to appear not to belong to it, would take a wife, would keep mistresses in other cities, where they would find, moreover, all the appropriate amusements.\u201d More pointedly, an unambiguously Jewish character in the novel, Marcel\u2019s onetime schoolmate Albert Bloch, is brilliant but uncouth, a caricature of the pushy, ill-mannered Jew of anti-Semitic tropes.<\/span><\/p>\n

What makes the Jewishness of Bloch and Swann important in\u00a0Lost Time\u00a0<\/i>is the backdrop of the great political issue of turn-of-the-century Paris, the Dreyfus affair, the campaign to vindicate an Alsatian Jewish Army captain framed by his gentile comrades for espionage.\u00a0The aristocrats of the \u201cGuermantes way\u201d are typically pro-Army, anti-Dreyfus. Marcel is a convinced Dreyfusard\u2014a believer in the officer\u2019s innocence. So is Bloch. And so is Swann. Toward the end of his life, Swann openly despises the anti-Semites of the aristocracy, but, knowing them well, he cautions the younger and more headstrong Bloch to act discreetly. When the Prince de Guermantes reveals to Swann that he has rethought the case and come out on the side of Dreyfus, Bloch is all for action:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe must ask him to sign our lists\u2026.with a name like his, that would have a tremendous effect.\u201d But Swann, tempering the burning conviction of the Israelite with the diplomatic moderation of the man about town, whose habits he had imbibed too deeply to be able this belatedly to shed them, refused to sanction Bloch\u2019s sending the Prince a round-robin to sign, even a seemingly spontaneous one. \u201cHe can\u2019t do that, one mustn\u2019t ask for the impossible,\u201d repeated Swann. \u201cHere we have a charming man who has traveled thousands of miles to get to where we are. He can be very useful to us. Were he to sign your list, he would simply be compromising himself with his own people, would be castigated on our account, would perhaps repent of his confidences and not give us any more.\u201d What was more, Swann withheld his own name. He thought it too Hebraic not to produce the wrong effect.<\/span><\/p>\n

The neo-Dreyfusard Prince is the exception to the rule in his social circles. In fact, when Swann publicly identifies himself with the Dreyfusard cause, the perfect\u00a0converso\u00a0<\/i>encounters a social inquisition in the salons and palaces where the fruits of his aesthetic wisdom hang on the walls. In the eyes of the Duc de Guermantes (the prince\u2019s cousin), Swann\u2019s position on Dreyfus is not just wrong, but disloyal:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026his behavior toward us has been unspeakable. He was taken up by society in the old days\u2026 I\u2019d never have believed it of him, him, a discerning gourmet, a positive mind, a collector, a lover of old books, a member of the Jockey Club, a man highly respected on all sides, a connoisseur of good addresses who used to send us the best port you can drink, a dilettante, a family man. Oh, I\u2019ve been badly let down\u2026he shouldn\u2019t have done that, he should have openly disowned the Jews and the condemned man\u2019s supporters.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

recomended by: Leon Rozenbaum<\/strong><\/em><\/span>\"\"<\/p>\n

Like Queen Esther, whom the\u00a0conversos\u00a0<\/i>venerated as a patron saint, Swann ultimately does not disown the Jews. Mind you,\u00a0In Search of Lost Time\u00a0<\/i>is not a book about Jews and Judaism. Swann\u2019s Dreyfusard sympathies are less central to Proust\u2019s story than his other brazen violation of upper-class mores: He marries his mistress, a former prostitute who is unacceptable in the \u201cbest\u201d salons where Swann himself would otherwise be welcome. His marriage is more an act of jealousy than affection, and like his activism in the Dreyfus Affair, it is socially costly.<\/span><\/p>\n

Perhaps Swann\u2019s loyalty to his wife (who, he remarks, wasn\u2019t even his \u201ctype\u201d) reflects a natural outsider sentiment, drawn from the same place as his ability to spot the anti-Semite. Although it can be uncomfortable for the contemporary Jewish reader to encounter the anti-Semitism of the French upper classes of more than a century ago, one reads today with the knowledge that the Europe that worshipped its crowned heads was destined for oblivion in the Great War, in which a rehabilitated Alfred Dreyfus served and was promoted to major.<\/span><\/p>\n

As for Swann\u2019s caution about names on petitions, like the youthful Bloch I would probably have been frustrated with him 50 years ago had I persevered with Proust as an undergraduate French major (at the pace of my reading Proust\u2019s labyrinthine sentences in French I would still be at it).\u00a0But from the vantage point of retirement, Swann\u2019s knowledge of the world and preference for results over sensation strike me as compelling arguments for Swann\u2019s way.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Former NPR host Robert Siegel<\/strong> is a special literary contributor to Moment.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

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Book Review A Jewish Outsider in Paris ROBERT SIEGEL I have been thinking about Marcel Proust and the Jews. Several weeks ago, in the doldrums of the second winter of my retirement, the memory of a friend\u2019s question about my plans to keep myself occupied, a question perhaps posed half-facetiously considering the clich\u00e9 it contained\u2014did […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71976"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=71976"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71976\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":72011,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71976\/revisions\/72011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=71976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=71976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=71976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}