A Reader on Reading

I SELDOM READ BOOKS WITH titles such as The French Identity, An Essay on Masculinity, or What It Means to Be a Woman. It was therefore with some considerable hesitation that, a few years ago, I picked up a copy of Alain Finkielkraut’s cautionary essay The Imaginary Jew. Through one of those curious autobiographical associations that a book sometimes conjures up, I suddenly recalled an event I had forgotten from far away and long ago. One afternoon when I was seven, on the bus back from the Buenos Aires English high school that I had started to attend, a boy whose name I never knew called out at me from the back seat, “Hey, Jew! So your father likes money?” I remember being so bewildered by the question that I didn’t know what to answer. I didn’t think my father was particularly fond of money, but there was an implied insult in the boy’s tone that I couldn’t understand. Above all, I was surprised at being called “Jew.” My grandmother went to the synagogue, but my parents were not religious, and I had never thought of myself in terms of a word I believed was reserved for the old people of my grandmother’s generation. But since the epithets applied to us imply a definition, in that moment (though I didn’t know it then) I was forced into a choice: to accept this vast, difficult identity or to deny it. Finkielkraut in his book tells of a similar moment and acknowledges the universality of such an experience, but his subject is not the inheritance of hatred. “I myself,” writes Finkielkraut, “would like to address and meditate upon the opposite case: the case of a child, an adolescent who is not only proud but happy to be Jewish and who came to question, bit by bit, if there were not some bad faith in living jubilantly as an exception and an exile.” These individuals of assumed identity, the inheritors of a suffering to which they have not been personally subjected, Finkielkraut, with a flair for the mot juste, calls “imaginary” or “armchair” Jews.

I am struck by how useful this notion is to address a question that troubles me: How does the perception of who I am affect my perception of the world around me? How important is it for Alice to know who she is (the Victorian child that the world perceives her to be) when wandering through the Looking-Glass Wood? Apparently, very important, since this knowledge determines her relationship to the other creatures she encounters. For instance, having forgotten who she is, Alice can become friends with a fawn who has forgotten it is a fawn. “So they walked on together through the wood, Alice with her arms clasped lovingly round the soft neck of the Fawn, till they came out into another open field, and here the Fawn gave a sudden bound into the air, and shook itself free from Alice’s arm. ‘I’m a Fawn!’ it cried out in a voice of delight. And, dear me! you’re a human child!’ A sudden look of alarm came into its beautiful brown eyes, and in another moment it had darted away at full speed.”

Around this notion of constructed identity, Finkielkraut has assiduously elaborated a sequence of questions about what it means to be Jewish (or, I would add, to be Alice or a fawn), and, since every definition is a limitation, he has refused to give these questions definitive answers. Central to Finkielkraut’s interrogation is the seemingly trite statement that the Jews exist, that whatever their identity may be, individually or as a group, they have a presence that not even the Nazi machinery was able to erase. This existence is not easily borne, let alone categorized. “Listen, Doctor,” wrote Heinrich Heine, “don’t even talk to me about Judaism, I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. Slurs and shame: that’s all that comes of it. It’s not a religion, it’s a misfortune.” The cry “Why me?” uttered by every persecuted Jew, the imaginary Jew picks up with a sigh of ennui. Using himself as an example, Finkielkraut confesses that on the one hand he broadcasts his wish to be a Jew while on the other he de-Judaizes himself, transforming himself into the “other” and becoming a messenger of his gentile companions: in this I vividly recognize myself. When his parents refer to the Holocaust, he responds with Vietnam; when they mention antisemitism, he points out that there are no Jewish garbage collectors in France. “Why me?” has become “Why am I not someone else?”