Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France: Rebuilding Family and Nation
330
Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France: Rebuilding Family and Nation
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Overview
At the end of World War II, French Jews faced a devastating demographic reality: thousands of orphaned children, large numbers of single-parent households, and families in emotional and financial distress. Daniella Doron suggests that after years of occupation and collaboration, French Jews and non-Jews held contrary opinions about the future of the nation and the institution of the family. At the center of the disagreement was what was to become of the children. Doron traces emerging notions about the postwar family and its role in strengthening Jewish ethnicity and French republicanism in the shadow of Vichy and the Holocaust.
“Doron’s book appears at a key moment. Its emphasis on children emerging from hunger, displacement and war should render it standard reading for policymakers, NGOs and others interested in shaping the destinies of today’s abandoned children.” —French History
“Raises fundamental questions for the understanding of not only Jewish reconstruction in post-World War II France, but also Holocaust memory, postwar French society and culture and the history of postwar European families and children.” —French Politics, Culture and Society
“Doron’s deftly argued and well researched book is an important intervention into a growing body of scholarship on the postwar decade. She convincingly documents the central role that the rehabilitation of Jewish children and the reconstruction of Jewish families played in post-war French Jewish reconstruction and underscores the importance of the decade following the war in shaping Jewish historical evolution in France.” —Maud Mandel, author of Muslims and Jews in France
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253017468 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Series: | The Modern Jewish Experience |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 330 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Daniella Doron is Lecturer in Jewish history at Monash University where she teaches courses on modern Jewish history, the Holocaust, and the history of the family.
Read an Excerpt
Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France
Rebuilding Family and Nation
By Daniella Doron
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2015 Daniella DoronAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-01746-8
CHAPTER 1
"Their Children? Our Children!"
Holocaust Memory in Postwar France
IN 1946 THE FRENCH JEWISH child welfare organization La Colonie scolaire (the School Colony) launched a fund-raising drive to fill its rapidly depleting coffers. Appealing to French Jewry's noblesse, the organization suggested that "no monument" could better "perpetuate" the memory of the dead than homes for the living. In exchange for a few hundred francs, La Colonie scolaire promised to engrave an orphan's bed with the name of the contributor's "dearly departed."
By transforming children into living memorials, the La Colonie scolaire metaphorically linked the tangible bodies of Jewish orphans to the intangible memory of the recent dead. The Bundist Jewish child welfare agency was not alone in maintaining that living Jewish children functioned as compelling symbols of survival and loss. This fund-raising strategy exemplified a larger trend emerging in postwar France as Jews began processing their recent memories of death and destruction. Jewish agencies and individuals repeatedly called attention to the issue of Jewish youth permanently lost to genocide and possibly lost to Christianity. Perhaps most dramatically, Jewish organizations and relatives desperately scoured the cities and the countryside of France for the eight thousand to ten thousand Jewish children who had been hidden from the Nazis, proclaiming that their estrangement from the Jewish community represented Nazi genocide by another means. French Jewish activists invoked the murder of the eleven thousand young Jews in their rabbinical sermons and radio broadcasts; the Jewish press made the wartime massacre of Jewish youth a central subject of reporting; French Jewish agencies staged public art shows visualizing the suffering endured by Jewish youth; and just months after the war, diverse Jewish organizations attempted to launch a united nationwide campaign depicting the "martyrdom" of their children.
This spotlight on Jewish children aimed to disentangle the Jewish experience of genocide from the French and greater European experience of suffering. In these attempts to launch an early conversation about the Holocaust, the symbol of the Jewish child victim represented a seemingly safe entry point. For one, the subject of children's victimhood emerged as a common theme in postwar European discussions about national victimhood under the Nazis; French Jews simply joined this larger European conversation. Furthermore, as literary scholar Mark M. Anderson aptly notes, the trope of child victim facilitates a certain "easy empathy" with Holocaust victims that enables the public to avoid confronting, as Anderson puts it, the "rougher edges" of the millions of other Holocaust victims: eastern European Hasidim, Zionists, or Jewish bankers. Jewish children operated as a convenient synecdoche for the murder of six million Jews.
Even if the child victim seemed an obvious metaphor for the Holocaust, this chapter will trace how it nonetheless proved frustratingly problematic and slippery. The danger lay in the fact that the image of the Jewish child victim was vulnerable to being politicized or universalized by competing interest groups. Thus even as some French Jews focused on the child victim to signify the singularity of the Jewish experience, French republicans could employ that very symbol to universalize the Holocaust, and French Catholics could harness it to advance Christian themes of sacrifice and redemption. The fierce resistance of French state and society to alternative memories of the war helps explain why these early efforts at articulating a memory of the Jewish genocide were suppressed, only to be unearthed again in later decades, the era that putatively gave birth to Holocaust memory.
This first chapter helps to unsettle the still dominant historiographical narrative that Jews in France avoided voicing a memory of the Holocaust at the war's end. The notion that some manner of collective amnesia or a conspiracy of silence about the Holocaust immediately beset postwar French (and international) Jewry had become the historiographical paradigm in French and Jewish history. Scholars such as Annette Wieviorka had argued that both Jews and non-Jews perceived their differing wartime experiences as "quantitative and not qualitative." This historiographical assumption in part stems from the fact that in the wake of occupation and collaboration, French political parties aspired to forge a wartime memory of a nation united in a shared memory of equal victimhood and suffering. Recent French scholarship, however, has documented how this attempt to build a united memory of the war inevitably sparked resistance among segments of the French population who harbored precise recollections of the occupation and collaboration. Current Jewish historiography on postwar American Jews and European Jewish historical documentation centers has likewise chipped away at the notion that a Holocaust memory only emerged after decades passed.
The question of how and if Jews in France could voice a specific memory of the war was shaped by the particular dynamics of French "memory politics" at the Liberation. Holocaust memory, contrary to the claim of several historians, was not glaringly absent from the postwar scene. For post-genocide Jews, no other historical fact more forcefully conveyed the genocidal plans of the Nazis than the systematic murder of their children; publicizing Jewish children's wartime experiences and pursuing the guardianship of orphaned young Jews ranked high on the Jewish communal agenda. In these discussions about murdered and still living Jewish children, postwar French Jews both publicly and privately invoked the Nazi plans for Jewish extermination as cause for reclaiming and remembering the youngest members of their community. And yet French non-Jews (and other Europeans) too remained convinced that they had greatly suffered in the war and too invoked the child war victim as cause for national mourning and concern. With their own innocence and suffering at center stage, the French of all faiths seemed transfixed by the fate of "their" youth.
While this concern for children was genuine and imminently reasonable, it also served a political agenda. The symbol of the child victim aggravated a case of formidable historical amnesia among postwar French who preferred to divert attention from guilt and complicity toward the far more comfortable subject of victimhood, resistance, and unwavering fidelity to republican values. Historian Nicholas Stargardt's observations about children in postwar European rhetoric accurately describe the French case as well. Youth, as Stargardt remarked, held an "ambiguous position" in the postwar imagination: as indisputable victims of Nazi aggression, as eager participants in Nazi cruelty, and as seemingly prime targets for denazification and re-education. For these reasons, nations across Europe in the war's wake clamored for victim status by harnessing the image of the child victim as a metaphor for all they had suffered and endured. Perhaps, as Stargardt observed, this "was natural," but "it was also parochial, censoring the experiences of those who did not belong." Europeans found themselves not united by their wartime experiences, but still at odds and building competing hierarchies of victimhood, with their own children reigning. In France, Jewish groups found that their efforts to portray the genocidal "martyrdom" of Jewish children as singular and unique encountered a skeptical public that either appropriated the symbols of the Jewish child war victim to conform to nascent French war memories or diverted attention toward their own victimhood. This chapter's focus on retrieving and representing Jewish youth thus both documents the earliest priority in Jewish communal reconstruction and helps challenge historiographical assumptions that promoting collective amnesia ranked top on that communal agenda.
THE WAR AGAINST JEWISH CHILDREN
In the wake of the Second World War, politicians and parents alike proclaimed that they had just endured "a war against children." After the axis defeat, postwar photographers and journalists traversed the Continent, capturing harrowing images and documenting stories of children damaged by years of violence and neglect. These depictions of malnourished and parentless youth were published in books and newspapers across the former theater of war and were often met with critical acclaim and popular interest. Films, from the most celebrated auteurs of European cinema, recounted dystopian narratives of a topsy-turvy world where children ruled the day and parents meekly lay in the shadows. These images amplified fears about a troubling rise in juvenile delinquency and the possibility of having to contend with yet another "lost generation." But they also resonated with Europeans principally because they hauntingly visualized the social repercussions of the Nazi order and the long road to reconstruction that lay ahead.
European Jewry likewise remained convinced that the Second World War represented a "war against children" and fiercely launched into the task of documenting their children's "martyrdom" and tracking down their whereabouts. In the displaced persons (DP) camps of Germany and the orphanages of Poland, teachers and historians collected testimonies from still agitated and traumatized child survivors. These personal accounts were broadcast on the radio and published in volumes titled The Children Accuse and The Martyrdom of Children and in films such as Long Is the Road (Lang ist der Weg) and Our Children (Unzere Kinder). One French Jewish child welfare agency, the Oeuvre des secours aux enfants (Children's Relief Agency, OSE), considered the fate of a group of one thousand teenage Holocaust survivors, known as the Buchenwald Boys, so compelling that they proposed having Columbia Records record the boys' camp songs. Columbia Records never recorded that disk, but the OSE took matters into their own hands by publishing in book format the boys' melancholic tunes. The OSE was not alone in publicizing the fate of Jewish children in France and in insisting that lost children symbolized collective loss. The murder of their innocent children remained a raw and repeatedly invoked subject among French Jews still reeling from the scale of their personal and collective losses. In the years following the war, French Jewish agencies and the Jewish press produced an endless homage to the eleven thousand young French Jews murdered by the Nazis. These initiatives embodied in striking terms the distinctive experiences of Hitler's youngest victims and thus attempted to disabuse non-Jews of the idea that all French citizens had endured the same lot under the Nazis.
The Jewish press functioned as a central forum for these discussions. Jewish publications, across the political spectrum, routinely narrated the wartime and the postwar experiences of Jewish youth through articles, fictional stories, poetry, and photographs. In fact, in scanning the Jewish press in the decade following the war, one is struck by the volume of articles focusing on subject matter relating to children. Vacillating between meditations on a sorrowful past and looking forward to a (tenuously) hopeful future, pictures that depicted postwar children reflected the crossroads confronting post-Liberation Jewry. Titles such as "Towards Life," "The Day After," "Onwards [Kadimah in Hebrew]," "The Toll of Extermination," and "Child Martyrs" accompanied the endless articles and series on postwar youth. The spotlight on Jewish children — including articles about their murder, speculations about the fate of hidden Jewish children, or even the pictures of smiling youth that dotted the pages of the Jewish press — paralleled the commemorative culture around children witnessed in the DP camps of Germany. In the DP camps, such a startling number of young adult Holocaust survivors rushed headlong into marriage and childbirth in an effort to reaffirm life and sexuality that it culminated in the highest birthrate in postwar Europe. These messiach kinder, as they were frequently referred to, were then paraded in the streets of German cities and photographed in Jewish newspapers as a resounding assertion that mir zaynen do (we are here). At the same time, by naming their babies after their dead, these young men and women, who had often lost entire families to the Nazis, constructed living memorials to their murdered loved ones.
The Jewish baby boom remained a central European issue, never reaching the French borders. But French Jewish public representations of children's past suffering and their improbable survival reveal an analogous commemorative impulse that poignantly linked children to memory of the Holocaust.
In published poetry, the eerie absence of Jewish children functioned as a means to mourn both familial and Jewish communal loss. One such poem narrated the agony of parents vainly searching for their lost child: "One day, the Germans, ripped him out of his bedroom in order to lead him to the gas chambers / because he had committed the crime of being born Jewish, the crime of being a little Jew." The poem's title — literally translated as "One Searches for a Child" — is provocative in its ambiguity. Does the indefinite pronoun "one" mean "they," thereby denoting parental mourning? Or does it suggest "we," expanding the searchers to all French Jewry (or even France)? Furthermore, the murder of Jewish children, this poet and other writers intimated, was born of the specific fate of wartime Jews. These children, after all, had been deported not as resisters, criminals, or slave labor, but rather as Jews targeted for murder. Jewish pedagogue Isaac Pougatch in a 1952 speech thus called into question the commensurability of French children's suffering: "Our children have known their own tragedy and the tragedy of others. Ours: searched out, tracked down ... annihilated. The others: indirect victims. How many? 1 ½ to 2 million?"
The invocation of a war against Jewish children did not fade from the spotlight, even in later years. Articles in the Bulletin du service centrale des déportés israélites (Bulletin of the Central Service for Deported Jews) by journalist and former resister Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar took up Pougatch's call to reflect upon the larger significance of children's victimhood. Her emotional article of 1953 ruminated on the role of children within the vicissitudes of history: "Some men make history, others are subject to it. But it is the children who live and embody it in all of its twists and turns even being its symbols ... for us they are History." For Mesnil-Amar, children perfectly symbolized the existential significance of the Holocaust, and thus she weighed the persecutions on a heretofore unprecedented historical scale. In an earlier article, titled "The War on Children," she asked, "Are they appeased ... by this Holocaust unique in the history of humanity, by the sacrifice of our children?" Mesnil-Amar's recognition of this "unique Holocaust" alienated this formerly assimilated and wealthy French Jew from the nation precisely at its moment of national glory. Mesnil-Amar found de Gaulle's now nearly canonical 1945 "not a tear will be forgotten" speech especially distasteful. De Gaulle's insistence upon equal victimhood and his attempt to impose reason to the murder of children reeked of platitudes and, according to historian Karen Adler, "jarred Mesnil-Amar's conviction of her own place in France." De Gaulle's celebration of the war dead led the former resister and child advocate to accuse the general of insensitivity in the face of arbitrary suffering: "All the children ... so many children, massacred because they couldn't work, thrown in the ovens with their mothers because they didn't want to leave them? ... All this wasn't in vain? Is there some sense in such suffering?" (emphasis in the original). Evidence suggests that others harbored similar sentiments after their harrowing experience of persecution, even if they did not air their feelings so publicly. One French Jewish adolescent directed her feelings of indignation at Rabbi Jacob Kaplan, after hearing his assertion that the persecutions had fortified Judaism. Myriam Jurovics wrote to Kaplan, "Our heroes, our saints have uselessly died — our ordeal has been in vain." Both Mesnil-Amar and Jurovics failed to find reason and redemption in senseless murder.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France by Daniella Doron. Copyright © 2015 Daniella Doron. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1. "Their Children? Our Children!:" Holocaust Memory in Postwar France
2. "A Drama of Faith and Family:" Custody Disputes in Postwar France
3. Notre Vie en Commune: The Family Versus the Children's Home
4. The Homes of Hope?: Trauma, Universal Victimhood, and Universalism
5. From Competition to Cooperation: Redefining Jewish Identities
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Index
What People are Saying About This
Doron's deftly argued and well researched book is an important intervention into a growing body of scholarship on the postwar decade. She convincingly documents the central role that the rehabilitation of Jewish children and the reconstruction of Jewish families played in post-war French Jewish reconstruction and underscores the importance of the decade following the war in shaping Jewish historical evolution in France.
Doron's deftly argued and well researched book is an important intervention into a growing body of scholarship on the postwar decade. She convincingly documents the central role that the rehabilitation of Jewish children and the reconstruction of Jewish families played in post-war French Jewish reconstruction and underscores the importance of the decade following the war in shaping Jewish historical evolution in France.
Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France tells the story of the Holocaust and its aftermath from a strikingly original vantage point: through the lens of the children who survived. In reconstructing how French Jews mobilized around children and families after the Second World War, Daniella Doron demonstrates the centrality of children to the broader project of reconstruction and remembrance in the aftermath of genocide. This gripping and powerful history should be read by anyone interested in the history of the Holocaust, the family, and Jews in Modern France.