Self-Portrait with Parents and Footnotes: In and Out of a Postwar Jewish Childhood by Annette Aronowicz (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Self-Portrait with Parents and Footnotes: In and Out of a Postwar Jewish Childhood by Annette Aronowicz L. Scott Lerner Annette Aronowicz, Self-Portrait with Parents and Footnotes: In and Out of a Postwar Jewish Childhood. Boston: Cherry Orchard Books/Academic Studies Press, 2021. 152 pp. 17 b&w photos. Hardcover $119. Paperback $22.95. ISBN: 1644696207, 978–1644696200, 9781644696217, 978–1644696217 Annette Aronowicz, a scholar in the field of Jewish and Religious Studies, has written an exquisitely original memoir, a book that invites and inspires our questions rather than delivering pronouncements or giving conventional answers. The text is divided into two sections, a narrative account of the first sixteen years of her life, followed by “a series of meditations on the engagements and puzzlements that stemmed from that period, in the light of the moment in which I am writing.” The latter are organized under the headings: “Communism,” “Jewish,” “Mental Illness,” “Money,” “Russian Friendships,” and “Theological Fragments.” Missing from this synopsis are her parents, yet they appear in her title and loom so large that there would be no book without them. Their absence in her synopsis of the book may evoke the concept of what is missing, along with its counterpart, what is inherited, both of which course through these pages as essential themes. A great deal of Aronowicz’s Self-Portrait calls to mind another book about Paris, the War, and the deportation: Georges Perec’s W, or the Memory of Childhood (Paris, 1975). Both Aronowicz and Perec write from the perspective of the French-speaking child of Polish Jews. Like W, which moves between two distinct realms, autobiographical and fictional, in alternating chapters and contrasting type, Aronowicz’s memoir may best be read with attention to the movement, as she calls it, not only between the narrative of her formative [End Page 261] years and the thematic chapters that follow, but also between Parents and Footnotes. The latter designates the many intertexts, the books and ideas of her intellectual life (Charles Péguy, Romain Gary, Sarah Kofman, Emmanuel Levinas, Blaise Pascal, I. B. Singer, and others), while the former refers to the voices that are lost in this intellectual mode and that she revives through the act of writing-remembering. Neither realm can stand of its own accord. The “footnotes” help her read the stories inherited from her parents, while the parents ground the intellectual discourses, opening a space for subjectivity and voice as a complement to analysis. Why is this necessary? Because, as she illustrates time and again, truth and theology, the transcendent, the human, reside in the density of the bonds formed with other human beings, the bonds formed in primis with one’s parents. Near the heart of the memoir lies the story of faithfulness and betrayal in the search for one’s parents and for oneself. Aronowicz summarizes the soul-wrenching story of Sarah Kofman, who, as a Jewish girl in hiding in Paris during the Occupation, was “saved” by a Christian woman (Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, 1996). Kofman struggled tragically with questions of faithfulness and betrayal in relation to her mother, as well as her father, whose pen she inherited and whose legacy she was determined to live up to by writing. Like Kofman, Aronowicz wrestles with her father’s faithfulness, in this case, to a Communist ideal, and with her own faithfulness to the lone adjective that stands as a chapter title, “Jewish.” She reflects on her father’s likely infidelity to her mother, describing the resentment she felt toward her mother for corralling her, as a child, into becoming an instrument to punish her father. Her mother, who spoke to her of the death camps at a tender age, never intentionally broached with her the question of her father’s infidelity. Aronowicz turns the question round and round, addressing it no more directly than she receives, and writing about it from an emotional and intellectual distance. Then something happens. A key character in the story turns out to be her parents’ friend Boris, whom she visits as a young woman. When she recounts his role, her story unfolds, much as in her reading of Singer’s “A...