Simon, maître d'école par Alain Gaba

Abstract

Reviewed by: Simon, maître d'école par Alain Gaba Kate M. Bonin Gaba, Alain. Simon, maître d'école. L'Harmattan, 2022. ISBN 978-2-14-027334-6. Pp. 139. This novel begins with interesting themes of homecoming and loss. The year is 1947: the hero, seven-year-old, Parisian-born Simon, has just lost his mother to illness, and his Jewish grandparents to Auschwitz. His grandfather refused to go into hiding, instead putting his trust in French values: "[Il] ne pouvait pas penser que son pays d'adoption, la France, le pays des Droits de l'Homme, ne les protegérait pas" (14). Simon, in contrast, survived the war by being fostered among a family of Catholic farmers in rural Touraine. Post-war, Simon's father, the newly-widowed Robert, returns from harrowing imprisonment (POW? STO?) to admit he is unprepared to parent the son he has never even met. Simon is re-placed back on the farm with his foster family. The subsequent years he passes among them are figured as hardworking but idyllic—although Simon maintains almost no contact with his Jewish family and is bewildered at a cousin's bar mitzvah. "Un vrai petit goy, en fait", the cousin concludes disdainfully (42). Readers might expect the novel to center around issues of belonging and estrangement, as Simon grows up in the long shadow of World War II. Will Simon and his traumatized father reunite? Will Simon reconnect with his Jewish heritage, or remain committed to a laicized, republican "Frenchness"? Readers who find these questions compelling will be disappointed. What began as a postwar Bildungsroman turns into a roman à thèse focusing entirely on issues of pedagogy, as Simon fulfills his childhood promise to become an instituteur. Whole chapters are dedicated to the elaboration of revolutionary teaching theories which decenter textbooks and rote memorization in favor of more experimental, self-guided learning. Moreover, the revolution which Simon embraces is not just pedagogic, but also plays out "sur un front politique et social pour la défense des libertés démocratiques" (90). The consumerism and rural exodus of the Trente Glorieuses are challenged as May 68 looms on the horizon. However, fictional Simon's friends and family—even Simon himself—become overshadowed within the novel by a laundry list of real-life international teachers and innovators whom Simon admires, including Paulo Freire, Maria Montessori, Célestin Freinet, and Melvil Dewey (inventor of the Dewey Decimal system; this last inclusion might raise readers' eyebrows, due to his well-documented anti-Semitism, which the novel does not address). The last words of the novel belong not to Simon, but to the pop singer Léo Ferré. Simon's own final intervention is a poem written in honor of his upbringing "dans une ferme du beau pays de France," praising his foster parents, and declaring "Les travaux de la ferme se sont inscrits en moi" (127). Readers may well feel sympathetic towards pedagogic innovations that seek to decolonize the curriculum, shaking up prescriptive norms that maintain the socioeconomic status quo. That said, it is disappointing that the values inscribed in the protagonist's deepest sense of selfhood appear to be an unacknowledged palimpsest, subsuming (effacing?) his connection to anything other than a narrowly framed French universalism. [End Page 235] Kate M. Bonin Arcadia University (PA) Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French