Writing Occupation: Jewish Émigré Voices in Wartime France by Julia Elsky

Abstract

Reviewed by: Writing Occupation: Jewish Émigré Voices in Wartime France by Julia Elsky Nick Underwood Julia Elsky. Writing Occupation: Jewish Émigré Voices in Wartime France. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020. 288 pp. For those interested in the history of Jews in France, the current moment is exciting. Building upon Paula Hyman's, Nancy Green's, and David Weinberg's pioneering work (the most recognizable to English-speaking academics), an increasing number of scholars are working on a wide range of issues related to the histories and cultures of the varieties of Jews in modern France. The growing body of literature on Jewish migration to France has broadened our understanding of Jewish France and has illuminated the contours of the French Jewish communities. Adding to these new approaches and interjecting an explicitly literary framework to the recent literature is Julia Elsky's Writing Occupation: Jewish Émigré Voices in Wartime France, which, over seven chapters (including the introduction and epilogue), analyzes how the writers Benjamin Fondane, Jean Malaquais, Romain Gary, Elsa Triolet, and Irène Némirovsky wrote about their Jewishness and Frenchness during the years of occupation, collaboration, accommodation, and resistance in wartime France. Elsky's writers all immigrated to France during the interwar years and all adopted French as their literary language. Indeed, one of Elsky's major contributions is to challenge us to read French as a Jewish language and explore the content of Jewish identity as it was written by these authors in the French language. Elsky utilizes these writers' works to explore the ideals of French national belonging. For Elsky, the war and occupation were turning points for these authors and highlight how "under the pressures of war, [these writers] wrote a Francophonie that shifts the paradigm of dominant and dominated cultures to one of immigration and transnational circulation and expands the idea of what a Jewish language is" (206). As Elsky shows, it was under the occupation that these authors addressed the choice to write in French in new ways. These Jewish immigrants to France, as Elsky highlights, expressed hybrid and shifting cultural, religious, and linguistic identities. In fact, "French became universal in a different way; a language with no center or periphery, in which they could represent Jewish voice and multiple languages, including their maternal tongues and the language of prayer" (28). As Elsky argues explicitly, this group of "Eastern European Francophonie … blur distinction between center and periphery" (5). Again, as Elsky argues repeatedly, defeat and occupation changed Jewish immigrant writers' approach to French; they blurred the boundaries of belonging within national borders. In this line of [End Page 465] thinking, Elsky here pairs these Jewish writers' experiences with those of postcolonial French writers. Although focused on the occupation broadly, the writers highlighted in Writing Occupation wrote about some specific experiences during World War II, from the June 1940 flight from Paris to life in the occupied and southern zones, roundups, and internment camps, and the Resistance. In addition to these moments, these writers were also influenced by contemporary debates about Yiddish, the importance the French held in governmental rhetoric related to citizenship, and attacks in the antisemitic press about Jewish immigrants and their adulterated French. The role that French played in the immigrant imagination was central to these writers, as Elsky makes clear. In chapter 3, which focuses on Romain Gary, Elsky shows how his "multilingual heteroglossia" (95) demonstrates how languages are in contact with each other. They do not cancel one other out. "Gary represents French as the language of democracy that could encompass a wide range of languages—and therefore national identities," writes Elsky, "in one democratic European language" (96). In challenging the binary relationship between periphery and center and demonstrating how these French and Jewish writers articulated their sense of belonging and not belonging in wartime France, Elsky expands the historical and literary function of the French language. "Under the Occupation in particular, Benjamin Fondane, Romain Gary, and Jean Malaquas wrote in a French that incorporated Jewish voice," argues Elsky, "or even rejected the notion of French as a closed, monolingual language" (203). This was a direct challenge to the Vichy government's exclusionary nationalist practices. "Taking a different approach...