J'ai des photos de toutes les personnes de this histoire, sauf de Nathan. Il fait partie des gens dont l'existence est attestée par les administrators du génocide: son nom figure sur des lettres de sous-préfets ayant l'honneur d'adresser des listes classées alphabétiquement à leurs supérieurs, sur des registres d'internement dans des camps, et sur des stèles où les mêmes noms ont été rassemblés longtemps après. Mais comme du Dieu des Juifs, comme des parias absolus de l'Histoire, on ne connaît de lui aucune image.
Cloé Korman, Les Presque Sœurs
I have photographs of everyone in this story except Nathan. He is one of those whose existence is documented by the administrators of the genocide: his name appears in letters from sub-prefects who had the honor of sending alphabetically ordered lists to their superiors, in registers of internment in camps, and on stelae where the same names were compiled long afterward. Yet, like the God of the Jews, like the absolute outcasts of history, no image of him exists.
Laurent Joly recently published a comprehensive account of the Winter Velodrome raids – the French mass arrest of Jews and their deportation to the German extermination camps in Eastern Europe. 1 For a long time, the memorial plaque on site commemorating French collaboration in the persecution of Jews in France was controversial. Ten-year-old Mireille, five-year-old Jacqueline, and three-year-old Henriette were deported to Beaune-la-Rolande (Loiret) in 1942 and later transferred to another home in Val-de-Marne. These cousins of their father are honored with the presence of Cloé Kormans. Les Presque Sœurs (Seuil, 2022) a face back, the author wrote the book while pregnant, partly in a joint search with her own sister Esther in an enchanted fairy-tale forest:
Certain histoires sont comme des forêts, le but est d'en sortir. D'autres peuvent servir à atteindre des îles, des ailleurs. There are so many barques or forests that they belong to the same wood.
Je ne sais pas de quelle sorte est celle qui commence ici.
Every day, I have a son at the porte d'un immeuble that can be found just in the face of the elle, in Paris. A female voice that responds. My voice is heard on the interphone and, without the demand for plus, the woman says: « Montez. »
The immeuble s'ouvre par un portail en métal forgé, sous un visage en pierre ailé et barbu. The address is in the white pages. If you look at all sorts of emblems to find something, it's still there.
Elle is revenue souvent. Elle voulait savoir tout ce qu'elle pourrait sur les trois petites filles. Et, bien que la femme les ait connues il ya très longtemps, elle était d'accord pour lui en parler.
Cloé Korman, Les Presque Sœurs
Some stories are like a forest; the goal is to get out of it. Others can serve as a means to reach islands or another country. Whether they are boats or forests, they are cut from the same cloth.
I don't know what kind of one it is that starts here.
One day, my sister rang the doorbell of a building directly across the street from her house in Paris. A woman's voice answered. My sister spoke her name into the intercom, and without asking any further questions, the woman said to her, "Come upstairs."
The building opened through a wrought-iron metal gate, beneath which was a winged, bearded face carved from stone. The address was in the White Pages. My sister expected all sorts of obstacles to finding it, but there were none.
She came back often. She wanted to know everything she could about the three little girls. And although the woman had known them a very long time ago, she agreed to tell her about them.
In homes and camps, the Vichy regime imprisoned thousands of Jewish children—11.104 according to Serge Klarsfeld—without their parents knowing their whereabouts. Between 1942 and 1943, the girls in this captivity were dependent on one another. The story actually focuses on six girls, of whom Andrée, Rose, and Jeanne would survive. Mireille, Jacqueline, and Henriette perished in Auschwitz in 1944. The author interweaves our contemporary history and her own life with that of the girls, transposing our COVID-19 pandemic into an epidemic of poverty. Her concrete historical research, in part, expands the Jewish transit spaces into the universal realm of migrant fates.
Cet été-là, the reflux of the epidemic nous fait apprécier ce qui d'habitude nous paraît banal, tout en donnant à chaque rencontre, à chaque promenade, un envers invisible et dangereux. Et pour me, the sensation of bonheur par contraste, d'un répit qui n'est que prêté, est due en surface à la crise sanitaire, but also aux dates de mes rendez-vous with Andrée. On arrival à la mi-juillet, aux jours anniversaires des grandes rafles de l'été 1942 qui ont embarqué sa mère, ainsi que Chava, Lysora et Biba. In Paris, the battles are particularly concentrated in the quarters of the two quarters of the city and in the milliers of people on the same day, in the north-east of the city, which preserves this identity in the accumulating area and the passage, où continuent de se relayer aujourd'hui les immigrés subissant différents degrés d'opprobre – here les juifs, aujourd'hui les Arabes d'Algérie, du Maroc et de Tunisie, les Chinois, et d'autres dont l'arrivée est plus récente encore, au gré des new guerres et des nouvelles epidemics of poverty.
Cloé Korman, Les Presque Sœurs
That summer, the epidemic made us appreciate what otherwise seemed banal, while simultaneously lending an invisible and dangerous flip side to every encounter, every walk. And for me, the feeling of happiness born of contrast, of a respite that was only borrowed, was superficially attributable to the health crisis, but also to the dates of my appointments with Andrée. It was mid-July, the anniversaries of the great roundups in the summer of 1942, in which her mother, along with Chava, Lysora, and Biba, were deported. In Paris, the raids focused particularly on the neighborhoods where she and I live, where thousands of people could be arrested within two days, in this northeast of the city that has retained its identity as a place of reception and transit, where even today immigrants who suffer to varying degrees of disgrace still come and go – yesterday the Jews, today the Arabs from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, the Chinese and others whose arrival is of a more recent date, depending on the new wars and the new epidemics of poverty.
Korman, a descendant and teacher from Seine-Saint-Denis, continues her literary work on what could be called French-Jewish literature with her book, which is among the last four Goncourt Prize candidates of the 2022 book season, as she did most recently in her autobiographical essay. Tu resembles à une Juive (2020). As Illana Weizman in Des blancs comme les autres? (2022) showed, Kormann reminds us, the plurality of Jewish identities, denying which is an anti-Semitic strategy. 2 Justine Augier similarly referred to Korman's book in 2021 to show that a "Jewish, atheistic, intellectual, diasporic identity" is not highly valued in contemporary France, insofar as antisemitism is not only a hatred of the cult and traditions of the Jews, but also of their integration and mixing: "The imaginary creation of the Israeli matrix, this simplification, this renunciation of Jewish pluralism, I consider this an antisemitic act," Augier concludes. 3 Korman himself emphasizes the connection between the external assignment of Jewish identity, the insistence on the diasporic-mixed modernity of Jewish life, and literary experience in this radical otherness:
The remark of this sympathique young artiste, "you don't have anything to do with joy", is risible soit-elle, me poursuit pourtant à travers les années. Le coup porte, le mot résonne encore dans le gouffre d'une histoire familiale marquée par les persécutions, les bannissements et les exiles. This expropriation verbale, je la considère aujourd'hui comme une forme de racisme établissant qui existe de droit, ou non, au sein d'une communauté dont les contours mériteraient d'être plus flous et plus ouverts. Il me semble indispensable de défendre un judaïsme athée, intellectuel, un judaïsme qui assume son character mélangé aux other cultures, aux other lands… Il est l'allégorie d'une certaine forme d'étrangeté, pour me inséparable de l'experience littéraire: one étrangeté radicale vis-à-vis the language and the society, and qui rend sensitives leur character fabriqué et leurs abus. L'étonnement, la honte d'être différent, la solitude qu'on éprouve en lisant Kafka ou Proust, David Grossman ou Philip Roth, je les crois essentiels pour remettre en cause l'arrogance de la culture, le fait que des systèmes symboliques et hierarchiques soient considérés et promus comme s'ils étaient naturels, alors qu'ils sont aussi très souvent des systèmes d'oppression. L'écriture de ces écrivains qui déclinent les avatars de l'étrangeté, l'expérience de l'exile et de la difference, le plurilinguisme, la double culture, ou l'humour juif, dont le ressort est un questionnement des évidences entêté jusqu'à l'absurde, a la vertu de Renvoyer le pays, the nation or the language à leur propre étrangeté. A contrario, promoting the image of Judaism as a religion contraignante and faire des Juifs une communauté clairement bornée, all même jusqu'à les identifier mécaniquement à l'État d'Israël, ce renforcement identitaire me paraît en fait une demande de renoncement, une exhortation à effacer the réalité de la Diaspora and de sa puissance critique. Enfin, s'il était vrai, par quelque logic absurde, que je n'étais pas juive, et que mes parents, mes grands-parents dans leur athéisme plus ou moins consommé ne l'avaient pas été non plus, ils auraient pu compter sur d'autres qu'eux pour les désigner comme juifs And you'll see the assassins in tant que tels. Le « tu n'es pas vraiment juive » de this camarade sonnait comme un écho sordide au « vous n'êtes pas français » address à mes ancestors en 1942, assorti de l'obligation de porter l'étoile jaune et d'aller s'inscrire eux-mêmes sur des registres servant à organizer leur extermination.
Cloé Korman, Tu resembles à une Juive
The remark made by this likeable young artist, “You’re not really Jewish,” however ludicrous it may have been, has haunted me over the years. The blow stings; the word still reverberates in the abyss of a family history marked by persecution, banishment, and exile. Today, I see this verbal dispossession as a form of entrenched racism, existing de jure or de facto within a community whose contours should be more blurred and open. I consider it essential to defend an atheistic, intellectual Judaism, a Judaism that embraces its fusion with other cultures and countries… It is the allegory of a particular kind of alienation that, for me, is inextricably linked to the literary experience: a radical alienation from language and society, which makes their fabricated nature and their abuse palpable. The astonishment, the shame of being different, the loneliness one feels when reading Kafka or Proust, David Grossman or Philip Roth, I consider essential for questioning the arrogance of culture, the fact that symbolic and hierarchical systems are seen as natural and promoted, even though they are very often also systems of oppression. The writing of these authors, who explore the avatars of otherness, the experience of exile and difference, multilingualism, dual culture, or Jewish humor, and whose driving force is a stubborn questioning of self-evident truths to the point of absurdity, has the virtue of pointing the country, the nation, or the language toward its own otherness. In contrast, it seems to me that promoting the image of Judaism as a binding religion, reducing Jews to a clearly defined community, and even going so far as to mechanically identify them with the State of Israel, is in reality a demand for renunciation, an invitation to erase the reality of the Diaspora and its critical power. After all, if, according to some absurd logic, it were true that I was not Jewish, and that my parents and grandparents, in their more or less complete atheism, hadn't been either, they could have counted on others besides themselves to label them as Jews and want to murder them as such. This classmate's "You're not really Jewish" sounded like a shabby echo of the "You're not French," directed at my ancestors in 1942, which included the requirement to wear the yellow star and register themselves in files used to organize their extermination.
The narrative sections of Les Presque Sœurs Following the spatial tripartite division, Montargis is the place of the families and their six children; Beaune-la-Rolande, the internment camp; and finally Paris, the author's home and the location of the various homes for the three surviving of the six girls. Florence Bouchy situates Korman's latest project Between research, empathy, and autofiction: "The great achievement of this sober yet tender text, which seeks to bring to light names long suppressed, lies precisely in its ability to make palpable an experience lived at a child's level. The author doesn't construct or invent scenes or dialogues. Rather, she visits the places where the girls lived, in Montargis, Beaune-la-Rolande (Loiret), or Paris, draws on accounts entrusted to her or read, accesses her own childhood memories and experience as a mother, and, without concealing it, 'surmises' the emotions and reactions of the little girls." 4 Fabienne Pascaud reads Kormann's approach positively, "without macabre voyeurism, with a delicate and consistent writing style at a child's level, which is playfully interwoven with concrete details - notebooks, pens, cutlery, songs and disguises," which achieves an archaic-mythical power. 5
« Chaumière » (or « petite farm », small farmhouse in the original text) is the term employed by the histories Raul Hilberg pour parler des premières installations destinées aux meurtres de masse à Auschwitz, after the essays in the trucks that are in sufficient space. “Chaumière” also chose the same language in the villages in the lands, in the forests. On my side, I'll have the opportunity to receive the cellar that I'll drink, and I'll have the lisière with the six children who are with me. Les orphelins sont les héros ou bien, selon la perspective dans laquelle on se place, les proies aisées dans les forêts des contes où ils sont abandonnés, et où seule la ruse peut les sauver. The forest is where Hansel and Gretel are at the same point, in the woods, where the two chaumières are found, not far from Hilberg. Là, affamés, the brother and the sister, the little Hans-Jean-Jeannot and the little Greta-Marguerite-Margot – the civil war has been modified according to the date of arrival or the Renaissance in France, in Allemagne, in Pologne, or in other parts of Europe This forêt –, sont attirés par une maison en pain d'épice qu'ils commencent à croquer sans savoir qu'elle est celle d'une vieille sorcière à moitié aveugle. Comme prévu, elle les capture et les engue à l'intérieur de ces murs sucrés. Elle décide de dévorer Hans, and de se servir de Gretel pour l'assister dans son entreprise de cannibalisme. Elle fait d'elle sa petite servante et la force à porter à son frère, enfermé dans une cage à oiseaux si étroite qu'il peut à peine s'y asseoir et dormir, de quoi le gaver jusqu'à ce qu'il soit suffisamment dodu pour son festin. Tous les jours Gretel entretient l'âtre du four destiné à cuire son propre frère et cuisine les plats destinés à l'engraisser. Mais Hans a compris que la vieille avait une mauvaise vue, et pour lui faire croire qu'il est toujours aussi maigre, tous les jours il tend à ses doigts examinenateurs des os de poulet et d'oiseaux morts qui traînent dans la cage au milieu de la sciure et des déjections. Au bout d'un moment, Gretel reussit à pousser la sorcière dans le four et délivre son frère. Elle find the clef of the cage and the two children reussissent à s'enfuir.
This means that this is counterfactual. Dans this forest-ci, ce sont les children qui sont tués. The rest of me also have two tendencies in this history, for a fair sorting of the trees between the trees and the raconter comme je veux, a rythme that I decided. Je peux lui jeter des mots pour la maintenir en respect, pour qu'elle se montre et qu'elle morde dans ces leurres plutôt que dans ma propre chair, et que jamais elle ne m'égorge ni ne m'asphyxie, ni moi ni mes enfants.
Cloé Korman, Les Presque Sœurs
The historian Raul Hilberg used the term "hut" (or "small farmhouse" in the original text) for the initial facilities for mass murder at Auschwitz after they had been tested in trucks that proved too small. "Hut" also evokes the image of villages in fairy tales, those bordering forests. I myself hesitate to recognize the forest I see and to cross its edge with the six children surrounding me. Orphans are heroes or, depending on one's perspective, easy prey in the fairy-tale forests where they are abandoned and can only be saved by cunning. The forest into which Hansel and Gretel wander is, except for one tree, exactly the same as the forest where the two huts Hilberg describes are located. There, the hungry siblings, little Hans-Jean-Jeannot and little Greta-Marguerite-Margot—their marital status might have been changed depending on when they arrived or were born in France, Germany, Poland, or some other European country connected to this forest—are drawn to a gingerbread house, which they begin to bite into, unaware that it belongs to an old, half-blind witch. As expected, she captures them and keeps them trapped inside the sweet walls. She decides to eat Hans and uses Gretel to help her with her cannibalistic plan. She makes her her little servant and forces her to bring her brother, who is confined in a birdcage so small he can barely sit and sleep, as much as he needs until he is fat enough for her feast. Every day, Gretel keeps the hearth of the oven going, the oven in which her own brother is to be roasted, and cooks the dishes meant to fatten him up. Hans, however, discovered that the old woman had poor eyesight, and to make her believe he was still thin, he held out bones of dead chickens and birds to her probing fingers every day. These bones lay scattered in the cage among the sawdust and droppings. After a while, Gretel managed to push the witch into the oven and free her brother. She found the key to the cage, and the two children were able to escape.
Everyone knows, however, that this ending is counterfactual. In this forest, it is the children who are killed. But I, too, can dangle bones in front of this story, pry its mouth out from between the trees, and tell it as I wish, at the pace I determine. I can throw words at it to keep it in check, so that it reveals itself and bites on these baits instead of my own flesh, and so that it never slits my throat or my children's throats or suffocates them.
Cloé Korman also interviewed the memories of the three surviving girls as far as possible. Rose was at least accessible in an archival video, but due to illness is no longer able to answer further questions; Andrée, an important interviewee, contradicts some of these accounts. Thus, Korman's book, dedicated to the memory of the three dead girls, also stands at a threshold of literature that confronts the testimony and the re-presentation of the Holocaust. At the end of the book, the author puts her children to bed, puts away toys, thinks of all the dead children, and leaves death as the final word, but in negation, as a place of memory, as it had already been introduced in the opening lines in the image of the island as a counterpoint to the forest, as a place of imaginary refuge.
J'ai pensé au legs des enfants morts, immense and invisible lui aussi, à l'idée que l'histoire humane qui se fraye à travers les difficultés de l'enfantement, les abandons, les maladies qu'on ne soigne pas, doit compter beaucoup plus d'enfants morts que d'adultes. Que la terre ait pu accueillir beaucoup plus d'enfants morts que d'adultes m'a déboussolée. I am in retrospect in my living room in the environment of the toys on the island of Etrange. This is the end of the ranger, our peluche, the cubes, the fusées, the insects, and the books, the balloons, the bateaux, all of which are now dérangé dans quelques heures. The light is imaginary and the window is disparaissant from the façade de l'immeuble, and this is also disparaissant from other sources, in a place where there is no existence or death.
Cloé Korman, Les Presque Sœurs
I thought of the legacy of dead children, equally immense and invisible, the idea that human history, winding its way through the difficulties of childbirth, abandonment, and untreated illnesses, must have far more dead children than adults. The fact that the earth could hold far more dead children than adults confused me. I found myself in my living room, surrounded by toys, as if on a strange island. I stopped tidying up—teddy bears, building blocks, rockets, bugs, books, balls, boats, everything that would be thrown into disarray again in a few hours. I turned off the light and imagined our window disappearing from the building's facade, and this island also vanishing for a few hours to a place that would be neither existence nor death.
Addendum
3 November 2022
Living witnesses have their own demands, because Andrée, Jeanne, Rose, and Madeleine Kaminsky are not actually the names of the surviving girls. As part of the "Presque Sœurs," they were anything but enthusiastic about the book project, demanding name changes and criticizing several elements of the story. They protested that the book was not a tribute, but an appropriation and dispossession of their history.
This is a very complicated story about his Romantic history – it comes to light when it comes to a drama about the Shoah. Pour les sœurs, il est clairement douloureux de découvrir un regard étranger sur leur enfance si déchirée ; sur leur père, disparu en 1965 ; sur d'autres adults qu'elles croisèrent pendant the war. Difficile de se voir attribuer des sentiments qu'elles ne revendiquent pas forcement ; ou de ne rien lire, à l'inverse, sur des épisodes qui les ont marquées – comme leur isolement force à l'hopital Saint-Louis, à cause de la gale, entre deux lieux d'internement.
Valerie Lehoux 6
It is always very complicated when one's own story is turned into a novel—especially when it touches upon a tragedy like the Holocaust. For the sisters, it is undoubtedly painful to have an outsider's perspective on their fractured childhood, their father's death in 1965, and the other adults they encountered during the war. It is difficult to have feelings attributed to them that they don't necessarily claim for themselves; or conversely, to read nothing about episodes that shaped them—such as their enforced isolation in the Saint-Louis hospital due to scabies between two internment sites.
It may be that this understandable, but unfortunate reaction to the book, published shortly before the Prix Goncourt was awarded, was one reason why another novel was chosen as the winner. Fundamentally, the question arises of the ethical responsibility of the writer to respect the privacy of the women who witnessed these events. Cloé Korman commented on this:
« Oui, je me sens une responsabilité, assure Cloé Korman, mais pas seulement vis-à-vis the sœurs Novodorsqui. Ma responsabilité, c'est de raconter une histoire qui pisse être appréhendée par le plus grand nombre. Depuis la sortie du livre, je reçois des témoignages d'anciens internés par l'Ugif, qui me remercient d'en parler. This is a great opportunity for the milliers of small girls and small garçons to be available in the foyers and purgatoires of young children. This story is also available on the subject 3, which is important for the story in my own way. Pour transmettre largement, the faut mettre en forme ; il faut des histoires, des représentations. C'est toujours delicat. Mon histoire ne remet absolute pas en cause le récit que les sœurs ont pu faire de la leur. »
Cloe Korman 7
“Yes, I feel a responsibility,” Cloé Korman assures us, “but not only to the Novodovsky sisters. My responsibility is to tell a story that can be understood by as many people as possible. Since the book's publication, I've received accounts from former children who were interned by the UGIF, thanking me for speaking out. It was devastating for me to learn that thousands of little girls and boys had lived for two years in these homes, purgatory for Jewish children. And although historians had already addressed the subject, it was important to me to tell it in my own way. To convey it comprehensively, you have to give it form; you need stories and representations. That's always delicate. My story in no way calls into question the narrative the sisters were able to create of their own.”
This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.
Notes- Laurent Joly, La Rafle du Vel d'Hiv (Paris: Grasset, 2022), see the review by Marc Zitzmann in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung dated July 15, 2022.>>>
- “Dans son essai Tu resembles à une Juive, Cloé Korman rappelle qu'il existence de multiples identités juives et que le bannissement de this réalité « a tout à voir avec l'antisémitisme […] this simplification, ce renoncement au pluralisme juif, je considère cela comme un acte antisémite ».” Illana Weizman, Des blancs comme les other? Les Juifs, angle die racisme (Paris: Stock, 2022).>>>
- “Dans son livre Tu ressembles à une juive, Cloé Korman montre comment antisémitisme et racisme puisent à la même source, et sur ce rapprochement entre antisionisme et antisémitisme je tombe sur ces mots que je trouve d'une grande justesse: Il est une identité juive, athée, intellectuelle, diasporique, qui n'est pas bien accueillie in the France d'aujourd'hui. Et ce bannissement a tout à voir avec l'antisémitisme, qui hait les Juifs pour leur culte, leurs traditions, mais aussi pour leur integration, leur mélange à l'intérieur des other territoires et des other cultures qui les ont accueillis. The fabrication imaginaire de la matrice Israelinne, this simplification, ce renoncement au pluralisme Juif, je considère cela comme un acte antisémite.” Justine Augier, Par une espèce de miracle: récit (Actes Sud, 2021).>>>
- "The grande réussite de ce texte à la fois sobre et délicat, qui veut faire résonner des noms trop longtemps tus, est précisément sa façon de rendre sensitive une experience vécue à hauteur d'enfant. Non que l'autrice brode ou invente de toutes pièces des scènes ou des dialogues, se rendant sur les lieux où ont vécu les fillettes, à Montargis, à Beaune-la-Rolande (Loiret) ou à Paris, s'appuyant sur les témoignages qu'on lui confie ou qu'elle lit, puisant dans ses propres souvenirs d'enfance et son expérience de mère, elle « suppose », sans s'en cacher, les émotions et réactions des petites filles.” Florence Bouchy, « Les Presque Sœurs », by Cloé Korman: les camps de Vichy à hauteur d'enfants, Le Monde, October 7, 2022.>>>
- “Sans voyeurisme macabre, d'une écriture délicate et constamment à hauteur d'enfants, gaiement entrelacée de détails concrets – cahiers, crayons, dînettes, chansons et déguisements […]”, Fabienne Pascaud, “Les Presque Sœurs, Cloé Korman”, Télérama, October 20, 2022.>>>
- Valérie Lehoux, “La colère et l'incompréhension des “presque sœurs” du roman de Cloé Korman, finaliste du prix Goncourt, TéléramaNovember 1, 2022.>>>
- Valérie Lehoux, “La colère et l'incompréhension des “presque sœurs” du roman de Cloé Korman, finaliste du prix Goncourt”, TéléramaNovember 1, 2022.>>>
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