Diaspora as a movement: Manuel Carcassonne

No faith, no country, no beginning: constellations of Jewish self-interpretation

Manuel Carcassonne, Le Retournement (Paris: Editions Grasset, 2022). [quote as RET]

What does it mean to be Jewish if you don't believe, don't speak the language, don't know any rituals, and don't have a country? This question, as old as the Jewish diaspora experience itself, takes on an urgent new form in contemporary French literature: In an age of controversial identity politics and global rootlessness, authors are searching for narrative forms that can withstand the paradox of belonging without a foundation—supported neither by faith nor geography, neither by language nor by adherence to tradition. Manuel Carcassonne's late debut, RET, confronts this challenge in a way that makes it a literary document of a specifically French-Jewish experience of late modernity. The publisher's announcement from Grasset (sic!) concludes: "The most wonderful refutation imaginable against the identity-assignment that shapes our modern age." ¹ Here, the announcement is explicitly political, directed against contemporary identity essentialism without naming it. In January 2022, a few months before the French presidential election and at the height of the Zemmour debate, this is a clear positioning: the book responds to a political trend without being a political book itself.

The narrator walks in the hills around Rachaya el-Wadi, near the Israeli-Syrian-Lebanese border, and reflects on his placelessness and simultaneous multiple belonging:

The enumeration of places of origin—Egypt, Spain, Andalusia, Narbonne, Judea, perhaps nowhere—is not confusion, but rather the precise image of an identity composed of layers and fractures, not of a single core. “Je sors de l'Histoire” is a bold formulation: the narrator does not step out of history, but emerges from it—history is his place of origin, not a date or a country. Rosenzweig's bridge metaphor transforms this ahistoricity into a theological concept of time: Jewish law spans time like a bridge, while history murmurs powerlessly beneath it. Gary and Ajar's formula, “cerné de tout côté, et c'est l'appartenance,” reverses the logic of belonging: not the center, but the encirclement is the Jew's place. This is anti-essentialism as a positive determination of place.

Carcassonne, a long-time editor at Grasset and, since 2013, publisher at Stock, is releasing his first book at almost sixty. This delay is a programmatic element of the text itself: an encounter with a Lebanese Christian woman, named "Nour" in the novel, and a serious psychological crisis set the writing process in motion. RET is about a man who spent half his life publishing other people's books—in other words, being, as he puts it, "the merchant of other people's courage"—before realizing that the real expedition inward is yet to come.

The title promises a turning point, a reversal: the French word "retournement" means both a literal reversal and a strategic counteroffensive. In the text, this turning point unfolds on several levels simultaneously: as a return to repressed Jewish heritage, as a reversal of one's own social masking, as a traversal of millennia of Jewish history backwards to the destruction of the Second Temple, and finally as a literary reversal of genre expectations themselves. The book refuses to be a simple identity novel, as the critic Raphaëlle Leyris (in The world of books) observed: It is neither genealogical research nor autobiographical confession, neither autofiction variation nor essay, but all of these alternately and sometimes simultaneously.

In the history of French-Jewish literature, RET occupies a unique place: it stands in the tradition of assimilated Jewish self-examination, which does not begin with a traumatic primary experience of the Shoah, but rather with the peculiar void that arises when the memory of persecution and the desire for assimilation have sedimented over generations into a diffuse uncertainty about identity. At the same time, it breaks with this tradition by confronting it with the Arab-Mediterranean present, with dying Beirut, with the Melkite Church, with the figure of a woman who gives the assimilated Parisian Jew back his "Orient."

RET begins with a declaration of love that is simultaneously a story of conflict: “Souvent, Nour et moi, nous nous disputions” – this opening sentence of the novel sets the tone for the work that follows. The first-person narrator, Manuel (an alter ego of the author, whom we are allowed to read as such without entirely abandoning autofictional distance), is in a relationship with Nour, a Lebanese-French writer from a Greek Catholic Melkite family in Achrafieh, and later married to her. Their relationship is tumultuous, marked by frequent arguments and equally frequent reconciliations. Nour calls him “Israélite lacrymal” – tearful Israelite – and he corrects her every time because she persistently confuses “israélite” and “israélien.” This first layer of the text, the portrait of a couple from two Mediterranean-Oriental minorities in Paris and Beirut, forms the dramatic framework.

Beneath this lies a second layer: the depiction of a mental breakdown. In December 2013, shortly after his appointment as publishing director of Stock, Manuel takes a handful of tranquilizers, mixes them with vodka, and ends up in the psychiatric emergency room of the Hôpital Cochin in Paris. There, on a shabby hospital bed, gazing at a barred December window, he confesses to a psychiatrist: "I am of Jewish origin." ² – to which he replied: “So you mean: You are a Jew.” ³ This correction – the omission of the word "origin" – becomes the catalyst for the entire book. A friend aptly remarks: "It's not the word 'Jewish' that matters, but the word 'origin'." ⁴ What follows is an attempt to explore this question of origin in all its historical depth.

The third layer is an archaeological journey through two millennia of Jewish history: from the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, through the Sephardic flourishing in medieval Languedoc and the "Pope's Jews" in the Comtat Venaissin (Carpentras, Avignon, Cavaillon, L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue) with their expulsions in 1394 and 1481, to the assimilated bourgeoisie of the 20th century. This strand is developed in separate chapters, but is always connected to the autobiographical strand through associative transitions. Manuel's family, on his father's side, belongs to the Pope's Jews—a community repeatedly described in the text as "ultraminorité dans la minorityité"—and on his mother's side to Alsatian Ashkenazim. This historical archaeology is not presented in a dry, academic manner, but rather woven into associative anecdotes and personal family stories: a visit to Carpentras, where the narrator stands before the mikveh of the medieval synagogue and discovers a photograph of Captain Dreyfus, scarred by the Dreyfus Affair, in a family album belonging to the Astruc family; the readings of Maimonides and Flavius ​​Josephus, which he does not comment on academically, but experiences in the first person, as if he himself were fleeing burning Jerusalem. Levinas, Buber, Jankélévitch, Benny Lévy, Leo Strauss, Bernard Lazare, Adolphe Crémieux, Amos Oz, Franz Rosenzweig – the library invoked in the text is deliberately eclectic, encompassing both canonical and lesser-known works of Jewish philosophy and historiography.

The fourth layer is an intense Beirut experience: The narrator repeatedly accompanies Nour to Lebanon, witnessing the power outages and the collapse of the infrastructure. In the summer of 2019, he drives past Hezbollah convoys to the Israeli border at Odaisseh, where a small, painted metal gate separates the two countries, which are still officially at war. After the port explosion of August 4, 2020, which narrowly misses his three-year-old son Hadrien—a 600-kilogram pane of glass crashes down beside him—he immediately flies to Beirut and traverses the devastated neighborhoods of Mar Mikhael and Rue Sursock on foot, where young people clear rubble with plastic brooms while balconies collapse in slow motion. Paradoxically, in this shattered, chaotic country, he begins to feel "at home"—"Lebanon awakened me to Judaism," as one review quotes.

These four levels – love story, crisis management, Jewish historical journey, Beirut experience – intertwine to form a text structure that critic Raphaëlle Leyris describes as “tohu-bohu identitaire”, an identitarian chaos that the author elevates to a program.

Carcassonne himself describes his book as a work that ranges from genealogical archaeology to autobiographical confession, historical reflection, and essay, without settling into any one of these forms. This hybridity is the literary equivalent of the central thesis: that identity cannot be reduced to a single characteristic, but rather consists of the sum of heterogeneous affiliations.

Despite its autofictional nature, the text maintains a consistent ironic distance from itself. The author-narrator, "Manuel," openly plays with his dual role as both experiencing and reflecting observer. In a self-deprecating remark, he refers to himself as the "merchant of others' courage." ⁵, who now feels compelled to write himself. This formulation is an autopoetological reflection: Publishing other people's books was a way of repressing his own compulsion to write. Now he writes, but he writes the way a good publisher reads: with an inherent critical eye on his own genre's clichés.

The work belongs to the great tradition of the récit, that is, the shorter, non-fictional or semi-fictional narrative work with autobiographical elements, which has established its own genre tradition in France. At the same time, RET contains essential characteristics of the essay: it does not merely recount experiences, but constantly theorizes, comments on, and philosophically contextualizes them. The intertextual references to Levinas, Buber, Jankélévitch, Scholem, Yerushalmi, and Amos Oz form a dense network of argumentation that elevates the text beyond the purely autobiographical sphere.

Another important genre characteristic is digression as a structural principle. The text meanders, returns to themes, jumps from family history to the destruction of Jerusalem, from a Beirut street scene to a rabbinical school in medieval Lunel. This discursiveness formally reflects what the text asserts in terms of content—that identity cannot be narrated linearly, but only emerges in the movement of associative remembering and research.

Two minorities as a mirror

The novel's cast of characters is manageable, yet highly symbolic. At its heart are Manuel and Nour, a structurally contrasting pair whose profound analogy is revealed as the text unfolds. Both come from persecuted, marginalized minorities: he from French Jewry, she from the Greek Catholic Melkite Christianity of Lebanon. Both cultivate an "aristocracy of the oppressed"—or rather, Carcassonne projects this concept onto their relationship while simultaneously questioning it, for Nour is by no means a martyr of her community, but a self-assured, capricious, and politically astute woman who asserts her identity through entirely different means than he does.

Nour is the catalytic figure of the text: without her, the narrator would have continued to repress his Jewish identity. Her otherness—her Arab Christianity, her Lebanese family ties, her propensity for dramatic mood swings and direct physical confrontation—reflects back to the narrator his own sense of alienation. She calls him "Arab" and claims he looks like a Tunisian; he corrects her and thinks at the same time: perhaps she's right? ⁶ The confusion between “israélite” and “israélien” is not merely a linguistic error, but a thematically charged motif: it shows how little these categories are differentiated in the Arab-Christian world and provokes the narrator to a self-definition that he would otherwise have avoided.

The narrator's mother is another significant figure: she embodies Jewish memory as a traumatic transmission. As a survivor of the "accident" (the death of her parents and eldest brother on December 3, 1960), she has become a motionless Pythia of pain, her compass still pointing to that date. She keeps meticulous records of insults and missed calls; at the same time, she can describe the swimsuit she wore on the beach at Saint-Lunaire in 1936. She is the unconscious bearer of Jewish memory. ⁷, by reciting the words of the Mishnah without knowing it.

Jean d'Ormesson, Manuel's first father-in-law and an elegant representative of the Catholic French establishment, appears as both a role model and a mirror reflecting the narrator's own assimilation. The narrator describes how he secretly transformed d'Ormesson into a Jew in his imagination—imagining him as an old rabbinical sage from an Isaac Bashevis Singer novel, not as a conservative academic and chronicler of Le Figaro. D'Ormesson, sensing the joke, gleefully turned his napkin upside down at the table to make Manuel's daughter laugh. This small scene encapsulates the tragicomic story of Jewish-French integration: the assimilated Jew escapes into the realm of the imaginary, while the Catholic establishment good-naturedly plays along.

Space and time of the return

RET is narrated entirely in the first person, in the past tense, which is repeatedly interrupted by present-tense formulations. The narrator speaks directly to the reader, sometimes with an explicit address: "lecteur rassure-toi" – calm yourself, reader. This direct, apostrophic tone creates an intimate conversational atmosphere, befitting the genre of récit. The narrator presents himself as someone who thinks and speaks simultaneously, who shares his reflections at the moment of their emergence without smoothing them over.

Particularly striking is the frequent use of direct speech. The arguments between Manuel and Nour are often presented as short dialogues, clearly illustrating their differing communication styles: he argues, explains, clarifies; she provokes, suddenly falls asleep, changes the subject. The narrator's mother is also present through lengthy, verbatim quotes and statements that document her neurotically precise record-keeping of perceived emotional deprivations. These embedded voices break through the monologic texture and lend the work a dialogic quality.

The narrative perspective is not linearly chronological, but follows an associative principle. The technique of analepsis is central: the collapse in Cochin, recounted at the beginning of the work, chronologically took place in 2013; the Beirut episodes unfold between 2013 and 2020; the childhood memories and family stories are set even earlier in time. The historical digressions into antiquity or medieval Languedoc completely disrupt the narrative timeframe. This radical non-linearity formally reflects Yerushalmi's thesis. Zakhorwhich explicitly quotes Carcassonne: Jewish memory, according to this view, does not function historiographically, but through structural analogy – every exile is the Egyptian exile, every catastrophe the destruction of the Temple. Historical events are thus not experienced as past, but as present in the rhythm of liturgical repetition, ‘hors du temps’. Carcassonne’s associative narrative structure, which jumps between antiquity and the present without a clear chronology, formally replicates this model of memory.

The novel's spatial structure is organized along polar lines and simultaneously designed to reflect a deep geographical continuity. The three main settings are Paris, Beirut, and the Provençal past (Carpentras, Avignon, Marseille). In addition, episodic settings include Athens (marriage), Kabul (travel episode), Masada and Jerusalem (historical fantasies), and the Hôpital Cochin.

Paris appears in the text as a space of assimilation and masking. The sixteenth arrondissement, the Académie Française, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the sophisticated social life surrounding d'Ormesson—these are the coordinates of a bourgeois-Catholic world in which the narrator tried to disappear for thirty years. He was an "éternel invité," a perpetual guest who never truly belonged, even though he mastered all the codes perfectly. The crucial spatial formula for Paris is invisibility: one could be Jewish without showing it, without being seen.

Beirut, on the other hand, is a space of revelation and noise. Chaos, traffic, political instability, a mosaic of religious beliefs, contradictions between luxury and decay—everything the narrator finds in Beirut is the antithesis of Parisian self-discipline. And paradoxically, it is precisely this chaotic space in which he feels "at home"—more so than at the Vavin metro station, where he gets off every morning. ⁸Lebanon becomes the Orient, giving Western Jews back their original sounding board – a romanticized projection that the text does not leave unchallenged, but repeatedly questions through the sober depiction of Lebanese misery.

The Provençal past—Carpentras, the “Jerusalem of the Comtat Venaissin,” with its medieval mikveh, its synagogue, its Jewish alleyways—is a space of historical imagination. The narrator visits these places physically, but he traverses them primarily through reading and family history. The fact that a seven-minute walk leads from his father's birthplace in Marseille to the oldest Melkite church in France—the church founded by a bishop named Mazloum (Arabic: “the oppressed one,” Nour's family name)—is one of the book's central spatial metaphors: spatial proximity as an image for historical and identity-based entanglements that went unnoticed for decades. ⁹

The Hôpital Cochin as a space has a special function: it is the place of enforced exposure, of involuntary self-encounter. The garden behind barred windows, the shabby walls, the patients' communal television evenings – this space of the total institution (in Goffman's sense) paradoxically becomes a space of healing because it sheds all social roles.

The narrator quotes Benny Lévy and reflects on the impossibility of portraying Jewish life as a straightforward career, following the description of his bourgeois successes as a publisher:

The comparison of Who's who And survivor consciousness is the structural paradox of the assimilated Jewish bourgeoisie: outwardly settled, inwardly still on the run. Benny Lévy's statement formulates not a religious, but an existential thesis: Jewish life knows no teleological narrative, no career arc, because continuity can be interrupted at any time. The mother who whispers in her child's ear "we are survivors"—with the gesture with which God breathes life into Adam—transmits this temporal structure physically and pre-linguistically. This is anti-essentialism of a particular kind: not the rejection of Jewish identity, but its experience as structural fragility rather than as a fixed substance.

The temporal structure of RET is exceptionally complex and of central importance. Formally, the text operates on four temporal levels: the narrated present (approx. 2020–2021), the personal past (2013 to 2020), the family history (20th century), and Jewish history (from antiquity to the early modern period).

The crucial point is how these temporal planes are brought into contact with one another. Carcassonne shares with Yerushalmi, whom he explicitly quotes, the thesis of a cyclical Jewish temporality: each generation is called upon to feel as if it itself had emerged from Egypt. Jewish memory knows no clear separation between past and present; historical events continue to live on in the ritual cycle. This religious conception of time translates in the secular text into a narrative technique: the destruction of the Temple is not merely the past, it is the present of the narrative. ¹⁰ The narrator imagines himself as a time traveler, as the Marty McFly of Jewish history, who appears in Babylon and meets Herod.

At the same time, the text develops a psychoanalytic model of time: the concept of the "anniversary syndrome" (Anne Ancelin Schützenberger). The psychiatric crisis in December 2013 coincides with the anniversary of the grandparents' death (December 3, 1960) – not exactly, but close enough to make the transmission of trauma across generations appear non-random. The syndrome of invisible loyalty, the repetition of familial death dates, situates personal time within a transgenerational structure.

Another image representing a particular era is the hourglass motif: ¹¹ Time flows in both directions; the past flows into the future, and the future (in the form of the son Hadrien, who is given an Arabic nickname) carries the past onward.

Addition of identities, water, fire, journey

The dominant theme of the novel is identity as a multiple, historically fraught, and never-ending entity. Carcassonne implicitly argues against any essentialism of identity: neither blood nor faith, neither language nor country constitute belonging as the sole characteristic. Instead, the text advocates for the "addition of identities"—the juxtaposition of Jewish, Provençal, Alsatian, Parisian, and Levantine, culminating in a new self-image as "Abou Hadri," father of a small Melkite child.

Closely linked are the themes of invisibility and masks. The narrator, as he himself diagnoses, has been an actor for decades – Swann, who elegantly navigates between social classes; Zelig, who assumes every form; the stranger, who adapts perfectly and precisely for that reason never arrives. ¹² The unmasking that Cochin forces and that completes Beirut is the true dramatic event of the novel.

The semantic field of water runs through the text as one of its strongest chains of metaphors. Tears (the “Israélite lacrymal”), seawater (the past washes like saltwater), the mikveh in Carpentras, the baptism of the son Hadrien in the water of the Christian church, the spring rising from a fissure – water represents the primal, the vital, that which cannot be contained and transcends identities. The baptism of the son is a particularly significant image in this context. ¹³

Fire is the complementary element: the destruction of the Temple, the Inquisition's pyre, the burnt wheat in Jerusalem, the August 4th explosion in Beirut. Fire signifies catastrophe and annihilation, but it is also the burning bush from which God speaks. The narrator waits in vain in the desert for a burning bush sign: "Show yourself, God. Reconcile me."

The realm of travel and movement contrasts with images of rootedness and the earth. This tension between rootedness and uprootedness is the fundamental psychological pattern of the text. The realm of movement and uprootedness encompasses the biblical Exodus, the Sephardic expulsion from Spain in 1492, the expulsion of the Jews from France in 1394, the relocation of the Talmudic schools from Narbonne to Lunel, and Maimonides' journey from Fez via Acre to Egypt—all these are stages in a never-ending departure that extends into the present of the narrator, who himself commutes between Paris, Beirut, and southern Lebanon. In contrast, there are images of radical rootedness: the family grave at the foot of Mount Hermon, where Nour wants to bury the narrator—a Greek Orthodox burial vault on a rocky outcrop, a few kilometers from the Israeli border—the medieval mikveh in Carpentras, whose dark water makes the narrator shudder physically, and the barren landscape of the hills around Rachaya, which he traverses on foot and which, as the only place in the text, grants him something like silence and reconciliation. The tension between these poles—never truly arriving anywhere, yet leaving traces everywhere—is the fundamental psychological pattern of the text.

Diagonal writing

Reflection on the act of writing itself is a recurring element in RET. Carcassonne is a publisher, and he writes like someone who has read and commented on thousands of manuscripts: the text contains an implicit theory of genres and literary writing, which manifests itself in critical self-commentaries.

The central autopoetological thesis of the text is that writing is a form of remembering that differs fundamentally from the usual forms of memory work – genealogy, psychoanalysis, family novels, oral history: It creates a new connection between associative thinking and historical knowledge: “I traveled a lot to finish this book. Thousands of kilometers – sometimes real, sometimes imaginary – through fairytale landscapes that have disappeared into the vastness of time.” ¹⁴

The narrator is well aware of the danger of genre clichés. He explicitly writes that he has published or rejected dozens of similar books—about men in midlife searching for their roots. The solution he finds is not an escape from genre conventions, but their simultaneous, ironic overfulfillment: he fulfills all the patterns and overfulfills them until they undermine each other.

The text also contains a crucial clue to the connection between publishing and hiding: “J’ai été le marchand du courage des autres : éditeur. Je me suis caché sous eux.” Publishing other people’s books was a form of self-concealment—a variation of the same logic of assimilation that pervades the narrator’s Jewish life. Now he writes himself, and thus he ceases to hide. The book is—on a meta-level—the act of revelation that the text describes on the level of content.

The novel's poetics rest on a principle that could be described as "diagonal writing": the text moves diagonally through genres, time periods, and discursive traditions. It is neither sentimental nor dry, neither esoteric nor populist, neither naively religious nor cynically secular. This slant is not indecisiveness, but a precise aesthetic choice.

RET's intertextual network is unusually wide-meshed and heterogeneous. It ranges from canonical texts of Jewish philosophy and theology to popular cultural references, and it is precisely this heterogeneity that is significant.

On the side of Jewish intellectual history, the central references are: Mamonides (with his Guide for the perplexed and his eventful biography as an exile), Emmanuel Levinas (with the concept of election by the Other to responsibility), Martin Buber (with the concept of "immediate proximity to God"), Franz Rosenzweig (L'Étoile de la Rédemption), Gershom Scholem (with the quoted line of a letter to Walter Benjamin: “Là où se tenait Dieu jadis se tient à présent la mélancolie”), Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (Zakhor), Bernard Lazare and Leo Strauss (La Persécution et l'art d'écrireThe book's mottos come from Georges Perec, Bernard Malamud, and Groucho Marx – a triad that spans the spectrum between doubts about identity, universal Jewish belonging, and self-ironic distancing.

On the literary side, the most important references are: Marcel Proust, whose character Swann the narrator explicitly names as his youthful model – the assimilated Jew who elegantly navigates between the classes and never truly arrives; at twenty he was “Swann, or the mask of Swann over my faceless face.” ¹⁵ been.

The narrator reflects on his youth in Paris, his Christian girlfriends with aristocratic names, his strategy of social mimicry:

The self-description as a "rabbinical phantom" is a powerful phrase: The narrator is a mask without a face beneath, a phantom with rabbinic roots, insinuating himself into the Christian aristocratic world. The vampire image is crucial: He doesn't suck life force, but genealogy—he desires the pedigree he lacks. This reveals the core of assimilated Jewish identity as identity through borrowing: One defines oneself not by one's own heritage, but by proximity to the other. At the same time, the scene is a sharp critique of class—Jewish brewery money saved the ailing aristocracy, while they speak of "French people of the devil."

Romain Gary/Ajar is quoted with the formula "We are all more than the sum of our parts" ¹⁶ He is cited as a theorist of multiple identity, but also as a counter-image: Gary ultimately killed himself, "lassé" by constantly changing his skin – "à trop changer de peau, on finit par se perdre," the narrator comments, and therein lies an unspoken self-warning. André Schwarz-Barts The Last of the Righteous It presents the image of the righteous wanderer through Europe, who finally finds a kind of paradise in the Provençal south – a passage that quotes Carcassonne verbatim to mark the Jewish experience of the Comtat Venaissin as a moment of historical happiness. The Lebanese poet Nadia Tuéni appears with a single stanza about the noise of moonlight crashing against the rocks of Lebanon – for the narrator, the distillation of what he cannot express in a thousand words. Etel Adnan is introduced via Leïla Slimani and delivers the thesis of Arab culture's transience: "Arabs lead a transient life." ¹⁷, a formulation that explains Nour's minimalism and her indifference to possessions and memory. Mahmoud Darwich's statement about Beirut – “The consecration of the shadow is more beautiful than its poem” ¹⁸ —appears as an epigraph to a scene of destruction and condenses the ambivalence of beauty and decay that runs through the Lebanon narrative. In the world of essayists, Alain Finkielkraut's The Imaginary Jew – “Nothing in this name that refers to me is myself or belongs to me” ¹⁹ – as a diagnosis of the empty Jewish self-concept, from which the narrator explicitly wants to distance himself without completely stepping outside of it. Benny Lévy provides this with the sentence, "A non-Jew can imagine that life is a career, but a Jew cannot." ²⁰ the most striking formula for the Jewish impossibility of telling one's own life story as a straightforward success story.

The intermedial references are also significant: The narrator mentions Joseph Losey's film "Monsieur Klein" (a film about Jewish identity confusion in occupied Paris) in a scene vividly discussed with Nour, and refers to the TV series "Le Prisonnier," whose protagonist refuses to be classified by number—a metaphor for the Lebanese panoptic society and, at the same time, for the rejection of any reductive attribution of identity. "Blade Runner," "Apocalypse Now," "Mary Poppins," "Back to the Future," the Asterix comics—these popular cultural allusions democratize the high-cultural network of identity discourse and lend the text its peculiar lightness.

From conflict to sleep: French-Jewish literature and the desire for invisibility

The novel opens with a disarming simplicity in its first sentence: “Souvent, Nour et moi, nous nous disputions.” This sentence opens the entire work: two people, very different yet in love, argue repeatedly. The tone is even, without pathos, almost like a confession between friends. The topics of contention unfold in the novel's opening pages: Lebanese politics, physicality, and attributions of ethnic identity. The character Nour is present from the outset as the living embodiment of irritation and awakening. At the same time, the first sentence announces a narrative simultaneity: “Souvent” implies repetition, rhythm, not a single story, but a pattern. The book knows from the beginning that it will not tell a classic coming-of-age story, but rather a recurring pattern of division and union, of repression and revelation.

The book's ending returns to this original structure, but on a different level. The final pages take place in Beirut after the port explosion of August 4, 2020. The narrator and Nour walk through the devastated city, witnessing the destruction, the chaos, the young people sweeping away rubble with plastic brooms where bulldozers and cranes are needed. Nour has changed: the apolitical beauty has become "Miss Che Guevara," demanding public executions on the Corniche. "Enough with the resilience! Stop it, stop holding this card up to us—the card of the phoenix that has risen a thousand times over." ²¹

The very last sentence of the novel reads: "The next moment she was already asleep." ²² This sentence has almost the same structure as the first: Nour in a state of sleep, an image of sudden exhaustion after the intensity of life. The circularity is both formal and thematic: the book begins with conflict and ends with sleep; it begins with the question "Who am I?" and ends not with an answer, but with a gesture—a kiss, a whisper of words of encouragement. "It was better to love and fight, but to flee took even more courage." ²³ – followed by falling asleep.

This circular argument, however, is not a simple framework. The narrator is not the same one who began with the first sentence. The book he has now written is proof of his transformation: he has embraced his Jewish identity, he has lived through his people's history, he now bears an Arabic nickname, and his youngest son is a little Melkite. The sleeping Nour at the end is not the provocatively ignorant woman from the beginning, but an exhausted political activist in a devastated city. And the narrator watching her is no longer the sophisticated Parisian searching for his identity, but someone who—for the time being—knows who he is.

To better appreciate the literary merit of the text, a brief contextualization within the history of French-Jewish literature is helpful. This literature developed primarily along two axes in the 20th century: one is Shoah literature (Wiesel, Semprún, Perec, Charlotte Delbo, among others), which focuses on annihilation and survival as constitutive experiences. The other is assimilation literature, which describes the life of the Jewish bourgeoisie in France—with all the tensions between the desire for invisibility and the impossibility of completely shedding one's Jewish heritage.

Carcassonne occupies a secondary position, but it shifts the question of assimilation into a new geopolitical constellation: it is no longer the configuration of "Jew vs. Christian France," but rather "Jew/Frenchman vs. Arab Christian/Lebanese woman" that raises the identity problem. This shift is historically significant: it reflects the transformations of the Jewish situation in France, in which, since the 2000s, new forms of antisemitism from post-colonial milieus have emerged, and the Jewish-Arab relationship has acquired a new, conflict-ridden relevance. The text does not avoid this sensitive terrain; it writes right through it: when Nour confuses the terms "Israélite" and "Israélien," she unintentionally shifts the level of analysis: she reads a religious-cultural identity as a geopolitical one. This is precisely where the explosive potential lies – the distinction between Jewishness and Israeli citizenship is blurred, and identity appears as something unambiguous, whereas the novel emphasizes its complexity. The debates following the port explosion, in which Israel is fantasized as the culprit, the descriptions of the Beirut synagogue and its deserted congregation – all of this places the text at a crossroads rarely addressed so directly in French-Jewish literature.

Also of interest is the comparison with the tradition of French Jewish-Moroccan or, more generally, North African-Jewish literature (Amrouche, Albert Memmi, Albert Cohen): RET shares with these texts the Mediterranean grounding of the Jewish experience, the critique of the Northern Europeanization of Judaism in the culture of remembrance, and the emphasis on the Jewish-Arab historical entanglement. Carcassonne, however, starts from the specifically Provençal Judaism—the Jews of the Pope, the Tibbonids of Lunel, the doctors and diamond merchants of the Comtat Venaissin—and thus reveals a regional Jewish history that has received little attention in the culture of remembrance, which is predominantly focused on Ashkenazim and Sephardim.

Amos Oz is quoted in connection with the question of what Jewish continuity means when neither country nor language nor faith can support it:

Amos Oz's formula "textés à nos ancêtres"—written to our ancestors, connected through text—is the novel's concise formulation of anti-essentialist Judaism. Identity is not grounded in blood, land, or faith, but in a practice of reading and commentary that forms a chain. The immediately following historical evocation—from Damascus to Córdoba to Lucena, where the coat of arms bears a Star of David—translates this abstract thesis into concrete geography: Judaism was a Mediterranean civilization of textual circulation, not an ethnic entity. The concluding sentence, "Il m'est impossible de dissocier l'intime de l'histoire," is thus a core autopoetological formula of the entire book: the personal and the historical are inseparable because the narrator himself is composed of this thread of the text.

The critical reception of RET in the French press was remarkably unanimous and positive, but the reviews can be grouped into two main lines of argument: one that primarily praises the text as a successful document of identity by an assimilated French Jew, and a second that emphasizes its literary quality—style, genre innovation, and virtuosity of language and composition. Nathalie Crom described the work as a "viviferous" reflection on Jewish identity, "full of love and spirit," and highlighted Carcassonne's ability to transform the personal encounter with the Lebanese woman Nour into a renewal of self-understanding. ²⁴ Virginie Bloch-Lainé emphasized the motoric character of the text – RET being “un mouvement perpétuel” – identified Nour as “pilule d'Orient” and “étrangère révélatrice” and attested to the book, despite its dispersion, an “énergie” and vitality that sets it apart from the conventional autobiographical search for identity; noteworthy is Bloch-Lainé’s insistence that Carcassonne “does not write between the lines” but brings everything to the surface in an explosive manner – a reversal of the Jewish tradition of persecution-driven encryption described by Leo Strauss. ²⁵ Raphaëlle Leyris focused on the problem of genre: the book is neither a genealogical inquiry nor an autobiographical confession nor an autofictional variation nor an essay, but all of these alternately and simultaneously – a “tohu-bohu identitaire” that formally reflects what it claims in terms of content, namely that identity cannot be reduced to a single affiliation. ²⁶ Sabine Delanglade highlighted the unclassifiability of the work and formulated the basic formula of the text: "How does the Jew, who was ashamed in his childhood, find his way back to his Judaism through the love relationship with his inverted image?" ²⁷ Anne Fulda dedicated a lengthy portrait to the work, in which she highlighted Carcassonne's thesis of the accumulation of affiliations and the stratification of identities ("additionnement des identités") and analyzed his self-description as "the secular, assimilated, imaginary Jew of French origin" ("juif français laïc, assimilé, finkeltrautien"), whose identity is only revealed under the pressure of the Lebanese-Christian counter-world; Fulda situated the work in the context of a political current in which Zemmour and other identity essentialists propagate the exact opposite of Carcassonne's "addition". ²⁸

The most idiosyncratic literary critique was delivered by Frédéric Beigbeder, who began with a fabricated scathing review, only to reverse his judgment in the middle of the chronicle, a literary-critical “retournement”: The book is “of an elegance and complexity that can rival François Weyergans” ²⁹ and “this plea for intelligence turns one inside out” ³⁰ – a formulation that incorporates the title joke itself. ³¹ Jean-Paul Enthoven placed the text in the mythological tradition when he described Carcassonne as a “Ulysse proustien” who “resurrected the ghosts of the past” and emphasized the intertwining of personal chaos and universal identity questions as a “carcassonne egodyssée”. ³² Jérôme Garcin emphasized the psychological dimension: a “hypocondrie pathologique”, the “narcissique du deuil”, the “vraie-fausse tentative de suicide” – and saw the phrase “le Liban m'a réveillé juif” as the emotional core of the book. ³³ Georgia Makhlouf interviewed Carcassonne and focused on the question of Genet and Sabra-Chatila: The book takes the Palestinian tragedy seriously and attests to Israel's moral co-responsibility, which sets it apart from sentimental self-examination and leads it into a politically uncomfortable zone. ³⁴ The literary-critical appreciation was finally sealed by institutional recognition: In November 2023, RET received the Prix Renaudot du livre de poche – an award that retrospectively grants the text the status of a work of lasting relevance. ³⁵

RET is a book that thrives on a paradox: it doesn't want to be an identity book like so many others, and yet it is one—but an unusual one, productively undermining genre conventions by taking them literally. Manuel Carcassonne writes what he published for decades under other authors, and he does so with the expertise of a man who knows the literary market and therefore consciously takes anti-commercial risks: chaos instead of coherence, digression instead of chronology, essay instead of drama.

The text's central literary merit lies in its ability to liberate the question of Jewish identity from the ghetto of Holocaust remembrance and religious observance and to integrate it into a vibrant Mediterranean context. Here, being Jewish means neither faith nor suffering, neither language nor land, but rather a particular way of experiencing time—cyclical, open-ended, always permeated by the past—a particular way of engaging with books ("Our line is not defined by blood but by text"), and a particular readiness to recognize oneself in the other. Nour, the Arab Christian, is Manuel's Jewish mirror; Beirut, the destroyed city, is his Jerusalem.

The fact that the narrator knows nothing definitive about himself at the end of this journey—that the final scene shows him kissing a sleeping woman in a ruined city, without enlightenment, without a homecoming—all this is very honest. The "retournement," the turning back, doesn't reach a destination, but rather signifies a movement that continues. The book itself is this movement.

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

1. “La plus merveilleuse réfutation qui se puisse imaginer à l'assignation identitaire qui caractérise nos temps modernes”>>>
2. “Je suis d'origine juive”>>>
3. “Vous voulez dire: vous êtes juif.”>>>
4. “Ce n'est pas le mot juif qui compte, mais le mot origine.”>>>
5. “J'ai été le marchand du courage des autres: éditeur”>>>
6. "Tu es arabe, un Oriental levantin comme moi. Ton seul problème, c'est que tu es agressif comme un Israelite.">>>
7. “If you have a generation, you have sent it like you are in Egypt.”>>>
8. “Pourquoi ai-je le sentiment que j'y suis, bien davantage qu'à la station de métro Vavin où je descends chaque matin, également chez moi”>>>
9. "The atmosphere falls to the times for a simple promenade. Cinquante ans pour sept minutes.">>>
10. “J'aurais pu voir les légions Romaines se lever et punir la ville sacrée.”>>>
11. “Je suis enfermé dans un sablier, le sable s'écoule et remonte à la fois.”>>>
12. “I am a long-term believer in the long term.”>>>
13. “De this volonté, de ce lieu, de ce lien inédit, […] a jailli ce livre, s'ouvrant dans this faille, comme une source d'eau vive.”>>>
14. "J'ai beaucoup voyagé pour mener ce livre à bien. Des milliers de kilomètres réels, parfois imaginaires à travers des contrées fabuleuses, disparues dans la texture du temps.">>>
15. “Swann ou le masque de Swann par-dessus mon absence de visage”>>>
16. “Nous sommes tous des additionalnés”>>>
17. “Les Arabes vivent des vies éphémères”>>>
18. “consécration de l'ombre plus belle que son poème”>>>
19. “Rien n'est moi, ni à moi, dans ce nom qui pourtant me désigne”>>>
20. “Un goy peut s'imaginer qu'une vie, c'est une career, pas un Juif”>>>
21. "Basta la résilience ! Khalass, ça suffit de nous brandir this carte, celle du phénix mille fois ressuscité.">>>
22. “L'instant d'après, elle dormait.”>>>
23. “I'm brave enough to fight, but I'm sure I'll fall with enough strength and courage.”>>>
24. Nathalie Crom, “'Le Retournement': l'identité juive selon Manuel Carcassonne,” The Obs, January 6, 2022.>>>
25. Virginie Bloch-Lainé, “Manuel Carcassonne, back à la lignée,” Libération, January 27, 2022, 27.>>>
26. Raphaëlle Leyris, “'Le Retournement', de Manuel Carcassonne: tohu-bohu identitaire,” The world of books, 18. February 2022.>>>
27. “Comment le Juif honteux de l'enfance est-il rendu à son Judaïsme par la rencontre amoureuse avec son double inversé?” Sabine Delanglade, “The identity card of Manuel Carcassonne,” The echoes, January 17, 2022, 11.>>>
28. Anne Fulda, “Manuel Carcassonne, ou la révélation amoureuse,” Le Figaro, January 17, 2022, 40.>>>
29. “Elegance and complexity of François Weyergans”>>>
30. “Ce plaidoyer pour l'intelligence vous retourne comme une crêpe”>>>
31. Frédéric Beigbeder, “Frédéric Beigbeder: 'L'éreintement raté de mon ancien éditeur',” Le Figaro, 4 Februar 2022.>>>
32. Jean-Paul Enthoven, “Livre – Les mystères de Carcassonne,” The Point, January 17, 2022, 72.>>>
33. Jérôme Garcin, “'J'ai été le marchand du courage des autres': l'éditeur Manuel Carcassonne se confesse enfin,” The Obs, January 10, 2022.>>>
34. Georgia Makhlouf, “Manuel Carcassonne, le captif amoureux,” L'Orient-Le Jour, October 20, 2022.>>>
35. “Le prix Renaudot attribué à Ann Scott for 'Les insolents',” France Media Agency, 7 November 2023. The Prix Renaudot du livre de poche for RET was announced at the same time.>>>