Romain Gary

A recent talk by a novelist at the English university of the bilingual province of New Brunswick was a talk premised on the audience being ignorant of the work of Romain Gary.

The talk began with an insult to those of the West who failed to grasp that "other Europe" of Milosz. We, the acquisitive, we in our striving for recognition, reward, we who have not read Hamlet (one supposes.)  Or not understood Hamlet.

And surely none of us in the audience displaced, dispossessed, unemployed ...

The one Lithuanian in the audience had not heard of Romain Gary (!) let alone read Education or Cerfs.  Some present may even have seen the film, "Madame Rosa", or heard of it.

In "La Parole" Ge. Gusdorf writes of how we must mistrust the speaker who is too aware of his audience - or perhaps too sure.

In fairness, the opening words which I heard concerned the trove of documents concerning partisans in the years 1944-1948 and the talk closed with an admission that our author had worked from secondary sources.

My initial reactions were posted on Facebook.  At the close of the talk I mentioned The Painted Bird, but this seemed to pass unnoted.  There is a parallel between the story of the re-submission  and rejection of that manuscript and the view Gary took of himself in the hey-day of his Emile Ajar personna.  The gap between 1944 and the 1987 Klaus Barbie trial is almost that which our writer invoked and that of Education and Cerfs.

But Gary was not simply a French novelist.

By 1953, no assassin came stalking Milosz. Or do the KGB records read otherwise?  And then came '54, then '56, '67.  Who are we supposing lived in the sunny light of ignorance? Children?

By 1980 there was no feigning ignorance of the role of Milovan Djilas.

By 1980 we had Nikolai Tolstoi's Victims of Yalta.

What is this requirement for historical documents and "distance". Reconciliation? Truth?

notes:

1945: Éducation européenne
1975 : La Vie devant soi (as Emile Ajar)
1980: Les Cerfs-volants

"Der Oger" and "The Syrian Bride"

Last evening we finally watched "The Syrian Bride".  Hearing Russian and French and Arabic was almost as much a treat as had I been allowed popcorn.  But the disappointment: at my elbow in my work-corner of the sofa is Veza Canetti, "Der Oger".  It is impossible to notice that the first son and his wife and son, (sons all bearing the name of the patriarch,) could not be living in an Israeli city, that she could not be a Jew, not even an unbelieving Russian Jew and certainly they could not be speaking Yiddish, let alone living in Vienna.  We know they could not be living in Lublin or Vilna.  They live in Russia.
The foreign wife's name was surely Helen and she would be a healer.  She does not have a wide face and thick, dark hair.  She is slender.  I know as surely as I know anything that Veza would have felt outrage.  Only worse would be if he had rescued his Russian bride from one of the reinstated Baltic states.  Where was the lack of courage? He could have found an ethnic Lithuanian in Kazakhstan from that other Diaspora or any other.
That she is blonde is the very worst cliché - the easiest, most facile sign of the other for the Druze family.
Yes, the blonde and red-haired Hasidim, I met them on the streets of Outremont where they would not acknowledge my existence let alone that I understood their Yiddish (unlike the urbane Orthodox who were even inter-married, who met in DP camps and on boats when crossing to us over the Atlantic.)
Do we really imagine that Putin could have helped resolve the impasse on the Golan?  He only envies the cult of personality achieved in Damascus and fears the cruel political satire of the Israeli press.
Yet Israel Film and Berlin Brandenburger participated in this French film project (have we already forgotten the role of France in the preposterous borders?)
Borders.  At least the fool, the uni-glot Kohl, committed to the Polish border, an essential prerequisite to tolerating reunification.  And who remembers the present circumstances of a Kaliningrad?  And where is Lublin?