French Jews and Assimilation

It’s become conventional wisdom to tut-tut about how foolish the French have been, to let all those Muslims into the country and then leave them parked, as it were, until they decide to make trouble. Writing in the 1927, Joseph Roth offers another take on the issue. As a “wandering Jew,” after Vienna and Berlin, he found Paris a paradise:

Eastern Jews are allowed to live as they please in Paris. They may send their children to Jewish schools or French. The Paris-born children of Eastern Jews may acquire French citizenship. France needs inhabitants. It seems to be positively its duty to be underpopulated and forever to stand in need of new inhabitants, and to make foreigners into Frenchmen. In that lies both its strength and its weakness.

Admittedly there is anti-Semitism in France, even outside royalist circles. But it is not one hundred proof. Eastern Jews, accustomed to a far stronger, cruder, more brutal anti-Semitism, are perfectly happy with the French version.

And why not? They enjoy religious, cultural, and national rights. They are allowed to speak Yiddish as loudly and as much as they like. They are even allowed to speak bad French without incurring hostility.

—Joseph Roth, Report from a Parisian Paradise 147 (2005)

But there is a complication:

The consequence of such leniency is that they learn French, and that their children no longer speak Yiddish.

x—Id.

Oh really? Now, that is one part of the program that didn’t seem to carry

Roth, Zweig and the Ostjuden

Yesterday I blogged about Josepth Roth and his nostalgic salute (in The Radetzky March) to his Galician homeland (link). The Galician salute was almost a superfluity in the novel, not at all necessary to the plot, although perhaps useful to suggest the breadth and diversity of the Austrian Empire.

The other great nostalgiast of the Austrian Empire is Stefan Zweig. Roth and Zweig are easy to confuse, but only from a distance. They were both Jewish; both industrious and productive practitioners of a kind of high-end journalism; they shared an affectionate, if ironic, affection for the Empire after its collapse in the debacle of World War I.

But the differences are dramatic. Zweig’s father was a rich textile manufacturer. He spent his young adulthood among the aesthete glitterati, scarcely aware that he was a Jew; for years he presided over a salon at Salzburg. The critic Joan Acocella remarks on “his willingness to disassociate himself from the poor, despised Ostjuden, who [in the early 20^th Century] were pouring into Western Europe in flight from the Russian pogroms.” See her Introduction to the NYRB edition of Beware of Pity xv (2006).

Roth was one of the ostjuden. He was the orphaned son of a nobody from Brody near Lviv (Freud’s mother came from the same place).

No surprise that Roth salutes the ostjuden. More remarkably, there is a somewhat similar strain in Zweig’s only novel, Beware of Pity. The plot revolves around the household of Herr von Kekesfalva, seemingly a country aristocrat but in truth not at all what he appeared to be. We learn his story from another character, the all-seeing Doctor Condor (who himself may be modeled on Sigmund Freud, but that is yet another matter). Dr. Condor says:

Perhaps we had better begin at the beginning and for the moment leave our aristocratic friend Herr Lajos von Kekesfalva completely out of the picture. For when my story begins no such person existed. There was no landed proprietor in a long black coat, with gold-rimmed spectacles, no Hungarian nobleman. There was only, in a wretched little village on the Hungarian-Slovak frontier, a keen-eyed, narrow-chested little Jewish lad called Leopold Kanitz, familiarly referred to, I believe, as Lämmel Kanitz. …

Yes, Kaniktz—Leopold Kanitz, I can’t change that. It ws only much later that on the recommendation of a Minister the name was so sonorously Magyarized and decked out with the prefix of nobility. … Kekesfalva’s father, or rather Kanitz’s father, then, far from being an aristocrat, ws the poverty-stricken, be-ringleted Jewish landlord of a wayside tavern just outside of town. The woodcutters and coachmen looked in there every morning and evening to warm themselves with a glasss or two of kontuschowska before or after their drive through the Carpathian frost. Sometimes the fiery liquid went too quickly to their heads; at such times they would smash chairs and glasses, and it was in a brawl that Kanitz’s father received his death blow. …

Dr. Condor indulges himself with a leisurely and loving account of Kanitz’s maturation. It turns out he was another of those traders of whom Roth spoke:

He became what is known in Galicia as a “factor”, a man who trades in everything, acts as middle-man for everything, and in all sorts of ways spans the bridge between supply and demand. … [H]e knew everything and was an expert on everything; was there a widow, for example, who was trying to marry off her daughter, he would come out in the role of marriage broker; was there someone who wanted to emigrate to America and needed information and papers, Leopold would procure them. In addition, he bought and sold old clothes, clocks, antiquarian articles, valued and exchanged land and goods and horses, and when an officer wanted a loan, he always managed to procure it for him.

--Stefan Zweig, Beware of Pity 95-97 (NYRB Classic 2006)

There is much more of this; clearly, Zweig enjoys it at least as much as Dr. Condor. It’s readable and engaging, yet I don’t think it strikes quite the right note. Joan Acocella says: “Zweig’s portrayal of Kekesfalva’s early years is what, today, many of us would call anti-Semitic writing.” Id. I don’t think it is quite that – there is nothing here any more harsh than “Figaro qua! Figaro là!” I think the problem, rather, is that it doesn’t quite work: Zweig is trying has hard as he knows how to understand Kanitz, but his product has a manufactured tone about it. Roth’s effort seems to me, on the one hand more spooky and remote, and on the other, more engaged and ultimately more plausible.

Beware of Pity is, in its own way, a wonderful novel: both Roth and Zweig paint indelible portraits of life in the old Empire. But at the end of the day it is Roth the nobody who does a better job with life among the nobodys.

Sadly, there are other points of convergence between Roth and Zweig. Both found their lives destroyed by the Nazis. Zweig committed suicide in Brazil in 1942; Roth preceded him, having died of alcoholism (suicide by bottle?) in Paris in 1939.

The March and the Marsh

It is no small irony that the great novel of the Austrian empire may be one written by a Jew—and at that not a sophisticated, Viennnese middle-class Jew, but a Galicianer, a Glitz, a bumpkin, almost as embarrassing to his urban cousins as he was an object of hostility to the Goyim. But Roth’s Radetzky March captures the atmosphere of the K.u.K better than any book I know. It’s one of those books that sneaks up on you; deceptively straightforward in presentation, it leaves behind a tang that stays and stays.

One of the most remarkable episodes in this whole remarkable enterprise is the part where Roth’s protagonist gets himself shipped off to what must have been Roth’s own natal turf—“not more than two miles,” Roth writes, “from the Russian frontier. … The district was akin to the home of Ukranian peasants, their melancholy concertinas and their unforgettable songs; it was the northern sister of Slovenia.” (120)

The people in this district were swamp-begotten. For evil swamps lay far and wide to either side of the highroad and over the whole face of the land. Swamps that spawned frogs and fever, deceptive grass, dreadful enticement to a dreadful death for the unsuspecting stranger. Many had perished in the swamps with no one hearing their cries for help. But all who had been born here were familiar with the malignity of the marshland, and they themselves were tinged with the same malignity. In spring and summer, the air was thick with the deep and endless croaking of frogs. Under the sky, equally jubilant larks rejoiced. It was an untiring dialogue between sky and marshland. (122)

But Roth addresses himself not just to the larks and frogs:

[A] third of the town’s ten thousand inhabitants were craftsmen of various kinds; another third lived in poverty off meager small holdings. The rest engaged in trade of a sort.

We call it ‘trade of a sort’ since neither the goods nor the business methods corresponded in any way to the notions which the so-called civilized world had formed of trade. In these parts the tradesmen made their living far more by hazard than by design, more by the unpredictable grace of God than by any commercial reckoning in advance. Every trader was ready at any moment to seize on whatever floating merchandise heaven might throw in his way, or even to invent his goods if God had provided him with none. The livelihood of these traders was indeed a mystery. They displayed no shopfronts, they had no names. They had no credit. But they possessed as keen, miraculous sharp instinct for any remote and hidden sources of profit. Though they lived on other people’s work, they created work for strangers. They were frugal. They lived as meanly as if they survived by the toil of their hands. And yet the toil was never theirs. Forever shifting, ever on the road, with glib tongue and clear, quick brains, they might have had possession of half the world if they had had any notion of the world. But they had none. They lived remote from it, wedged between East and West, cramped by day and night, themselves a species of living ghosts spawned by the night and haunted by the day. …

[They] dealt in wood. They dealt in coral for the peasant girls of nearby villages and for those other peasants over the border on Russian soil. They dealt in feathers for featherbeds, in tobacco, in horsehair, in bar silver, in jewelry, in China tea, in fruit from the south, in cattle and horses, poultry asnd eggs, fish and vegetables, jute and wood, butter and cheese, woodlands and fields. Italian marble, human hair from China for the making of wigs, raw-silk and finished-silk merchandise, Manchester cotton and Brussels lace, galoshes from Moscow, Viennese linen, lead from Bohemia. No cheap bit of goods or splendid merchandise thrown up by the earth in profusion was unknown to the tradesmen of this district. … Some of them traded in live human flesh. They shipped off deserters from the Russian army to America and peasant girls to Brazil and Argentina. They had shipping agents and business connections with foreign brothels. Yet, with it all, their gains were meager, and they had no inkling of the vast superfluity in which a man may live. (121-2)

--Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March (Tusk/Overlook ed. 1983)

The swampland of which Roth speaks would be, I suppose, the Pripet Marsh, the trackless void where Nazi tankers liked to chase down their victims (it may also be the homeland of the Indo-European language). The most noteworthy local monument would be, I suppose, this one.

Fn.: Here is the March.