But You Did Not Come Back (6 page)

Today, I have a lump in my throat. I often lose my temper. I don’t know how to detach myself
from the outside world—it kidnapped me when I was fifteen. The world is a hideous medley of communities and religions pushed to the extreme. And the hotter things get, the more unclear and important everything becomes, the more it has to do with us, the Jews. I now know that anti-Semitism is an eternal given; it rushes in waves along with the crises in the world, the words, the monsters, and the means of every era. Zionists like you predicted it: Anti-Semitism will never disappear. It is too deeply rooted in the world.

When the century stumbled into 2000, then 2001, something terrible happened, something unthinkable to me, impossible to describe to you who had left this world so long before: Two planes flown by terrorists crashed into the two highest skyscrapers in New York, the whole world saw it on television, the towers disintegrated, I watched people throw themselves out of the windows to escape the fires, and I was completely torn up inside. But everything became clear as well, the
illusions I still had fell from me like dead skin. I don’t know if that horror reawakened the other horror, but from that day on, I felt how much it meant to me to be a Jew. It was as if, up until that day, I’d been avoiding the fact that being Jewish is the strongest thing about me.

I feel like I’m the disillusioned heir of your illusions, an extension of you, the child born of your escape. You dreamed of America; well, the first time I went to New York, the city drew me in, I never wanted to leave, and I realized I was pursuing your exile. You dreamed of Israel, it exists. I feel good every time I go there, but it isn’t the land of peace we’d hoped for. Israel has been at war ever since it was created. Wars normally end, but not this one, for the Jewish state has never been accepted by the Arab countries that surround it; its borders are never fixed, ever-changing, violent. And the longer this goes on, the more suspect Israel becomes, in the opinion of Europeans as well. I can hear a response in my mind, a film
called
Welcome in Vienna
.
†
It retraces our history, the history of European Jews. One of the characters says: “They will never forgive us for the evil they’ve done us.” I’ve always been in favor of the coexistence of Israel and a Palestinian state, but I’ve become more and more moved by what is happening and what I’m hearing. I don’t want to judge, I don’t live there, but I will never have a single doubt when it comes to the right of Israel to exist. I will follow your dream.

You had chosen France, she isn’t the melting pot you’d hoped for. Everything is getting tense again. We’re called “French Jews”; there are also French Muslims, and here we are, face-to-face—I who had hoped never to take sides, or at least, to simply be on the side of freedom. I’ve listened to threats that sounded like echoes from the past, I’ve heard people shouting “Death to the Jews” and “Jews, fuck off, you don’t own France,” and I’ve wanted to throw myself out the window. Day
by day, I’m losing my convictions, the nuances, some of my memories; I end up questioning my past commitments; I see policemen outside of synagogues but I do not want to be someone who needs protection.

I lived because you wanted me to live. But I’ve lived the way I learned to back there, taking one day at a time. And there were some beautiful days, in spite of everything. Writing to you has helped me. When I talk to you, I don’t feel consoled. But I release what is clasped tightly in my heart. I would like to run away from the history of the world, from this century, go back to my own time, the time of Shloïme and his darling little girl. That way I can return to my childhood, to the adolescence that was stolen from me, and that’s normal at my age.

Two years ago, I asked Henri’s wife, Marie: “Now that we are approaching the end of our lives, do you think it was a good thing for us to have come back from the camps?” “No, I don’t,” she replied, “we shouldn’t have come back. But
what do you think?” I couldn’t say whether she was right or wrong; all I said was: “I’m starting to think like you.” But I hope that if someone asks me that question just before I’m about to die, I’ll be able to say, “Yes, it was worth it.”

Marceline Loridan-Ivens was born in 1928. She has worked as an actress, a screenwriter, and a director. She directed 
The Birch-Tree Meadow
 in 2003, starring Anouk Aimée, as well as several documentaries with Joris Ivens. Now 87 years old, she lives in Paris.