Albert Cohen died forty years ago. This is an opportunity for K. to pay homage to this extraordinary novelist, author of a body of work which, from Solal in 1930 to Les Valeureux in 1969, including Mangeclous (1938) and Belle du seigneur (1968)[1], should be understood as a vast fresco, a unique storm of lyricism and narrative dazzle in which the comic and the tragic are intertwined in a virtuosic and abundant game which places at one of its multiple centers a unique reflection on Jewish destiny. Before that, in the context of the rise of anti-Semitism in France, which led Jewish intellectuals to speak out publicly, Albert Cohen founded La Revue Juive in 1925, in the inaugural declaration of which (a facsimile of which is reproduced below) he wrote, among other things: “We will look in the face the problems which arise from the existence among the nations of a grouping which is too original and which is understandably a nuisance to some. It would be improper to conceal from ourselves the uneasiness caused in certain countries by the presence of Jewish masses among non-Jewish majorities. We will not deny that there is a pressing Jewish question in the world which has been thrown off course by war and by a precarious peace. We shall examine the Jewish problem and the reasons of the theorists of anti-Semitism without partiality. We will try to judge with righteousness and, while reserving the right to point out injustices, we will provide remedies, we will propose solutions.”
“A Jewish child encounters hatred on his tenth birthday. I was that child,” writes Albert Cohen in O vous, frères humains [O You, Human Brothers]. This hatred has not disappeared, it has mutated in the forms of its expression. It can now present itself in a way that is ambiguous and concealed, like an art form that is cultivated among oneself and seeks to spill out into the public space. On October 20, the judgment of Cassandre Fristot in France was rendered. Remember: this far-right activist who had the good taste to hold up a sign during a demonstration against the French government’s health pass, listing several names of supposedly Jewish personalities (Rothschild, Soros, BHL, Attali, Buzyn, etc.), topped by a question (“But who?”) and the word “traitors” as a central reference. Rudy Reichstadt returns to the rhetoric of an anti-Semitism which, thinking that it is safe – and in particular from the limits imposed by the law – moves forward masked. The courts have just ruled on this derisory camouflage technique which, paradoxically, increases the violence of the message in its very coding, and which requires costly deciphering. The verdict? A six-month suspended prison sentence.
The conservative Austrian chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, has just resigned following a judicial investigation for misappropriation of public funds. Within the very small Jewish population (about 10,000 people), this resignation prolongs old tensions, described in Danny Leder’s report published in K. last June and which this Austrian news pushes us to put back on the front page. For, as Danny Leder notes, while many Austrian Jews appreciate Kurz’s unabashed commitment to Israel (during the war with Hamas, he had the Israeli flag raised on government buildings in Vienna), other Jewish voices that spoke out against Kurz at the beginning of his reign (when he initially governed with the far right) are once again at the forefront of denouncing the multiple violations of the law by Kurz and his entourage.
Notes
| 1 | Almost all the novels of Albert Cohen mentioned above have been translated into English. |
