644
PARTISAN REVIEW
metaphor, disrespect for a word and a memory.
He looked at me indulgently. There I went, focussing on the wrong
things
again.
"Well, I want to get people's attention," he explained.
"You have no right."
Naturally, as it tends to do in such cases, this led to a discussion about
whether I might be homophobic. I tried to explain that certain ideas can't be
used to sell other ideas. The Holocaust shouldn't
be
brought out to cadge free
office space.
There
is
difficulty using it as an occasion for literature, too, which is one
of the starting points for the few great writings on the subject-the words of
those who bore witness and were able to tell something. Yet, despite
queasiness, the event is continually present, surely for all Jews-when we
make love; when our children are born; when we try to reckon with the
Jewish idea that salvation is on earth, not in heaven, and in the works of
humankind which the idea of
God
has helped to make possible.
Our troubles with both the word and deed, the idea and the memory,
are now fixed in our lives forever, and in the lives of those who come after
us.
***
At age near ninety, my cousin in Paris is still practicing medicine. I
imagine one of the reasons for his present survival is will-he is the last of a
line but for his son, now the only representatives in Europe of an extended
family. In cheerful lunches at his apartment, on Avenue de la Bastille, we
joke about wine and cheese, America and France, the quirks of our relatives,
and the shadow is there in the teasing, too. When a converted Jew became
the Cardinal of Paris, he said, "The ChiefRabbi of France is Sephardic, but at
least the Cardinal is Ashkenazic." When the French government released
Arab terrorists, played that pro-Arab game of oil and resentment which
DeGaulle inaugurated at the end of his life, he turned somber about the
nation which he had loved as an adopted child adores his new parents. "The
reason the Arabs don't have magic carpets anymore," he said, "is that they
don't need them. They just ask a Frenchman to lie down and they can ride
on
his
back."
Each time, during my years of visiting France, he asks the old questions
about our family in the United States, most ofwhom he has never met, with
a greedy need for connection with something that endures. He is amused by
my mother's pride that the two survivors from our family in Europe were
both doctors. Perhaps there was a lesson there for me, she used to hint.
